SERGEY IZMESTYEV*
Abstract
Globalization is a natural process whereby the regulation of social relations is moved to a global international level and away from the competence of individual governments. States that objectively assess the situation form transnational governance structures, while other states losing these powers replace them with ostentatious rituals, including bureaucratic procedures. This way a phenomenon of the ritualistic state arises. Such states imitate the process of control in these spheres. Globalization itself has two directions: international globalization, i.e. the creation of transnational governance systems by states and unions, and grassroots social media globalization based on social services and the Internet, which unites the efforts of the world population to solve global problems through a movement of activists at the international level. However, ritualistic states are not only unwilling to participate in transnational governance systems but also prevent the population from freely exchanging information and accessing such exchange by restricting access to the Internet. The right to communicate freely on the Internet should be guaranteed at the international level as a natural human right.
Keywords: globalization, global revolution, freedom of the Internet, supranational associations, “ritualistic” state, ritualistic law, ritualization, fundamentalism, bureaucracy.
In today’s world, everything is becoming global: the world financial system, world trade, science, culture, world health, the planetary climate, and even organized crime. And global problems require a global toolkit. Individual nation-states cannot solve them individually in an efficient manner.
Globalization is an intrinsic process of human history. Families gradually merged into tribes, tribes into people, and people into nations and civilizations, and this process was accompanied by the inevitable loss of distinctive traditions, beliefs, languages, and cultures. The concept of globalization is fair to consider not as a separate phenomenon, but as society’s awareness of the natural process of the dialectical development of humanity in its historical perspective. The denial of this fact is a conscious distortion of the essence of history, the denial of progress itself.
Intuitively, humanity is gradually uniting forces, thus building global security systems and global development, which should take over some state powers and “absorb” the sovereignty of states in particular fields. It will lead to the inevitable “end of international politics” and the creation of global security, justice, and development institutions.
The development of information exchange and social networks provides an effective mechanism for globalization on a personal level – people’s diplomacy that suggests an open dialogue and information exchange between people from different parts of the world. The international community must guarantee and protect the freedom of this interaction from the attacks and restrictions of “zealots” and “priests” of the state monopoly on governing society anywhere in the world.
The paper “The Crisis of the State as a Social and Political Institution in the Era of Globalization” distinguishes two historically established types of globalization in the sphere of social governance: globalization of nations (international) and people’s globalization (social media). “The first type is the unification of nation-states into global international associations held together by the international law. This particular type can be called an alliance of unequal, where the larger players of the “civilized world” often solve problems at the expense of weaker partners, imposing their political and economic will on them. By the will of the politicians who drive these processes, such globalization typically degenerates into a means of expansion of its participants. In recent decades, thanks to the development of information and communication technologies and the unified social and cultural space formed by ICT, we can talk about a different type of globalization in the governance of society – the grassroots mass desire of people of the world to remove barriers to cultural and economic interaction” [1].
This process of growing self-consciousness of people around the world through the free exchange of information, coordination of joint actions and efforts in protecting human rights and freedoms, and the struggle to preserve and create a favorable ecological and social environment can be called a global revolution. Clear evidence of it is the emergence of worldwide grassroots movements of environmental and human rights activists, such as the ecology movement of Greta Thunberg and the international human rights movement Black Lives Matter (BLM). However, at both the national and international levels, there is no legislative basis for the status and guarantees of the activities and members of such associations. It creates preconditions both for infringement of the rights of their participants by individual states and for abuse by the associations themselves.
British sociologists A. Giddens and F. Sutton in “Basic Concepts in Sociology” predicted the emergence of global social movements that surpass local or national politics without the participation of existing international organizations in 2018.
The most successful example of supranational globalization today is the European experience of delegating part of state sovereignty to the supranational level and the transition to a single European post-political society. The European Union has found the necessary balance between the transforming institution of the state and the emerging globalized community, which opens up prospects both for expanding the sphere of globalization and for including new peoples and territories in this process. In this case, each new participant receives more off-the-shelf mechanisms of supranational interaction and transnational governance, already fine-tuned and legally formalized.
