Бесплатный фрагмент - ETHNOS AND GLOBALIZATION: Ethnocultural Mechanisms of Disintegration of Contemporary Nations

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

(Genesis 11: 1–9)

Introduction

Most long-term forecasts of global development at the end of the twentieth century that were based on widely accepted scientific approaches and empirical patterns predicted the evolution of globalization as the establishment of a new global social community (a social entity) of a supranational kind and the all-encompassing dominance of cultural and political unification and convergence.

However, the current reality of globalization demonstrates that a global social community is not being formed despite the establishment of a global market, global digital (information) space, and manifold growth of temporary and permanent migration. Furthermore, as economic and informational globalization is expanding, the fragmentation and differentiation of cultures, civilizations, ethnicities and confessions, the “ethnicization’ of the collective consciousness, singling out ethnic identity as the leading one, is skyrocketing universally.

That means that, besides nation states and transnational corporations, global development entities (actors) are joined by an increasing number of social entities of a non-economic and non-state (non-political) nature, including ethnic communities (ethnoses).

Futurologists have had to face the unexpected: the growth of divergent tendencies; the growing number of actors participating in global processes; the revitalization and acceleration of the influence of ethnic and religious communities; the exacerbation of old ethnic and religious conflicts and the appearance of new ones. This contradicts the concepts that were formed in the twentieth century that postulate that humankind’s progress towards convergence, unification or universalization is irreversible; such concepts were based on the idea of continuous ascending progress, a multi-stage approach and economic determinism.

Therefore, social sciences are facing not only a fundamental scientific problem, but also the pressing social and pragmatic task of creating of a new paradigm of sociogenesis that will function in a brand new environment of globalization in a new historical age and that will allow analysis and prediction of the evolution of the leading social processes of our time, including ethnic and cultural phenomena.

Such leading ethnic and cultural phenomena that require theoretical understanding in terms of their social and philosophical positioning include the re-emergence of ethnic communities, ethnicity and ethnic consciousness that is taking place amid the crisis and erosion of modern nationalities.

The concept of globalization as a category of a wider sociopolitical and scientific discourse became widespread in the scientific community after 1991, when the falling apart of the USSR and of the system of its allies eliminated all obstacles to the establishment of a global market of goods and services, including media, allowing significant growth of international trade and migration as well as the global implementation of neoliberal reforms that had been tested not long before that by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

That explains why globalization was seen generally (above all, by Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher, its creators and supporters) as a politically determined and largely economic process of spread and universalization of the neoliberal variant of the western economic model and its global victory. All of this created an impression of the imminence of the creation of a global supracommunity, similar to the “end of history’ explored by Fukuyama and the creation of the global empire with a Euro-Atlantic civilizational nucleus and several circles of dependent subject-less periphery.

However, as the results of the establishment of the “united world’ have been manifesting themselves, the need has arisen to study a brand new social reality that is not limited to the phenomena of economic nature and trends of cultural unification and westernization.

The basics of the sociology of globalization were laid down in the works by Wallerstein, Bell, Giddens, etc.

Philosophers, such as Kant, Marx, Teilhard de Chardin, Vernadsky, Russell, Toynbee, Jaspers etc., who were developing and substantiating the concept of the gradual ascension of humankind to the united global community were the forerunners of modern studies of globalistics.

The geo-economic and geopolitical aspects of globalization have been studied in the works by Buzgalin and Kolganov, Delyagin,, Inozemtsev, Utkin and others.

The influence of globalization on the national state and state institutes has been studied by Beck, Bauman, Kissinger, Martin and Schumann, Stryker, Soros, Drucker, Butenko, Delyagin, Rieger and Leibfried, Kara-Murza, Kagarlitsky, Podzigun, Pantin and Lapkin, Pozdnyakov, Panarin, etc.

The world-systems approach to globalization as a process of an increasingly multi-faceted and all-encompassing interaction of social actors and entities was used by Wallerstein, Braudel, Amin,, and others.

The synergistic approach, based on a somewhat incorrect extrapolation of the pattern in natural science of the emergence of ordered structures in non-equilibrium thermodynamic systems into the social form of being, was used in the works by Budanov, Kapitsa, Moiseyev, Podzigun, Panarin, Fuller, Shadzhe and others. An indisputable advantage of the synergistic approach is a general presentation of a problem in the creation and gradual sophistication of new structures and entities as a result of the dispersion of flows of energy and matter, which, when applied to social phenomena, may mean the development of divergent social processes.

The problem of the genesis of local social groups — ethnic groups and nations being the most important among them — has an evident interdisciplinary character and is studied under sociology, ethnology, social anthropology, conflictology and ethnopolitics, as well as within history-related disciplines.

The processes of ethnogenesis, nation-building and (looking at it through a broader lens) the building of social communities are studied within three schools of thought: constructivism, instrumentalism, and primordialism.

Primordialism is based on an evolutionary approach to sociogenesis and ethnogenesis. It looks at large groups that have existed for a long time (in particular, ethnic groups and nations) as a result of the long and continuous evolution of social communities that maintain their agency even in the course of deep social transformations of society. Two leading strategies in the ethnology of the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism, as well as the evolutionist approach in linguistics that allowed specification of the genesis of cultural and linguistic communities, established the basis for the primordialist approach.

Primordialism has two major branches, sociocultural (cultural primordialism) and sociobiological, the latter focusing on the genetic similarities of social groups — ethnic ones above all — as well as on the special social role of an instinctive underlying cause of social behaviour

The leading approach of modern primordialism is undoubtedly cultural primordialism, which views the genesis of large social groups (ethnic groups and nations) as a result of the evolution of social institutes and social relations. Cultural primordialism in Soviet and Russian science is represented by the works by Bromley, Kozlov, Arutyunov, Mnatsakyan, etc.

The modern sociobiological movement, having overcome the legacy of racial sociogenetic theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is mainly represented by ethnogenetic,,, and neurogenetic concepts close to behaviourism. However, despite its seeming attractiveness, the sociobiological variations of primordialism, at best, explain the formation of tribal communities in a simplified manner. They do not explain the genesis and the patterns of establishment and evolution of more developed and complicated communities, in which culture and politics play a systematically important role.

Constructivism believes the leading mechanism for sociogenesis to be a direct sociopolitical and socioeconomic construction of social communities from top to bottom by political elites, which is usually led through state institutions. Constructivists see modern ethnos as a sociocultural relic, an ideological phantom that the elites used to rule over the masses.,,

The instrumentalists also see this social group as an outcome of a target-oriented activity, not simply as an instrument of power and elites, but as a tool or instrument of the individuals that make up the group that allows use of membership of the group to reach certain goals or to fulfil certain social functions.

Fredrik Barth is considered the leader of this movement. Tishkov, Guboglo, Voronkov and Osvald, Shnirelman, Kulagin, Drobizheva, and Lurye, as well as recent works by Popov, Nizamova, Nimayeva, Ortobayev and others, should be mentioned among Russian scientists subscribing to the constructivist doctrine. Informational and symbolist (identificational) approaches to ethno- and sociogenesis are in line with constructivism and instrumentalism.,,,

Sociological research interested in the revitalization of ethnic and ethno-social processes in the south of Russia, includes works by Avksentyev,, Abdulatipov, Gasanov, Gadzhiyev, Markedonov, Tishkov, Tkhagapsoyev, Chernous, Denisova, Zhade, Sampiyev, Hoperskaya, Hunagov, Tsutsiyev, Shadzhe, Shakhbanova and others.

Chapter I. The crisis of nations and increase of importance of the ethnos during globalization

The main goal of social philosophy has always been to understand the leading tendencies of historical evolution that determine the fate of the society and the individual, to search for the few key patterns that allow us to see or even create the outlines of the future through the chaos of reality.

The key to understanding the world of today is, undoubtedly, globalization — the ever more complex process of qualitative sophistication, acceleration and integration of the development of humanity that is pointing with ever-growing certainty to the transition from the technical and social progress of the two preceding centuries towards uncontrollability and global catastrophe.

Globalization is, in the first place, a system of qualitative social changes that include the formation of not only a single global market, but also a global social and information environment, devoid of spatial and political borders, giving rise to the previously unseen sophistication and acceleration of social-historical processes. It also means the appearance of global informational openness, the appearance of new information technologies, directly and non-inertially, influencing individual and mass consciousness in real time, as well as a qualitative increase in contacts between geographically distant communities and individuals, including those that have not been facilitated by the state and its institutions.

In a more general sense, globalization can be defined as the process of intensification of all systems of social relations and the formation of a global interaction environment, which results in not only global, but local social phenomena too being formed under the weight of remote external reasons and influences, leading to the all-encompassing, global linkage of social communities, structures, institutions and cultures. The process of globalization helps form a qualitatively new system of social relations and institutions within which not a single phenomenon of the social being on the local level cannot be studied from outside the all-encompassing system of the links with other parts of the global system.

However, while not so long ago the world was a sum of relatively closed-off social systems, at the moment, all local social and economic systems assume an open character and cannot be studied unless in the global context.

As the economies of several countries are being integrated, globalization continues moving past the economy, which supplied the initial terminology for it, and begins to take on a global, total character that cannot be reduced to particular patterns, giving rise to the unpredictable chaos of processes of different order that are happening in social, economic, political, cultural and other spheres of social life. From the perspective of these processes’ systemic interaction, they make up globalization with its integral but internally contradictory and unstable structure. That is why the analysis and prognosis of the development of globalizational processes is being impeded by the transition from the technical and social progress of the previous two centuries towards a growing uncontrollability and global catastrophe

Thus, globalization, as a leading social phenomenon of our times is the establishment, development and qualitative increase in the interconnection of the global environment — in particular, its economic, political, informational and social sphere. It qualitatively strengthens interactions within the society and therefore causes increasing conflict among all social entities.

As a result of this, crisis processes are sharply amplified in the time of globalization, which is a qualitatively new stage of historical evolution. Globalization is shown to be a progressively less stable system of crises and catastrophes on all planes of existence that feed into each other.

1.1. Globalization as a sociohistorical phenomenon

Globalization has a temporal dimension apart from functional dimensions such as economic, social, political and others.

Globalization is not a new tendency: intergovernmental, intercivilizational, and trade links and interactions have played a significant role throughout the history of humankind that has been through a few cycles of “globalization-localization’.

During the Hellenistic period and Roman domination, the prevailing tendency was for globalization (or, to be more exact, ecumenization, considering the isolation of the new world and the periphery of Eurasia and Africa). Conversely, regionalization and fragmentation of the territory into feudalistic and religious enclaves was the leading tendency of the Middle Ages.

The Age of Discovery became a new step towards globalization, bringing the previously isolated territories of the New World, Africa and Asia into the global historical and economic process. However, in terms of the degree of involvement in globalization of elites and local communities (including the European ones) up until the twentieth century, trade volumes were comparable to only a few percent of domestic manufacturing and transcontinental migration routes only concerned a small part of the population. The Hispano-Portuguese colonization of the New World that drew people out of parent states and streams of gold flowing into Europe were more of an exception proving the rule.

