The problem of the genesis of local social groups – ethnic groups and nations being the most important among them – has an evident interdisciplinary character and is studied under sociology, ethnology, social anthropology, conflictology and ethnopolitics, as well as within history-related disciplines.
The processes of ethnogenesis, nation-building and (looking at it through a broader lens) the building of social communities are studied within three schools of thought: constructivism, instrumentalism, and primordialism.
Primordialism is based on an evolutionary approach to sociogenesis and ethnogenesis. It looks at large groups that have existed for a long time (in particular, ethnic groups and nations) as a result of the long and continuous evolution of social communities that maintain their agency even in the course of deep social transformations of society. Two leading strategies in the ethnology of the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism, as well as the evolutionist approach in linguistics that allowed specification of the genesis of cultural and linguistic communities, established the basis for the primordialist approach.
Primordialism has two major branches, sociocultural (cultural primordialism) and sociobiological, the latter focusing on the genetic similarities of social groups – ethnic ones above all – as well as on the special social role of an instinctive underlying cause of social behaviour35
The leading approach of modern primordialism is undoubtedly cultural primordialism, which views the genesis of large social groups (ethnic groups and nations) as a result of the evolution of social institutes and social relations. Cultural primordialism in Soviet and Russian science is represented by the works by Bromley, Kozlov, Arutyunov, Mnatsakyan, etc.
The modern sociobiological movement, having overcome the legacy of racial sociogenetic theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is mainly represented by ethnogenetic36,37,38,39 and neurogenetic concepts close to behaviourism.40 However, despite its seeming attractiveness, the sociobiological variations of primordialism, at best, explain the formation of tribal communities in a simplified manner. They do not explain the genesis and the patterns of establishment and evolution of more developed and complicated communities, in which culture and politics play a systematically important role.
Constructivism believes the leading mechanism for sociogenesis to be a direct sociopolitical and socioeconomic construction of social communities from top to bottom by political elites, which is usually led through state institutions. Constructivists see modern ethnos as a sociocultural relic, an ideological phantom that the elites used to rule over the masses.41,42,43
The instrumentalists also see this social group as an outcome of a target-oriented activity, not simply as an instrument of power and elites, but as a tool or instrument of the individuals that make up the group that allows use of membership of the group to reach certain goals or to fulfil certain social functions.
Fredrik Barth44 is considered the leader of this movement. Tishkov,45 Guboglo,46 Voronkov and Osvald,47 Shnirelman,48 Kulagin,49 Drobizheva,50 and Lurye,51 as well as recent works by Popov,52 Nizamova,53 Nimayeva,54 Ortobayev55 and others, should be mentioned among Russian scientists subscribing to the constructivist doctrine. Informational and symbolist (identificational) approaches to ethno- and sociogenesis are in line with constructivism and instrumentalism.56,57,58,59
Sociological research interested in the revitalization of ethnic and ethno-social processes in the south of Russia, includes works by Avksentyev,60,61 Abdulatipov,62 Gasanov,63 Gadzhiyev,64 Markedonov,65 Tishkov,66 Tkhagapsoyev,67 Chernous,68 Denisova,69 Zhade,70 Sampiyev,71 Hoperskaya,72 Hunagov,73 Tsutsiyev,74 Shadzhe,75 Shakhbanova76 and others.
Chapter I. The crisis of nations and increase of importance of the ethnos during globalization
The main goal of social philosophy has always been to understand the leading tendencies of historical evolution that determine the fate of the society and the individual, to search for the few key patterns that allow us to see or even create the outlines of the future through the chaos of reality.
The key to understanding the world of today is, undoubtedly, globalization – the ever more complex process of qualitative sophistication, acceleration and integration of the development of humanity that is pointing with ever-growing certainty to the transition from the technical and social progress of the two preceding centuries towards uncontrollability and global catastrophe.
Globalization is, in the first place, a system of qualitative social changes that include the formation of not only a single global market, but also a global social and information environment, devoid of spatial and political borders, giving rise to the previously unseen sophistication and acceleration of social-historical processes. It also means the appearance of global informational openness, the appearance of new information technologies, directly and non-inertially, influencing individual and mass consciousness in real time, as well as a qualitative increase in contacts between geographically distant communities and individuals, including those that have not been facilitated by the state and its institutions.
In a more general sense, globalization can be defined as the process of intensification of all systems of social relations and the formation of a global interaction environment, which results in not only global, but local social phenomena too being formed under the weight of remote external reasons and influences, leading to the all-encompassing, global linkage of social communities, structures, institutions and cultures. The process of globalization helps form a qualitatively new system of social relations and institutions within which not a single phenomenon of the social being on the local level cannot be studied from outside the all-encompassing system of the links with other parts of the global system.
However, while not so long ago the world was a sum of relatively closed-off social systems, at the moment, all local social and economic systems assume an open character and cannot be studied unless in the global context.
As the economies of several countries are being integrated, globalization continues moving past the economy, which supplied the initial terminology for it, and begins to take on a global, total character that cannot be reduced to particular patterns, giving rise to the unpredictable chaos of processes of different order that are happening in social, economic, political, cultural and other spheres of social life. From the perspective of these processes’ systemic interaction, they make up globalization with its integral but internally contradictory and unstable structure. That is why the analysis and prognosis of the development of globalizational processes is being impeded by the transition from the technical and social progress of the previous two centuries towards a growing uncontrollability and global catastrophe