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Globalization has a temporal dimension apart from functional dimensions such as economic, social, political and others.

Globalization is not a new tendency: intergovernmental, intercivilizational, and trade links and interactions have played a significant role throughout the history of humankind that has been through a few cycles of “globalization-localization’.

During the Hellenistic period and Roman domination, the prevailing tendency was for globalization (or, to be more exact, ecumenization, considering the isolation of the new world and the periphery of Eurasia and Africa). Conversely, regionalization and fragmentation of the territory into feudalistic and religious enclaves was the leading tendency of the Middle Ages.77

The Age of Discovery became a new step towards globalization, bringing the previously isolated territories of the New World, Africa and Asia into the global historical and economic process. However, in terms of the degree of involvement in globalization of elites and local communities (including the European ones) up until the twentieth century, trade volumes were comparable to only a few percent of domestic manufacturing and transcontinental migration routes only concerned a small part of the population. The Hispano-Portuguese colonization of the New World that drew people out of parent states and streams of gold flowing into Europe were more of an exception proving the rule.

Globalization was preceded by the epoch of industrialism, which began with the creation of the railway tracks, steam fleet and telegraph that greatly changed the man-made environment and lifestyle in general.

It should be noted that globalization is traditionally considered to be preceded by the fight of the colonial empires over their share of Africa and the Second Boer War78 that ushered in the period of the global tug-of-war to remake the world order, including the two world wars.

It is not insignificant that the concept of imperialism, which was initially aimed against the domination of the British Empire, was fully formed and became a widely accepted political term by the beginning of the World War I.

On no account was Lenin’s famous work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)79 a first attempt to construct a theory of imperialism. It was, instead, built as a polemic debate with an earlier work by Karl Kautsky80. It also contains references to other earlier works by German, French and British authors, in particular Hobson’s Imperialism.81

Considering this work as a fait accompli, a century later one may see that Lenin, as a representative of the Marxist paradigm, was truly successful in singling out the essential features of a new stage of the development of capitalism that have fully shown themselves recently. They include not only the tendency towards monopolization of markets, which a hundred years ago had already come to replace “free competition’, a concept that became an ideological construct. The work also described the leading role of financial capital; the transition of incomes from the real sector to the financial; an outpacing development of export of capital; the transformation of metropolitan states into rentier states, or “Rentnerstaat’; and a new role of banks as the centres from which the economy is managed. Stock companies and subsidiaries that form – to put it in contemporary terms – transnational networks are given a special role in that work, as one of the key phenomena that defined the establishment of globalization as a qualitatively new stage of the sociohistorical evolution of humankind.

Lenin also remarked on the tendency of German capital to be exported into British colonies through the head of the empire, circumventing the colonial ownership – in other words, a tendency to move financial capital to jointly use less developed countries, a trend that fully manifested itself after World War II during neo-colonialism.

We can see that the theory of imperialism created at the beginning of the twentieth century within the Marxist paradigm contained all features typical of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first: that is, it was capable of defining the key features of globalization a hundred years before it came about.

In fact, only a chain of terminological innovations prevents us from seeing the globalization of the twenty-first century as a direct continuation of imperialism from the time of Cecil Rhodes,82 which was interpreted by contemporaries quite adequately, as we may see today.

However, the theory of imperialism, quite well-formed and corresponding fairly well to the social practice, was undeservedly forgotten at the end of the twentieth century: at the time, the establishment of globalization was a leading systemic phenomenon that was behind the fight among sociopolitical systems which defined the course of the twentieth century, so globalization then seemed something essentially new.

Nevertheless, despite the few manifestations of globalization, the impressive increase in physical and financial volumes of international trade (especially during the world wars that spurred on international trade and cargo turnover), nation states and regional blocs during imperialism and industrialism generally had closed-off economic, political and informational spaces. In a situation where internal networks were more important than external ones and where the state could be seen as a closed-off self-regulating system, allowing for external trade, the world could be seen as the sum of its parts, the description of which did not require states to be viewed as part of a global system.

The watershed moment for globalization came when the world’s leading states de facto turned into an open socioeconomic system while retaining nominal sovereignty. Their dependence on the global supra-system, including international political and financial institutions, has significantly strengthened and moved to a new level. The influence of this supra-system on the economic, social and cultural life of the population became comparable to the influence of national governments.