The reverse processes typical for societies and states that are sceptical of participation in world globalization deserve an individual study. The existing public institutions in such societies and states are also subject to transformation, and the authorities inevitably lose workable mechanisms of governing in globalized spheres of social life, primarily in finance, economy, culture, and information exchange.
Modern researchers note the correlation between the level of democracy, the development of public institutions, and the ability of society to reach the level of supranational interaction. The higher the level of democracy and development of civil society, the more actively it is included in the formation of supranational structures.
Anthony Giddens in his book “How Globalisation is Reshaping our Lives” says that the spread of democracy in recent times has been greatly facilitated by the development of global communications, and the rights to participate in the democratic process are connected with civil liberties – the freedom of expression and discussion.
Thus, we can talk about the cooperation of the processes of globalization and democratization of society, which synergetic effect was increasing throughout the XX century and the beginning of our century, covering most of the world. Expanding under the influence of progress, the international ICT environment provides people from different countries and societies with a global discussion platform for mutual exchange of information about distant and close events, for expressing opinions about them. This environment weakly regulated by national and international law has shown the ability for self-regulation. The principles of equality, mutual respect, correctness, and tolerance, without which a meaningful dialogue is impossible, have become the most suitable “equation” for such a pluralistic dialogue.
Consequently, the ICT environment fostered discussion, and the discussion fostered democracy, which can be defined as an equal social dialogue. As A. Giddens wrote, the presence of a global information society is a powerful democratizing force. [4]
Thanks to the development of online communication and the democratization of this communication environment, states and financial groups are gradually losing the right to a monopoly for information in the global open exchange of information. Giddens writes that authoritarian governance no longer meets new life conditions, including the flexibility and dynamics that are necessary to compete in the global online economy. In a world based on the active information exchange, rigid power is losing its power. [5]
However, information technology can be and is widely used for propaganda purposes. It applies primarily to authoritative international and state media, providing a one-way transmission of information to an unlimited number of users. Being under the control of state or private influential structures, they serve to disseminate one-sided official tendentious assessments of things, without the possibility of public discussion and dialogue. Thus, in the words of A. Giddens, television and other media destroy the very public space for dialogue. [6] This problem is especially acute in a society where freedom of speech is not provided by laws and is not controlled by public institutions. There are also examples when due to the globalization of the world information space, authoritative international media, especially TV and radio news channels and Internet giants, serve as an instrument of political and economic pressure within the framework of international and interstate political and economic competition, serving the interests of major powers or transnational corporations. This fact is often used as a reason for justified criticism of the processes of globalization of the information space.
Thus, we can distinguish two directions of globalization in the information sector: the broadening of the sphere of influence for large companies and the media, and the development of international discussion platforms based on social networks and services on the Internet. The first type does not contribute to an advance of civil society and building a supranational post-political world, often serving the purposes of international pressure, protectionism, illegal surveillance, and interference. The second type acts as an instrument of people’s globalization by including people in a free and equal dialogue, a manifestation of popular diplomacy without prejudice and borders.
It is, therefore, more urgent than ever to legally guarantee the natural right of people to freely participate in a global dialogue and exchange information through electronic services and technologies at the international level. In the absence of such international legal norms, some states adopt legislative acts aimed at infringement of human rights in the field of free information exchange and access to services and technologies. Admittedly, such efforts are frequently unsuccessful due to the lack of control over this globalized sphere by individual states.
