ETHNOS AND GLOBALIZATION: Ethnocultural Mechanisms of Disintegration of Contemporary Nations. Monograph

However, as Azroyantz rightly believes, social agents capable of and interested in resisting scientific and technological progress and managing the process of globalization on behalf of humankind have not yet been formed in the contemporary world.

At the same time, Azroyantz supposes that the spiritual and technological development of society are heading in opposite directions and, as a result, technological development under certain conditions objectively gives rise to social regression, which can be observed in the sphere of social relationships. Both cultural-civilizational unification and the general deterioration of culture occur during neoliberal globalization.

However, appeal to the networks, characterized by shapelessness and lack of obvious leadership centres and popular in the age of artificial social networks, serves only to stress the agentless nature of Azroyantz’s approach, which has no place for real political actors in the global process and their interests.

On the whole, Azroyantz’s theoretical approach is limited to relating the facts of globalization, highlighting its typical system of gradually increasing internal contrasts. It does not go further than reproaching the new world order.

At the same time, Azroyantz, while declaring the civilizational approach as a methodological system, is de facto offering his version of a formation-based approach under the guise of historical cycles. He repeats the main premise of economic reductionism (and liberal fundamentalism, as one of its varieties) in terms of the fatal inevitability of the convergence of cultures and civilizations as a global economy is formed.

Therefore, the works by Yakovets and Azroyantz, as typical contemporary works on the sociology and culturology of civilizations, are illustrative of the passive reflection of local social groups (including local civilizations, such as Russia), who find themselves and their systems of interest forced by globalization onto the periphery of social life.

Typically, this civilizational approach is based on a convergent, effectively multi-stage model of the development of social communities, the development of which occurs through the convergence of preceding communities until a global culturally homogenous society (“social megacommunity’, “global human ant hill’, “cheloveynik’ and others) is created.

At the same time, obvious contemporary tendencies towards ethnocultural divergence, fragmentation and a sharp increase in the importance of ethnicity and religiousness are being ignored.

Pivovarov¹⁴¹ raises the issue of the contemporary state of the formation-based and civilizational approach as complementing each other. He stresses in particular that the formation-based approach borrows key ideas from Christianity, including the universality of history, its patterns and the possibility of singling out periods within history.

Fursov¹⁴² stands out among the supporters of a formation-based approach, since he sees history not only as a fight among classes, social groups and state bodies within a certain societal formation, but as long cycles of standoffs between elites and lower classes that spread to the larger civilizational space and up to the global level during the last historical cycle. According to Fursov, the current moment is characterized by the global vengeance of the elites and, as a consequence, the global crash of social achievement of the masses.

Fursov sees a mutual need for social cooperation that requires a certain structure of the “social pyramid’ as a factor that determines the equilibrium of the higher and the lower classes coexisting within a society. In this regard, the lack of population after wars or the epidemics of the Middle Ages led to the emancipation of the third estate. Industry’s need for workers and then for markets for manufactured goods led to constraints upon elites and the rise in the social standing of the masses, the appearance of socialism first as a school of thought, then as a social system, and the creation of a middle class in industrialized bourgeois states.

Nevertheless, according to Fursov, globalization is yet another revenge of the elites who have lost connection with the nation state basis and who reap benefits from the privatization of the welfare state created in the industrial epoch.

The important task set before the theory of globalization is to create a theoretical world model (or several compatible models showing different spheres and aspects of social existence and collective consciousness), allowing us to model and compare variants and models of global development and global management. This will at least allow the introduction of qualitative criteria of efficiency and comparison of various models and trajectories of potential development.

Globalization engenders strong contradictions touching upon deep ontological foundations of the being of humankind as well as local communities at all levels. It would seem that the structure of contradictions should be an objective depiction of globalization. However, theoretical views of globalization are essentially subjective and usually reflect interests and points of view of a certain social agent.