However, it would be imprudent to talk about globalization before 1991, when the forms of social life typical of Western civilization were given an impetus for global spread. The 1991 landmark comprises the political dissolution of the USSR and the involvement of the new countries that appeared on the USSR’s territory, its former allies helping to form a global community and global market economy which considerably widened the “periphery’ and “half-periphery’ of the global system.

Starting from 1991, a wave of similar and almost simultaneous reforms swept across both the West and developing and post-socialist countries, including privatization of the systemically important state monopolies such as railways, energy, network providers, education and medicine. That was the beginning of the stage of crisis and top-down dismantlement of the classic imperialist bourgeois state and its social institutions. That was the stage of the privatization of welfare state and revenge of the elites, when the state was losing its influence in the economic and social spheres of the social being and transforming gradually into an instrument serving situational interests.

There had previously been no single socioeconomic environment on a global scale, but rather a range of large ones: politically, ethnically and culturally heterogeneous states (including empires) with relatively closed-off economies and a certain number of local and even regional trade and economy systems.

At the same time, any empire-like state, be it the Roman Empire or the state of Genghis Khan, Arab Caliphate or China, was striving for maximum territorial expansion in order to gain new subjects, aiming to reach natural geographical limits of territorial extension, seas and low-yield mountainous and desert-like terrains, devoid of population and roads.

However, empires eventually reached the peak of their territorial expansion, which was followed by a political crisis caused by the limited internal connections, the fragmentation of empire elites and the increase in the length of the borders that needed military protection.

The dramatic turnabout in world history came about on the cusp of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – that is, during the Age of Discovery. From that time onwards, more Western European countries (first Spain and Portugal, then Britain, France and Germany) began basing their policies on economic considerations.

Due to the Europeans having monopolized direct sea routes to other continents, the system of global trade connections appeared and began to evolve, gradually enveloping the whole known world. The top positions in this global trade system were held be those who created it – namely, the Europeans. They were capable of reaping the benefits from trade operations with countries in Asia, Africa and America, large benefits over which they held a monopoly due to the non-equivalent – that is, the one-sided character – of this trade exchange. That led to the creation of a phenomenon that had not existed before in the history of humankind: the global economic system, also known as the global capitalist system or simply the modern global system). From the perspective of the world-systems approach, modern history is nothing other than a watershed moment for the creation and development of the world (global) economic system.

The most important features of the global economic system are that, firstly, it functions as a market – i.e. the trade exchange system – and secondly (and of the utmost importance), it does not have external social systems. At the same time, local economic and social systems, while retaining their agency, are becoming increasingly open to external factors, less independent. In other words, the global economic system, moving away from the political regulations of the state, signifies the accretion and expansion of capital.

As a result, the commercialization of the whole world – including the commercialization, mechanization (industrialization) and unification of all spheres of the social life that were previously uninvolved in market turnover – is the main objective developmental tendency.

Adequate conceptual study of globalization leads to a whole range of new methodology issues. In particular, it is widely known that all sociophilosophical theories comprise two components: the descriptive one that explains the world, and a prescriptive one, describing what should be, or the perfect condition of the society and the human being.

Correspondingly, theories of globalization, claiming to be systemic, are forced not only to describe and explain, but also to provide a prescriptive model of social relations, either explicitly or implicitly, which means there should be an ideological component reflecting the interests of the elites, but at the same time calling upon the interests and values of wider social groups, including “panhuman’ ones.

The methodological weakness of theories of globalization lies in the fact that the external form of social theories – built upon the rules of the natural sciences, studying objective natural patterns – are inevitably hiding a subjective, instrumental, ideological component, predicated on the social, civilizational and corporate affiliation of the researcher and, on a more global level, on a certain scientific school of thought or a scientific community. The ongoing global commercialization of science and education makes the latent subjectivity of social studies explicit, as science becomes a commercial market of scientific services, where supply considerably exceeds demand. A so-called buyer’s market appears, where the client dominates and scientific services are more and more often requested by non-state agents.

In any case, the ideological, prescriptive component of theories of globalization should be singled out during the analysis as a model of a society or a type of social behaviour, designed for a certain social group (target audience). One should consider the theory of a certain social phenomenon not only as a model of this phenomenon, but also as a symbolical resource, forming social and individual consciousness.

Thus, existing concepts of globalization, while reflecting the point of view and interests of certain social agents, should be seen not only as theories, but also as instruments to promote these agents’ specific interests. Therefore, constructivist and instrumentalist approaches to sociogenesis, which take subjective moments of sociohistorical development into consideration, are especially important for the theory of globalization.

