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

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.77

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 War78 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)79 a first attempt to construct a theory of imperialism. It was, instead, built as a polemic debate with an earlier work by Karl Kautsky80. It also contains references to other earlier works by German, French and British authors, in particular Hobson’s Imperialism.81

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,82 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.