Legislation of Finland can be considered advanced in this respect: it guarantees every citizen a high-speed connection to the Internet since July 2010. The law provides not only opportunities but also the rights to a Finnish citizen. According to researches, four out of five people all over the world today believe that access to the World Wide Web is a fundamental right. [7]
It seems possible and relevant to raise the question of supplementing the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms with provisions on guarantees of the natural human right to free access to the Internet and information exchange in this network. Moreover, the protection of human information rights and freedoms to access and freely use the Internet deserves separate international acts at the EU level. The report of the UN General Assembly dated May 16, 2011, № A/HRC/17/27 says that the right of access to the Internet is recognized as an inalienable human right. Thus, deliberately depriving people in various regions of the world of the possibility to go online is now a violation of human rights. [8] The report also states that the Internet has considerable potential and many advantages. The fact is that information spreads among users at high speed, while being publicly available, which is the fear of many governments. The Internet is a way to bring people together and fight for justice, according to the authors of the report. It is also emphasized that providing people with access to the Internet should be one of the priorities for the development of any state. [9]
Among different age groups around the world, the number of people using the Internet for a free exchange of information increases every year. For example, according to GfK agency in Russia (the country with average world informatization indicators) in 2019 in a group 65+ the number of network users was 36%, 66% for a group of 50-64, and up to 89% and 94% for groups of 40-49 and 30-39 years old correspondingly. For the category aged 20-29, this indicator is 97%, and among teenagers (16-19 years old) the Internet penetration has reached 100%. [10] Thus, in the nearest future, as generations change, free access to the Internet will become an integral part of the life of each inhabitant of the planet.
Based on the position expressed by the UN General Assembly, attempts by individual politicians or national governments to limit free democratic dialogue on the Internet should be seen as an attack on human rights, civil society, and democracy itself. These cases should be seen as countering globalization as well, the right to participate in which should be recognized as a natural and inalienable right of the individual and requires international legal protection. Since globalization is linked to the development of technology, countering this process is inevitably the “steal of the future”, forcing following generations to run for what they have lost.
The non-governmental organization Freedom House publishes the results of the Freedom on the Net annual research on Internet freedom in different countries of the world. This organization estimates a degree of freedom for access to the Internet and ranges countries into countries with free Internet, relatively free Internet, and non-free Internet. In the report for 2019, experts expressed concern about the actions of several governments, which are increasingly using the World Wide Web and social networks to monitor their citizens, control their online behaviour, and manipulate the results of elections. Among the typical violations of freedom, the Freedom House named the following:
— Obstacles to Access – infrastructural and economic barriers to Internet access, government control of telecommunications operators, ISPs, Internet self-regulatory bodies, etc.;
— Limits on Content – legislative regulation of Internet content, filtering and blocking systems, self-censorship mechanisms, limiting the diversity of media online and the use of digital tools for civic engagement;
— Violations of User Rights – mass surveillance, violations of privacy, and persecution of users for their opinions expressed on the Internet (imprisonment, violence against bloggers, cyberattacks, etc.). [11]
Building an open information society, like globalization, is not a variant of possible development, but an awareness of the vector of humanity’s centuries-long movement, society’s awareness of reality, which requires timely legal regulation. Whereas isolationism is a product of myth-making, a departure from objective reality as such.
Isolationism is understood as “a type of political behaviour aimed at restricting connections and relations with other subjects” [12]. In the focus of globalization processes, the reasons for isolationism at the national level may be the desire of the political or economic elite to preserve the existing model in the country, to maintain influence or markets, as well as the intentional containment of potential strong players through their forced political or economic isolation by major players. The interest in the forced isolation of national markets may be dictated by the desire of interest groups to maintain artificial non-transparent, “shadow” zones for obtaining or placing illegal revenues.
This is another disadvantage of globalization in an international format, which is missing in participative globalization and the global revolution it spawns. The preconditions and signs of positive participative globalization are free information exchange, equal open dialogue, development of civil society, growth of democracy, mutual tolerance, strengthening of peace, and mutual understanding between peoples.