Are there any universally accepted postulates of globalistics?

Undoubtedly, the fact of the establishment of the global market as a global environment of economic and, therefore, social interaction that is levelling out the spatial disconnection of local economies and the interaction of local social systems, is universally recognized.

Most researchers agree that the objective basis of globalization is scientific and technological progress and the increase in productive forces, used by a range of economically and politically dominant countries (“the golden billion”) and their elites for their own economic and political ends, including the establishment of a world order that generally benefits them.

A certain consensus exists on the necessity of preserving the cultural and civilizational diversity of the world, which objectively clashes with the Western project of globalization.

Most researchers believe that a unipolar model of globalization based on liberal fundamentalism allows no future for the existing local civilizations and corresponding cultural and historical communities, or for the West itself. At the same time, the modern scientific community cannot offer anything except a vague slogan of “dialogue of civilizations’.

The idea of the dialogue of civilizations, as an extremely abstract position devoid of clearly formulated ideas and of any connection to social agents, is formulated in the foreword to the Russian translation of Braudel’s Grammar of Civilizations:83 “Globalization develops at the same time as the multipolar world appears. Civilizations have to learn… to agree to the existence of other civilizations, admit that they will never achieve dominance over others, be ready to see equal partners in others.”

As a result, theoretical consensus on globalistics is limited by the fact-based side of the globalizational processes.

As for the theory of globalization as such, the process is ongoing in terms of theory that reflects objectively the growing antagonism of social agents of global development, principally global and local elites. As a result, the theory of globalization and contiguous scientific areas and disciplines form the stage for a battle between the interests of global and local elites and may therefore be seen as the reflection of globalization processes in the сollective consciousness.

It is therefore evident that the theory of globalization needs to go beyond separate disciplines and local theoretical constructions to consider the interpretation of globalization processes on a sociophilosophical level.

Most globalization models have been based on a multi-stage approach, typically including economic determinism. Within this approach, globalization is seen as an objectively predetermined, largely economic process of the spread and universalization of the Western economic model in its neoliberal version. This has created an impression of the establishment of a global “suprasociety’ (Zinoviev), the announcement of the “end of history’84 and the appearance of the global empire with a Euro-Atlantic civilizational nucleus and several rings of dependable and agentless periphery.

The scope of the research may serve as a basis for the classification of theoretical approaches.

The approach to globalization as an objective historical tendency of the extension of intergovernmental and intercivilizational interactions and contacts was developed in the works of Beck,85 Berger,86 Huntington,87 Goldblatt,88 Castells,89 McLuhan,90 Soros,91 Stiglitz,92 Bratimov,93 Utkin,94 Chumakov,95,96 and others.

Geoeconomic and geopolitical aspects of globalization were studied in the works by Buzgalin and Kolganov,97 Delyagin,98,99 Inozemtsev,100 Subetto,101 Utkin102 and others.

The problem of the influence of globalization on the nation state and state institutions was studied in the works by Beck,103 Bauman,104 Stryker,105 Drucker,106 Butenko,107 Rieger and Leibfried108 Podzigun,109 Kara-Murza,110 Karmadanov,111 Kagarlitsky,112 Pantin,113 Panarin114, E. Pozdnyakov,115 Spiridonov and others.

The world-systems approach to globalization as a process of increasingly multi-faceted and all-encompassing interaction of social agents and beings is used by Braudel116, Amin,117,118 Wallerstein,119 and others.

The approach to global development based on resources and ecology – one of whose variants, the sustainable development concept, became the basis for UN policies on demographics and development – has been considerably influential. This approach is based on objective natural resource limits (the “natural ceiling’), on economic activity and, as a result, on optimal population size. Nevertheless, the concept of the crisis of resources and demographics, while it does single out objective issues, cannot in principle be used to describe and make a prognosis for the social component of this crisis and how it could play out.

The correspondence between convergent and divergent social processes may be the basis for a classification. The philosophers who created the concept of humankind’s multi-stage development towards a single global social community can be considered the forerunners of modern globalistics, and one could single out the fundamental works in this field by Kant, Marx, Teilhard de Chardin, Vernadsky, Toynbee, Russell, Jaspers and others.

