[The Political Analysis of Postcommunism. Kyiv: Political Thought, 1995, pp. 51-66.]
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Nationalism and the Legitimation of postcommunist regimes
Yevhen BYSTRYTSKY
§1. Culture as a Political Phenomenon of Postcommunism
Culture as a political problem is a true historical discovery of the period of perestroika and postcommunist social transformations.
In their time, Soviet ideologists often abused the notion of culture which still remained, in fact, completely alien to people and their everyday practice. The Marxist ideological paradigm accustomed them to understanding culture as a domain and a specific creative affair of the intellectual, artistic, and power elites, as a spiritual field of "lofty" models of the "dignified life" isolated from drab routine. This is also true of the supervised cultivation of models of Ukrainian ethno-national culture (poetry, belles lettres, arts, music, and language) and, of course, the national artistic and humanitarian elite.
Today the problem of culture is virtually everybody's at the level of the daily self-affirmation of the individual — from a Ukrainian in central Ukraine or a Russian-speaking native of eastern Ukraine who feel their difference from the western Ukrainian of Galicia who is most confident in his authenticity and in his right to be a national culture leader. Perhaps it is just these geo-cultural differences, this cultural regionalism, that are most often exploited to their own advantage in present-day politics by politicians.
During the first years of Ukraine's independence, na-/52/tional culture and ethnocultural differences have taken on a far greater socio-political significance than economic issues. The slogan of national culture policy-making in the postcommunist period is being chanted along with the slogans of democratizing society, liberalizing it, and introducing market economy structures.
This is no accident. The crux of the issue is that the main active factor lending legitimacy to the political power and the transformation of the political order as a whole in Ukraine today was and remains the cultural sphere.
§2. The National Cultural Idea and the Legitimation of the
Contemporary Ukrainian State
The legitimacy of power means that most of the population accept a given political regime and system as right and lawful. Legitimacy is ultimately the public recognition of the structure and institutions of power.
As long as the current political system is oriented to democratic foundations and norms for managing social life (through free elections, referenda, freedom of speech, and an independent press), problems of legitimacy will always arise. Within the framework of our national-democratic oriented political system (at least, according to social transformations theory), the idea of the national rebirth and cultural identity of Ukrainian society provides an actual foundation for legitimacy in Ukraine. Thus, it was the constant championing of national-cultural self-determination of the Ukrainian nation that distinguished the program platform of one of the most active, popular, and influential political forces of the perestroika period — Rukh. It is no coincidence that practically all the provisions pertaining to nationalist issues and the necessity to develop Ukrainian culture (see section "Culture. Language. Science"), spelled out in Rukh's First Program, are in wide political circulation today, including the new authorities' political glossary.
As new political systems encounter more and more problems, however, the concept of culture as the basis of national-cultural revival eventually loses its original legitimiz-/53/ing force. The political weakening of Rukh, with its reputation staked upon nationalist issues, which were presented as "the foundation for the existence and progress of the Ukrainian nation," is indicative of the political limitations to the concept of culture solely in terms of conservative ideals of national-cultural revival and originality.
§3. The Conservative and Democratic Content of the Idea of
National Cultural Revival
Postcommunist political power in Ukraine ideologically exploits only the conservative side of the idea of national cultural revival. In the form of its political action, this side shows itself as predominantly ideational (officials' ritualistic attendance of cultural festivities, concerts, and performances) and ideological (fixed in the power structure's rhetoric in programmatic documents) support of cultural movements and initiatives aimed at the renewal, elucidation, and interpretation of a mass of customary, traditional, and ethnographic/folkloric forms of cultural life. In this context the notion of conservatism does not mean the wholly positive conserving cultural traditions as a unique way of preserving a national treasure. It means the political conservatism in the authorities' attitude to the cultural sphere, that is, the strengthening of the primary legitimizing function of the idea of a revived national culture, which is still inadequately developed under the truly democratic conditions. This conservatism perpetually tends towards cultural self-isolation, followed by economic and political isolation.
During perestroika, the idea of returning to the historical foundations of Ukrainian life was perceived by many as the basis for national existence, as the ultimate underpinning of Ukraine's rights to independence (including economic independence), distinctiveness, development, and direct participation in the global affairs of humanity without intermediaries. The disintegration of the Soviet Union did not occur according to the formulae of economic determinism. The decomposition of its monolithic social structure did not follow the fault lines dividing economically self-sufficient /54/ regions. On the contrary, the division took into account national and territorial borders between cultural worlds which had arisen over the course of time. This means that the national cultural idea encompasses not simply the conservative meaning of recreating history. When developed, it is not only a basis for the geopolitical separation of a nation but holds within itself the meaning of a natural basis for the open, democratic competition of various systems of social and cultural values. If we take as an example the contemporary Western European democracies, cultural identity loses its conservative attitude with regard to reviving national cultural. National features of cultural life are viewed as something self-evident, something that exist without making special political efforts to conserve and reproduce them. As to the main basis for the legitimation of power, it is found in the political systems and power structure.