In today’s context, young people consider traditional politics as a self-serving activity of politicians. Classical parliamentarism and representative democracy are no longer sufficient to take into account the views of citizens, we need direct electronic democracy that takes into account the interests of “interested groups” of voters. This practice would be a real revival of community spirit, a course of traditions of popular assemblies and councils at a new round of human development, marking the return of power from elites to society itself.
Giddens writes that in the detraditionalising world, politicians can no longer rely on the former forms – pomp and ceremony – to justify their activities [13]. However, the ruling clans and political elites in some states resist society’s awareness of the growing processes of globalization in an organized manner. This means a conscious substitution of the agenda, a hoax, not really opposing the process of globalization, but only aimed at distracting public consciousness from it.
There is a phenomenon of a “ritualistic” state in which the regulatory powers are lost due to a loss of state control in some spheres of society and replaced by demonstrative activities of the state apparatus which are ostentatious and ritualistic by nature. At the same time, the need for the existence of certain power structures is justified by the need for them to perform such “rituals and ceremonies”.
The reluctance of political structures to participate in global interaction on a supranational level and the obvious weakness and incompetence of the political system are presented to the society as a result of external conspiracies and threats. This is expressed in the ideology of fundamentalism, aptly defined by A. Giddens as “traditions under siege” or traditions that are defended traditionally that is by reference to ritual truth, in a globalizing world that demands reasonable justifications. Fundamentalism has nothing to do with the context of belief, both religious and atheistic. According to Giddens, what matters here is how the truth of these beliefs is defended and asserted. [14] Fundamentalism is categorical and irreconcilable, it is the rejection of dialogue in a world where peace and the future depend on dialogue. Fundamentalism is a child of globalization. It is both a reaction to it and a method for its exploitation [15]. In contrast to democratic dialogue, a logic of persuasion, and mutual respect, fundamentalism demands the categorical adherence to a ritualistic tradition, ensured by intolerance and violence towards any deviation from it.
Fundamentalism is often dressed up as traditionalism, which refers to the reliance on historical wisdom and experience expressed in tradition. Traditionalism expects an understanding of the new through the prism of established traditions; it is open to social innovations, putting them in traditional forms, expresses a willingness to share its traditions with partners, and to respect the traditions of others. Traditionalism is natural to countries with Asian cultures. A special, oriental-traditionalist notion of traditionalist ritual can be found in the writings of Confucius, who viewed it as a way of communicating with the expectation of reciprocity. Confucian ritual – a cultural tradition – is a means of preventing all kinds of conflicts and complications in communication, whose function was a means of adapting to the ‘external environment’ on a personal and social level. Confucian traditional ritual is a way of building positive relationships, adapting to the new, and communicating with the outside world. [16]
The border between traditionalism and fundamentalism lies in the latter’s categorical, irreconcilable and hostile attitude to other traditions and new practices.
Historically, the ritualization of power as a substitute for its effectiveness was clearly manifested in the collapse of empires. During the early Middle Ages, following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the very existence of states in globalized European society was maintained exclusively through collective rituals. The power of the sovereigns at that stage was not clearly defined either legislatively or territorially. Its only manifestation was the right to perform public rituals, which were perceived by society as a manifestation of power, while the real regulation of social relations was carried out locally, at the level of self-organization of professional communities (guilds and chambers), and also in family-traditional and communal ways. A historian M. Boitsov in his article “Rituals are Power” says that “In medieval society, power is dispersed: it is actualized and felt by the subjects directly. For example, dukes and earls, de facto masters of vast territories and possessors of great power, used to meet at the royal court on great church feasts. It was at such meetings that subjects could see, many for the first time, what their kingdom looked like: it was not abstract, but personified, appearing to them as a group of people who had a particular status reflected in their attire, insignia, the spatial arrangement of certain figures, etc. The kingdom was thus “read” by those present in the course of a particular ritual that unfolded before their eyes” [17].
