The social world’s parts and whole:

Globalization and the future of some non-Western cultures

in the civilization and world-system theories perspectives

Dmitri M. Bondarenko

The social world’s parts and whole: Globalization and the future of some non-Western cultures
in the civilization and world-system theories perspectives

Published in J. Sheffield (ed.). Systemic Development: Local Solutions in a Global Environment.

Litchfield Park, AZ: ISCE Publishing, 2009. P. 17–24.

Abstract
While there are a diverse range of approaches to contemporary social and cultural theory, two
particular approaches, civilization and world system, would seem to be at opposite poles of the
conceptual spectrum. However if these are not seen as in opposition, we will be more likely to
understand the current processes in the world and in its parts. In particular, the association between
globalization and Westernization may be misleading: The global civilization can form only as a
federation of local civilizations by absorbing their features at the universal level. Indeed, the correlation
between the individual and the society will become crucial for both the global civilization and local
civilizations. Neither a completely Western nor any non-Western influences will be able to dominate the
emerging synthesis of a global civilization. So, the global civilization cannot form as purely Western or
purely non-Western.

Globalization: the world system and civilization theories perspectives

While there are a diverse range of approaches to contemporary social and cultural theory, two
particular approaches would seem to be at opposite poles of the conceptual spectrum: one seeing
emerging social structures in terms of civilizations, the other in terms of global world systems. This may
look like the former rejects the possibility of the global community emergence by emphasizing the
insurmountable differences in the local civilizations' cultural backgrounds, while the latter insists on the
global economic processes' ability to integrate the world into a global civilization by the cultural
differences' transcending and elimination. However, I will try to demonstrate that it is wrong to set
these two views in opposition to each other, and that if we do not do so, we will have a better chance to
understand the nature of the processes that are nowadays taking place both in the world as a whole (as
a system of societies and relations between them) and in its different parts (culture areas and relations
within them).
“World-economies” and “world-empires” are among the key notions of the world-system
conception as introduced by its “founding father”, Immanuel Wallerstein. Remarkably, according to him,
“world-economies” and “world-empires” must be considered precisely as alternatives, and not as two
stages of social evolution. The examples of the ancient Greek poleis, and especially of the precolonial
Maya and Yoruba polities, are significant in this respect. The heterarchic Greek poleis system was never
transformed into an empire. The Maya and Yoruba interpolity networks consisted of the non-democratic
societies. However they were never integrated as empires too, though in all the three cases particular
polities dominated during some historical periods.
Nonetheless, I do not find it productive to describe the alternative to a world-empire as a world-
economy, as this tends to downplay some other vital dimensions of such systems; the cultural dimension
first and foremost. For example, in the European Union (a typical world-economy in Wallerstein’s
terms), the economic links no doubt play a significant part, but the links of other types – political,
cultural and so on – are no less important. Besides, the EU can be treated as an element of wider world-
economies (for instance, the European economy in general and, even wider, the Western industrial and
high-tech economy), as well as of the global – “trans-”, or “supra-national”, economy. On the other
hand, not all the parts of the EU communication networks are currently completely integrated
economically (e.g., as testified by the refusal of some of the EU member countries to join the euro zone,
and the debates on the future of the euro in some others). This shows that world-economies are not the
only possible type of politically decentralized intersocietal networks. Rather, in this case we are dealing
with a politically decentralized civilization.
 For most of the last few millennia of human history, decentralized civilizations constituted
the most effective alternative to world-empires. Besides the Classical Greek inter-poleis system, there is
the example of the intersocietal communication network of Medieval Europe. Furthermore, politically
decentralized networks of societies, close to each other socio-culturally, and tightly connected
economically and politically, appeared effective alternatives to a separate society’s development long
before the formation of the first empires. For example, the networks of Sumerian cities prior to the rise
of Akkad and of Egyptian nomes before the country’s integration are readily recalled. Wallerstein
suggests that in the age of complex societies, exclusively world-economies and world-empires could be
treated as units of social evolution in general. Yet, I believe that both politically centralized and
decentralized civilizations should be treated as such units. At this point, the significance of the cultural
dimension of such systems should be stressed once again. Of course, the exchange of what Wallerstein
calls “bulk goods” is important. But exchange of information is also always important, especially in our
time.
Thus, not only is it essential to take into account the general character and type of particular
cultures for an understanding of particular societies and the whole world’s pathways of transformation,
as well I believe that it is not correct to reduce the globalization process to primarily its economic
aspect (the current transition from the “international” to “transnational” market economy) and the
political aspect derived from it (consolidation of the multiparty democracy all over the world), though
such a reduction is evident in many publications. Moreover, taking the cultural aspect of globalization
into account also allows a more sensible approach to the prospects of globalization in the economic and
political spheres. I also believe that this aspect of the problematic might be well examined within the
civilization approach framework. Furthermore, as has been pointed out above, I will try my best to
show that there is no real contradiction between the two respective approaches, i.e., world-system
(generally globalistic) and civilization (generally particularistic in most of the contemporary versions).
Originally, in the mid-18th century, the Enlightenment thinkers developed the idea of civilization as
the highest progressive stage of the essentially unilineal evolutionary process. It did not possess any
substantially spatial connotations: though the stage of civilization was considered to be achieved by that
time in Europe and its settler colonies only, it was regarded basically possible for other peoples of the
world to rise up to this level, too. That time the study of civilization took into account predominantly
the spiritual dimension of human life; the formation of civilization was regarded as the result of the
human nature’s “improvement”, the increase in morality, the development of civil feelings, and,
eventually, of “progress”. Out of this the formation of the socio-political and economic institutions of
the civil society, attributed by those thinkers to “civilized” nations, was derived by them.
Later on, the approach was becoming more and more diversified. Febvre (1991: 280–281) wrote
that in the second half of the 19 th century there happened the “… divergence of the notion of the
civilization into two;.. [the supporters of] one of them finally arrived at the conclusion that any group
of human beings, notwithstanding the means of its influence, material and intellectual, on the
surrounding world, possesses a civilization of its own; the other (now old) is the conception of the
higher civilization, which white nations of Western Europe and North America possess and spread...”
So, the spatial approach to this notion, i.e., the idea of “civilizations”, consolidated and this viewpoint
did not suppose a direct link between the notion of civilization and a certain stage of development
(though the foundations of such an approach also date back to the 18 th century, ascending to Vico,
Voltaire, and Herder).
But in this context the stress on the spiritual essence of the phenomenon of civilization has become
even stronger. It is evident in the works of the first “local civilizations” theories creators (Rückert,
Buckle, Danilevsky, Spengler and others). They demarcated a local civilization’s boundaries on the basis
of religion, mental characteristics, “the cultural-historical type”, etc. of the population of a given large
region. This tradition found its further development in the works by Toynbee and many other theorists.
During the 20th century a new trend within the civilization approach appeared. Its essence is
manifested precisely in the attempts to combine the global aspect with the local one, i.e., to reveal the
connection between changes of cultural types and human spirituality at the universal scale on the one
hand, and local civilizations on the other. Jaspers and Eisenstadt are those who represent this tradition
in the most prominent way. My approach basically stems from this tradition.

