ETHNOS AND GLOBALIZATION: Ethnocultural Mechanisms of Disintegration of Contemporary Nations. Monograph. A. L. Safonov
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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.159
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”.160 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.161
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
Zinovyev, A. A. Toward Suprasociety. M., 2000. – p. 310—355.
Haass, Richard. The age of nonpolarity: What will follow US dominance? // Foreign Affairs. 2008. May – June. – P. 44—56.
Safonov, A. L., Orlov, A. D. Globalization and problem of predetermination of global development // Vestnik Buryatskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Issue 14 (Philosophy, Sociology, Political Science, Culturology). Ulan-Ude, 2011. – p. 3—7.