Pirogov¹⁴³ says that: “Globalization these days is perhaps the most fashionable world in political slang. However, everyone understands it differently. The differences in understanding are an estimation and this leads to a new ‘Babel confusion of tongues,’ threatening to crash the Babel tower before it has been built. Strong interests are behind each understanding of globalization. The process of globalization is permeated with sharp contradictions.” A detailed list of key contradictions can be found in the work by Timofeyev.¹⁴⁴

The current stage of economic globalization, whose point of departure is Western victory in the Cold War, is characterized by the ubiquitous and clichéd commercialization and privatization of state monopolies (housing and utilities, power, transport, defence). Commercialization and privatization have affected other, initially non-commercial spheres and institutions of social life (education, science, medicine, culture). At the same time, the objective tendency of the capital to expand and the expansion of the effectiveness of money-for-goods exchanges even at this time, during the peak of corporate globalization and privatization of welfare state, is not absolute and is always within certain non-economic limits. These limits may be material (limited space or resources), political (state borders), technological (transport and communications), related to social stability (social stratification is simply a downside of capital concentration), security and long-term needs for modernization and the construction of infrastructure, which require long-term investments.

Correspondingly, economic globalization, with its typical ultra-liberal economic model, should be seen not as an irreversible process, as neoliberal ideologues usually see it, but as a reversible and even cyclical shift of equilibrium of powers and interests between elites from various levels and other social groups.

The objective nature of the labour theory of value (LTV) does not signify the need to cancel limitations of a non-economic type, as the limitations of the LTV allow human social communities to exist. The constant tendency does not cancel out contrasting objective and subjective powers. The objective truth of the law of universal gravitation influences evolution, but does not cancel the living organisms on Earth that exist in constant contradiction with gravitation.

Liberalization and commercialization engender the degradation of extremely important – especially long-term – non-commercial spheres of social life (science, culture, education, marriage), that make up an essential part of human existence.

It is quite likely that crises in the global economy and internal affairs of certain states that are prompted by liberalization, commercialization and deregulation will in the future logically lead to the movement in reverse – namely to deliberalization and regionalization, as well as to the reinvigoration of such social institutes as nation states and ethnicities.

In any case, we see the example of Roosevelt’s New Deal that came to replace the decade of post-war liberalism of the twentieth century. Many other examples of successful deliberalization and deprivatization exist, above all the creation of the European model of the welfare state¹⁴⁵ and the construction of a whole range of viable models of socialism and compromise social models based on a number of civilizations and cultures.

The economy has seen global changes linked to the appearance and growth of transnational corporations and globalized banking and financial structures.

Manufacturing has long since ceased to be merely national. It is becoming more and more transnational: only some of the work on a certain product is done in any given country, while the item has to go through a long process from raw material to completeness through manufacturing cycles in many countries. Transnational corporations deal with this type of manufacturing, but they do not focus on one activity or one product.

In the 1990s, the joint sales of 500 largest global transnational corporations were responsible for over a quarter of the world’s GDP, over one-third of global exports of the manufacturing industry, three-quarters of the trade in goods, and four-fifths of the trade in technologies. At the same time, about 40 per cent of global trade happened within transnational corporations.¹⁴⁶

However, it follows from these figures that only about 30 per cent of the economy is globalized, considering national markets, including several exclusively local but very important economy sectors, such as housing, utilities and infrastructure. At the same time, only the high-technology sector of the economy, which is related to basic sustenance, has been globalized alongside finance and its specifics.

1991 may be considered the watershed moment of the update of another component of globalization – the global crisis of resources and demographics, which was officially declared a global threat by the experts of the Club of Rome. The reports of this elite group of experts ordered by the UN¹⁴⁷ were created in correlation with representatives and structures of the global elite. Therefore, the reports of the Club of Rome and its members are not exactly independent research, but rather the position of global elites in relation to the problem of a global crisis of resources and demographics camouflaged as research and illustrated by certain scientific computations. The policy of the “nucleus’ states and international political and financial institutions (UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.) is based thereon.

The leading cause of the crisis of resources and demographics was the “baby boom’ in non-industrialized countries on the global periphery (South, “third world’ countries), coupled with the growing depletion and, by consequence, the growing prices of natural resources. These days, the baby boom in countries on the global economic periphery has led to a migration tsunami, irreversibly destroying the ethnocultural integrity of European nations and Russia.