Globalization was preceded by the epoch of industrialism, which began with the creation of the railway tracks, steam fleet and telegraph that greatly changed the man-made environment and lifestyle in general.

It should be noted that globalization is traditionally considered to be preceded by the fight of the colonial empires over their share of Africa and the Second Boer War that ushered in the period of the global tug-of-war to remake the world order, including the two world wars.

It is not insignificant that the concept of imperialism, which was initially aimed against the domination of the British Empire, was fully formed and became a widely accepted political term by the beginning of the World War I.

On no account was Lenin’s famous work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) a first attempt to construct a theory of imperialism. It was, instead, built as a polemic debate with an earlier work by Karl Kautsky. It also contains references to other earlier works by German, French and British authors, in particular Hobson’s Imperialism.

Considering this work as a fait accompli, a century later one may see that Lenin, as a representative of the Marxist paradigm, was truly successful in singling out the essential features of a new stage of the development of capitalism that have fully shown themselves recently. They include not only the tendency towards monopolization of markets, which a hundred years ago had already come to replace “free competition’, a concept that became an ideological construct. The work also described the leading role of financial capital; the transition of incomes from the real sector to the financial; an outpacing development of export of capital; the transformation of metropolitan states into rentier states, or “Rentnerstaat’; and a new role of banks as the centres from which the economy is managed. Stock companies and subsidiaries that form — to put it in contemporary terms — transnational networks are given a special role in that work, as one of the key phenomena that defined the establishment of globalization as a qualitatively new stage of the sociohistorical evolution of humankind.

Lenin also remarked on the tendency of German capital to be exported into British colonies through the head of the empire, circumventing the colonial ownership — in other words, a tendency to move financial capital to jointly use less developed countries, a trend that fully manifested itself after World War II during neo-colonialism.

We can see that the theory of imperialism created at the beginning of the twentieth century within the Marxist paradigm contained all features typical of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first: that is, it was capable of defining the key features of globalization a hundred years before it came about.

In fact, only a chain of terminological innovations prevents us from seeing the globalization of the twenty-first century as a direct continuation of imperialism from the time of Cecil Rhodes, which was interpreted by contemporaries quite adequately, as we may see today.

However, the theory of imperialism, quite well-formed and corresponding fairly well to the social practice, was undeservedly forgotten at the end of the twentieth century: at the time, the establishment of globalization was a leading systemic phenomenon that was behind the fight among sociopolitical systems which defined the course of the twentieth century, so globalization then seemed something essentially new.

Nevertheless, despite the few manifestations of globalization, the impressive increase in physical and financial volumes of international trade (especially during the world wars that spurred on international trade and cargo turnover), nation states and regional blocs during imperialism and industrialism generally had closed-off economic, political and informational spaces. In a situation where internal networks were more important than external ones and where the state could be seen as a closed-off self-regulating system, allowing for external trade, the world could be seen as the sum of its parts, the description of which did not require states to be viewed as part of a global system.

The watershed moment for globalization came when the world’s leading states de facto turned into an open socioeconomic system while retaining nominal sovereignty. Their dependence on the global supra-system, including international political and financial institutions, has significantly strengthened and moved to a new level. The influence of this supra-system on the economic, social and cultural life of the population became comparable to the influence of national governments.

However, it would be imprudent to talk about globalization before 1991, when the forms of social life typical of Western civilization were given an impetus for global spread. The 1991 landmark comprises the political dissolution of the USSR and the involvement of the new countries that appeared on the USSR’s territory, its former allies helping to form a global community and global market economy which considerably widened the “periphery’ and “half-periphery’ of the global system.

Starting from 1991, a wave of similar and almost simultaneous reforms swept across both the West and developing and post-socialist countries, including privatization of the systemically important state monopolies such as railways, energy, network providers, education and medicine. That was the beginning of the stage of crisis and top-down dismantlement of the classic imperialist bourgeois state and its social institutions. That was the stage of the privatization of welfare state and revenge of the elites, when the state was losing its influence in the economic and social spheres of the social being and transforming gradually into an instrument serving situational interests.

There had previously been no single socioeconomic environment on a global scale, but rather a range of large ones: politically, ethnically and culturally heterogeneous states (including empires) with relatively closed-off economies and a certain number of local and even regional trade and economy systems.

At the same time, any empire-like state, be it the Roman Empire or the state of Genghis Khan, Arab Caliphate or China, was striving for maximum territorial expansion in order to gain new subjects, aiming to reach natural geographical limits of territorial extension, seas and low-yield mountainous and desert-like terrains, devoid of population and roads.

However, empires eventually reached the peak of their territorial expansion, which was followed by a political crisis caused by the limited internal connections, the fragmentation of empire elites and the increase in the length of the borders that needed military protection.

The dramatic turnabout in world history came about on the cusp of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — that is, during the Age of Discovery. From that time onwards, more Western European countries (first Spain and Portugal, then Britain, France and Germany) began basing their policies on economic considerations.

Due to the Europeans having monopolized direct sea routes to other continents, the system of global trade connections appeared and began to evolve, gradually enveloping the whole known world. The top positions in this global trade system were held be those who created it — namely, the Europeans. They were capable of reaping the benefits from trade operations with countries in Asia, Africa and America, large benefits over which they held a monopoly due to the non-equivalent — that is, the one-sided character — of this trade exchange. That led to the creation of a phenomenon that had not existed before in the history of humankind: the global economic system, also known as the global capitalist system or simply the modern global system). From the perspective of the world-systems approach, modern history is nothing other than a watershed moment for the creation and development of the world (global) economic system.

The most important features of the global economic system are that, firstly, it functions as a market — i.e. the trade exchange system — and secondly (and of the utmost importance), it does not have external social systems. At the same time, local economic and social systems, while retaining their agency, are becoming increasingly open to external factors, less independent. In other words, the global economic system, moving away from the political regulations of the state, signifies the accretion and expansion of capital.

As a result, the commercialization of the whole world — including the commercialization, mechanization (industrialization) and unification of all spheres of the social life that were previously uninvolved in market turnover — is the main objective developmental tendency.

Adequate conceptual study of globalization leads to a whole range of new methodology issues. In particular, it is widely known that all sociophilosophical theories comprise two components: the descriptive one that explains the world, and a prescriptive one, describing what should be, or the perfect condition of the society and the human being.

Correspondingly, theories of globalization, claiming to be systemic, are forced not only to describe and explain, but also to provide a prescriptive model of social relations, either explicitly or implicitly, which means there should be an ideological component reflecting the interests of the elites, but at the same time calling upon the interests and values of wider social groups, including “panhuman’ ones.

The methodological weakness of theories of globalization lies in the fact that the external form of social theories — built upon the rules of the natural sciences, studying objective natural patterns — are inevitably hiding a subjective, instrumental, ideological component, predicated on the social, civilizational and corporate affiliation of the researcher and, on a more global level, on a certain scientific school of thought or a scientific community. The ongoing global commercialization of science and education makes the latent subjectivity of social studies explicit, as science becomes a commercial market of scientific services, where supply considerably exceeds demand. A so-called buyer’s market appears, where the client dominates and scientific services are more and more often requested by non-state agents.

In any case, the ideological, prescriptive component of theories of globalization should be singled out during the analysis as a model of a society or a type of social behaviour, designed for a certain social group (target audience). One should consider the theory of a certain social phenomenon not only as a model of this phenomenon, but also as a symbolical resource, forming social and individual consciousness.

Thus, existing concepts of globalization, while reflecting the point of view and interests of certain social agents, should be seen not only as theories, but also as instruments to promote these agents’ specific interests. Therefore, constructivist and instrumentalist approaches to sociogenesis, which take subjective moments of sociohistorical development into consideration, are especially important for the theory of globalization.

Are there any universally accepted postulates of globalistics?

Undoubtedly, the fact of the establishment of the global market as a global environment of economic and, therefore, social interaction that is levelling out the spatial disconnection of local economies and the interaction of local social systems, is universally recognized.

Most researchers agree that the objective basis of globalization is scientific and technological progress and the increase in productive forces, used by a range of economically and politically dominant countries (“the golden billion”) and their elites for their own economic and political ends, including the establishment of a world order that generally benefits them.

A certain consensus exists on the necessity of preserving the cultural and civilizational diversity of the world, which objectively clashes with the Western project of globalization.

Most researchers believe that a unipolar model of globalization based on liberal fundamentalism allows no future for the existing local civilizations and corresponding cultural and historical communities, or for the West itself. At the same time, the modern scientific community cannot offer anything except a vague slogan of “dialogue of civilizations’.

The idea of the dialogue of civilizations, as an extremely abstract position devoid of clearly formulated ideas and of any connection to social agents, is formulated in the foreword to the Russian translation of Braudel’s Grammar of Civilizations: “Globalization develops at the same time as the multipolar world appears. Civilizations have to learn… to agree to the existence of other civilizations, admit that they will never achieve dominance over others, be ready to see equal partners in others.”

As a result, theoretical consensus on globalistics is limited by the fact-based side of the globalizational processes.

As for the theory of globalization as such, the process is ongoing in terms of theory that reflects objectively the growing antagonism of social agents of global development, principally global and local elites. As a result, the theory of globalization and contiguous scientific areas and disciplines form the stage for a battle between the interests of global and local elites and may therefore be seen as the reflection of globalization processes in the сollective consciousness.

It is therefore evident that the theory of globalization needs to go beyond separate disciplines and local theoretical constructions to consider the interpretation of globalization processes on a sociophilosophical level.

Most globalization models have been based on a multi-stage approach, typically including economic determinism. Within this approach, globalization is seen as an objectively predetermined, largely economic process of the spread and universalization of the Western economic model in its neoliberal version. This has created an impression of the establishment of a global “suprasociety’ (Zinoviev), the announcement of the “end of history’ and the appearance of the global empire with a Euro-Atlantic civilizational nucleus and several rings of dependable and agentless periphery.

The scope of the research may serve as a basis for the classification of theoretical approaches.

The approach to globalization as an objective historical tendency of the extension of intergovernmental and intercivilizational interactions and contacts was developed in the works of Beck, Berger, Huntington, Goldblatt, Castells, McLuhan, Soros, Stiglitz, Bratimov, Utkin, Chumakov,, and others.

Geoeconomic and geopolitical aspects of globalization were studied in the works by Buzgalin and Kolganov, Delyagin,, Inozemtsev, Subetto, Utkin and others.

The problem of the influence of globalization on the nation state and state institutions was studied in the works by Beck, Bauman, Stryker, Drucker, Butenko, Rieger and Leibfried Podzigun, Kara-Murza, Karmadanov, Kagarlitsky, Pantin, Panarin, E. Pozdnyakov, Spiridonov and others.

The world-systems approach to globalization as a process of increasingly multi-faceted and all-encompassing interaction of social agents and beings is used by Braudel, Amin,, Wallerstein, and others.

