Nevertheless, it should be noted that the process is currently happening in a somewhat different way – that is to say, an ideology of the supremely wide community, the people of the Western world, the “golden billion’, is being formed, which caters for global confrontation in the sphere that is responsible for material wealth. A confrontation is inevitable within a new global community, as the fight for natural resources is gaining momentum due to the exponential increase in population size, in particular. Ideology is a subjective, collective look at the reality.
At the same time, the idea of the dialogue of civilizations as an ideal and almost conflictless development, presented as an alternative to the reality of globalization and the real strategy of globalization, is not an actual alternative: at best it is an ideal tendency, if not wishful thinking. The idea is rooted exclusively in theory and fails to make it not only through the test of societal practice, but through detailed work, a creation of a local applied model of such a dialogue. While real interests and agents of the global process are behind globalization, the universal theoretical idea of the dialogue of civilizations does not seem to be powered either by economic interests that would outweigh the benefits of globalization for elites, including local ones, or by agents, not only interested in symmetrical, equitable dialogue, but capable of organizing it.
There does not seem to be a referee overlooking the fight, someone interested and capable of forcing dialogue participants to reach a consensus that is not simply defined by economic or some other kind of power wielded by the participants during which life or death issues are being solved. The result of direct interaction between a wolf and a lamb, without any mechanical or spatial barriers, is evident; the weaker side calls for equal dialogue notwithstanding.
Ultimately, the idea of the dialogue of civilizations is at best one of the forms taken by the losers’ plea with the winners for mercy, a form of integration into a Western model of globalization.
Another form of local outsiders’ appeal for mercy aimed at the leaders of global development is the idea of the preservation of civilizational (cultural) diversity, clearly repeating the slogan urging the “preservation of the biodiversity” of the environment. Preservation of the biodiversity is nothing short of a strategy to maintain the physical being of the ethnocultural community at the price of the loss of historical agency and transformation from an agent into an object of guardianship, the transformation of a local community into a guarded biological entity.
Nevertheless, the status of a guarded object has become a relatively successful solution for the trap of globalization for many primitive ethnic groups (aboriginal peoples, few in number, with a traditional economy).
Overall, when globalization is pressuring local social communities and groups, two types of reaction manifest themselves: a short circuit – an establishment of a guardian-like collective consciousness, the transformation of local communities into diasporas; and the urge for local and regional communities politically shaped into states to enter globalization on their own terms, as advantageous as possible.
A third option is available – a creation of one’s own global project – but that route requires plenty of resources and is unequivocally available only to China.
In any case, in criticizing, or rejecting, globalization in its Western, expansionist variant, one should recognize that the problem and relevant challenges will not go away, as the causes of globalization – globalization of the economy, the transformation of local social communities into open systems, the opening of spatial and information barriers, the growing crisis of resources and demographics – do objectively exist and increase.
Therefore, the majority of well-known theories and concepts of globalization are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon into separate, albeit essential, phenomena of an economic or political nature.
Contemporary Russian studies of globalization focus on several theoretical approaches that inadvertently reflect the power dynamics in Russia and around it.
The neoliberal approach to the processes of globalization that has been largely accepted as the official concept of the reformation and development of Russia reflects the views of contemporary Russian elites, whose interests are to a great extent tied to the resource-based economic cycle and global economic structure.
It is essentially a matter of the local adaptation of such classics of neoliberalism as Hayek128, Friedman129 and Popper.130 Correspondingly, negative consequences of the total liberalization of spheres of human being are presented as objectively inevitable and, as a result, as ungovernable phenomena without any alternative, such that an attempt to control them may result in an even worse outcome.
In general, liberal approaches to globalization as an extreme version of economic determinism are characterized by denial of the systemic complexity of social development that, in principle, cannot be reduced to phenomena and patterns of an economic and material kind.
Therefore, the neoliberal concept of globalization that has been taken up by the elites and which presents a condensed expression of their interests, takes on the character of an objective historical factor. Chubais and Popov are typical and influential representatives of neoliberal philosophy and ideology that are also part of the Russian elite.
On the whole, neoliberalism is interesting not so much as a theoretical model of a descriptive type, but rather as a prescriptive theory, which, put into practice in economic policies, is a typical manifestation of globalization.
In particular, neoliberalism, when thought of as a phenomenon of collective consciousness, can be considered a direct result of local elites separating themselves from local communities, a vertical fragmentation and a crisis of post-industrialism nations, as will be discussed below.
Considerable scientific results have been achieved within the socio-ecological approach that looks at globalization from the point of view of a global ecological, resource and demographic crisis. It should be noted that the socio-ecological approach has, since the very beginning, been controlled by representatives of global elites in the face of the Club of Rome and further international organizations and scientific communities.
By manipulating global threats, supporters of the concepts of sustainable development and zero growth motivate states and corresponding social communities to step back from choosing their own developmental path. They promote the creation of supranational institutions of global political power that member states cannot control or see through, using objective necessity to justify the lowering of the life standard and social guarantees for most of the world’s population, even the “inevitable’ decrease in the Earth’s population.
