Articles

This article deals with present-day threats from abroad to Russia’s security and offers proposals to reduce the danger they represent. The threats to Russian national security are, in the authors’ view, NATO expansion; the presence of large contingents of forces at Russian borders; claims to Russian territory and confl icts near its borders; aggravation of inter-ethnic and inter-nationality relations; violation of the integrity of the defense and an indeterminacy of the border of the Russian Federation, especially in the south and west; the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; and the West’s desire to establish its military and political dominance over the world as a whole and in particular regions. According to the authors, the threat to Russia’s national security forms the underlying ideology of the Western world, which is to form an archetype of the human of the future — an unthinking being, overwhelmed by unnatural instincts and dissimilar to his recent ancestors. The spiritual side of life is degraded in the Western world, notwithstanding continued attempts to impose the Western way of life on the rest of humanity.

This article is based on the position of the expert community of the World Public Forum “Dialogue of Civilizations” and presents the specifi c experience of a critical analysis of the current theory and practice of globalization. Arguments are offered as to the decline of the intellectual appeal of the universalist concept and its associated ideology. The author concludes that in the context of the ongoing systemic crisis of world economic relations, the further development of this once popular concept signifi cantly increases the threat of global armed confl ict. At the heart of this systemic crisis, the article maintains, lie accumulated socio-political and civilizational contradictions. The events in Ukraine have collapsed the myths of globalization for the majority of Europeans. Modern globalization is the globalization of ideology. Western globalism proclaims a universal ideological uniformity. The author concludes that the crisis of capitalism and of its inherent industrialism has proven fundamental. Finding a way out of this crisis will require substantial effort by the whole world. A fi rst step would be to change the historically enduring model of globali zat ion — reje ct ing the utopia of the de st r uct ion of nat ion state s in fa vor of their union in large and integrated projects by means of economic and cultural ties.