The approach to global development based on resources and ecology — one of whose variants, the sustainable development concept, became the basis for UN policies on demographics and development — has been considerably influential. This approach is based on objective natural resource limits (the “natural ceiling’), on economic activity and, as a result, on optimal population size. Nevertheless, the concept of the crisis of resources and demographics, while it does single out objective issues, cannot in principle be used to describe and make a prognosis for the social component of this crisis and how it could play out.

The correspondence between convergent and divergent social processes may be the basis for a classification. The philosophers who created the concept of humankind’s multi-stage development towards a single global social community can be considered the forerunners of modern globalistics, and one could single out the fundamental works in this field by Kant, Marx, Teilhard de Chardin, Vernadsky, Toynbee, Russell, Jaspers and others.

Representatives of the civilizational approach, who emphasize the unexpectedly stable preservation of sociocultural communities and cultural-civilizational differences even in a connected economic and social community, insist on the restricted nature of the convergent tendencies of globalization in the sociocultural sphere.

Most existing theories and concepts are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon into separate, although significant, phenomena of economic, sociocultural and political character.

In addition to the above, convergent aspects of development (monopolization and unification, including ethnocultural) are being seen in absolute terms and the phenomenon of social regression is being denied as an objective tendency, an attribute of globalization.

It is equally important that globalization is a comprehensive system of major changes — often revolutionary or catastrophic ones — in separate spheres of the social being, a system that is not equal to the sum of its parts and engenders a qualitatively new level of difficulty of social phenomena in the new epoch.

The analysis and the prognosis for development of globalization processes are hindered by the crisis-like character of the changes, increasingly more likely to end in moving from the technical and social progress of the two previous centuries towards growing ungovernability and global catastrophe: the modern world is changing faster than the science community can reach a consensus on the character of the changes.

The threats and challenges posed by globalization are not limited to the objective problems related to resources, ecology and economy on which the scientific community focuses. Global threats of a social kind, subjective in nature and linked to the transformation of the system-building social communities — in particular, national and ethnic ones — play an equally important role.

Ethnocultural fragmentation of civil nations is a new global threat eliciting not only the establishment of new ethnic and religious conflicts and the energizing of the old ones, but also new forms of their establishment and development. Thus, the clash of civilizations assumes not an intergovernmental but an internal, diffusive character tied to the elimination of spatial borders and barriers.

It seems efficient to divide the phenomena that make up globalization into objective components, linked generally to the spike in limits on natural resources and the objectively inevitable establishment of the global economic and social space, and subjective components, linked to the activities of the social agents of global development, including large and socially important communities such as nations and ethnic groups.

One of the leading objective components of globalization is the increase in global connectivity — that is, economic, transport and information globalization, as well as a global crisis of resources and demographics.

At the same time, growth of the objective component of the global systemic crisis inevitably leads to subjective manifestations in the form of a confrontation between the social agents of the global process involved in the fight for the limited resources, not so much by the desire to reap benefits and rule, but by the necessity to save oneself.

Objective and subjective components should be singled out in the theoretical approaches to globalization. It has been established that the theories may be descriptive or prescriptive. When analysing theories and models of globalization, one should single out their objective, descriptive component, and the subjective component that reflects the peculiarities, interests and intentions of the agent that shows a preference for a certain theoretical approach.

The prescriptive component of social theory (including the theory of globalization), understood as an ideal model of society, plays a special part in forming nations and other social communities of political genesis. The national idea is nothing short of the social order controlling the masses and forming their common identity.

Therefore, one should single out an ideological, prescriptive component of the theory of globalization — in other words, a value-based message, aimed at a certain social group (target audience), born out of certain social agents (usually elites), using ideology as a social management tool actively shaping or “building’ social reality.

Therefore, comparative philosophical-methodological analysis of well-known theories and globalization concepts, created within various science disciplines, shows that most are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon to separate, albeit significant, economic or political phenomena.

At the same time, most existing globalization concepts, apologetic and critical theories, exhibit absolutization of convergent aspects of the development, monopolization and unification, including the ethnocultural one.

The aforementioned limitations placed on theoretical approaches inevitably lead to cognitive restrictions that hinder the theory not only from making forecasts, but also from explaining the course of the global development post factum, necessitating a review of the sociophilosophical approaches used in certain social studies.

Globalization is usually described using the well-known categories of internalization of the economy and integration of states — in other words, from the point of view of economic determinism and the concept of world politics as the interaction of sovereign states.

However, globalization does not simply weaken nation states that reached their development peak in the twentieth century, including great powers, and erode nations as system-building social communities, but also brings to life new agents in the global game, new centres and power mechanisms that serve as alternatives to the nation state.

According to one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers and sociologists, the creator of social structuration, Anthony Giddens, the process of globalization cannot be reduced to such substantial factors as information and communication technologies and the liberalization of trade and finance.

The concept of the “hybridization’ of society that presupposes the process of cultural, racial, ethnic mixing and miscegenation has gained some traction. Therefore, hybridization is a model of a slowed-down convergence that reduces new entities to mechanic superposition, overlaying already known phenomena and entities.

According to Guseynov, globalization is the transformation of long-standing, rather independent (although capable of complex interactions) cultural-civilizational and nation state forms of social life into a single system including all of humankind. This new system inevitably takes a stand against those forms of collective life which it is supposed to replace in a new, wider, inclusive (to the point of being universal) synthesis.

The confrontation of the global and the local becomes especially evident, and dramatically antagonistic, when globalization moves beyond economy to take over cultural, political and ideological (in a wider sense, including outlook, mentality) spheres.

According to Stepin, globalization is a choice between the two scenarios, which are called the “golden billion” concept and the “dialogue of civilizations” concepts.

The golden billion concept stems from the idea of globalization as the rule, the triumph of Western civilization and the Western peoples, “the end of history” The rest should strive to become more like them under the threat of being relegated to an existence on the periphery or the semi-periphery. In the same manner, the future global society is seen as a semblance of the feudal and hierarchical system in the centre, with concentric circles of various levels around it.

The concept of the “global human ant hill” (Cheloveynik), as a final and definitive variant of the integration of humankind within the Western paradigm, was sociologically forecast and shown in the work of Zinoviev.

The events of the last two decades provide objective proof that globalization, as the establishment of a qualitatively more connected and homogenous global environment, does not lead to the extinction of the formed social communities, similarly to how biological evolution in ecosystems does not lead to a decrease in biodiversity. As a result, despite the obviously outdated nature of religious and ethnic social institutions, the influence of ethno-religious and ethnocultural processes across the world is increasing as the migration flows across states are increasing, the state institutions are losing their significance and, consequently, the nation state identity is weakening, being replaced by an ethnic and religious identity.

From that point of view, the epoch of globalization is analogous to the axial age — a pivotal age of the formation of the first local civilizations, introduced by Karl Jaspers — the secession and the setting apart of the political sphere and, as a consequence, the appearance of the largest global denominations that defined the global history for ages to come.

Consequently, globalization is not a gradual evolutionary approach to the only possible equilibrium point, but a global crisis during which catastrophic and, accordingly, essentially unpredictable major changes occur in the global society, linked to the establishment, development and extinction of a wide range of social agents as a result of an increasing global confrontation that is not limited by spatial barriers.

As a consequence, a global economic empire, even if it swallows the whole world, gives rise to new processes of structuration and divergence inside itself, undoubtedly begetting the possibility of a historical choice, a bifurcation of the historical process.

At the same time, the main consequence of the variability of global development and the increase in the number of agents in a new global world is the undoubtedly uncontrollable nature of global sociohistorical development that reaches its peak during historical crises.

The concept of the dialogue of civilizations, justifiably assuming that the sociocultural sphere is not a carbon copy of economic processes, proposes the principle of equality of civilizations, cultures and peoples, and sees the ideal global society as unity in diversity.

In fact, the concept of the dialogue of civilizations is a cover for the global periphery already formed to counter the pressure of the West in terms of the unification of culture and values, and to work out its own project for the existence in a united world. Seen from this angle, globalization is a challenge for the cultural, civilizational and national identity, which is applicable to all development scenarios, including the concept of the dialogue of civilizations.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the process is currently happening in a somewhat different way — that is to say, an ideology of the supremely wide community, the people of the Western world, the “golden billion’, is being formed, which caters for global confrontation in the sphere that is responsible for material wealth. A confrontation is inevitable within a new global community, as the fight for natural resources is gaining momentum due to the exponential increase in population size, in particular. Ideology is a subjective, collective look at the reality.

At the same time, the idea of the dialogue of civilizations as an ideal and almost conflictless development, presented as an alternative to the reality of globalization and the real strategy of globalization, is not an actual alternative: at best it is an ideal tendency, if not wishful thinking. The idea is rooted exclusively in theory and fails to make it not only through the test of societal practice, but through detailed work, a creation of a local applied model of such a dialogue. While real interests and agents of the global process are behind globalization, the universal theoretical idea of the dialogue of civilizations does not seem to be powered either by economic interests that would outweigh the benefits of globalization for elites, including local ones, or by agents, not only interested in symmetrical, equitable dialogue, but capable of organizing it.

There does not seem to be a referee overlooking the fight, someone interested and capable of forcing dialogue participants to reach a consensus that is not simply defined by economic or some other kind of power wielded by the participants during which life or death issues are being solved. The result of direct interaction between a wolf and a lamb, without any mechanical or spatial barriers, is evident; the weaker side calls for equal dialogue notwithstanding.

Ultimately, the idea of the dialogue of civilizations is at best one of the forms taken by the losers’ plea with the winners for mercy, a form of integration into a Western model of globalization.

Another form of local outsiders’ appeal for mercy aimed at the leaders of global development is the idea of the preservation of civilizational (cultural) diversity, clearly repeating the slogan urging the “preservation of the biodiversity” of the environment. Preservation of the biodiversity is nothing short of a strategy to maintain the physical being of the ethnocultural community at the price of the loss of historical agency and transformation from an agent into an object of guardianship, the transformation of a local community into a guarded biological entity.

Nevertheless, the status of a guarded object has become a relatively successful solution for the trap of globalization for many primitive ethnic groups (aboriginal peoples, few in number, with a traditional economy).

Overall, when globalization is pressuring local social communities and groups, two types of reaction manifest themselves: a short circuit — an establishment of a guardian-like collective consciousness, the transformation of local communities into diasporas; and the urge for local and regional communities politically shaped into states to enter globalization on their own terms, as advantageous as possible.

A third option is available — a creation of one’s own global project — but that route requires plenty of resources and is unequivocally available only to China.

In any case, in criticizing, or rejecting, globalization in its Western, expansionist variant, one should recognize that the problem and relevant challenges will not go away, as the causes of globalization — globalization of the economy, the transformation of local social communities into open systems, the opening of spatial and information barriers, the growing crisis of resources and demographics — do objectively exist and increase.

Therefore, the majority of well-known theories and concepts of globalization are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon into separate, albeit essential, phenomena of an economic or political nature.

Contemporary Russian studies of globalization focus on several theoretical approaches that inadvertently reflect the power dynamics in Russia and around it.

