The omnipresent multiculturalization and ethnicization of classic civil nations is developing in the United States, where multiple ethnic communities, increasingly oriented towards their countries of origin, are becoming increasingly influential and transforming the traditional party system of the United States into a system of ethnic lobbies.
Non-state elites, comprising a social basis of non-state actors of global politics, are not separated by the insurmountable barriers of old elites born out of the nation state. On the contrary, they all intersect and fit together to create a single stratum, integrated by social connections and mechanisms of social mobility.
Non-state local elites, interested in the resource flows of nation states, rather efficiently reach their goals through the mechanism of the intersection of elites, gradually transforming the state, according to Adam Smith178, from political sovereign to night-watchman. At the same time, non-state social actors do not form global elites separated from historical soil, non-mythicized new nomads devoid of cultural identity, but rather globalized strata of national and local elites. These elites play out a liberal scenario of the privatization of national income, nationalization of expenditures, mostly on national and local levels, but also on a global level.
Sketching out the social structure of a new global world, Richard Haass, the chairman of the Council of Foreign Relations, acknowledges the appearance in the social arena of new types of influential political and social actor, comparable in their abilities to the classic territorial state but having at the same time their own agency and interests independent from the state and its institutions.179 The transition of global politics into non-state and non-spatial dimensions, not linked to geopolitical poles and power hubs, is, according to Haass, “nonpolarity”. The situation of nonpolarity provides an organic base for the concept of soft power as political dominance based on the control and exploration of new spheres of non-force conflict in close cooperation with new types of influential social actor, many of which – for example, non-state organizations and private armies – are purposely created as foreign policy tools.
The growth in the number of conflicting sides, typical of contemporary times, the appearance of new dimensions and trans-border connections, and the deepening of contradictions are emphasized by the well-known concept of controlled chaos, reflecting the essential characteristics of globalization as a systemic crisis. This chaos is characterized by the existence of many points where one has to make a choice (bifurcation) during the historical process, with potential governability of such chaos through weak pressure on critical points and processes being another attribute.
In other words, governing the chaos is nothing but governing the flow of crisis situations as special vulnerable points within the social process with consequent purposeful interference of third parties in the resolution of crises, which may be defined as a variant of the multi-crisis approach to global governing.
What may be gained from the multi-crisis approach to globalization as a system of interconnected sub-crises, transforming the world-system that was formed by the end of the twentieth century?
Above all, the model of the development of globalization, as the mutual influence of various sub-crises, gives an adequate idea of the systemic difficulty of globalization, its off-balance and catastrophic dynamics, its ability to give way to qualitatively new social phenomena and agents, first of all challenges and threats. Such a view of globalization as a system of global crises and one catastrophe giving way to another, a system born not so much out of the growth limits of the resource base as the explosive growth of global interconnectedness, allows us to overcome the limited nature of theoretical approaches formed in the last century, understanding the systemic regression of the basics of contemporary civilization as growth expenditures. The very concept of growth, understood as the exploration of the resources of the outside environment, loses its meaning in the situation of fundamental resource limits.
As a result, the multi-crisis model of globalization acknowledges the end of the era of incremental socioeconomic progress, with humankind transitioning to a lower branch of regressive development, from steady growth to self-preservation under the conditions of total instability and antagonism. It means the loss of the most important social opportunities and achievements of the industrial era, at the very least.
An important indicator of social regression is the archaization of social relations and the mythologization of collective consciousness, the increase in the importance of ethnic and religious feelings, or the ethnicization and clericalization of the politics. The fight for the redistribution of resources and minimization of losses is becoming the core of the global process in the situation of the global conflict of civilizations.
The narrowness of the growth limits predicated on the scarcity of resources moves humankind into the territory of self-recycling, where outsider agents – including not only peripheral states, but, first of all, multiple influential strata in developed countries, including the middle class as their social basis – become the chief source of resources for the development.
The era of systemic progress and growth is finishing: the time is coming for an inevitable descent as competition grows.
As a result, the limitation of the resource base gives way to the degradation and primitivization of system-building social institutions, the formation of circles of steadily depressive regions and settlements as the concentration of resources in one sphere requires taking resources from other spheres of existence.
From the point of view of ensuring steady development, it is important that one addresses the issues of interference, mutual strengthening, synergy of crisis processes, the appearance of cause-and-effect ties between crisis processes, the export and outflow of social catastrophes and the phenomenon of their synchronization (the domino principle, trigger process, cascading catastrophes).
It is important to note that crisis processes in separate spheres, like systemic malfunctions in medicine, may provoke or strengthen, but not compensate for one another. Strengthening of the crisis in separate spheres of existence, or regions, may strengthen or provoke crisis processes in linked areas, resulting in the crisis becoming uncontrollable and then entering into the realm of catastrophe. Thus, the phenomenon of synchronization and generalization of local crisis processes that may result in the transition of local crises into a global systemic catastrophe is obvious.
The problem of the synergy and interaction of global sub-crises is characterized, too, by the instantaneous and global nature of digital communications. The lifting of spatial barriers objectively leads to the acceleration of social processes whose development outstrips their study and, as a consequence, does not give way to the possibility of purposeful governing and regulation.