№ 4 - 2005
Galkin A.A.
Globalization and Political Shocks of the 21st Century

As any deep-reaching process developing in social organism, globalization is fraught not only with positive, but also with negative results. To counterbalance what dominates the special literature and political journalism, i.e. the tendency to lay stress on the benefits of globalization, the author accentuates its costs. The article contains thorough analysis of economic and social problems engendered by globalization, as well as of conflictogenous consequences of the phenomenon determined by the author as mass-level contact of civilizations that have difficulty in getting used to one another. Substantial attention is given to forms of realization of mass protest against globalization, first of all to alterglobalism and to fundamentalism. It is in the context of globalization, too, that the author considers the so-called “coloured revolutions” realized in recent years in a number of post-Soviet countries.