The neoliberal approach to the processes of globalization that has been largely accepted as the official concept of the reformation and development of Russia reflects the views of contemporary Russian elites, whose interests are to a great extent tied to the resource-based economic cycle and global economic structure.

It is essentially a matter of the local adaptation of such classics of neoliberalism as Hayek, Friedman and Popper. Correspondingly, negative consequences of the total liberalization of spheres of human being are presented as objectively inevitable and, as a result, as ungovernable phenomena without any alternative, such that an attempt to control them may result in an even worse outcome.

In general, liberal approaches to globalization as an extreme version of economic determinism are characterized by denial of the systemic complexity of social development that, in principle, cannot be reduced to phenomena and patterns of an economic and material kind.

Therefore, the neoliberal concept of globalization that has been taken up by the elites and which presents a condensed expression of their interests, takes on the character of an objective historical factor. Chubais and Popov are typical and influential representatives of neoliberal philosophy and ideology that are also part of the Russian elite.

On the whole, neoliberalism is interesting not so much as a theoretical model of a descriptive type, but rather as a prescriptive theory, which, put into practice in economic policies, is a typical manifestation of globalization.

In particular, neoliberalism, when thought of as a phenomenon of collective consciousness, can be considered a direct result of local elites separating themselves from local communities, a vertical fragmentation and a crisis of post-industrialism nations, as will be discussed below.

Considerable scientific results have been achieved within the socio-ecological approach that looks at globalization from the point of view of a global ecological, resource and demographic crisis. It should be noted that the socio-ecological approach has, since the very beginning, been controlled by representatives of global elites in the face of the Club of Rome and further international organizations and scientific communities.

By manipulating global threats, supporters of the concepts of sustainable development and zero growth motivate states and corresponding social communities to step back from choosing their own developmental path. They promote the creation of supranational institutions of global political power that member states cannot control or see through, using objective necessity to justify the lowering of the life standard and social guarantees for most of the world’s population, even the “inevitable’ decrease in the Earth’s population.

However, the term “sustainable development’ allows us to see clearly the interests of global financial elites behind it, lobbying for the maintenance of and increase in inequality of the global nucleus and the global periphery, to solve global contradictions at the expense of economic and political outsiders of the global community. Notably, Mikhail Gorbachev became a well-known supporter and promoter of global sustainable development, publishing several compilatory works under his name.

Nevertheless, Russia’s groundwork in basic natural science could not but result in scientific achievements, important not only in a practical sense but in terms of general philosophy. The most notable in this regard is concept of physical economy and a number of works on globalistics and system analysis of global development by some members of the Russian science community. Geophysicist and climatologist Kondratyev and his associates should be noted among the latest, as well as the works by Fedotov and Subetto, developing the noospheric approach.

The crisis of the formational approach resulted in a wave of interest in the civilizational approach. The first post-revolutionary reprint of Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe became a landmark moment for the rehabilitation of the civilizational approach.

The publication of the works of Leo Gumilev, which may not have solved but at least presented clearly the problem of ethnogenesis and the correlation between ethnographic and nation state in the historical process, became an important source of renewed interest in civilizational issues and the overcoming of economic determinism.

However, interest in the civilizational approach sprang mainly from the reality of globalization, namely the crisis of the classic nation state of the industrial epoch and a flare-up of crisis processes of an ethnocultural kind — above all, processes of ethnic and religious fragmentation of civil nations and invigoration of ethnicism, ethno-separatism and clericalism that filled the institutional vacuum born from the crisis of social institutions in the industrial epoch.

The split of the USSR and a number of eastern European states (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) into ethnic enclaves that gained the status of sovereign states entailed the need for a theoretical and ideological basis for corresponding projects of state construction and attempts to create them.

From the point of view of this study, it is of the utmost importance that scientific work on ethno-political issues is carried out, among others, by corresponding local elites that aspire to political separation or a special status within large states (ethnic communities within Russia, for example). The dissertation by Zaripov is a typical work illustrating this. Stating that “despite expectations of scientists and politicians, ethnicity not only failed to disappear, but showed a tendency for the expansion on a group level. Ethnic identity, ethnic feelings, ethnic solidarity stopped fitting into contemporary globalist tendencies that led to the unification of peoples”, Zaripov presents an idea of strengthening the ethno-confessional regionalization of Russia.

It should be noted that direct or implicit call to raise the status of titular ethnic groups is typical of the many sociological works on ethno-political issues that are being researched in Russia and in new independent states in the territory of the former USSR.

Obviously, the goal to justify raising the status of ethnic autonomies is linked to certain support on the part of regional ethnic elites trying to transform ethnic communities into political ones through purposeful artificial construction of the idea of a nation state (ideology) and a corresponding collective consciousness based on the ethnic culture.

On the theoretical level, the goal to assign political status to ethnic autonomies is based partly on post-modern concepts of constructivism and instrumentalism, partly on the ideas on multi-stage transformation of the ethnicity into a nation.

The crisis of the formational approach as a form of economic determinism caused reasonable interest in the civilizational approach which focuses on sociocultural issues.

Yakovets should be singled out among Russian researchers studying globalization through the civilizational approach.

Yakovets’ “Globalization and interaction of civilizations” proposes several key concepts of the contemporary civilizational approach to globalization:

1. The history of humankind is periodic change in global civilizations that assumes the form of changing global historical cycles.

2. Each global civilization can be presented as a five-step pyramid, with a demographical substrate with its biosocial needs and manifestations as a foundation. The pyramid top comprises spiritual and cultural phenomena, including culture, science, education, ideology, ethics and religion. Social transformation begins at the base and gradually transforms all the floors of the pyramid, which leads to the change of civilizations.

3. The intensity of intercivilizational interactions is increasing with each historical cycle, with humankind gradually becoming a united social system as a result.

4. The contemporary period is the transition from an industrialized to a post-industrialized global civilization.

5. Processes of globalization are a typical attributive characteristic of the establishment of a contemporary post-industrialized global civilization.

6. The main contradiction of a neoliberal-technocratic model of globalization is the fact that it is not in the interests of humankind, but in the interests of the largest transnational corporations.

According to Yakovets, the process of sociocultural unification, the convergence of local communities, is a threat because it lowers the viability and potential for the development of humankind. The formation of civilizations of the “fourth generation” is a response to this challenge. Yakovets discussed his concept built on the idea of the historically evolving structure of local civilizations, which includes the consequential change of civilizational leadership, in several works.,

At the same time. Yakovets believes that at the moment the sociocultural unification of local civilizations is generally prevalent. Therefore convergence of the local civilizations is moving toward the global one — that is to say, it de facto assumes the neoliberal model of global convergence (“Westernization’, according to Zinovyev) as a basis, without seeing or suggesting either alternative development models or agents interested in the alternative development.

Meanwhile, global unification is impossible, not least because peripheral local civilizations are fighting the current dominant Western civilization. Qualitatively new types of social life, social norms and rules, alternative values and models of social life will appear in the course of this fight.

Having swallowed the whole world, the global civilization will inevitably engender new processes of the formation of structures and groups.

However, Yakovets’ rejection of the formational approach leads to the rejection of its main achievement — the understanding of class and group interests as the most important powers behind the sociohistorical development. It also leads to rejection of the achievements and possibilities of sociological structuralism, which sees society as a system of objectively existing social groups and structures which include, in particular, class and ethnocultural communities.

Azroyantz presents his unique model of globalization as a concept of historical cycles, singling out three most important cycles in the evolution of the humankind: the establishment of man; the establishment and development of social community; and, ultimately, the establishment of the global social mega-community as the most advanced moral and spiritual form of human existence.

Development cycles are linked by transition periods during which situations occur where the historical choice of the next road to take must be made. These are seen as the bifurcation points, the arborization of the trajectory of historical development. Each cycle is looked upon as an evolutionary niche, while the transition during which a possible path of development for local or global social community is chosen is seen as a choice and the mastering of a new niche. At the same time, according to Azroyantz, the possibility of fatality cannot be ruled out for local civilizations and for humankind in general in the current global crisis as one of the variants of the development of the situation.

Azroyantz justifiably believes that humankind is experiencing a civilizational crisis that corresponds to the transition from the second cycle — i.e. the establishment of society — to the third one, the establishment of the social megacommunity.

In view of this, according to Azroyantz, the contemporary liberal model of globalization (globalization of scientific and technological progress and of financial capital) precludes moving onto a new level of development, which is why the creation of a qualitatively new “humane’ model of global development is required.

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.

Pivovarov 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.

Fursov 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.

Pirogov 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.

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 state 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.

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 UN 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.

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.

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 Moiseyev, 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 Kapitsa and research by Kondratyev 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.

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 LaRouche and Kuznetsov. 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.

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:

• 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.

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.

The significant financial and social expenditures on governing the colonies with their primitive material production after the war — which did not recoup the cost of supporting colonial administration and security forces — led to the dissolution (according to several substantiated opinions, the dismantling from above) of the largest colonial empires of Europe and the transformation of former colonies into a neo-colonial exploitation regime. Characteristically, the United Kingdom offered partial independence to its colonies and protectorates after war, thus passing the government expenditures and moral responsibility for the low standard of life from the metropolis onto the administrations of new states.

Therefore, the transformation of colonial dependency into neo-colonial turned out to be not liberation but a form of raising the profitability of the capital through the nationalization of expenses (put onto governments of new states in the periphery) coupled with the privatization of profits from the most profitable companies remaining property of the capital of nucleus countries.

At the same time, decolonization of the countries of the global periphery, which took place a historically short period from the beginning of World War II to the middle of the 1960s, lowered political contradictions between countries of the capitalist nucleus (leading to two world wars between nucleus empires), giving the capital equal access to the markets of former colonies.

Paradoxically, it was decolonization — which lowered political contradictions between nucleus countries fighting for monopoly over resources and markets of colonies, included in the economy of metropolises — that allowed them to grow closer politically (NATO, EU, G7, etc.), focusing on the victory in the Cold War and, above that, accelerating economic globalization.

Evidently, obtaining nominal independence — i.e. a change in the international legal status of various territories — is essentially incapable of automatically changing its position in terms of the global economic hierarchy.

The established system of economic elites, increasingly independent from national governments, is keeping a number of countries and a group of elites on the periphery as eternal debtors, which allows other groups to stay part of the nucleus, raising their standard of living at the expense of the resources of the periphery.

Characteristically, systemic opposition, including so-called “anti-system’ movements — i.e. mass social protests oriented towards overcoming “backwardness’ and increasing in some way the standard of living of certain population groups — is an important part of the process of permanent marginalization of the geopolitical periphery. This includes other workers’ movements in the nucleus countries, and communist and national liberation movements in third world countries (under various slogans, from national to religious to fundamentalist).

The joint result of their actions lies in the fact that, while introducing local tensions into the system short-term, they become, in turn, a stabilizing factor, creating legal grounds for building up the system of repression and total control over the population — which, in fact, is what is required for the global economic hierarchy to function efficiently and with fewer risks.

The uncertainty of global development is to a great extent being strengthened by the fact that, apart from old power hubs, China, combining civilizational-cultural, economic, industrial and power centre functions, is confidently moving forward into first place in the global economic hierarchy.