On the cusp of the 1990s, the growth of the population of the “third world’ exhausted the results of the green revolution – the technological modernization of the agricultural sphere of the third world, initiated by industrialized countries and meant as a means of social rehabilitation of former colonies. The end to the growth of productivity against the backdrop of the growth of population and conversion of arable lands into space used for other purposes resulted in lower per capita grain production as an objective indicator of the lower food security and life standard in general.¹⁴⁸

The stabilization of the fast pace of economic growth typical of the first stage of the industrialization led to the population growing faster than the GDP, which stamped out newly industrialized countries’ hopes for a new consumption level characteristic of the countries in the old industrialized and financial nucleus of the global system.¹⁴⁹

As a result, the contradiction between the limited resources and the unlimited growth of population in countries with a traditional model of demographic growth left the confines of the third world and took on a new quality, becoming a global problem. At the same time, the crisis of resources and demographics is not only manifested as a growing lack of balance between the global population and world’s resources, paving the way for a global catastrophe, even based on an average model from the Club of Rome. The inconsistency of the demographic development, which put demographic and migration pressure on the countries at the nucleus, as well as on the countries of the industrialized periphery (for example, Russia) is no less dangerous.

How many billion men can our planet feed if the population of the Earth may reach eight billion by as early as 2020? This issue is becoming a matter of life and death for billions, rather than millions, of the inhabitants of the world’s periphery and half-periphery, who do not “fit in” with the competing projects of a post-crisis lifestyle.

At the end of the 1960s, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence in Kennedy’s administration, who later became, characteristically, the President of the World Bank, spoke about the threat of the “demographics explosion” and impending lack of resources. In fact, it was McNamara who brought the term “demographics explosion” into the political vernacular.

At the beginning of the 1970s, a secret directive on the policy on global population elaborated by a similarly famous figure, Henry Kissinger, was adopted by the United States National Security Council, wherein the policy on “containing’ the growth of the global population was equal in importance to the defence programmes in terms of US national security.

Similar reports on the inevitability of the deficit of resources and ecological crisis were received by other expert groups, which is not surprising: the problem of the finite nature of the global mineral and biological resources was up in the air: in particular, it was clearly formulated within Vernadsky’s theory of geospheres. The problem of the limits of growth was posed and solved in the USSR largely independently from the West and based on own scientific potential.

In particular, Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky suggested to academic Moiseyev¹⁵⁰, a member of the Computation Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the creation of a mathematical model allowing estimation of how many billion men may fit into natural ecological cycles of the Earth at the current level of technologies. Essentially, the wording of the task and its solution were comparable to the results obtained by experts of the Club of Rome.

Later, the problem of objective limits of the world’s population, based on some or other boundary conditions and limits, was posed more than once and the scientific community is focused on this now. In particular, the model of the Earth’s population growth made by the scientist Kapitsa¹⁵¹ and research by Kondratyev¹⁵² received widespread attention.

First theoretical estimates of the maximum Earth population date back to the times of van Leeuwenhoek (1679), but most were published in the twentieth century, when humankind neared objective limits of economic and demographic growth. The discrepancy between various estimates is from one billion to a thousand billion people, although the most realistic estimates of contemporary researchers are between two billion and 20 billion people.

Most of these estimates are based on mathematical models extrapolating the population growth curve based on regional dynamics of population density, forecasts of the accessibility of water and land, estimates of fertility of arable lands, and other ecological and economic indices.

A well-known model from US demographist Cohen from Rockefeller University forecast a change in population based on the difference between the actual and the largest possible population density, multiplied by a certain constant known as a Malthusian coefficient. At the same time, the Earth’s human-carrying capacity is a function of a range of parameters of various quality, including subjective ones such as investment and economic climate defining the economic possibility of the introduction of necessary technologies.¹⁵³

Therefore the population may invest resources in sustainable development or, on the contrary, exhaust the critically important resources that future generations need, which will influence the Earth’s human-carrying capacity in the future as well as in the present. It is typical that liberalization of the economy, orienting businesses towards receiving profit in the present (efficiency as profitability), is forcing capital to borrow from the future.

In this context, the global crisis of resources and demographics is not made up by neo-Malthusians but is an objective component of the global systemic crisis whose urgency is proved not only by scientific extrapolations, but by actual economic tendencies, reflecting the growing deficit of natural resources as well as the growth of over-population.

Moreover, it is the crisis of resources and demographics that is the primary reason for crises and catastrophes in the economy. The foremost importance of the physical nature of economy, putting material limits on market reality, was pointed out by such supporters of a physical approach to economy as LaRouche¹⁵⁴ and Kuznetsov.¹⁵⁵ The inevitable growth of an objective component of global systemic crisis inexorably engenders its subjective manifestations such as altercations between the agents in the global process involved in the fight for limited resources, led not so much by the desire for profit and power but by the need for self-preservation.

