“Macrosociological theory of the state and the revolutions of Charles Tilly and Immanuel Wallerstein”
On June 16 the famous sociologist and the professor of North-Western University in Chicago Georgi Derlugyan lectured in Caucasus Research Resource Centre (CRRC) on the subject of macrosociological theory of the state and the revolutions of Charles Tilly and Immanuel Wallerstein. While lecturing he went into a number of issues connected with reasons of that many revolutions in XX century, the role of the Soviet Union in that perspective, the origin of globalization, etc.
The professor pointed out that according to classical scheme of Charles Tilly, revolutions break out from the conflicts inside the elite standing at the top, are followed by the burst from below and at last are completed from above. Some figures like George Washington, Napoleon, Bismarck, Stalin, Franco, De Gaulle, Castro or Khomeini come to power and are able to direct this or that steady institutes of authority. The vicinity of that different names is not by chance- in the past this or that historical problem was solved by other means, from democracy to national independence and dictatorships of leftists or rights. Worst of all is that when the old regime collapses, the new one lacks political energy and material resources.
In fact, this calamity didn’t pass round post Soviet countries either. The countries in the Central Asia turned up to be the luckiest ones, which owning to historical and geographical factors easily turned the dependence on Moscow, lacking its once generosity, into the EU. Change of the vector of dependence became their strategy to avoid of revolution.
Russia is a typical example of a country pursuing development, which, for the last five decades, has succeeded in compensating shortages of capitalistic rationality by means of state compulsion and centralized bureaucratic coordination. However, in the second half of XX century this model was exhausted, when unpretentious Russian peasantry disappeared and new classes of educated specialists, demanding more participation in ruling industrial enterprises, cultural sphere and the state, took their place.
All-Soviet democratization failed because of the country’s sudden collapse. What is to come next- slipping down into corruption and poverty inherent to the Third World countries, another military-bureaucratic reform as under the rule of Peter or Stalin, or something different defined by social democratic geo-culture of United Europe, aspiring to get rid of the US hegemony by means of deepening integration inside and expending it to the east?
The process of wide raging and global expansion of free capitalistic market named “globalization” is in reality one of the periodic cyclic tendencies in the history of capitalism. As a matter of fact we are drawing to the close of one of the economic and technical cycles (regime of accumulation) and come into the beginning of the other: in 1970s the paterialistic-burocratic “fordistic” model got into wide ranging crisis, which was marked by the beginning of “global revolution” in 1968 and the “the last straw” became the revolution in 1989. The collapse of Soviet system at the end of 1980 was just one of the elements of this crisis making the beginning of the next capitalistic globalization. The other important element of it became the American deregulation of the world market in 1990s, the consequences of which were called “globalization”.
According to the professor, the key issue of “globalization” is the integration of new “dangerous classes” from the South into the global capitalistic system. The alternative to the social-democratic version of world-order institutionalization is multidimensional confrontation according to Huntington’s well-known scene of clashes of civilizations. In this case one can never guarantee that in contrast to optimistic and reserved Social-American contest, global war of civilization blocks will not grow into a real genocide.
At the end of the lecture Georgi Derlugyan gave an interview for the site of “Noravank” Foundation
-According to some researchers the process of modernization has considerably slowed down in the Third World countries. What do you think about it?
-Modernization is a twice ideological construction, which the western countries put on top of the pyramid. It directs the moves necessary to reach their level to resemble them.
The idea of modernization used to have an important role. An object must be put before the countries at the periphery, to give them a hope that one needn’t break tables and windows in this system; they should just wait for the moment to reach the limit of so called developed countries. Meanwhile you must put up with the fact that you are at the periphery of this system. The problem has more become the failing of the world system then the slowing down of the speed. Less and less resources get into this periphery, and those which at last get are quickly concentrated in the hands of the elite and are brought out of the periphery back to the centre. Here occurs a complicated problem, which is now moved to the periphery by the West with accusations of corrupting these countries: “Everything is wrong with you as the elite are corrupted and the western elite, you see, are absolutely clean”. The matter is, that if you have little money and you will steal some more, no money will be left to pay the salary of teachers. That’s the whole difference. That’s not a modernization, that’s a state in the space of systems.