Representatives of the civilizational approach, who emphasize the unexpectedly stable preservation of sociocultural communities and cultural-civilizational differences even in a connected economic and social community, insist on the restricted nature of the convergent tendencies of globalization in the sociocultural sphere.

Most existing theories and concepts are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon into separate, although significant, phenomena of economic, sociocultural and political character.

In addition to the above, convergent aspects of development (monopolization and unification, including ethnocultural) are being seen in absolute terms and the phenomenon of social regression is being denied as an objective tendency, an attribute of globalization.

It is equally important that globalization is a comprehensive system of major changes – often revolutionary or catastrophic ones – in separate spheres of the social being, a system that is not equal to the sum of its parts and engenders a qualitatively new level of difficulty of social phenomena in the new epoch.

The analysis and the prognosis for development of globalization processes are hindered by the crisis-like character of the changes, increasingly more likely to end in moving from the technical and social progress of the two previous centuries towards growing ungovernability and global catastrophe: the modern world is changing faster than the science community can reach a consensus on the character of the changes.

The threats and challenges posed by globalization are not limited to the objective problems related to resources, ecology and economy on which the scientific community focuses. Global threats of a social kind, subjective in nature and linked to the transformation of the system-building social communities – in particular, national and ethnic ones – play an equally important role.

Ethnocultural fragmentation of civil nations is a new global threat eliciting not only the establishment of new ethnic and religious conflicts and the energizing of the old ones, but also new forms of their establishment and development. Thus, the clash of civilizations assumes not an intergovernmental but an internal, diffusive character tied to the elimination of spatial borders and barriers.

It seems efficient to divide the phenomena that make up globalization into objective components, linked generally to the spike in limits on natural resources and the objectively inevitable establishment of the global economic and social space, and subjective components, linked to the activities of the social agents of global development, including large and socially important communities such as nations and ethnic groups.

One of the leading objective components of globalization is the increase in global connectivity – that is, economic, transport and information globalization, as well as a global crisis of resources and demographics.

At the same time, growth of the objective component of the global systemic crisis inevitably leads to subjective manifestations in the form of a confrontation between the social agents of the global process involved in the fight for the limited resources, not so much by the desire to reap benefits and rule, but by the necessity to save oneself.

Objective and subjective components should be singled out in the theoretical approaches to globalization. It has been established that the theories may be descriptive or prescriptive. When analysing theories and models of globalization, one should single out their objective, descriptive component, and the subjective component that reflects the peculiarities, interests and intentions of the agent that shows a preference for a certain theoretical approach.

The prescriptive component of social theory (including the theory of globalization), understood as an ideal model of society, plays a special part in forming nations and other social communities of political genesis. The national idea is nothing short of the social order controlling the masses and forming their common identity.

Therefore, one should single out an ideological, prescriptive component of the theory of globalization – in other words, a value-based message, aimed at a certain social group (target audience), born out of certain social agents (usually elites), using ideology as a social management tool actively shaping or “building’ social reality.

Therefore, comparative philosophical-methodological analysis of well-known theories and globalization concepts, created within various science disciplines, shows that most are based on the reduction of globalization as an all-encompassing phenomenon to separate, albeit significant, economic or political phenomena.

At the same time, most existing globalization concepts, apologetic and critical theories, exhibit absolutization of convergent aspects of the development, monopolization and unification, including the ethnocultural one.

The aforementioned limitations placed on theoretical approaches inevitably lead to cognitive restrictions that hinder the theory not only from making forecasts, but also from explaining the course of the global development post factum, necessitating a review of the sociophilosophical approaches used in certain social studies.

Globalization is usually described using the well-known categories of internalization of the economy and integration of states – in other words, from the point of view of economic determinism and the concept of world politics as the interaction of sovereign states.

However, globalization does not simply weaken nation states that reached their development peak in the twentieth century, including great powers, and erode nations as system-building social communities, but also brings to life new agents in the global game, new centres and power mechanisms that serve as alternatives to the nation state.

According to one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers and sociologists, the creator of social structuration, Anthony Giddens,120 the process of globalization cannot be reduced to such substantial factors as information and communication technologies and the liberalization of trade and finance.

The concept of the “hybridization’ of society that presupposes the process of cultural, racial, ethnic mixing and miscegenation121 has gained some traction. Therefore, hybridization is a model of a slowed-down convergence that reduces new entities to mechanic superposition, overlaying already known phenomena and entities.

