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

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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.

      Azroyantz140 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Pirogov

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