The single national democratic nature of social transformations in Ukraine, however, gives no reason to be guided by any one political interpretation of culture, be it conservative or democratic. The real contradiction in the contemporary political elite's attitude to culture may be described as either giving priority to the conservative content of culture at the expense of limiting the democratic transformation in society, or stressing the democratic meaning of cultural identity as a formal precondition for organizing modern society and, consequently, inevitably losing the public support which was generated during the perestroika period. This may be seen, for example, in Ukraine's legislative and executive branches. Higher echelons of legislative power tend to cultivate the conservative aspect of culture more often, whereas, in cases when executive power is confronted with the necessity to interpret the idea of national cultural independence in democratic terms (for example, because it is being treated by the prospect of losing needed economic links with the other regions of former Soviet Union), it is often disposed to stress the formal interpretation of cultural uniqueness. /55/
§4. The Idea of "Scientific Nationalism" in
Postcommunist Political Literature
In Autumn 1993 the Ministry of Education of Ukraine sent out a letter of instruction with a syllabus of a new course, scientific nationalism, to institutions of higher education. The syllabus began by expanding upon the urgent need to restore to Ukraine its scientifically understood political history — the study of Ukrainian political life, history, and political thought. But soon this indisputable thesis took a somewhat different turn. The authors of the letter maintain that "so-called general political science," which had been created "largely by the West," lacks a clearly defined research object. Rather, it was seen only as a series of "abstract theoretical claims which, at best, can be useful as a certain universal political vision thereby constituting a general part of national political science." This latter was named "scientific nationalism" as a recognized academic discipline.8
But this undoubtedly testifies to the fact that the authors of this new syllabus in Ukrainian political science did not confine themselves to a traditional approach to the study of politics, its history and present state, whereby political processes themselves become objects to be understood by the social sciences. In the syllabus introduced by the Ministry of Education, Ukrainian nationalism itself, as well as its outlook and ideology, are regarded as a science {i.e., as a scientific theory).
In other words, the authors held that Ukrainian nationalism itself can serve as a theoretical basis of political science, that it can represent by itself a particular methodology of scholarly comprehension of all possible political processes. "The Ukrainian national bias as scientific objectivity" is how the authors worded it.9
Making the idea of "scientific nationalism" public among broad circles of the national academic community implied that behind it was the most alarming theoretical confusion and muddled political thinking among Ukraine's intellectual elite. /56/
The crux of the issue is that "scientific nationalism" is opposed to the previously dominant ideology of "scientific communism," which was also taught doctrinally and universally in all Soviet institutions of higher education. But at the same time this new idea is equally opposed to the system of liberal-democratic values (and consequently to prevailing Western political conceptions of social development which are oriented towards universal human values) as was "scientific communism." In the context of the collapse of the communist empire, the theoretical distancing from Marxist ideology can be regarded as altogether reasonable, and the antidemocratic theme of "scientific nationalism" remained, of course, in the background. But its ideological sources can be clearly understood as turning to the classic texts of Ukrainian integral nationalism, developed in the 1920s-1930s within the general trend of militant, exclusivist nationalist authoritarianism popular in Europe at that time. The most lapidary of these sources charged in 1940 that "a nationalist fights all other false theories down to their extermination," including "Marxism, international socialism, (and)... liberalism" which were "invented by enemies in order to corrupt and weaken the nation, and then hand it over to the tender mercies of alien plunderers."10
Thus, intentionally or unintentionally, the concept of "scientific nationalism" is nothing more than a reflection of extant political efforts to define, pursue, and achieve a distinctively Ukrainian "third way" between the Scylla of Communism and the Charybdis of Western Liberalism, between the conservative values of Ukrainian life and the threat to traditional Ukrainianism from the nationally denigrating values of the modern civilization, between the lofty political objective of creating independent statehood and West European processes of the economic integration of nations on democratic principles. All these contradictions constitute real conflicts in Ukrainian political thought.