According to Guseynov,122 globalization is the transformation of long-standing, rather independent (although capable of complex interactions) cultural-civilizational and nation state forms of social life into a single system including all of humankind. This new system inevitably takes a stand against those forms of collective life which it is supposed to replace in a new, wider, inclusive (to the point of being universal) synthesis.

The confrontation of the global and the local becomes especially evident, and dramatically antagonistic, when globalization moves beyond economy to take over cultural, political and ideological (in a wider sense, including outlook, mentality) spheres.

According to Stepin, globalization is a choice between the two scenarios, which are called the “golden billion” concept and the “dialogue of civilizations” concepts.123

The golden billion concept stems from the idea of globalization as the rule, the triumph of Western civilization and the Western peoples, “the end of history”124 The rest should strive to become more like them under the threat of being relegated to an existence on the periphery or the semi-periphery. In the same manner, the future global society is seen as a semblance of the feudal and hierarchical system in the centre, with concentric circles of various levels around it.

The concept of the “global human ant hill” (Cheloveynik), as a final and definitive variant of the integration of humankind within the Western paradigm, was sociologically forecast and shown in the work of Zinoviev.125

The events of the last two decades provide objective proof that globalization, as the establishment of a qualitatively more connected and homogenous global environment, does not lead to the extinction of the formed social communities, similarly to how biological evolution in ecosystems does not lead to a decrease in biodiversity. As a result, despite the obviously outdated nature of religious and ethnic social institutions, the influence of ethno-religious and ethnocultural processes across the world is increasing as the migration flows across states are increasing, the state institutions are losing their significance and, consequently, the nation state identity is weakening, being replaced by an ethnic and religious identity.

From that point of view, the epoch of globalization is analogous to the axial age – a pivotal age of the formation of the first local civilizations, introduced by Karl Jaspers – the secession and the setting apart of the political sphere and, as a consequence, the appearance of the largest global denominations that defined the global history for ages to come.126

Consequently, globalization is not a gradual evolutionary approach to the only possible equilibrium point, but a global crisis during which catastrophic and, accordingly, essentially unpredictable major changes occur in the global society, linked to the establishment, development and extinction of a wide range of social agents as a result of an increasing global confrontation that is not limited by spatial barriers.

As a consequence, a global economic empire, even if it swallows the whole world, gives rise to new processes of structuration and divergence inside itself, undoubtedly begetting the possibility of a historical choice, a bifurcation of the historical process.

At the same time, the main consequence of the variability of global development and the increase in the number of agents in a new global world is the undoubtedly uncontrollable nature of global sociohistorical development that reaches its peak during historical crises.

The concept of the dialogue of civilizations, justifiably assuming that the sociocultural sphere is not a carbon copy of economic processes, proposes the principle of equality of civilizations, cultures and peoples, and sees the ideal global society as unity in diversity.

In fact, the concept of the dialogue of civilizations is a cover for the global periphery already formed to counter the pressure of the West in terms of the unification of culture and values, and to work out its own project for the existence in a united world. Seen from this angle, globalization is a challenge for the cultural, civilizational and national identity, which is applicable to all development scenarios, including the concept of the dialogue of civilizations.127

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.

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.

Pirogov143 says that: “Globalization these days is perhaps the most fashionable world in political slang. However, everyone understands it differently. The differences in understanding are an estimation and this leads to a new ‘Babel confusion of tongues,’ threatening to crash the Babel tower before it has been built. Strong interests are behind each understanding of globalization. The process of globalization is permeated with sharp contradictions.” A detailed list of key contradictions can be found in the work by Timofeyev.144

The current stage of economic globalization, whose point of departure is Western victory in the Cold War, is characterized by the ubiquitous and clichéd commercialization and privatization of state monopolies (housing and utilities, power, transport, defence). Commercialization and privatization have affected other, initially non-commercial spheres and institutions of social life (education, science, medicine, culture). At the same time, the objective tendency of the capital to expand and the expansion of the effectiveness of money-for-goods exchanges even at this time, during the peak of corporate globalization and privatization of welfare state, is not absolute and is always within certain non-economic limits. These limits may be material (limited space or resources), political (state borders), technological (transport and communications), related to social stability (social stratification is simply a downside of capital concentration), security and long-term needs for modernization and the construction of infrastructure, which require long-term investments.

