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Economic determinism, dominant in globalistics, does not take into consideration the social being of historical development, which has social groups and social structures rather than economic objects and individuals as its agents.

Meanwhile, socio-collective processes and changes, rather than macroeconomic indices, were and will be the stimulus, the result and the measure of historical processes. At the same time, macroeconomic parameters are important indices of social changes, albeit far from the only ones.

Well-known lists of global problems and global threats are fixating on economy and population growth limitations due to a lack of natural resources, but do not include global social problems.

Within the paradigm of the economy-based school of thought, which reduces globalization to economy and foreign policy, social mechanisms of globalization – including threats and challenges of a social nature – are not being studied or even recognized as they deserve to be, seen rather as the legacy of industrialism or as transient “growth illnesses’, a historical inevitability, the conscious change of which is useless.

As a result of the underappreciation of social forms of development with their typical complexity and multifacetedness, existing lists of global problems and global threats focus mainly on limitations on the growth of economy and population based on a lack of natural resources, excluding global social problems of a non-economic nature, in particular the ethnocultural fragmentation of large system-building communities.

To look in more detail at globalization as a qualitatively new sociohistorical reality, several major characteristics, attributes of globalization, should be singled out.

Some characteristics of globalization are widely known:157

• The major reduction of obstacles between local social communities, conversion of local societies into open social systems.

• The great scope of globalization, its systemic nature, encompassing all spheres of social life.

• The crisis of resources and demographics, as a result of humankind reaching the physically and ecologically determined limits of economic and demographic growth.

• The major acceleration of social processes, engendering the problem of lack of control and therefore instability of development.

• The establishment of global digital space as a qualitatively new social reality beyond space, whose significance is increasingly closer to the role of physical space and objective brick-and-mortar reality.

• The crisis of the nation state. The loss of importance of citizen nations and state institutions of the previous industrial era.

Some other special attributes of globalization, which are not clearly formulated and substantiated by other authors, should be listed:

• The dominance of processes of divergence and differentiation linked to the disintegration, fragmentation and differentiation of local social communities. Forced adaptation of social communities and structures to a new, obstacle-free and transparent world, which is richer in competition and less stable, compels them to strengthen their functions serving to bar and protect.

• The invigoration of ethnic and religious communities and corresponding forms of self-identification and collective consciousness as the most significant manifestation of processes of social divergence, differentiation, fragmentation and competition.

• The multi-agent nature of globalization – namely, not only existence, but dominance of significant subjective factors reflecting extremely important interests of conflicting social agents, increasingly competing for global resources in all spheres and dimensions. Global unity of the world manifests itself in the global conflict of a growing number of social agents which are forced to become involved in the global social and economic environment. Escalation of the increasingly multi-agent and multi-faceted conflict is becoming the essence and content of the global unity of humankind: global conflict unites enemies in a single system much faster and tighter than global peace.

• The multi-crisis character of globalization as a system of crises and catastrophes influencing and strengthening one another, born out of the uncontrollable growth of global unity rather than resource-based growth limitations.

• The social backslide assuming a systemic, global character. The exhaustion of resources and reserves of economic, technological and social progress typical of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries objectively leads to social backslide. The latter manifests itself not only in several countries and regions being relegated to the periphery of global development, but rather in the desocialization of enormous masses of people, alienated and removed from material production, social development and social elevators.

Let us look at certain attributes of globalization in more detail.

Undoubtedly, the most important and most obvious characteristic or attribute of globalization is the major decline of spatial, political and other obstacles that no so long ago separated local social communities – the appearance of global social space, which does not mean the convergence of the world’s population into a united culturally averaged community,

The complexity of globalization as an object of scientific research lies not only in its interdisciplinary nature, but also in its correspondingly systemic nature, the impossibility of reducing the phenomenon to the sum of its parts and of separating scientific disciplines within the terms which are normally used to define globalization.

In this manner, the all-encompassing nature of globalization – its systemic character, including all spheres of social life – is another attribute.

The global crisis of resources and demographics, as the result of humankind reaching material and ecological limitations of the growth of economy and population, is a logical step towards global crisis.

Objective limits of global natural resources and the establishment of a vertical structure of the world-system, which can be divided into the nucleus and periphery spatially and socially (revolt of elites, erosion and desocialization of middle class), lead to an increasingly non-equal development in all spheres of life, on both the global and the local level. Increasing inequality, including social differentiation, is both the cause and the effect of growing competition for all types of resources.

The global economic system consists of essentially non-equal interacting components, the nucleus and the periphery. The nucleus of the global economic system (developed capitalist countries) is the zone that receives the bulk of the profit during economic exchange, while the periphery is the zone that loses the bulk of the profit. These components were shaped definitively in the twentieth century.

Twenty per cent of the world’s population – that is, the inhabitants of the nucleus or “golden billion” – saw their per capita income in real terms grow approximately 50 times during the last two centuries. At the same time, 80 per cent of the world’s population saw a growth three to five times at best, while in some cases it remained basically on a medieval level or became even lower than it was before the establishment of a global economic system.158

Apart from the nucleus and the periphery, a third zone is often marked out in a system, a so-called “half-periphery’, the most flexible element. Its existence is a constant of a kind, but any one state finding itself in it is a variable, conditioned on sharp and continuing competition.

Admittedly, competition for a place in the vertical structure is being led within the nucleus (the fight between developed countries for hegemony) as well as among the states on the periphery (the fight to enter the half-periphery with the hope of entering, in time, the nucleus of the global economic system). However, the latter have little hope in this fight as the nucleus has expanded its borders as much as it could as a result of possible expansion of the fight for monopoly.

Nevertheless, a new type of inclusion of the social periphery of the global system in the nucleus is accelerating – migrational expansion (colonization) of the global periphery into “golden billion” states, transforming the old contradiction between nucleus and periphery into qualitatively new forms.

The global economic system was built on the laws of monopoly, and the vicious fight taking place in the nucleus was a competitive fight not so much for equal access, but mostly for monopoly over global markets – i.e. for redistribution and reshaping of the spheres of exclusive influence.

Originally, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this manifested itself in the fight for control over sea routes and the most profitable littoral trade hubs in the countries of the East and the New World, through which an intense exchange of trade with Europe was being conducted. Then, starting from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when Europe experienced an industrial revolution, a vicious fight began for the promotion of cheap European goods in Eastern markets. Finally, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the nucleus countries led the fight for a final remaking of the world order, as it concerned not only markets for manufactured goods but also objects of the export of capital – that is, investment targets.

The state, with its institutions, remains the most important tool in the fight for global dominance. The Western European nation state, since the beginning of the modern era (i.e. the beginning of the functioning of the global economic system) and the expression of interest in trade and business circles, has played a vital role in the process of establishing the global periphery and the creation of various levels of payment for labour and consumption, corresponding to the three main zones.

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

Therefore, the study and analysis of globalization inevitably loses scientific objectivity, inexorably suggesting an outlook on the global situation from the point of view of a certain social agent participating in globalization as the antagonistic conflict among various agents.

Attempts to create a descriptive theory of globalization are doomed to failure as they inevitably transition into the field of politics as the “art of the impossible’, into the strategy and tactics of political governing and political construction and permanent global political confrontation, with no foreseeable prerequisites for it stopping.

In general, globalization as a systemic social phenomenon has a non-economic character. In light of this fact, it may only be adequately understood within the framework of a sociophilosophical and sociohistorical discourse.

As for economic globalization, its role lies in forming a global social milieu as the field for the development and intense interaction of phenomena of a social nature.