But in current political life, which is in a state of primary structuralization and incomplete ideological stratification, pursuits of an "individual" way exist, virtually, in the "creative potentiality" of the Ukrainian ruling and opposi-/57/tion elites. Likewise, the notion of "scientific nationalism" rashly suggested by some political scientists is, in fact, a sort of ideological mule wielded together from two antagonistic ideologies, communism and liberalism. Its theoretical fuzziness reflects the existing lack of clear vision characterizing of political movements in Ukraine today. That is why it makes sense to consider in greater detail the real meaning of the concept "scientific nationalism" in order to better understand the future.
The dissemination by state structures of a Ukrainian political science program containing the idea of "scientific nationalism" was no accident. The political basis of official propaganda of a national Weltanschaung in Ukraine — begins with a special emphasis on traditional values, a single common language and spiritual unity, and ends with the evaluation of all international developments and cultural phenomena in the world in light of the recognition and consolidation of the Ukrainian nation. Since the perestroika era the ideas and ideals of cultural separation and national self-determination have been viewed by many as identical to the general political slogan of national statehood, thereby serving as a prime factor in the wide recognition of national leaders. After the sweeping criticism of communist doctrine during the period of glasnost, that doctrine was replaced by a Ukrainian national idea that embraced all sorts of hopes for a better future, which could be built only on the basis of national and cultural unity. Its main elements were people's perception of the distinctiveness of their collective everyday life (in the marginal social situation of the collapse of the Soviet empire), their collective political experience of being different from other national communities of the former USSR (just as these other communities, in turn, differ from one another), and their understanding of the particular features of the interpersonal relations that existed on the territory of Ukraine, together with an act of political to national unity. It was only natural that in real politics, the accomplishment of such a general visions of the Ukrainian national idea by the new leaders gave prominence to certain features of classical Ukrainian integral nationalism of the interwar period. /58/
In order to understand the objective factors leading to the merger of the ideals of national independence with integral nationalistic ideology in current political action, it must be noted that at a period of the ideological restructuring of political life, Ukraine was and continues to be very reluctant to discard the old dilapidated foundation of the command system of administration and management. Thus, overly rash efforts to implement national ideas and values for the sake of political legitimation assume the form of direct command, unofficial administrative interference, along with the total control characteristic of a totalitarian state.
There are many examples of this, beginning with the current economic policies towards the preservation of national self-isolation at the expense of profitability. But, most striking of them, given the lack of a clear political vision of how to restructure Ukraine economically (suffice it to recall how a former Prime-Minister, who is now President, once spoke about the need to decide what kind of social system Ukraine wants to build), can be found in cultural and artistic life.
Between 1991-1994 new "commissars" from Supreme Rada (Parliament) commissions on science and culture often attempted to impose their visions of society upon academics and other intellectuals, making use of typically Bolshevik methods of accusing those who think differently of ideological national sabotage and insufficient national loyalty. Current Ukrainian politics confirms an apt remark, based on experience, by the late Professor Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytzkyj, one of the leading thinkers of the postwar Ukrainian emigration, that "Ukrainian (integral) nationalism falls under the rubric of a totalitarian movement: it strives to subject the whole life of the Ukrainian people, in all its manifestations, to its influence... The nationalist movement does not confine itself to political objectives but also demands control over the cultural process."11
These attempts to directly shape societal life and control the cultural process in postcommunist Ukraine, proceeding from an ideological system not altogether different from the old communist, one provide prerequisites for understand-/59/ing what this "scientific nationalism" was all about. The new proponents of integral nationalism wanted to preserve the same old policy of total interference in people's lives and use the same general methods which were employed by the adherents of scientific communism.
We use this latter notion without quotation marks deliberately because the Marxist vision of the historical process was oriented explicitly towards the norms and ideals of European scholarship and natural philosophy. Completing the so-called project of Enlightenment, Marxist ideology mandated total rational control over the organization of human life and a Utopia of perpetually managed social processes, which its authors believed was to rely on laws of human historical development discovered by reason. Today there are very few people who doubt that the historical experience of one-sixth of the world proved (by its own example) that it is impossible to organize a political regime on the basis of a classical theory of Enlightenment scienticism. Essentially, the concept of "scientific nationalism" is based on much the same ideals of subjecting the diversity of human life to ideological principles, "scientific" standardization, and overall control. But Marxism differs in certain basic ways from the integral nationalist notion of why it claims that its ideology is scientific.
One may be certain that the scholars who put forward the concept of "scientific nationalism" never read such authentic texts of Ukrainian integral nationalism as Dmytro Dontsov's. Likewise, the philosophical foundation of Ukrainian nationalism represented in well-known works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Ortega-y-Gasset, has escaped their professional attention. The only thing clear is that the idea of "scientific nationalism" was made possible because of the striking coincidence of political style between old communist and new postcommunist power-holders favoring the active and violent molding of social and cultural life. But the latter are diametrically opposed to their predecessors in ideological and philosophical content.