The phenomenon of the “ritualistic” state in this period was also a characteristic of Rome’s “successor” Byzantium which was losing its economic and political influence and was being replaced by the bureaucratization and ritualization of state functions, as is eloquently demonstrated by the Byzantine book “On the ceremonies of the Byzantine court”, compiled for the Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913-959 AD). The book “describes court rituals in great detail, often in minute detail, from the point of view of the administrators of the court, describing how they should conduct them, being a manual containing advice and instructions for Byzantine officials and courtiers” (18). During the decline of Byzantium, there was the substitution of state activities with bureaucratic rituals. For Europe, it was the post-imperial period, when states of a new type were yet to be organized.
The specific ritualization was also evident in late imperial Rome, in the “era of the talentless Caesars” who unsuccessfully emulated Julius and Augustus, relying not on the will and opinion of society, but on fundamentalism, terror, and endless rituals.
According to sociologists, a ritual in the modern sense is “a customary or statutory procedure, a ceremonial”. [19] Rituals, according to the research of the French sociologist E. Durkheim, are characterized by the collectivity of their performance and are aimed at identifying and rallying a group of participants. Thus, “the consequence of a constant and systematic performance of rituals is the gradual development of the social category of causality, which differs from natural (natural-scientific) causality; the difference is that in the case of ritual the result of a change is not visible” [20]. Durkheim identifies the following main types of rituals in terms of their orientation: negative, which is a system of prohibitions, and positive, which aims to bring a person closer to the world of the sacred. According to the type of actions performed, he distinguished imitative rituals – staged actions and commemorative, reproducing the events of the revered past. [21]
Thus, in general terms ritualization of consciousness can be characterized as a conscious collective escape from reality, where the process of influencing the changing social environment is replaced by formal actions whose effectiveness is not a meaningful criterion for their participants. The only result, from the perspective of ritual participants, is the cohesion of their group and the group’s refusal to consciously interact with reality. This is the case when it is the process that matters to the participants and not the result.
A specific and multi-faceted feature of ritualization is the allocation of special leaders-priests from the social group of ritual participants whose role falls on the “keepers of traditions, interpreters, having secular and spiritual power”. [22] Consequently, no matter how many players there are in the ritual, the one who leads it wins. As public rituals develop, the number of “priests” and “servants” – bureaucrats – increases dramatically, and their social strata are formed. Bureaucratization as a form of ritualization throughout its history is a sure companion to the degradation of states, which can be opposed by the centralization of power at the supranational level, or by the return to a mature civil society as globalization processes suggest. Bureaucracy itself is a pseudo-administrative ritual. On this basis, debureaucratization is what deritualization is all about.
Similarly, the ritualization of state functions affects law-making, forming a ritualistic law comparable with the late Byzantine law, when the authorities issue multiple legislative and normative acts aimed not at the actual regulation of social relations, but the endless regulation of the actions of the official apparatus, building its hierarchy, establishing all kinds of celebrations, veneration, or prohibitions. The adoption of these norms is not accompanied by the necessary assessment of their real regulatory influence on current legal relations in society, the criteria, and necessity of which would be well anchored in international legal norms.
Globalization, in return, requires liberation from rituals different for every society and state, purification from the ritualistic cover-up of the meaning of aims and notions, homogeneous and common for all mankind.
Essential features of ritualized consciousness are highlighted alienation from the facts of reality and irreconcilable hostility to everything that does not conform to the ritualistic logic set by ritual organizers. These circumstances make the ritualization of social consciousness the primary tool of fundamentalism in the manipulation of society.
The ritualization of social consciousness leads to a rejection of the modernist scientific “uncharming” (demystification, intellectualization) of reality described by M. Weber that has been going on since Antiquity [23], and a new “opacity” and mystification of consciousness that plunges the modern society into the postmodern are emerging again.