Globalization as a long-term historical process

 At least from the Neolithic revolution era on, cultural distinctions between different areas tended to
increase and to dominate the globalizing tendencies till the period of the Great Geographic Discoveries
of the Early Modern Time. The results achieved on the pathway to globalization in the times of
Hellenism, the invasions of the Eurasian steppe nomads and so on were most often temporal, reversible,
and did not touch many parts of the world at all. From the era of the Great Geographic Discoveries the
most important period in the history of all the local civilizations began. Now the intercivilization
interactions of various kinds involved practically the whole universe. The impact of those interactions
on absolutely all their participants has increased many times. The immanent smoothing effect of the
newly-born capitalism has also significantly contributed to the respective processes. As a result, the
changing of the civilizational map has been quickened due to the absorption of some civilizations by
others. Since then, new civilizations have appeared only as a synthesis of different older civilizations,
and not many such syntheses have appeared; the formation of the Latin American civilization being the
most significant event of that sort.
Thus, the process of globalization can be seen as not a completely recent and purely economic
phenomenon, but as stemming from the formation of global civilization due to the long-lasting and
multidirectional intercivilization interaction. From a definite standpoint, a global civilization is not
emerging nowadays, but rather the whole human history is that of gradual and up to the Modern Time
slow process of the global civilization's revealing as the common background for particular civilizations'
existence. It would be a mistake to present the humankind as a simple sum of separate cultures or even
separate local civilizations for any historical period. World history demonstrates vividly that the
globalization process can be effective only if it takes the shape of mutual adaptation and synthesizing of
various civilizations’ backgrounds, and this imperative has become more and more categorical in the
course of time.
The explication of the global civilization in no way means the disappearance of particular
civilizations but rather presupposes the formation of a kind of “federation”. In this federation some
common basic principles obtained in the course of globalization will be combined with, not only visual
(ethnocultural), but also to some extent with essential (precisely civilizational) diversity of the
federation’s members. Furthermore, the local civilizations’ existence is a pledge of socio-cultural
variability of the humankind. This variability between local civilizations is necessary and just as vital as
the internal variability within any particular civilization (the fact, broadly recognized by the civilization
approach theorists starting with Danilevsky and Gizaut). This is even more so if one speaks about the
macrocivilizational units that is about the East and the West. To put it mildly, it is not obvious at all that
the division between East and West will become irrelevant in the visible future. What might tend to
happen is that at least some of the culture traits that separate different civilizations will be supplemented
(gradually and often painfully for people) by new traits, original for another civilization but becoming
common for them all. In the meantime, the East and the West are not geographical but socio-cultural,
macrocivilizational phenomena; their borders having changed more than once, the present-day
borderline being drawn only by the end of the 17th century (e.g., Konrad, 1966: 452). It looks like there
are no good reasons to rule out at the outset that this borderline will move east- or westwards again in
the future.
However, there is an important restriction for the process of the global civilization's revealing. Some
features of this or that civilization may contradict sharply that imposed by global forces. So, we are
coming here to the problem of the limits for globalization. It seems unreasonable and even misleading
and counterproductive to attempt to solve this problem from the universalistic viewpoint. As every
civilization is distinguished by a unique set of traits and features, a unique complex of cultural
characteristics, each civilization has its own globalization limits.