This can be seen from a general definition of Ukrainian nationalism by any authoritative author of this ideology. In /60/ the concise work cited above, Tkachuk points out that "nationalistic ideology" is not "an artificially constructed theory (science)" but "a number of closely interrelated truths... on the basis of which develops life... and, hence, the nation's life."12 In Dontsov, the general thesis of Ukrainian nationalism assumed central significance as the guiding idea which he propagated all his life, the idea of a basic difference of the nationalist outlook from the ideals of European Enlightenment in general and those of its successors — positivism, scientific socialism, and scientific materialism in particular. It was precisely for such scienticism that Dontsov subjects nearly all nineteenth century Ukrainophiles and Ukrainian democrats (beginning with Panteleimon Kulish and ending with Mykhailo Drahomanov and his numerous intellectual followers) to unsparing criticism, dubbing their efforts at popular education and pro-socialist orientation as "Ukrainian provincialism" (in that they lagged behind the European irrationalism fashionable during the flowering of the European fascist dictatorships). At nearly the same time, but proceeding from the opposite philosophical assumptions as E. Husserl in the first third of the twentieth century, Dontsov independently expounded upon the idea of crisis in European culture and European nations. (See: his Nationalizm, Lviv, 1926; a more refined exposition of the idea can be found in Where Should We Seek Our Historical Traditions, Lviv, 1937, both in Ukrainian). Just like Husserl, he saw the cause of such a crisis in the European world-view in the ideals of Enlightenment and scientific Reason, i.e., in its rationalism. But in contrast to the famous phenomenologist, the Ukrainian thinker came to opposite conclusions.
Dontsov argued that the crisis in Europe, which culminated in the outbreak of World War I in 1914, was a consequence of the maturation of national life worlds, that it was caused by the confrontation of national wills for self-affirmation, their struggle to win their own place in the world.
Basing himself exclusively on the latest modern philosophical tradition of his time, which called itself the philosophy of will, voluntarism, or irrationalism, Dontsov argued /61/ that the ultimate basis of human life, world view, and ideology is not rational consciousness but human will. For this reason he called his philosophy "voluntarist nationalism." Dontsov's idea of voluntarist nationalism is not fortuitous for the Ukrainian nationalistic movement as a whole. Under the rubric of this philosophical grounding, it constituted the central conclusion of classical Ukrainian integral nationalism.
Integral nationalism, in the sense in which it was historically established in the classics of Ukrainian nationalistic thought, is a system of "voluntaristic" truths as to the life of the nation. The philosophical concept of will or volition, is merely a general form of signifying a realistic attitude to the attainment of human wishes, desires, and aspirations. It may also be a reflection of the will to live, which is contained in all human feelings and experience and, which in its sources is not subject to rationality, but is motivated by all factors of human vital activity. Thus, for the Ukrainian nation, whose state of unrealized will for nationally existential self-affirmation is almost permanent, nationalism takes on real social sense as the will for its own culture and for independent statehood. But, just as volition and feeling cannot substitute for reason, so too nationalism is not in a position to carry out the functions of scientific knowledge and political theory.
Nationalism and nationalist ideology are not and cannot be a system of views that are based on the facts of consciousness and reason. Nationalism can be based only on an extra-scientific fact of volition, on the "national will" which is not related to any previous act of reason. "This will is the major feature of a nation and the crux of nationalist ideology."13 Thus, nationalism cannot in any case be a science in its exact European sense. Our newly minted nationalists artificially invented or fantasized the concept of "scientific nationalism." Given their historical and philosophical primitivism, one might well refrain from arguing with them. But behind their idea of Ukrainian nationalist political science lurks the disorientation and real scholarly primitivism of the would-be politicians who would make (and are already making) use of such pseudo-scientific claims. /62/
Martin Heidegger, reflecting on his own tragic experience under the domination of nationalist ideology and "German science," after the Second World War put forward the idea of the inherent "subjectivism of any nationalism" ("Letter on Humanism"). No one familiar with this great German's life and philosophical contribution would attempt to interpret this as a vulgar denial of the national idea or national existence. He meant genuine subjectivism, i.e., the unwillingness or inability to face the realities of life which the nationally oriented consciousness acquires when it assumes the role of official ideology and scientific knowledge.