Describing this problem, J. Habermas in his work “Philosophical Discourse on Modernity” justifiably calls modernism an unfinished project of the twentieth century, being surprised at its unexpectedly interrupted fly [24]. The Russian academia, following the Russian thinker A. Panarin, has been looking for an explanation of today’s postmodernism in the processes of globalization and “loss of national identity by an atomizing society”. [25]
In this context, there is a reason to believe that the origins of today’s postmodernism, or rather a shift away from modernity, lie in the phenomenon of the “ritualistic” state based on fundamentalist ideas and mystifications that obscure reality and its prospects from the individual. A characteristic of the postmodern “ritualistic” state is the rejection of the future, a collective ritualistic commemoration in place of ideas about a unified, progressive future. Globalization, on the other hand, is seen by modernist ideologists as a means to create a common future for humanity.
In the process of ritualization of public consciousness and building a “ritualistic” state, the position of church and religion is difficult as they are under serious pressure from politicians and governing bodies, which inevitably try to replace them (or absorb, “governmentalize”), or rather, to displace the genuine Faith and Religion, replacing them with a pseudo-spiritual official ideology. In this spiritual substitute, an ersatz of religion, the subject of worship is “gurus” and “priests”, and the subject of confession is the state ideology. The spiritual openness of the true Faith is replaced with the grinning insularity of a totalitarian sect. Bright examples of this are “talentless Caesars” of late imperial Rome who proclaimed themselves gods; the weakening and fragmentation of the Church in late medieval Europe; the persecution of believers in revolutionary Russia; the quasi-paganism of the National Socialists of Hitler’s Germany.
Constitutions and laws in many countries contain provisions aimed at guaranteeing the secular nature of the state, but today international legal guarantees are also required to protect religious organizations from pressure and appropriation of their functions by the state, which can be called the governmentalization of the church.
The Christian Church in Europe has come a long way from the source of righteous authority, which vested sovereign powers by the right of “vicar of the Son of God Jesus Christ” (Vicarius Filii Dei, Vicarius Christi) in the medieval ages, to the de facto instrument of state propaganda in Nazi Germany, and an institution forcibly removed from the government of society in modern Europe.
The rejection of fundamentalism, the “ritualistic” state, and the imposed ideology is the key to the return of society to the true Faith, the true return of religious spirituality to society.
A detrimental role in the ritualization of public consciousness is played by the mass media, which is also subject to the processes of globalization. German researcher N. Luhmann describes it as follows: the globalization of the media system leads to the comprehensive nature of the information distribution: the scale and speed of a messaging lead to the perception that the next second the information is already known by everybody. [26] The main characteristic of broadcast media is a unidirectional, from a source to a recipient, linear nature of the information transmission process compared to social networks without the possibility of feedback and public discussion. Thus, influence groups (“priests”) use broadcast media to engage consumers of their content in the rituals, making the transmission itself and the collective one-sided perception (often uncritical) of this content a “media ritual”.
Since public control of media giants is very difficult and expensive for the society, it is necessary to legally limit their influence on the audience by demonopolizing and liberalizing media space and introducing broadcasting quotas at the international legislative level. In the information sphere today, there is an acute problem of abuse by Internet giants that uncontrollably collect and use data of citizens and companies in the interests of national governments and international business. Legal regulation of these issues is only possible at the international level.
Fundamentalism uses ritualization, “enchantment” of reality through “media rituals” as an ersatz religion for confused minds faced with the complexities of a globalizing world, shutting them out of reality, immersing them in a “whirlpool” of postmodernism, obscuring from them a genuine reality and true spirituality.
The paradox is that fundamentalism, like anything else, actively uses the fruits of global information technology. Giddens says that it is at the same time a reaction to it and a method of exploiting it; thanks to modern technology, and global media, it acquires a global scale. [27] This explains the irreconcilable attack of fundamentalists of all kinds on the right of citizens to participate in a free global information dialogue on the web.