Correspondingly, economic globalization, with its typical ultra-liberal economic model, should be seen not as an irreversible process, as neoliberal ideologues usually see it, but as a reversible and even cyclical shift of equilibrium of powers and interests between elites from various levels and other social groups.

The objective nature of the labour theory of value (LTV) does not signify the need to cancel limitations of a non-economic type, as the limitations of the LTV allow human social communities to exist. The constant tendency does not cancel out contrasting objective and subjective powers. The objective truth of the law of universal gravitation influences evolution, but does not cancel the living organisms on Earth that exist in constant contradiction with gravitation.

Liberalization and commercialization engender the degradation of extremely important – especially long-term – non-commercial spheres of social life (science, culture, education, marriage), that make up an essential part of human existence.

It is quite likely that crises in the global economy and internal affairs of certain states that are prompted by liberalization, commercialization and deregulation will in the future logically lead to the movement in reverse – namely to deliberalization and regionalization, as well as to the reinvigoration of such social institutes as nation states and ethnicities.

In any case, we see the example of Roosevelt’s New Deal that came to replace the decade of post-war liberalism of the twentieth century. Many other examples of successful deliberalization and deprivatization exist, above all the creation of the European model of the welfare state145 and the construction of a whole range of viable models of socialism and compromise social models based on a number of civilizations and cultures.

The economy has seen global changes linked to the appearance and growth of transnational corporations and globalized banking and financial structures.

Manufacturing has long since ceased to be merely national. It is becoming more and more transnational: only some of the work on a certain product is done in any given country, while the item has to go through a long process from raw material to completeness through manufacturing cycles in many countries. Transnational corporations deal with this type of manufacturing, but they do not focus on one activity or one product.

In the 1990s, the joint sales of 500 largest global transnational corporations were responsible for over a quarter of the world’s GDP, over one-third of global exports of the manufacturing industry, three-quarters of the trade in goods, and four-fifths of the trade in technologies. At the same time, about 40 per cent of global trade happened within transnational corporations.146

However, it follows from these figures that only about 30 per cent of the economy is globalized, considering national markets, including several exclusively local but very important economy sectors, such as housing, utilities and infrastructure. At the same time, only the high-technology sector of the economy, which is related to basic sustenance, has been globalized alongside finance and its specifics.

1991 may be considered the watershed moment of the update of another component of globalization – the global crisis of resources and demographics, which was officially declared a global threat by the experts of the Club of Rome. The reports of this elite group of experts ordered by the UN147 were created in correlation with representatives and structures of the global elite. Therefore, the reports of the Club of Rome and its members are not exactly independent research, but rather the position of global elites in relation to the problem of a global crisis of resources and demographics camouflaged as research and illustrated by certain scientific computations. The policy of the “nucleus’ states and international political and financial institutions (UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.) is based thereon.

The leading cause of the crisis of resources and demographics was the “baby boom’ in non-industrialized countries on the global periphery (South, “third world’ countries), coupled with the growing depletion and, by consequence, the growing prices of natural resources. These days, the baby boom in countries on the global economic periphery has led to a migration tsunami, irreversibly destroying the ethnocultural integrity of European nations and Russia.

On the cusp of the 1990s, the growth of the population of the “third world’ exhausted the results of the green revolution – the technological modernization of the agricultural sphere of the third world, initiated by industrialized countries and meant as a means of social rehabilitation of former colonies. The end to the growth of productivity against the backdrop of the growth of population and conversion of arable lands into space used for other purposes resulted in lower per capita grain production as an objective indicator of the lower food security and life standard in general.148

The stabilization of the fast pace of economic growth typical of the first stage of the industrialization led to the population growing faster than the GDP, which stamped out newly industrialized countries’ hopes for a new consumption level characteristic of the countries in the old industrialized and financial nucleus of the global system.149

As a result, the contradiction between the limited resources and the unlimited growth of population in countries with a traditional model of demographic growth left the confines of the third world and took on a new quality, becoming a global problem. At the same time, the crisis of resources and demographics is not only manifested as a growing lack of balance between the global population and world’s resources, paving the way for a global catastrophe, even based on an average model from the Club of Rome. The inconsistency of the demographic development, which put demographic and migration pressure on the countries at the nucleus, as well as on the countries of the industrialized periphery (for example, Russia) is no less dangerous.

How many billion men can our planet feed if the population of the Earth may reach eight billion by as early as 2020? This issue is becoming a matter of life and death for billions, rather than millions, of the inhabitants of the world’s periphery and half-periphery, who do not “fit in” with the competing projects of a post-crisis lifestyle.