Another attribute of globalization, closely linked to the growth of a propensity for conflict and differentiation, is a major acceleration of social processes, engendering the problem of loss of control and, correspondingly, the instability of development.

Steady acceleration of social processes is increasingly frequently leaving behind their analysis and study, and, correspondingly, purposeful regulation. An additional factor contributing to the diminishing control is time constraints on control (over money flows, in particular), curbing the volume of impact regulation.

Another widely accepted attribute of globalization is the establishment of global digital space as a qualitatively new, supra-spatial social reality, whose meaning is more and more comparable to the role of the physical space and objective physical reality.

By admitting means of communication, the storage and spread of information (digital media), digital paperwork and digital trade (digital money), and navigation, and integrating these into an unbreakable unity, the digital sphere has become the fourth spatial dimension, directly and immediately linking people who are in different places across the planet. This change to the topology of the social space, having de facto become four-dimensional, has led, in particular, to a historically immediate global spread of virtual social networks as a qualitatively new form of social group, the relationships in which are effectuated through the digital space.

Another consequence of the establishment of the digital space, directly integrated with the social milieu, is a major acceleration of social processes, whose speed is no longer limited by the speed of physical movements and the spatial factor.

It took global digitization some twenty years to turn the globe into a “global village’, where everyone is potentially linked to any spot in the world and has access to previously impenetrable volumes of information. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this phenomenon is not being followed by adequate reflection on the significant negative social consequences of digital globalization and is being seen through the rose-coloured glasses advertising the IT industry.

So, the digital acceleration of social communications and social processes, losing spatial limitations, is the reason for the appearance of new types of social instability and the loss of equilibrium, as destructive, catastrophic social processes which do not require the investment of time and resources are being accelerated first of all.

On the other hand, the digital sphere and indirect man-machine social networks are engendering a qualitatively new level of purposeful and centralized interference of political agents in the life of the society and individuals, which means the establishment of new technologies of alternative power and new power agents. Multi-agency, anonymity and the indirect character of digital power, acting through the digital sphere, engender new types of social threat.

An increasing number of social transactions and relations are being carried out through the digital sphere, which is superseding, replacing and transforming the whole range of social relations and institutions in the circumvention not only of regular social practices, but of legal procedures, too.

As a result of total computerization, a qualitatively man-machine social sphere has appeared in which each individual is taking up an increasingly dependent, unequal state, liable to be manipulated.

The example of digital globalization shows that real globalization is not exhausted by processes of integration and convergence following the establishment of the global market and global economy. Globalization is going beyond the economy, by whose terms it was first defined, and taking on a more general character, leading to a wide range of social processes, problems and threats of various types related to key social structures in society.

A paradoxical situation has appeared, where public attention is focused on economic and technological globalization, but leading social tendencies of globalization have still not been realized by the scientific community as objective development patterns. Correspondingly, attributes of globalization that are an inalienable part of it have not been fully discovered.

Another attribute of globalization is its essential multi-agency — that is, not only the existence, but also the dominance of subjective and ideological components, reflecting vital interests of conflicting agents of global development, competing for increasingly scarce global resources in all spheres and dimensions.

It follows from the multi-agency of contemporary global processes that there is no objectively pre-arranged, predetermined outcome of globalization, which supporters of globalization’s Western model insist on.

The Western view on globalization comes from an understanding of globalization as the stable perpetual dominance of an exclusively Western civilization to the end of time, which negates the very possibility of historical choice as such. Hence it appears that all non-Western and, consequently, peripheral, participants in global development may fit into and, as a result, passively adapt to the reality of the new global order, but cannot significantly change it, including locally. It has been suggested that a future global “suprasociety’ would be a unipolar semblance of a feudal, hierarchical system with the West at its centre and concentric circles of dependent geopolitical periphery of various levels around. In particular, such a model of sociohistorical development was proposed and studied by Zinovyev.

However, in recent years, the unipolarity of the modern world-system and the resulting pre-arrangement of history have been called into question by such influential experts Huntington and Haass. Richard Haass, Chairman of the US Council of Foreign Relations, sums up the “moment of unipolarity” that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s and offers a concept of “non-polarity”. At the same time, the significant difference between “non-polarity’ and “multipolarity’ suggested by many researchers and politicians lies in the fact that active agents, actors in the global process in the time of non-polarity, may be not only states and blocs, as is the case of multipolarity. Other social agents which do not have marked spatial and state-political features may become agents as well: transnational corporations, terrorist and criminal networks, and, above all, ethnic and religious groups, attaining agency.

Despite the canon of economic determinism, the disappearance of habitual spatial, political and economic barriers has not turned and will not turn humankind into a united social subject, a state society, evolving into a predetermined final state, the end of time.

Therefore, globalization is not an evolutionary approach of the unipolar world to an objectively predetermined stable equilibrium, but global antagonism of a wide range of social agents of various types, with the outcome essentially unpredictable. The issue of birth, life and death of a wide range of social agents determining the look of the future is being decided in the course of the altercation.

The practice of globalization proves objectively that the unity of a newly achieved global world means not the establishment of a united social organism, a global state, but the appearance of a global space, the lifting of spatial and economic barriers between local social communities which used to protect them.

The multi-agency of the global process means a qualitatively new character of globalization: global unity in the global conflict among social agents. The world is united not as an inalienable whole, but rather as the field for permanent global conflict on which the fate of all agents, actors in the global process, is being decided, be they states, peoples, social groups, or legal and physical entities. At the same time, the most important consequence of globalization is the impossibility of escaping global crisis due to its all-encompassing and universal character.

The escalation of increasingly multi-faceted and multi-aspect conflict becomes the essence and the content of the global unity of humankind: a global war unites enemies into a united system faster and firmer than global peace.

At the same time, the state of peace (as an absence of war) may be defined as the state of lower intensity interaction between agents, at least because peaceful coexistence does not pose the issue of life and death of the protagonists.

Correspondingly, the reverse is true: growing intensity in the interaction between agents up to a certain threshold (globalization being an intensification of connections) turns into conflict. From this point of view, universal interconnectedness is nothing but an objective reason for a global conflict.

Indeed, the erosion of spatial and administrative borders has led not to the disappearance but to the aggravation of disagreement among agents, including among civilizations and groups, and the transference of old geopolitical conflicts into new non-spatial dimensions (informational, legal, ethnocultural) whose quantity and role continue to increase.

While earlier crises and altercations in self-sufficient local communities had a local, isolated character, globalization transformed local communities of all levels into open off-balance systems, having created powerful channels for a financial, migrational and informational “transfusion of crisis’, not only spontaneous, but also purposeful (“export of instability”), significantly lowering the stability of the global system in general.

As a result of globalization, a global systemic crisis has united a world-system not through a unity of interests and values, but through a unity of conflicts of the agents of global development, whose interests are objectively antagonistic.

Therefore, the study and analysis of globalization inevitably loses scientific objectivity, inexorably suggesting an outlook on the global situation from the point of view of a certain social agent participating in globalization as the antagonistic conflict among various agents.

Attempts to create a descriptive theory of globalization are doomed to failure as they inevitably transition into the field of politics as the “art of the impossible’, into the strategy and tactics of political governing and political construction and permanent global political confrontation, with no foreseeable prerequisites for it stopping.

In general, globalization as a systemic social phenomenon has a non-economic character. In light of this fact, it may only be adequately understood within the framework of a sociophilosophical and sociohistorical discourse.

As for economic globalization, its role lies in forming a global social milieu as the field for the development and intense interaction of phenomena of a social nature.

1.3. Ethnocultural aspects of globalization

The most important aspect of the sociodynamics of globalization processes is the correspondence of divergent and convergent aspects of social development. The dominant view of globalization as a unidirectional and all-encompassing process of unification and convergence follows from the economic determinism dominant in the scientific community. For example, it is accepted that social groups and communities, somewhat meaningful within the contemporary historical process, are almost exclusively formed by economic interests and relations. Nations and national (local) and global elites are usually considered such historically important groups. As for ethnos and ethnicity, actual ethnicity and ethnic identity are being accepted almost exclusively as belonging to isolated marginal ethnoses, adhering to a traditional lifestyle.

At the same time, the ethnic identity of members of political nations is either completely denied or admitted only as part of a sociohistorical phantom, a historical relic. It is significant that constructivism, as one of the leading movements of the theory of sociogenesis, denies the inseparable evolutionary character of cultural continuity, considering the contemporary flare-up of ethnic consciousness as a result of purposeful political propaganda in the interests of marginalized elites. Admitting, albeit under pressure, the consistent maintenance of ethnicism and ethnic identity beyond archaic communities, constructivism denies the existence of the modern ethnos as a real social community.

Globalization is considered to lead to crisis and the extinction of civil nations and nation states, which lose their economic essence by transforming relatively closed-off national economies into open social and economic systems. Based on that, one may come to seemingly logical conclusions about the inevitability and global character of convergent development engendering a certain global “suprasociety’ in which national, cultural and religious differences are being relegated to marginalized subcultures and will, in the foreseeable future, be completely eroded.

Correspondingly, within this approach, state nations, great powers and their blocs — and, since the second half of the twentieth century, transnational corporations — have been considered as actors in the global process. Globalization of national media markets and then educational systems, with global digital space as the technical basis, is the most important tool of ethnocultural convergence.

Therefore, from the point of view of economic determinism, the globalization of markets and the flows of goods, money, information and migration lead to the convergence and unification of humankind, the erosion of cultural and civilizational borders, and the formation of a new global identity without any alternative as a product of a global melting pot.

However, processes of real globalization, contrary to the logic of economic determinism, suddenly moved toward ethnic, civilizational and confessional divergence.

In this context, we may see the increasing contradiction of economic determinism as a dominant theoretical approach and the reality of globalization.

In 1991, following the triumphant actualization of the Western scenario of the convergence of two global systems, the actual process of globalization — despite the destruction of economic and political borders forming local social communities — moved towards ethnic and confessional divergence. That is why none of the theories of ethno- or national genesis that appeared in the twentieth century can sufficiently explain the post-industrial increase in ethnic and religious feelings.

The long foretold crisis of civil nations became not the synthesis of global supranational and supra-ethnic unity, but the fragmentation of post-industrial nations into ethnic and confessional groups.

Despite expectations, melting pots on the regional and global local level did not lead to the creation of a homogenous society with a common identity.

An example of an unexpected crash of the melting pot theory in the course of globalization is the United States itself, where the term “melting pot’ appeared as an idea of a polyethnic, multicultural and multiconfessional immigrant nation. Strictly speaking, the US melting pot has not been functional since the migration wave of the end of the nineteenth century. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the US society has been made up of a range of ethnic communities (Italian, Irish, Chinese, African-American) steadily maintaining their identity in an urban social environment.

Ethnocultural fragmentation of US society not only persists but is increasing, despite the higher mobility of the workforce than in Europe. Notably, at the end of the 1960s, the United States was forced to abandon the melting pot model and turn to multiculturalism under the pressure of several ethnocultural minorities, especially African-Americans.