It is the development of the Internet and social networks as a global discussion medium, a platform for genuine people’s diplomacy, and a self-regulating system based on the principles of democracy and tolerance, that promotes a new, people type of globalization aimed at the formation of independent supranational associations, self-regulated social structures of the unified post-political world. This is the real global revival of modernity, a global revolution.
At the opposite pole of these processes, there is another type of globalization, where large national or international groups struggle to expand their influence by ritualizing society, alienating it from reality, and imposing on it an ideology of fundamentalism or isolationism. This is a way of intensifying political struggle, impossible without destruction, repression, and violence. It is associated with the society’s lurch towards godlessness, today’s postmodernity, the rejection of the idea of conquering the future, the plunge into the abyss of modern magic, ersatz religion, media rituals, and bureaucratic arbitrariness.
The danger of the ritualization of mass consciousness should not be underestimated. American historian Wendy Z. Goldman, in his work “Terror and democracy in the age of Stalin: the social dynamics of repression” sees terror as an extreme form of media ritual – public, media-covered, organized persecution of opponents not engaged in collective rituals (ritual terror). [28]
The Italian philosopher and publicist J. Evola in his “Metaphysics of War” considers the cult of war as the main state ritual, a sacral (ritual) action of sacrificing heroes “who do not actually die, but become part of the mystical army in a universal battle”. He sees the origins of the ritual character of warfare back in the culture of the ancient Romans, where there were “sacred collegia of priests (fetiales), who controlled a well-defined system of rituals which provided a mystical component of every war, from its declaration to its end”. [29] Thus, we can consider the cult of war, widely replicated in the media, along with ritual terror, as an extreme form of media ritual used by political regimes to mobilize society under their rule by immersing it in mysticism.
Hope, as always, is directed towards the future, towards those to whom it rightfully belongs – young people who subconsciously choose democratic forms of globalization, actively using the possibilities of the Internet, participating in the global revolution that is changing personality and society nowadays. Whereas the traps of fundamentalism and isolationism of the “ritualistic” state are attractive for people of the older generations, fascinated by the media and unable to master the new technologies of information exchange.
Thus, the key to the formation of a new supranational post-political future is a unified and free information and communication environment based on access to the Internet. The free information exchange and communication created within this environment contributes to the development of civil society and democracy, the triumph of justice, and strengthens peace among nations.
Despite the exponential growth of these processes, the rights of their participants to free access to the information and communication environment, and to unite efforts at the supranational level require international guarantees and legislative mechanisms of protection against global information manipulation and ritualization of consciousness, imposed by international influence groups, fundamentalists and “ritualistic” states captured by them that pursue mercenary aims.
The consequence of the refusal of society from pseudo-managerial rituals will be not only the collapse of fundamentalism and bureaucracy but also the development, and purification of unified global meanings, which will be used by humanity in global interaction, including the participation with the artificial intelligence. The key to the building of a unified post-political future, true popular globalization, a return to the project of modernity, and true spiritual values on a new supranational level is the protection of human rights to free access and exchange of information, the prohibition of the substitution of religious morality and spirituality by ideological ersatz generated by bureaucracy and influence groups. The leading role in this process should belong to international and in an ideal scenario to the world (global) law, norms accepted by everyone and applicable to everyone.
Thus, at the present stage there is an urgent need for the development and adoption of international law: to supplement the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms with provisions to guarantee the natural human right to free access to the Internet and information exchange on it; an international convention on the rights and status of supranational activist associations; an international code of information exchange and use (an information code); unified mechanisms to protect human rights to free information exchange from illegal limitations by state bodies.
*Sergey Izmestyev – independent researcher, lawyer, international expert in local government and public administration, graduate of USAID programmes, Member of the Association of Lawyers in the Countries of The Black Sea-Caspian Region
Contact the author: [email protected]
The first edition of the paper was published in “Theory and Practice of Social Development” (International Scientific Journal), No 9, 2020 https://doi.org/10.24158/tipor.2020.9.8
Translated by Oksana Chernikova, 2022