The objective problem of the physical deficit of resources and population density leads to a subjective process of remaking economic and social expenditures and risks of global crisis, taking on the form of growing competition and antagonism between globalization agents.

Not only is limited access to critically important resources threatening, but the process of fighting for their redistribution is equally so.

Evidently, with the need to spread out survival quotas when they are in obvious deficit (the Earth’s population at stable development is estimated to be between one and five or six billion people), the dialogue of civilizations at best turns into a cold war of civilizations and other agents of globalization widely using all available forms of confrontation.¹⁵⁶

One should note the appearance of qualitatively new forms of fighting for resources and living space, such as migrational expansion of the periphery, using the inner social vulnerabilities of the nucleus countries and the most liberal ideology, ignoring the issues of ethnicities and identity but incapable of “cancelling’ their objective existence.

As a result, globalization, as a completely new form of interaction of social agents, leads to the transformation of contradictions into new social forms, largely different from those of the age of industrialization.

1.2. Attributes of globalization

Economic determinism, dominant in globalistics, does not take into consideration the social being of historical development, which has social groups and social structures rather than economic objects and individuals as its agents.

Meanwhile, socio-collective processes and changes, rather than macroeconomic indices, were and will be the stimulus, the result and the measure of historical processes. At the same time, macroeconomic parameters are important indices of social changes, albeit far from the only ones.

Well-known lists of global problems and global threats are fixating on economy and population growth limitations due to a lack of natural resources, but do not include global social problems.

Within the paradigm of the economy-based school of thought, which reduces globalization to economy and foreign policy, social mechanisms of globalization – including threats and challenges of a social nature – are not being studied or even recognized as they deserve to be, seen rather as the legacy of industrialism or as transient “growth illnesses’, a historical inevitability, the conscious change of which is useless.

As a result of the underappreciation of social forms of development with their typical complexity and multifacetedness, existing lists of global problems and global threats focus mainly on limitations on the growth of economy and population based on a lack of natural resources, excluding global social problems of a non-economic nature, in particular the ethnocultural fragmentation of large system-building communities.

To look in more detail at globalization as a qualitatively new sociohistorical reality, several major characteristics, attributes of globalization, should be singled out.

Some characteristics of globalization are widely known:¹⁵⁷

• The major reduction of obstacles between local social communities, conversion of local societies into open social systems.

• The great scope of globalization, its systemic nature, encompassing all spheres of social life.

• The crisis of resources and demographics, as a result of humankind reaching the physically and ecologically determined limits of economic and demographic growth.

• The major acceleration of social processes, engendering the problem of lack of control and therefore instability of development.

• The establishment of global digital space as a qualitatively new social reality beyond space, whose significance is increasingly closer to the role of physical space and objective brick-and-mortar reality.

• The crisis of the nation state. The loss of importance of citizen nations and state institutions of the previous industrial era.

Some other special attributes of globalization, which are not clearly formulated and substantiated by other authors, should be listed:

• The dominance of processes of divergence and differentiation linked to the disintegration, fragmentation and differentiation of local social communities. Forced adaptation of social communities and structures to a new, obstacle-free and transparent world, which is richer in competition and less stable, compels them to strengthen their functions serving to bar and protect.

• The invigoration of ethnic and religious communities and corresponding forms of self-identification and collective consciousness as the most significant manifestation of processes of social divergence, differentiation, fragmentation and competition.

• The multi-agent nature of globalization – namely, not only existence, but dominance of significant subjective factors reflecting extremely important interests of conflicting social agents, increasingly competing for global resources in all spheres and dimensions. Global unity of the world manifests itself in the global conflict of a growing number of social agents which are forced to become involved in the global social and economic environment. Escalation of the increasingly multi-agent and multi-faceted conflict is becoming the essence and content of the global unity of humankind: global conflict unites enemies in a single system much faster and tighter than global peace.

• The multi-crisis character of globalization as a system of crises and catastrophes influencing and strengthening one another, born out of the uncontrollable growth of global unity rather than resource-based growth limitations.

• The social backslide assuming a systemic, global character. The exhaustion of resources and reserves of economic, technological and social progress typical of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries objectively leads to social backslide. The latter manifests itself not only in several countries and regions being relegated to the periphery of global development, but rather in the desocialization of enormous masses of people, alienated and removed from material production, social development and social elevators.

