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.174
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.175
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.176
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.177
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.