According to Lozansky, author of the monograph “Ethnoses and lobbyism in the United States’, ethnic minorities and diasporas in the United States are becoming more and more separated, creating within the bodies of power all the more powerful lobbies compared to the corporate lobby (of transnational corporations), and even a party system. At the same time, ethnic lobbies in the United States purposefully lobby the interests of the states from which they came: diasporas within themselves not only turn into diasporas for themselves, but are becoming the tools for ethnic metropolises to influence states admitting migrants.

Orientation of the United States toward the formation not of a single alloy in the ‘furnace’ of many nationalities, but toward forming of a motley multi-faceted multiculturalism led to logic results, a strengthening of positions of ethnic minorities.

To prove his theory, Lozansky emphasizes that other US authors are worried about the threat of ethno-confessional fragmentation of the American nation, up to the possibility of Balkanization.

In particular, Huntington remarks on the increasing influence of civilizations in global politics and the stability of the links between immigrants and their countries of origin, believing that the basis for unity in the United States and the USSR is ideology, not a single national culture. This points to the fact that the role of ethnic cultures and ethnic communities remains rather important. State ideology plays a vital part in the integration of society in this case.

The United States is a leading power hub in the contemporary world order and may be seen as an accurate enough model of the global post-industrialized society. Hence it follows that the increasing role of ethnicity seen everywhere in the world, the ethnicization of politics and the conversion of diasporas into agents of local and global politics, is not a chance paradox but one of the key attributive characteristics of globalization.

Despite the expectations of the end of the twentieth century, the globalization of the economy with its convergent focus engenders processes of ethnocultural divergence. This partly reflects the ubiquitous strengthening of competition for vitally important resources, objectively caused by the deepening of the global crisis of resources and demographics, but cannot be reduced to economic competition.

The erosion of borders of nation states and national economies has brought to life the process of the reconstruction and regeneration of ethnicities, including the process of reinvigoration of large state-forming ethnoses of the Old World, buried by the theoreticians of the twentieth century.

The ethnicization of collective consciousness and the politics of the states of Eastern Europe and the former USSR may be seen from the viewpoint of social constructivism, understanding the reinvigoration of ethnicity as a purposeful reconstruction of ethnos in the interests of local elites, creating an ideological base for their nation state project.

The widely discussed ethnocultural crisis in Germany, provoked by the increasing lack of loyalty of diasporas to the host society, is an example of the recuperation and regeneration of state-forming ethnos from the bottom up, happening largely in contradiction to the interests of German political elites, avoiding accusations of German nationalism and ethnicism.

At the same time, the crisis of the policy of multiculturalism in Germany is a de facto affirmation of the increasing ethnocultural fragmentation of classic European nations, a manifestation of a general tendency toward globalization.

Erosion of the economic and political borders of nation states, while not overcoming the contradictions of the global crisis of resources and demographics, transforms the conflict, transferring the contradictions from the interstate level to the level of social groups including ethnic communities.

As a result, the link of ethnic and national self-identification to the economic model,, quite fitting to the reality of the twentieth century, is becoming increasingly contradictory to the reality of globalization. As a result, nation and ethnos, seen as relics of bourgeois and even pre-state eras, are exerting more and more influence over the collective consciousness and global politics. The expected corporate globalization in reality turned out to be the globalization of ethnic diasporas and ethnoses.

Therefore, the reality shows that as globalization and the crisis of nation states strengthen, ethnocultural differences are not smoothed over: the contemporary ethnos does not assimilate or integrate into a global multicultural environment, but steadily maintains its identity.

At a time when social institutions of the nation state are living through a deep crisis, ethnos and ethnic and religious self-identification are experiencing a period of revival and are in active demand among the masses.

The forced realization of the “ethnic renaissance’ of marginalized ethnoses and emigrant communities does not preclude the scientific community from ignoring the main problem of the current theory of ethno and national genesis, the problem of the existence of large state-forming ethnoses as the most large-scale social communities, making up the basis of the social community, largely independent from state institutions.

Driving forces and social mechanisms of the ethnocultural fragmentation of the contemporary society and their connection to globalization on the one hand and to the crisis of the contemporary post-industrialized state on the other, have not been sufficiently studied either.

It would be logical to suppose that the objective driving force behind sociogenesis processes, transformation and the competition of social communities during globalization is their ability to satisfy the most important needs and interests of their members, ensuring that members of the communities have additional opportunities and advantages in a more competitive and conflict-ridden global environment, devoid of protective spatial and political barriers.

The cause of the divergent fragmentation of contemporary nations into ethnocultural parts was the narrowing of the state’s social functions, born out of the globalization of local economies The state of the industrialized era has in a relatively short period abandoned a whole range of social guarantees and functions, vitally important to citizens and making up the institutionalized basis of the social state in the middle and the end of the twentieth century. The post-industrialized state is increasingly losing the functions of largest employer, social guarantor and social regulator, including the role of regulator of ethnoconfessional relations and migration processes.

No less important is the state’s steady abandonment of its most important function as basic social elevator, carrying out principles of equality and ensuring vertical social mobility, uniting participants with the help of a united social future, the most important function for sociogenesis.

While classic European nations and national elites of the industrialized era were formed by state systems of universal education, the post-industrialized privatization, commercialization and globalization of education means not only a lowering of the previously attained educational level but also of the social attractiveness of the nation state and its institutions, rendering them less and less capable of creating a social future for members participating in the nation as a social community.

The “revolt of the elites’ plays an important role in the ethnocultural fragmentation of contemporary civil nations, signifying the increasingly open abandonment by former national elites of key social responsibilities of earlier compatriots that created the basis of the welfare state and civil society in the second half of the twentieth century. Obviously, the abandonment by the state of system-building social functions leads to the devaluation of the nation as the most important social community for the population, ensuring the individual and group interests of its citizens.

Elites’ abandonment of social cooperation and support within the nation forces an individual to search for alternatives to a nation — social communities — increasing competitive ability and security and allowing him or her to adapt to a new structure of society, changing his or her identity.

Sociological research has shown that the choice of a new basic identity is predetermined by the individual possessing an alternative ethnic identity which takes the lead under the new conditions. As the system of social relations of a citizen with the state and its institutions are deconstructed, the citizen almost inevitably chooses an alternative ethnic identity, seeing him- or herself as a member of an ethnos first of all. Evidently, ethnic affiliation predetermines the choice of religion in many cases.

As a result, globalization, while dismantling the social institutions forming nation and national identity, engenders the ethnocultural fragmentation of polyethnic nations into ethnoses, which under certain circumstances become politicized, giving way to hidden and obvious ethno-confessional contradictions and conflicts.

Therefore, the understanding of globalization as ethnocultural unification and convergence born out of economic determinism is not proved by the social reality. The crisis of the civil nation as a system-building social community in the industrialized era in the course of globalization stimulates processes of divergence and fragmentation of nations, including the reinvigoration of ethnicity, the consolidation of global ethnic diasporas and religious confessions as agents of global politics.

Transnational corporate elites, linked to global economic and global finances — and, as large and significant social groups on a global scale, possessing their own identity — have been formed in the course of globalization. Nevertheless, social roles and statuses proper to such groups, which would have significance for most individuals, have not been formed.

Therefore, instead of convergent development leading to a synthesis of a united humankind, one may see largely forced contact between local communities and groups, caused by the essential characteristics of globalization and leading to a battle for resources and increasingly non-spatial separation of competing social communities. Having created a united global field for competition for limited resources, globalization has strengthened processes of stratification, separation and group cooperation — that is, the processes of social divergence.

Globalization, while bringing major change to the forms of social interaction, not only transforms and destroys previous civilizational, cultural, ethnic, national, political, state and other forms of civil life and corresponding civil communities, but also, out of necessity, engenders a growing diversity of social agents and manifestations of their appearance and development. First of all, those forms which, during the preceding historical development, have achieved a sufficiently independent local existence undergo a transformation.

Divergent processes — that is, the creation of new, more or less unstable social communities and other phenomena of a collective nature as a result of the transformation and fragmentation of previous agents and forms of social life — are inevitable in the course of this transformation. This flow of transformation, involving increasingly large flows of material, financial, human and other resources, inevitably leads to the appearance of a wide range of unstable social groups as typical dissipative structures, studied under synergetics, some of which will determine the shape of the future while others are doomed to disappear.

Moreover, at the present stage of the development of globalization, one may speak of the sociogenesis vector turning towards divergence, which manifests itself clearly in the ethnocultural fragmentation of local communities, principally in the crisis of identity and ethnocultural fragmentation of nations. In any case, the intensity of divergent social processes will increase as global crisis processes strengthen.

At the same time, one of the leading attributive characteristics of globalization is the existence of powerful tendencies of a divergent nature, including ethnocultural differentiation and fragmentation of local communities and of humankind in general, the increasing multi-agency of global processes, major sophistication and the diminishing stability of the historical process.

1.4. The crisis of the contemporary nation as the manifestation of the essence of globalization

Globalization is a global systemic crisis of a united world-system not only through the unity of economic and informational space, but also through the all-encompassing nature of the conflict of agents of global development, whose interests are objectively antagonistic.

Thus, another attribute of globalization is its crisis-like — or, more precisely, multi-crisis — character. The real globalization is not just a global crisis at the stage of acceleration, but a system of interconnected crises connected in space and time, impossible to reduce to the sum of its parts. That is why increasing complexity, instability, total competitiveness and propensity for conflict are characteristic of globalization.

Everything that was considered part of the expenditures, contrasts or transition processes of globalization is, in fact, its essential content.

The model of globalization as a system of sub-crises of varying quality presents a more acceptable vision of the complexity and dynamics of globalization and its ability suddenly to engender major new social phenomena, including global challenges and threats.

Correspondingly, understanding globalization as an all-encompassing system of interacting crises and catastrophes engendered not so much by growth limits for resources as by the unprecedented growth of global interconnectedness, allows us to move beyond the limits of theoretical approaches formed in the last century that see the destruction of the basis of the industrialized civilization as growth expenditure. In fact, the very notion of growth is losing its primary meaning of exploration of the outer environment resources under the conditions of fundamental limits on natural resources.

Ultimately, the multi-crisis and multi-faceted structure of globalization as a qualitatively new form of systemic social crisis finishes the era of stable socioeconomic progress and signifies the transition to a descending, regressive branch of historical development, from the social progress of the industrialized era to self-preservation under the total antagonism and instability characteristic of the post-industrialized era. This signifies a gradual loss of the crucial social achievements and possibilities of the industrial era up to the loss of agency and dissolution of nations.

At the same time, the multi-agent and critical nature of social challenges and threats, which are attributes of globalization, has a positive side — a possibility to manoeuvre and govern, which is maintained not only on a global level but also on a local one, and is determined by the level of understanding of current social processes.

Therefore, looking at globalization as a systemic crisis connected to the exhaustion of the progress of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a transition of the society and system-building social groups into a phase of descent and crisis development allows us to conclude that the most acute social problems of current times are not the legacy of the past, but an objective result of globalization and its characteristics.