Let us look at certain attributes of globalization in more detail.

Undoubtedly, the most important and most obvious characteristic or attribute of globalization is the major decline of spatial, political and other obstacles that no so long ago separated local social communities – the appearance of global social space, which does not mean the convergence of the world’s population into a united culturally averaged community,

The complexity of globalization as an object of scientific research lies not only in its interdisciplinary nature, but also in its correspondingly systemic nature, the impossibility of reducing the phenomenon to the sum of its parts and of separating scientific disciplines within the terms which are normally used to define globalization.

In this manner, the all-encompassing nature of globalization – its systemic character, including all spheres of social life – is another attribute.

The global crisis of resources and demographics, as the result of humankind reaching material and ecological limitations of the growth of economy and population, is a logical step towards global crisis.

Objective limits of global natural resources and the establishment of a vertical structure of the world-system, which can be divided into the nucleus and periphery spatially and socially (revolt of elites, erosion and desocialization of middle class), lead to an increasingly non-equal development in all spheres of life, on both the global and the local level. Increasing inequality, including social differentiation, is both the cause and the effect of growing competition for all types of resources.

The global economic system consists of essentially non-equal interacting components, the nucleus and the periphery. The nucleus of the global economic system (developed capitalist countries) is the zone that receives the bulk of the profit during economic exchange, while the periphery is the zone that loses the bulk of the profit. These components were shaped definitively in the twentieth century.

Twenty per cent of the world’s population – that is, the inhabitants of the nucleus or “golden billion” – saw their per capita income in real terms grow approximately 50 times during the last two centuries. At the same time, 80 per cent of the world’s population saw a growth three to five times at best, while in some cases it remained basically on a medieval level or became even lower than it was before the establishment of a global economic system.¹⁵⁸

Apart from the nucleus and the periphery, a third zone is often marked out in a system, a so-called “half-periphery’, the most flexible element. Its existence is a constant of a kind, but any one state finding itself in it is a variable, conditioned on sharp and continuing competition.

Admittedly, competition for a place in the vertical structure is being led within the nucleus (the fight between developed countries for hegemony) as well as among the states on the periphery (the fight to enter the half-periphery with the hope of entering, in time, the nucleus of the global economic system). However, the latter have little hope in this fight as the nucleus has expanded its borders as much as it could as a result of possible expansion of the fight for monopoly.

Nevertheless, a new type of inclusion of the social periphery of the global system in the nucleus is accelerating – migrational expansion (colonization) of the global periphery into “golden billion” states, transforming the old contradiction between nucleus and periphery into qualitatively new forms.

The global economic system was built on the laws of monopoly, and the vicious fight taking place in the nucleus was a competitive fight not so much for equal access, but mostly for monopoly over global markets – i.e. for redistribution and reshaping of the spheres of exclusive influence.

Originally, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this manifested itself in the fight for control over sea routes and the most profitable littoral trade hubs in the countries of the East and the New World, through which an intense exchange of trade with Europe was being conducted. Then, starting from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when Europe experienced an industrial revolution, a vicious fight began for the promotion of cheap European goods in Eastern markets. Finally, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the nucleus countries led the fight for a final remaking of the world order, as it concerned not only markets for manufactured goods but also objects of the export of capital – that is, investment targets.

The state, with its institutions, remains the most important tool in the fight for global dominance. The Western European nation state, since the beginning of the modern era (i.e. the beginning of the functioning of the global economic system) and the expression of interest in trade and business circles, has played a vital role in the process of establishing the global periphery and the creation of various levels of payment for labour and consumption, corresponding to the three main zones.

The positioning of Asia’s Japan, which began ascending within the nucleus in the last third of the nineteenth century, is testament to the fact that the relationship between nucleus and periphery is wider than the West-East antithesis and the clash of civilizations.

At the same time, the liberation of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America from political colonial dependence did not bring any major changes to the global economic system.

Coercion by force was required to lower the status of the defeated state and to include the victim of the expansion into the global economic system as a source of materials, a market and an investment target.

By the twenty-first century, when most countries on the periphery were steadily functioning, the need for the application of force drastically decreased along with spending on these endeavours, although the need for them was not completely exhausted, as many believe. Direct military pressure – albeit in new forms, lowering the extent of the permanent military presence in the countries of the periphery – has persisted and will persist in the foreseeable future, which may be seen in the examples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and others.