The positioning of Asia’s Japan, which began ascending within the nucleus in the last third of the nineteenth century, is testament to the fact that the relationship between nucleus and periphery is wider than the West-East antithesis and the clash of civilizations.
At the same time, the liberation of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America from political colonial dependence did not bring any major changes to the global economic system.
Coercion by force was required to lower the status of the defeated state and to include the victim of the expansion into the global economic system as a source of materials, a market and an investment target.
By the twenty-first century, when most countries on the periphery were steadily functioning, the need for the application of force drastically decreased along with spending on these endeavours, although the need for them was not completely exhausted, as many believe. Direct military pressure – albeit in new forms, lowering the extent of the permanent military presence in the countries of the periphery – has persisted and will persist in the foreseeable future, which may be seen in the examples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and others.
The significant financial and social expenditures on governing the colonies with their primitive material production after the war – which did not recoup the cost of supporting colonial administration and security forces – led to the dissolution (according to several substantiated opinions, the dismantling from above) of the largest colonial empires of Europe and the transformation of former colonies into a neo-colonial exploitation regime. Characteristically, the United Kingdom offered partial independence to its colonies and protectorates after war, thus passing the government expenditures and moral responsibility for the low standard of life from the metropolis onto the administrations of new states.
Therefore, the transformation of colonial dependency into neo-colonial turned out to be not liberation but a form of raising the profitability of the capital through the nationalization of expenses (put onto governments of new states in the periphery) coupled with the privatization of profits from the most profitable companies remaining property of the capital of nucleus countries.
At the same time, decolonization of the countries of the global periphery, which took place a historically short period from the beginning of World War II to the middle of the 1960s, lowered political contradictions between countries of the capitalist nucleus (leading to two world wars between nucleus empires), giving the capital equal access to the markets of former colonies.
Paradoxically, it was decolonization – which lowered political contradictions between nucleus countries fighting for monopoly over resources and markets of colonies, included in the economy of metropolises – that allowed them to grow closer politically (NATO, EU, G7, etc.), focusing on the victory in the Cold War and, above that, accelerating economic globalization.
Evidently, obtaining nominal independence – i.e. a change in the international legal status of various territories – is essentially incapable of automatically changing its position in terms of the global economic hierarchy.
The established system of economic elites, increasingly independent from national governments, is keeping a number of countries and a group of elites on the periphery as eternal debtors, which allows other groups to stay part of the nucleus, raising their standard of living at the expense of the resources of the periphery.
Characteristically, systemic opposition, including so-called “anti-system’ movements – i.e. mass social protests oriented towards overcoming “backwardness’ and increasing in some way the standard of living of certain population groups – is an important part of the process of permanent marginalization of the geopolitical periphery. This includes other workers’ movements in the nucleus countries, and communist and national liberation movements in third world countries (under various slogans, from national to religious to fundamentalist).
The joint result of their actions lies in the fact that, while introducing local tensions into the system short-term, they become, in turn, a stabilizing factor, creating legal grounds for building up the system of repression and total control over the population – which, in fact, is what is required for the global economic hierarchy to function efficiently and with fewer risks.
The uncertainty of global development is to a great extent being strengthened by the fact that, apart from old power hubs, China, combining civilizational-cultural, economic, industrial and power centre functions, is confidently moving forward into first place in the global economic hierarchy.
Another attribute of globalization, closely linked to the growth of a propensity for conflict and differentiation, is a major acceleration of social processes, engendering the problem of loss of control and, correspondingly, the instability of development.
Steady acceleration of social processes is increasingly frequently leaving behind their analysis and study, and, correspondingly, purposeful regulation. An additional factor contributing to the diminishing control is time constraints on control (over money flows, in particular), curbing the volume of impact regulation.
Another widely accepted attribute of globalization is 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 geopolitical conflicts into new non-spatial dimensions (informational, legal, ethnocultural) whose quantity and role continue to increase.
While earlier crises and altercations in self-sufficient local communities had a local, isolated character, globalization transformed local communities of all levels into open off-balance systems, having created powerful channels for a financial, migrational and informational “transfusion of crisis’, not only spontaneous, but also purposeful (“export of instability”), significantly lowering the stability of the global system in general.
As a result of globalization, a global systemic crisis has united a world-system not through a unity of interests and values, but through a unity of conflicts of the agents of global development, whose interests are objectively antagonistic.162