ETHNOS AND GLOBALIZATION: Ethnocultural Mechanisms of Disintegration of Contemporary Nations. Monograph. A. L. Safonov
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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.
3. Well-known theories and approaches to globalization do not fully explore the reasons, scale and consequences of the ethnic fragmentation of the social community typical of contemporary times and of the crisis of the contemporary nation. This is related to the fact that the majority of contemporary theories and concepts of globalization are characterized by absolutization of convergent aspects of development, tendencies for global ethnocultural unification and the denial of social regression as an objective tendency, an attribute of globalization.
4. The existence of powerful tendencies and processes of a divergent nature is one of the chief attributes of globalization, being a process of the establishment of the global environment of interaction and antagonism of social agents. Growing social differentiation and the fragmentation of local social communities and humankind in general is an inalienable part of divergent processes, which are attributes of globalization engendering major sophistication and a more fragile balance of the historical process.
5. Ethnic and ethnoconfessional fragmentation of large and highly organized local communities – in particular, nations and humankind in general – is an inalienable part of divergent processes and systemic social regression, which are typical of globalization.
6. Intensifying interaction among social agents, globalization objectively engenders increasing antagonism of all social agents and communities, including ethnoses and nations, which inevitably takes on a multi-dimensional, connected and therefore increasingly unstable system of interacting crises strengthening one another.
7. One attribute of globalization is the global increase in the number of phenomena of social regression, a symptom and mechanism of which is ethnic fragmentation of the social community and, correspondingly, primitivization and archaization of system-building, social communities and institutions of the industrialized era, and increasing importance of the role of ethnoses and social institutions typical of them.
Chapter II. Notions of ethnos and nation as basic categories of sociophilosophical discourse
2.1. Genesis and evolution of notions “nation” and “ethnos” as categories of philosophical discourse and historical perspective
To analyse patterns of the appearance, establishment and development of such social communities as ethnos and nation that manifested themselves under the influence of globalization processes, one should look into the genesis and evolution of such concepts as “nation’ and “ethnos’ as categories of sociophilosophical discourse, which will allow us to differentiate given theoretical categories and the social phenomena behind them.
The semantics of the concepts in question are comparable in the context of various languages and cultures, where they may have not only different shades of meaning, but often very different meaning in general. It is important to differentiate the almost identical notions of, for example, “nation’ in English and “нация” (natsiya) in Russian.
The meaning of the word “nation’ and related notions differs in various European languages, in particular in French and in German, where the difference in meaning stems from the history of the formation of German and French political nations. While France was formed as a synthesis of historical provinces heterogeneous in terms of language and culture, Germany as a political agent was formed as a result of a political unification of German dukedoms, the population of which was disconnected politically but understood clearly the close links based on culture and history as well as on the German standard language that had by then been formed.
The English term “nation’ has its own cultural and historical particularities, which prove a pattern-like dependence of sociopolitical terminology on the concrete historical conditions under which it was formed.
So, “national’, often translated into Russian directly as “национальный” (natsionalny: национальный Mузей – national museum; национальная безопасность – national security; национальная сборная – national team; национальная история – national history), in fact corresponds better to the Russian terms “state’ and “peoples’, whereas национальный in Russian is widely used when speaking of ethnic minorities and ethnic territorial autonomies included in a federation.
Illustrative cases have been known where a notion borrowed from the English political vernacular via a direct translation, such as natsional’naya bezopasnost’ (national security), is then understood in the scientific and expert community of national-territorial regions of Russia as the security of the state-forming nation (in fact, the state-forming ethnos) of a certain region, but not as a security of the state in general, as it was in English language.
At the same time, the existence of cultural and linguistic particularities in the interpretation of the term “nation’ only highlights the fact that the term has a stable range of meanings, shared by various cultures, on which, according to the author, the objective existence of nations