-Is it possible to reach a stage of developed capitalism in Russia?
-Yes, it’s possible, but let’s not to call it a “stage”. Russia can return to the stage, which, in reality, it has always been taking. By the level of life and income per capita it is lower then Austria and Hungary, but it is higher then Turkey and South Caucasus. Besides, it is obvious that Russia forms hearths with quite different structure of population. The striking example of it is how much Moscow differs from provincial cities in Russia. And this gap is likely to get deeper.
Russia has a chance to make a close zone of its influence, which it tries to do in SIC countries today. Maybe it is not that bad. As usual somebody will win defeating the other. The countries included in this Russian system will be able to raise their life level in a way, but will it make them more influential in world affairs or happier? Somebody is sure to become, but not all of them. It is difficult to predict for all of them.
Russia’s main trump card in the world arena was certainly the army and not the economy. Like five hundred years ago, when the territory of the future Russian Empire was being shaped under the rule of Ivan the Terrible, Russia was first of all a military power at the edge of Europe. It was stabilizing the restless regions of East Europe, Caucasus and the Middle Asia. To all appearances, Russia tries to play its traditional role one more time. Whether it will manage or not, it is not possible to predict like in football, will they be able to score a goal or not? Maybe…
-The number of illegal emigrants is growing in Russia; do you think it may cause inter-ethnic conflicts like in France?
-A very difficult question. I think hardly. From one hand just because the emigrants in Russia live better. They have jobs. There isn’t social net of support in Russia like in France. From the other hand these emigrants haven’t come long ago that’s why emigration in Russia it is more like the one of 50s in the west. People were first of all try to survive without predicting what will happen with their children when they grow up in the new epoch of, God forbid, racist Russia. In case the number of natives reduces by mere demographical reasons, it will have to fulfill this demographical gap at the expense of able-bodied citizens of the post Soviet Union.
There is an obvious potential for conflicts. It is very difficult to predict conflicts, to prognosticate how they will be realized in a concrete form.
-In your opinion, how adequately the global and social processes affect on Russian and Armenian social and philosophic sciences.
-I’ll say nothing about philosophy; I’m not good at it, as for social sciences, the situation today is transitional and very chaotic, because very many macro-schools of 60-70s have disappeared. By the way, I don’t speak only about Marxism, the school of modernization has disappeared. Everybody speaks about modernization here, but there is not such a school in the west. It was blown up from inside: the people disappointed in it left it still in 1970s. It partially appeared in a new form as a school of globalization. But globalization is almost the same as modernization, it is dissemination of western model of economy, policy and behavior all over the world. Modernization presented it as transfer to a new stage and globalization as an expansion, transformation of the whole world into a united field, a united market, built according to the American model.
Today there is a big progress in the direction of subjectivist and personal models. In economy all the models explain the world proceeding from what is happening in the head of a rational subject. It is a so called model of national choice. Postmodernism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethnographic methods of microanalysis, attempts to analyze culture on the level of individual prevail in culturoloy and sociology. Both modernism and hermeneutic of 1980s seemed to be original humanistic protest against very pompous and ponderous science of that time. But unfortunately, fulfilling such a useful function, mixing all this stagnant water, postmodernism and hermeneutics has left it muddy. Today personal explanations, streaming from the behavior of a certain individual preceding the action, sound very unconvincing and even uninteresting. Much of the postmodernist literature is difficult to read because of technically complicated jargon, sometimes invented by the author himself. Of course people suspect that something very important is hidden in them, but I must disappoint them.
By the way the same thing may be faced in mathematization of social science. Very often, while translating it into a normal human language a question raises “What? That’s it?” this is all we achieved with mathematization and philosophic jargon. I think that in scientific researches a new period of disillusion and pragmatics has come. We understand that individuals are important, but they exist in many sociological fields. One must see how and what these fields are made of, examine their historical way and the direction they have taken now. As I have already pointed out, it is not possible to predict individual trajectory, it is prophecy. But it is possible to predict the field, it is relief. As for how individual trajectories will pass it through, is already political and individual moral choice.
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