Globalization and the prospects of non-Western civilizations: Tropical Africa, Russia, the
Muslim world
The leading role of the Western civilization in the process of globalization is determined not just
historically, but culturally (civilizationally) as well. This is not just by chance. Many non-Western
peoples (the Arabs, Chinese, Polynesians, etc.) were experienced in navigation, even more peoples
implemented into life expansionistic projects, and economically the East was generally leaving the West
behind till the 18th century (see, e.g., Wallerstein, 1974; Kennedy, 1989). Nevertheless, it was only the
Europeans who accomplished the Great Geographical Discoveries, introduced the colonial system and
 redrew the civilizational map of the world. The point is that the European civilization is
practically the only one among those still existing today in which socio-cultural dynamism has been
characteristic throughout its whole history. Dynamism was tightly connected with deeply rooted
rationality of thinking, individualism, and other features the enumeration of which is a common place in
many studies of the “European phenomenon”. Dynamism this or that way revealed itself even in the
most traditionalized period of the European history that is in the Middle Ages (Gurevich, 1999: 43–
131). Europe realized the advantages of such a transformational mode when all its direct or indirect
partners in the game for the role of the locomotive of globalization had already exhausted their
civilizationally determined potential of dynamism. It was just this that eventually permitted the West to
impose its rules and terms of globalization, to declare its civilizational values “global” and “universal”;
thus, in fact, to identify globalization with Westernization.
If we now compare, or even better contrast, the present-day East Asia and Tropical Africa, we will
see how crucially and dramatically the socio-cultural (i.e., civilizational) possibilities to adapt to the
Western rules and values differ from one civilization to another. We should stress that what we mean is
not the adaptive potential as such, but just the possibilities for adaptation to the civilizational features of
the Western civilization that common people, politicians and academics associate with a global
civilization. There is a paradox. On the one hand, this association is correct: volens nolens one should
agree that the global civilization is now revealing itself first of all due to the attempts of the West and
hence in accordance with its civilizational code and model. On the other hand, the respective association
is basically wrong: the global civilization cannot but absorb in a non-contradictory manner the features
of various civilizations. Another aspect of the problem of the local civilizations' adaptation to
globalization is that of their contribution to its still emerging complex of features; globalization remains
a history's “work in progress”. The potential for peoples and states to adapt and contribute to the global
civilization is crucial for their future prospects: for their equal or non-equal position in the reshaping
system of international economic and political relations.
For example, the civilization of Tropical Africa, as its fortunes from the 15th century on demonstrate,
seems to be adaptable to the features of the Western civilization to a rather limited degree. What can
globalization mean for Africa? In my opinion, globalization may be the last chance for her to move from
the periphery of contemporary world at least a little bit, to integrate into it on a more deserved basis
than before. Unfortunately, this chance is not that great. Nevertheless, at least, the very existence of this
opportunity is determined on the one hand by the transference of the centre of gravity of the world
economic processes from the national and international level (as it was during not only the colonial but
also neocolonial period) to the transnational, universal level and on the other hand, by the global
civilization's inability to reveal itself without synthesising of different local civilizations' backgrounds.
So, I believe that it would be unwise to attempt to shut off from the universal integration processes as
from new manifestations of harmfulness of the West but rather the policy of reasonable economic and
information openness, of gradual but steady inclusion into these processes could be most profitable for
the African countries. However, one should not expect that the inclusion of Africa into the new, global,
system of economic relations must automatically result in the general acceptance of such fundamental
Western values as the liberal (market) economy and democratic political regime at the national level. If
we look at globalization as the process of cultural interaction, we will have to recognize that it is
senseless and politically dangerous to expect their true (not formal) world-wide consolidation, at least in
their purely Western shape.
The contribution of some other non-Western civilizations, such as the Russian and Muslim
civilizations, to the global civilization cannot but turn out significant. This is not just because of the vast
territories and big population, but it is likely that these civilizations, especially the latter one, are able to
play the role of main “stabilizers” of the globalization process on the whole. Furthermore, these are able