However, the term “sustainable development’ allows us to see clearly the interests of global financial elites behind it, lobbying for the maintenance of and increase in inequality of the global nucleus and the global periphery, to solve global contradictions at the expense of economic and political outsiders of the global community. Notably, Mikhail Gorbachev became a well-known supporter and promoter of global sustainable development, publishing several compilatory works under his name.131
Nevertheless, Russia’s groundwork in basic natural science could not but result in scientific achievements, important not only in a practical sense but in terms of general philosophy. The most notable in this regard is concept of physical economy and a number of works on globalistics and system analysis of global development by some members of the Russian science community. Geophysicist and climatologist Kondratyev and his associates132 should be noted among the latest, as well as the works by Fedotov133 and Subetto,134 developing the noospheric approach.
The crisis of the formational approach resulted in a wave of interest in the civilizational approach. The first post-revolutionary reprint of Danilevsky’s135 Russia and Europe became a landmark moment for the rehabilitation of the civilizational approach.
The publication of the works of Leo Gumilev, which may not have solved but at least presented clearly the problem of ethnogenesis and the correlation between ethnographic and nation state in the historical process, became an important source of renewed interest in civilizational issues and the overcoming of economic determinism.
However, interest in the civilizational approach sprang mainly from the reality of globalization, namely the crisis of the classic nation state of the industrial epoch and a flare-up of crisis processes of an ethnocultural kind – above all, processes of ethnic and religious fragmentation of civil nations and invigoration of ethnicism, ethno-separatism and clericalism that filled the institutional vacuum born from the crisis of social institutions in the industrial epoch.
The split of the USSR and a number of eastern European states (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) into ethnic enclaves that gained the status of sovereign states entailed the need for a theoretical and ideological basis for corresponding projects of state construction and attempts to create them.
From the point of view of this study, it is of the utmost importance that scientific work on ethno-political issues is carried out, among others, by corresponding local elites that aspire to political separation or a special status within large states (ethnic communities within Russia, for example). The dissertation by Zaripov136 is a typical work illustrating this. Stating that “despite expectations of scientists and politicians, ethnicity not only failed to disappear, but showed a tendency for the expansion on a group level. Ethnic identity, ethnic feelings, ethnic solidarity stopped fitting into contemporary globalist tendencies that led to the unification of peoples”, Zaripov presents an idea of strengthening the ethno-confessional regionalization of Russia.
It should be noted that direct or implicit call to raise the status of titular ethnic groups is typical of the many sociological works on ethno-political issues that are being researched in Russia and in new independent states in the territory of the former USSR.
Obviously, the goal to justify raising the status of ethnic autonomies is linked to certain support on the part of regional ethnic elites trying to transform ethnic communities into political ones through purposeful artificial construction of the idea of a nation state (ideology) and a corresponding collective consciousness based on the ethnic culture.
On the theoretical level, the goal to assign political status to ethnic autonomies is based partly on post-modern concepts of constructivism and instrumentalism, partly on the ideas on multi-stage transformation of the ethnicity into a nation.
The crisis of the formational approach as a form of economic determinism caused reasonable interest in the civilizational approach which focuses on sociocultural issues.
Yakovets137 should be singled out among Russian researchers studying globalization through the civilizational approach.
Yakovets’ “Globalization and interaction of civilizations” proposes several key concepts of the contemporary civilizational approach to globalization:
1. The history of humankind is periodic change in global civilizations that assumes the form of changing global historical cycles.
2. Each global civilization can be presented as a five-step pyramid, with a demographical substrate with its biosocial needs and manifestations as a foundation. The pyramid top comprises spiritual and cultural phenomena, including culture, science, education, ideology, ethics and religion. Social transformation begins at the base and gradually transforms all the floors of the pyramid, which leads to the change of civilizations.
3. The intensity of intercivilizational interactions is increasing with each historical cycle, with humankind gradually becoming a united social system as a result.
4. The contemporary period is the transition from an industrialized to a post-industrialized global civilization.
5. Processes of globalization are a typical attributive characteristic of the establishment of a contemporary post-industrialized global civilization.
6. The main contradiction of a neoliberal-technocratic model of globalization is the fact that it is not in the interests of humankind, but in the interests of the largest transnational corporations.
According to Yakovets, the process of sociocultural unification, the convergence of local communities, is a threat because it lowers the viability and potential for the development of humankind. The formation of civilizations of the “fourth generation” is a response to this challenge. Yakovets discussed his concept built on the idea of the historically evolving structure of local civilizations, which includes the consequential change of civilizational leadership, in several works.138,139
At the same time. Yakovets believes that at the moment the sociocultural unification of local civilizations is generally prevalent. Therefore convergence of the local civilizations is moving toward the global one – that is to say, it de facto assumes the neoliberal model of global convergence (“Westernization’, according to Zinovyev) as a basis, without seeing 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.