This means that the global social problems of the present cannot be solved within the limits of the existing paradigm of global development, which is based on universalization of the money economy, non-state and post-state, post-national forms and development priorities, antagonistic to the state forms of the organization of society.

Correspondingly, overcoming the negative social consequences of globalization and its attributes is possible only through controlled curbing of globalization processes.

On the whole, globalization is the development of systemic social crisis as a multi-dimensional system of interacting crises in various spheres of social being, strengthening one another, which engenders a qualitatively new level of complexity and acuteness of contradictions typical of social phenomena of the new era.

The contemporary, essentially post-globalization stage of the development of the united world-system, which has largely exhausted the potential of convergent processes and convergent development, is characterized by the dominance of processes of divergence and the diversification of local communities. Forced adaptation of social groups and structures to the new barrier-free and transparent but more competitive and unstable world forces them to strengthen their own barrier and protective functions.

Transnational and transcultural convergence and integration that were not so long ago considered leading sociocultural processes of globalization are, in reality, increasingly limited by minimum consumer communication and common consumer standards sufficient for the existence of the individual in a global market sphere and by the extended communicative standard required to work in transnational structures.

While, during the early stages, differentiation — cultural-civilizational, ethnic, political — had a largely spatial character, social differentiation of non-spatial character is dominant during globalization.

Thus, social processes of divergent types, including the direct separation of certain social groups and the increase of barriers among groups, is a vital characteristic of globalization.

The chief mechanism and chief cause of differentiation and divergence is dissolution, the major weakening and loss of social importance of nation states and civil nations as system-building social groups and the degradation and fragmentation of institutions and social groups of a lower order.

Furthermore, differentiation and divergence are direct results of crisis and conflict processes linked to the battle of social agents for the redistribution of increasingly scarce resources, during which not so much separate individuals as whole social groups are being deemed rejects and pushed aside from resources.

In particular, mass marginalization of the population of industrialized countries — first of all, of the middle class, making up the basis not only of production forces and the inner consumer market but of a nucleus of civil nations — is the result of the globalization of economy.

Desocialization of the middle class is a paradoxical but obvious result of continuing technological progress in the context of the global economy and sharpening global limits on natural resources.

Catastrophic alienation of the population of industrialized countries from material production has obvious reasons: steady growth of the productivity of labour against the backdrop of the deficit of labour objects engenders a lack of vacancies. However, these vacancies either move towards newly industrialized countries as a result of the capital outflow or are lost by the indigenous population as a result of mass immigration of the workforce, destroying not only labour markets but also basic social structures of host states, firstly civil nations.

As a result, globalization creates unsolvable social problems for social communities of old industrialized countries, the very golden billion whose interests motivated globalization, objectively leading to the social regression.

The direct reason behind and a leading mechanism of social regression was the crisis of the nation state that reached its development peak in the twentieth century, and the corresponding system-building social group, a civil nation.

Civil nations, and social groups and structures of a lower order included in them, ensured the full cycle of reproduction of the local social community as a closed system, potentially capable of stable self-sufficient development.

The destruction and loss of importance of the civil nation as a structured social majority whose interests and activities ensured extended economic and social reproduction — i.e. progress — led to an increase in the importance of alternatives to nation and religious and ethnic social groups, as well as the separation of corporate social groups and elites.

The systemic social regression happening globally is not exclusively the consequence of the crisis of resources and demographics. The reasons for the growth of stratification and mass desocialization at the beginning of the twenty-first century have a social, group-like nature linked to major changes in the objective interests of elites, separating themselves from local social communities.

For the first time in history (if one does not count the episode with fences in England) the elites are objectively and consciously interested in the quantitative reduction and qualitative lowering of material consumption of dependent social groups. This is manifested not only in actual social policy but on a conceptual level — for example, in the recommendations of the UN Population Fund.

While the elites were previously objectively interested in quantitative increase, material well-being and the civil loyalty of tax payers, at present, the growing separation of dependent social groups from the process of redistribution of society’s wealth is the source of resources for the elites.

The loss of importance of nations and institutions of civil society leads to an increase in the importance of social groups and identities, providing an alternative to the civil nation — ethnic and religious groups which not long ago were considered hold-overs, relics or phantoms of the pre-industrialized era.

The increase in importance of ethnic and religious groups and corresponding forms of group identity and collective consciousness has taken on such a scale and importance that it may be seen as a separate characteristic of globalization.

Social regression, increasingly typical of our times, takes on a systemic, all-encompassing character and may be considered a crucial attribute of globalization and, correspondingly, a central global problem of the social order.

The exhaustion of resources and reserves of economic, technical and social progress, typical of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, objectively leads to social regression. It manifests itself not so much in the relegation of certain countries and regions to the periphery of global development as in the desocialization of large masses of people, the establishment and spread of new social strata separated and removed from social development and social elevators. During the industrialized period, scientific and technological progress, increasing labour productivity, average per capita production of material goods and involving natural resources in the economy led to social progress. At the time of globalization, during which humankind is moving towards the fundamental limits of economic growth, physically predetermined by the finite nature of the planet, objective reasons appear for the social regression of a range of social strata, geographical regions and social institutions.

The very situation of total control of interests stipulating that the fight for the redistribution of physically limited resources is a necessary prerequisite for self-preservation and development means that social regression in all its forms and manifestations, unthinkable in the twentieth century, becomes not only a characteristic, but a dominant trait of the current global development.

This means that a global increase in the importance of ethnic and religious communities against the backdrop of the crisis of civil nations is not only an indicator but also a vital social mechanism of the institutionalization of systemic social regression, society going back to archaic forms of social relations and collective consciousness.

At the same time, even the utmost archaization of social institutions, including zones of long-standing ethnic conflict, is coupled with scientific and technological progress, organically and without contradictions, in the form of the increasingly large use of consumer variants of advanced technologies: cellular networks, digital networks and media technologies, satellite networks and positioning, global transport networks, biological technologies (hybrid and genetically modified plants) and others.

This outwardly paradoxical coexistence of social regression and scientific and technical progress characteristic of globalization, however, creates cause for the deeper and irreversible fragmentation and archaization of society on a local and global level.

The united world, on which many hopes were pinned (unable to come true, as is evident today), has in reality become a global crisis, with global catastrophe as a future possibility.

While in the 1990s globalization was thought of as global equilibrium, a compromise signifying the beginning of a new era of sustainable development in the form of a united humankind, it is obvious these days that globalization is the final stage of the economic and social progress of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that has exhausted itself.

The global unity of the world did not engender a global noospheric synthesis, not a united humankind, but gave way to a global systemic crisis in all spheres of human existence, which is the essential basis of globalization.

In two decades of the transitional period to the global world, a complicated system of crises in separate spheres of social existence took form, each not only potentially dangerous in itself, but also capable of provoking a crisis in linked areas.

Therefore, the interaction of separate crises gives way to a new, systemic quality, a possibility of catastrophic generalization of crisis phenomena.

While crisis in a separate sphere of life — for example, an energetic or demographic one — is usually a gradual and predictable accumulation of imbalance, an establishment of positive feedback describes a catastrophic character to the crisis, similar to self-accelerating physical processes such as chain nuclear and chemical reactions.

Basically, particular global crises include the financial-economic crisis, resources and demographics crises, political, ecological and other crises, each of which may provoke global instability.

The crisis of system-building social structures and institutions has been realized even less, with outward manifestations such as the growth of social stratification, the crisis of family and marriage relations, the lack of social elevators and the growth of social tension.

One of the most important aspects of the global social crisis is the crisis of the nation state as a system-building element of the global political and economic system. While in previous historical stages the crisis of separate social systems had a local, isolated character, globalization is transforming local communities into open off-balance systems, linked by economic, information and migration channels as a spontaneous outflow of instability and purposeful export of instability, which has significantly reduced the stability of separate states and of the whole global system. At the same time, the crises in separate nation states have a ubiquitous, almost simultaneous character, having similar mechanisms and development scenarios.

The appearance of a global supra-state social system may be considered a fait accompli; however, the character of global unity as a qualitatively new phenomenon has not been studied and has not yet been fully realized. Despite the forecasts, the global system has not became a global state with its usual attributes. Despite declarations, this system does not regulate or freeze conflicts or contradictions, local or global. Global unity of connections has not solved contradictions and has not led to the convergence of parts into a harmonious noospheric whole. Moreover, we may see a noticeable lowering of the stability of development on the level of elements and on the level of the whole.

The unity of the world born out of globalization has become not only a sociocultural synthesis for all humankind but a global conflict whose reason is the increase in global interconnectedness. The world united as the field of an all-encompassing global battle in which the fate of all actors in the global fight is decided, of peoples, states, social communities. At the same time, the important consequence of globalization is the impossibility of avoiding conflict because of its all-encompassing character. From this point of view, a global systemic crisis is similar to the arena of the Roman circus, which was impossible to escape.

Characteristically, just like in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, researchers focus on sub-crises in separate spheres and their particular aspects and, as a result, considerably underestimate the catastrophic nature, irreversibility and lack of control of globalization.

Many theoretical researchers reduce the global systemic crisis to its economic, political, resource, demographic or ecological components; sociologists study the crises of separate social institutions without taking into consideration the connections between crisis processes.

The illusion of predetermination, the pre-arrangement of the historical development typical of major religious systems and of national and civilizational projects whose ideologies are detailed self-fulfilling prophecies, stands in the way of the realization of the threats of the global crisis.

The certainty of political and religious leaders and the masses in the fact that all historical development trajectories inevitably lead society to a pre-determined, ideologized social ideal — the open society, the heavenly kingdom on Earth, the global caliphate, communism or noosphere — stands in the way of understanding the essential unpredictability, instability, catastrophic and regressive character of the ongoing global process, which does not, in principle, fit into the limits set by the theories and ideologies of the twentieth century.

Compared to the twentieth century, the attainability of social ideals has become much lower under conditions of global openness coupled with the lack of resources.

Globalization turned out to be a transition from an era of progress that has exhausted its development potential to a regressive descending era of development whose characteristics include complexity, catastrophic nature, instability, liability for conflict and competitiveness.

The transition to regressive development does not mean simplification and primitivization of the social reality, even in cases of the death or disappearance of significant social structures and agents.

The appearance of new connections and degrees of freedom under the conditions of sharpening of wide range of divergent processes, during which new social agents and structures appear.

The all-encompassing social dissolution, with enormous resources previously collected by humankind, inevitably gives way to a new social complexity, a wide range of dissipative structures engendered by the openness and off-balance nature of social systems.

At the same time, processes of social regression often imitate progressive development (reforms, modernization) or fit into system-building social institutions, state ones mostly. From this point of view, the growth of organized crime and corruption and their integration into power institutes is a typical indicator of the transition of humankind into a phase of protracted regression.

