The transition to regressive development does not mean simplification and primitivization of the social reality, even in cases of the death or disappearance of significant social structures and agents.
The appearance of new connections and degrees of freedom under the conditions of sharpening of wide range of divergent processes, during which new social agents and structures appear.
The all-encompassing social dissolution, with enormous resources previously collected by humankind, inevitably gives way to a new social complexity, a wide range of dissipative structures engendered by the openness and off-balance nature of social systems.
At the same time, processes of social regression often imitate progressive development (reforms, modernization) or fit into system-building social institutions, state ones mostly. From this point of view, the growth of organized crime and corruption and their integration into power institutes is a typical indicator of the transition of humankind into a phase of protracted regression.
The strengthening and collecting of contradictions, objectively coming from the lack of vitally important resources, gives objective cause to the new differentiation, fragmentation and polarization, to the appearance of qualitatively new non-spatial borders among conflicting social agents, creating cause for new social synthesis, the birth of new agents of the global development. So, processes of unification, typical of globalization, engender compensating counteraction on a local level, taking on various forms of ethnic and regional separatism, regional fundamentalism and other forms of social fragmentation and group antagonism.175
But the dominant aspect of globalization is deep social change, predicated on the crisis of state institutions and religious and ethical bases of leading global civilizations defining history of the last two thousand years.176
The antagonism of peripheral and dominant social communities and groups will engender essentially different, alternative values, models and forms of social life. Having swallowed the whole world, the global empire engenders and nurtures within its borders new processes of the formation of structures.
To sum up, globalization is a process of the synthesis of the systemic whole, but similarly a deeply fragmented and antagonistic global social community that cannot be reduced to the mechanical sum of local communities and local economies.
The synthesis of civilizations and states forced by globalization into a single, albeit heterogeneous and contradictory supra-system does not signify the expected transformation into a global state. Actors in the global development become participants in an increasingly multi-faceted and multidimensional conflict, wherein a global war unites conflicting parties into a single system much faster than the global world.
While the difference between peace and war may be defined as a major reduction in the intensity of the interaction of agents, as peaceful coexistence does not pose issues of life and death for the sides, the opposite is also true: increasing intensity of interaction (globalization being the intensification of the interconnectedness of the global system) inevitably grows into conflict.
Thus, the erosion of spatial barriers and borders has led not to the dismissal but to the aggravation of contradictions between agents, including intercivilizational and social ones, to the transition of old geopolitical conflicts into new non-spatial dimensions – legal, informational, cultural, demographical – whose importance is steadily increasing and will grow in the foreseeable future.
As a result, the situation in which spatial barriers are falling during the aggravation of contradictions and competition often leads not to the dissolution of social groups involved in the global process but to their additional consolidation and radicalization, the strengthening of non-spatial mechanisms of separation and the formation of identities, initially ideological and ethnocultural. In brief, it leads to sharp invigoration of sociogenetic and convergent processes.177
Persisting under the conditions of globalization, local social systems can no longer be adequately described or adequately ruled outside the systemic context, be it a global cooperation or a global conflict.
Collapsing in on itself in the space, the contemporary ecumene takes on previously unseen complexity through new, non-spatial changes. Geopolitical agents continue to lose their spatial geographic localization and take on a qualitatively new topology which cannot be accurately described using the categories of pre-globalization, when space was a universal regulator and a limit-setter for external impacts, a leading system-building and structuring factor of ethno- and nation-building.
Due to a major increase in social mobility and transparency, national, corporate and ethnic elites are obtaining degrees of freedom that are more significant than in the time of the nation states, to the extent that it is possible for them to be completely separate from the national soil and state institutions. Non-state social institutions and structures, such as corporations, ethnic diasporas and social networks, which become full-fledged actors in global and local politics, are becoming the new elite generators.
While previously the world consisted of relatively closed-off social systems, at present, local systems maintain and strengthen the regional and civilizational specific character, including confessional and ethnic particularities.
The social mechanism of the influence of globalization on the social sphere consists of the establishment not so much of global markets of goods and finance but of new mechanisms of the reproduction of the elites as influential social groups standing behind the actors of global politics and forming it with their interests.
Characteristically, every large actor in contemporary global politics has a corresponding mechanism of social mobility behind it, a generator of skilled workers, or social elevators, alternative to traditional mechanisms of vertical mobility, connected to the institutions of the nation state.
It should be noted that the resource of new, non-state actors derives from the policy of utilization, well understood by the alternative non-state elites: the policy of the interception of the resource base of states and nation states is often defined as privatization of the welfare state. Not only are top managers of large transnational corporations and international financial structures part of new non-state elites, but so too is an influential, although relatively narrow, group of the so-called international bureaucracy, managers at the IMF, the UN, the European Union and other influential international organizations.
A specific type of new non-state elite is being formed within the borders of global and regional ethnic communities, communes, diasporas and ethnocriminal groups, whose political influence in the world has grown significantly along with the growth of global migration, the degradation of the institutions of the contemporary state, the erosion of national identity and its partial replacement by the confessional and ethnic.