to be “correctors” of the Western values at the global civilization’s consolidation, because these have a
good chance to occupy merited positions in it. While not being part of the West, it is precisely because
the Russian and Muslim civilizations are the closest to the West, that this is possible. The closeness
arises partly because of the common cultural and undoubtedly common religious roots related to the
monotheistic Abrahamatic religions – Christianity and Islam. Note that while in reality the modern
Western civilization has lost religiosity in the proper sense to a considerable degree, it is still implicitly
based, culturally and ethically, on the values of Christianity that made a significant contribution to its
formation. It is quite evident that Russia is closer to the West in this respect than the Muslim world,
owing to the greater similarity of the predominant religious doctrines (different versions of still one
Christianity) on the one hand, and a vaster positive experience of intercivilizational dialogue with the
West. However, the Muslim world, notwithstanding its evident present-day contradictions in the
relations with the West, does not oppose; rather the West and the Muslim world supplement each other.
In the specifically medieval way this was realized in Europe as long ago as in the 12 th century when the
Papacy frightened by the Tartars who ravaged the Christian and Muslim countries equally, advocated
that Muslims should not longer be regarded as pagans but as heretics.
Besides, also importantly, the economic and intellectual potential of the societies of these two
civilizations allows them to adapt to the demands of the supra-national economy and to make use of the
modern high technologies. In this respect, the societies of the Russian and the Muslim civilizations may
become “well-equipped” for the postindustrial age, hence, increasing the likelihood that they will play
important active parts in the global world. The ability of their social and political systems to adapt to the
postindustrial era looks much more problematic as the prospects of transformations in these spheres
always depends more crucially on the civilizational – socio-cultural – characteristics. The present state
of the socio-political systems in the Muslim world, and the problems Russia is still currently
experiencing, are in many cases really disappointing or even discouraging in the context under
discussion. Nevertheless, the civilizational backgrounds of the respective societies encourage the hope
of the transformation of their socio-political systems (although not rapid at all) in the direction the
globalization within the postindustrialization of the world presupposes.
Thus, in the future, the Russian and Muslim civilizations can occupy highly merited positions in the
global civilization. Having preserved their most significant socio-cultural traits (at least because they do
not contradict the general backgrounds of globalization as cultural process) they will “share” some of
them – those which will form parts of the global civilization’s cultural code – with other local
civilizations on the one hand, and will acquire from them some new features, on the other. Today it
would still be too speculative to talk about it in more definite terms but it is likely that in the socio-
cultural realm, the correlation between the individual and the society will become the key issue both in
the global civilization and in the local civilizations. Precisely in this one can find the basic difference
between contemporary civilizations of “the West and the rest”. It is evident that neither a completely
Western nor any completely non-Western solution is appropriate for the global civilization. Probably
every local civilization will elaborate a specific version of the new correlation between the individual
and the society but there is no doubt that, in absolutely all of them, this correlation will have to become
more balanced, that is some will have to acquire more elements of collectivism while others – of
individualism.

Conclusion
So, to this or that degree, there will inevitably be changes in the codes of all civilizations, including
not only non-Western but Western as well. Though the West is still the main locomotive of the
globalization process, some other civilizations, the East Asian civilization first of all, have already
demonstrated their ability not only to adapt, but also to contribute, considerably and productively, to the
global civilization’s set of features. The “third way” synthesis is to be based on adaptation to natural
environment by means of high technologies at a high level of production. This is possible only in the
postindustrial world when the role of human conscious activities will become even greater than it is
today, being supplemented by qualitative increase in the sense of social responsibility. This means that it
is necessary for the appearance of new principles and forms of human existence in the natural and social
milieu, accompanied by, and to a great extent determined by changes in human mentality.
The methods of studying globalization, that see the complete opposition of the world-system and
civilization approaches, often claimed by the supporters of each approach, is no more than a perception.
On the contrary, they are mutually complementary, as the present contribution is to demonstrate.

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