The strengthening and collecting of contradictions, objectively coming from the lack of vitally important resources, gives objective cause to the new differentiation, fragmentation and polarization, to the appearance of qualitatively new non-spatial borders among conflicting social agents, creating cause for new social synthesis, the birth of new agents of the global development. So, processes of unification, typical of globalization, engender compensating counteraction on a local level, taking on various forms of ethnic and regional separatism, regional fundamentalism and other forms of social fragmentation and group antagonism.

But the dominant aspect of globalization is deep social change, predicated on the crisis of state institutions and religious and ethical bases of leading global civilizations defining history of the last two thousand years.

The antagonism of peripheral and dominant social communities and groups will engender essentially different, alternative values, models and forms of social life. Having swallowed the whole world, the global empire engenders and nurtures within its borders new processes of the formation of structures.

To sum up, globalization is a process of the synthesis of the systemic whole, but similarly a deeply fragmented and antagonistic global social community that cannot be reduced to the mechanical sum of local communities and local economies.

The synthesis of civilizations and states forced by globalization into a single, albeit heterogeneous and contradictory supra-system does not signify the expected transformation into a global state. Actors in the global development become participants in an increasingly multi-faceted and multidimensional conflict, wherein a global war unites conflicting parties into a single system much faster than the global world.

While the difference between peace and war may be defined as a major reduction in the intensity of the interaction of agents, as peaceful coexistence does not pose issues of life and death for the sides, the opposite is also true: increasing intensity of interaction (globalization being the intensification of the interconnectedness of the global system) inevitably grows into conflict.

Thus, the erosion of spatial barriers and borders has led not to the dismissal but to the aggravation of contradictions between agents, including intercivilizational and social ones, to the transition of old geopolitical conflicts into new non-spatial dimensions — legal, informational, cultural, demographical — whose importance is steadily increasing and will grow in the foreseeable future.

As a result, the situation in which spatial barriers are falling during the aggravation of contradictions and competition often leads not to the dissolution of social groups involved in the global process but to their additional consolidation and radicalization, the strengthening of non-spatial mechanisms of separation and the formation of identities, initially ideological and ethnocultural. In brief, it leads to sharp invigoration of sociogenetic and convergent processes.

Persisting under the conditions of globalization, local social systems can no longer be adequately described or adequately ruled outside the systemic context, be it a global cooperation or a global conflict.

Collapsing in on itself in the space, the contemporary ecumene takes on previously unseen complexity through new, non-spatial changes. Geopolitical agents continue to lose their spatial geographic localization and take on a qualitatively new topology which cannot be accurately described using the categories of pre-globalization, when space was a universal regulator and a limit-setter for external impacts, a leading system-building and structuring factor of ethno- and nation-building.

Due to a major increase in social mobility and transparency, national, corporate and ethnic elites are obtaining degrees of freedom that are more significant than in the time of the nation states, to the extent that it is possible for them to be completely separate from the national soil and state institutions. Non-state social institutions and structures, such as corporations, ethnic diasporas and social networks, which become full-fledged actors in global and local politics, are becoming the new elite generators.

While previously the world consisted of relatively closed-off social systems, at present, local systems maintain and strengthen the regional and civilizational specific character, including confessional and ethnic particularities.

The social mechanism of the influence of globalization on the social sphere consists of the establishment not so much of global markets of goods and finance but of new mechanisms of the reproduction of the elites as influential social groups standing behind the actors of global politics and forming it with their interests.

Characteristically, every large actor in contemporary global politics has a corresponding mechanism of social mobility behind it, a generator of skilled workers, or social elevators, alternative to traditional mechanisms of vertical mobility, connected to the institutions of the nation state.

It should be noted that the resource of new, non-state actors derives from the policy of utilization, well understood by the alternative non-state elites: the policy of the interception of the resource base of states and nation states is often defined as privatization of the welfare state. Not only are top managers of large transnational corporations and international financial structures part of new non-state elites, but so too is an influential, although relatively narrow, group of the so-called international bureaucracy, managers at the IMF, the UN, the European Union and other influential international organizations.

A specific type of new non-state elite is being formed within the borders of global and regional ethnic communities, communes, diasporas and ethnocriminal groups, whose political influence in the world has grown significantly along with the growth of global migration, the degradation of the institutions of the contemporary state, the erosion of national identity and its partial replacement by the confessional and ethnic.

The omnipresent multiculturalization and ethnicization of classic civil nations is developing in the United States, where multiple ethnic communities, increasingly oriented towards their countries of origin, are becoming increasingly influential and transforming the traditional party system of the United States into a system of ethnic lobbies.

Non-state elites, comprising a social basis of non-state actors of global politics, are not separated by the insurmountable barriers of old elites born out of the nation state. On the contrary, they all intersect and fit together to create a single stratum, integrated by social connections and mechanisms of social mobility.

Non-state local elites, interested in the resource flows of nation states, rather efficiently reach their goals through the mechanism of the intersection of elites, gradually transforming the state, according to Adam Smith, from political sovereign to night-watchman. At the same time, non-state social actors do not form global elites separated from historical soil, non-mythicized new nomads devoid of cultural identity, but rather globalized strata of national and local elites. These elites play out a liberal scenario of the privatization of national income, nationalization of expenditures, mostly on national and local levels, but also on a global level.

Sketching out the social structure of a new global world, Richard Haass, the chairman of the Council of Foreign Relations, acknowledges the appearance in the social arena of new types of influential political and social actor, comparable in their abilities to the classic territorial state but having at the same time their own agency and interests independent from the state and its institutions. The transition of global politics into non-state and non-spatial dimensions, not linked to geopolitical poles and power hubs, is, according to Haass, “nonpolarity”. The situation of nonpolarity provides an organic base for the concept of soft power as political dominance based on the control and exploration of new spheres of non-force conflict in close cooperation with new types of influential social actor, many of which — for example, non-state organizations and private armies — are purposely created as foreign policy tools.

The growth in the number of conflicting sides, typical of contemporary times, the appearance of new dimensions and trans-border connections, and the deepening of contradictions are emphasized by the well-known concept of controlled chaos, reflecting the essential characteristics of globalization as a systemic crisis. This chaos is characterized by the existence of many points where one has to make a choice (bifurcation) during the historical process, with potential governability of such chaos through weak pressure on critical points and processes being another attribute.

In other words, governing the chaos is nothing but governing the flow of crisis situations as special vulnerable points within the social process with consequent purposeful interference of third parties in the resolution of crises, which may be defined as a variant of the multi-crisis approach to global governing.

What may be gained from the multi-crisis approach to globalization as a system of interconnected sub-crises, transforming the world-system that was formed by the end of the twentieth century?

Above all, the model of the development of globalization, as the mutual influence of various sub-crises, gives an adequate idea of the systemic difficulty of globalization, its off-balance and catastrophic dynamics, its ability to give way to qualitatively new social phenomena and agents, first of all challenges and threats. Such a view of globalization as a system of global crises and one catastrophe giving way to another, a system born not so much out of the growth limits of the resource base as the explosive growth of global interconnectedness, allows us to overcome the limited nature of theoretical approaches formed in the last century, understanding the systemic regression of the basics of contemporary civilization as growth expenditures. The very concept of growth, understood as the exploration of the resources of the outside environment, loses its meaning in the situation of fundamental resource limits.

As a result, the multi-crisis model of globalization acknowledges the end of the era of incremental socioeconomic progress, with humankind transitioning to a lower branch of regressive development, from steady growth to self-preservation under the conditions of total instability and antagonism. It means the loss of the most important social opportunities and achievements of the industrial era, at the very least.

An important indicator of social regression is the archaization of social relations and the mythologization of collective consciousness, the increase in the importance of ethnic and religious feelings, or the ethnicization and clericalization of the politics. The fight for the redistribution of resources and minimization of losses is becoming the core of the global process in the situation of the global conflict of civilizations.

The narrowness of the growth limits predicated on the scarcity of resources moves humankind into the territory of self-recycling, where outsider agents — including not only peripheral states, but, first of all, multiple influential strata in developed countries, including the middle class as their social basis — become the chief source of resources for the development.

The era of systemic progress and growth is finishing: the time is coming for an inevitable descent as competition grows.

As a result, the limitation of the resource base gives way to the degradation and primitivization of system-building social institutions, the formation of circles of steadily depressive regions and settlements as the concentration of resources in one sphere requires taking resources from other spheres of existence.

From the point of view of ensuring steady development, it is important that one addresses the issues of interference, mutual strengthening, synergy of crisis processes, the appearance of cause-and-effect ties between crisis processes, the export and outflow of social catastrophes and the phenomenon of their synchronization (the domino principle, trigger process, cascading catastrophes).

It is important to note that crisis processes in separate spheres, like systemic malfunctions in medicine, may provoke or strengthen, but not compensate for one another. Strengthening of the crisis in separate spheres of existence, or regions, may strengthen or provoke crisis processes in linked areas, resulting in the crisis becoming uncontrollable and then entering into the realm of catastrophe. Thus, the phenomenon of synchronization and generalization of local crisis processes that may result in the transition of local crises into a global systemic catastrophe is obvious.

The problem of the synergy and interaction of global sub-crises is characterized, too, by the instantaneous and global nature of digital communications. The lifting of spatial barriers objectively leads to the acceleration of social processes whose development outstrips their study and, as a consequence, does not give way to the possibility of purposeful governing and regulation.

The model of globalization proposed in the current work, presenting it as a dynamically unstable system of interacting global crises, creates a basis for understanding and forecasting social dynamics of the global crisis, removing the methodological limitations of economic determinism.

Moving past economic determinism demonstrates that globalization is not an objectively pre-arranged approach of humankind towards the only possible equilibrium. It also represents a global crisis, the establishment of a development which engenders major, often catastrophic and essentially unpredictable, social transformations connected to the establishment, development and death of a wide range of social agents in the course of a global conflict that is no longer limited by spatial borders.

Having taken in all the available world, global social system continues to develop, maintaining an unreducible complexity and creating within itself new social structures and agents, thus creating the definite possibility and bifurcation of the historical process.

Therefore, the main consequence of maintaining the inner complexity, multipolarity and multi-agency of the world-system is the indisputable ungovernability of the sociohistorical process, reaching its maximum during historical crises.

At the same time, the systemic difficulty and variability of globalization against the backdrop of an increasing lack of vitally important resources and increasing competition among the actors in global politics means a heightened risk of catastrophe for humankind in general, as well as for a wide range of social agents, with ethnic and national communities undoubtedly being the most important among them.

Chapter I conclusions

1. The ontologistic nature of globalization, as the leading modern phenomenon, is essentially impossible to reduce to economic phenomena given the establishment, development and major increase in the interconnectedness of the global economic, political, informational and social environment. The unity and interconnectedness of the contemporary world intensifies the interaction and antagonism of all social agents, taking on the form of a multi-dimensional, connected and therefore increasingly unstable system of interacting crises powering one another. This engenders a qualitatively new level of complexity and the dynamics of the establishment and development of modern social phenomena.

2. Globalization, as a qualitatively new form of interaction of social agents, leads to contradictions transitioning into new social forms, differing greatly from the forms typical of the industrialized era.