At the end of the 1960s, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence in Kennedy’s administration, who later became, characteristically, the President of the World Bank, spoke about the threat of the “demographics explosion” and impending lack of resources. In fact, it was McNamara who brought the term “demographics explosion” into the political vernacular.

At the beginning of the 1970s, a secret directive on the policy on global population elaborated by a similarly famous figure, Henry Kissinger, was adopted by the United States National Security Council, wherein the policy on “containing’ the growth of the global population was equal in importance to the defence programmes in terms of US national security.

Similar reports on the inevitability of the deficit of resources and ecological crisis were received by other expert groups, which is not surprising: the problem of the finite nature of the global mineral and biological resources was up in the air: in particular, it was clearly formulated within Vernadsky’s theory of geospheres. The problem of the limits of growth was posed and solved in the USSR largely independently from the West and based on own scientific potential.

In particular, Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky suggested to academic Moiseyev150, a member of the Computation Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the creation of a mathematical model allowing estimation of how many billion men may fit into natural ecological cycles of the Earth at the current level of technologies. Essentially, the wording of the task and its solution were comparable to the results obtained by experts of the Club of Rome.

Later, the problem of objective limits of the world’s population, based on some or other boundary conditions and limits, was posed more than once and the scientific community is focused on this now. In particular, the model of the Earth’s population growth made by the scientist Kapitsa151 and research by Kondratyev152 received widespread attention.

First theoretical estimates of the maximum Earth population date back to the times of van Leeuwenhoek (1679), but most were published in the twentieth century, when humankind neared objective limits of economic and demographic growth. The discrepancy between various estimates is from one billion to a thousand billion people, although the most realistic estimates of contemporary researchers are between two billion and 20 billion people.

Most of these estimates are based on mathematical models extrapolating the population growth curve based on regional dynamics of population density, forecasts of the accessibility of water and land, estimates of fertility of arable lands, and other ecological and economic indices.

A well-known model from US demographist Cohen from Rockefeller University forecast a change in population based on the difference between the actual and the largest possible population density, multiplied by a certain constant known as a Malthusian coefficient. At the same time, the Earth’s human-carrying capacity is a function of a range of parameters of various quality, including subjective ones such as investment and economic climate defining the economic possibility of the introduction of necessary technologies.153

Therefore the population may invest resources in sustainable development or, on the contrary, exhaust the critically important resources that future generations need, which will influence the Earth’s human-carrying capacity in the future as well as in the present. It is typical that liberalization of the economy, orienting businesses towards receiving profit in the present (efficiency as profitability), is forcing capital to borrow from the future.

In this context, the global crisis of resources and demographics is not made up by neo-Malthusians but is an objective component of the global systemic crisis whose urgency is proved not only by scientific extrapolations, but by actual economic tendencies, reflecting the growing deficit of natural resources as well as the growth of over-population.

Moreover, it is the crisis of resources and demographics that is the primary reason for crises and catastrophes in the economy. The foremost importance of the physical nature of economy, putting material limits on market reality, was pointed out by such supporters of a physical approach to economy as LaRouche154 and Kuznetsov.155 The inevitable growth of an objective component of global systemic crisis inexorably engenders its subjective manifestations such as altercations between the agents in the global process involved in the fight for limited resources, led not so much by the desire for profit and power but by the need for self-preservation.

The objective problem of the physical deficit of resources and population density leads to a subjective process of remaking economic and social expenditures and risks of global crisis, taking on the form of growing competition and antagonism between globalization agents.

Not only is limited access to critically important resources threatening, but the process of fighting for their redistribution is equally so.

Evidently, with the need to spread out survival quotas when they are in obvious deficit (the Earth’s population at stable development is estimated to be between one and five or six billion people), the dialogue of civilizations at best turns into a cold war of civilizations and other agents of globalization widely using all available forms of confrontation.156

One should note the appearance of qualitatively new forms of fighting for resources and living space, such as migrational expansion of the periphery, using the inner social vulnerabilities of the nucleus countries and the most liberal ideology, ignoring the issues of ethnicities and identity but incapable of “cancelling’ their objective existence.

As a result, globalization, as a completely new form of interaction of social agents, leads to the transformation of contradictions into new social forms, largely different from those of the age of industrialization.