The point is that nationalism always falls prey to subjectivism, when, on the one hand it is unwilling and unable to address life as it really is, but rather rationalizes away the variegated nature of the actual national will and, on the other hand, when a certain group of people demand the imposition by force of their own nationalist world view in the guise of a rigidly rationalized "program," "methodology," or "ideology." This gives rise to a theoretical and political situation where private, partial, or one-party feelings, desires, wishes, and hopes, (i.e., one-dimensional, inadequate, deficient, incomplete, and, thus, biased visions of social life) are presented as scientifically valid and indispensable "arguments," "proofs," "explanations," "explications," as a search for "laws of social development," etc. Historically, the direction and power of human will is changeable. Its codification in the guise of an official ideological discourse or pseudoscience of politics marks the triumph of political dogmatism, and this means that society is fated to political caprice and the demise of democracy in any form.
There is only one known way of being safe from the possible consequences of subjectivism that can be bound up with the transformation of national will into a pseudoscience of politics. In the context of our discussion this is to see the national idea or nationalist world view for what it is — the nation's will to national-cultural and national-political selfaffirmation in all those regionally diversified and socially changeable forms, in which this will manifests itself in real life and political practice. This also suggests the ability to /63/ accept nationalism as an integral part of the Ukrainian political establishment, that is, as one of several established systems of views, thoughts, and slogans embraced by a certain group of people, movements, and parties, that is, within the context of democratic pluralism.
§5. The Idea of Democracy and Proto-Democracy
The sense of the culture and content of the democratic organization of society have many points in common, but they also differ greatly. While the postcommunist authorities and today's "instant" politicians make avid use of the former, they simply ignore or are in no hurry to notice the differences.
Aristotle gave the first general and simple definition of democracy. He understood democracy as the self-government of free and equal people,14 i.e., a social procedure whereby individuals freely and jointly determine what leaders they should elect and exactly what powers they are willing to give them. On what basis do they come to such an accord in selecting their rulers? For Aristotle, this problem is not one to be pondered over. For the "first democracies" such a consensus was ensured by common tradition and ethos, i.e., generally accepted norms of life, the self-evident nature of cultural coexistence, etc.
However, for the modern forms of developed democratic systems the issue of social concord and the problem of civic consensus gain overriding importance. In other words, this is a question of on the basis of which program different, but politically equal, people can come to a social consensus. It is also a question of the legitimation of power, i.e., the free recognition of the "leadership" by the majority of citizens.15
The sense and experience of most Ukrainian citizens that they differed existentially and culturally from other great communities of the former USSR led to them to opt for Ukrainian independence in a referendum. Not least important was the awareness of their own national-cultural differences (not to be confused with ethnocultural identity), /64/ which acquired legitimizing significance by their free recognition of their own Ukrainian state and the need for it to have an independent policy as expressed in the referendum of December 1, 1991. Ukraine's political independence, political order, and independent state can rise or fall according to whether or not it continues to recognize its own nationalcultural solidarity and community. The awareness of national, cultural, or, if you like, geo-cultural community had assumed the quality of a proto-consensus necessary for Ukraine's proto-democratic self-determination as a fullfledged political entity on the map of the modern world.
The simplest and most general concept of culture is one of a phenomenon which unites us all into a single national — and beyond this, human — world. An ethno-national community is a network of relationships, social ties, and cultural consensus which are bequeathed to us by history and cultural tradition. Dontsov provides a more accurate term in this connection: the unity of the will of Ukrainian society, the unity of its volition for self-affirmation. But — and this is for us the most important point — an ethno-national community today, in the developed European world, with its present day economic ties, personal mobility, and great variety of information impacting upon it, etc. is far from ensured by tradition. At present, an ethno-national community cannot serve as the sole basis for the democratic consensus, for which many of our current politicians hope. The cultural regionalism of Ukraine bears conclusive witness to this undeniable fact. The current stage of Ukraine's social development gives every reason to define the situation as a proto-democratic one, as only the first step toward the realization of the idea of democracy.
In its origin, the idea of the democratic organization of society is inalienably linked with its prospects for overcoming national narrowness and interethnic conflict. The outstanding theoretician of civil society, secular ethics, and law, Immanuel Kant perceived "the general universal state as a prenatal chamber in which all elemental potentialities of the human race gradually become full-blown."16 Indeed, the idea of democracy, just like the idea of justice, even /65/ with its appeal to the free accord of equal people cannot, in principle, be limited by the slogan "democracy only for one discrete community among other communities."
By arguing the universality of the democratic idea, Kant certainly did not foresee, for example, the specifics of the "denationalization" of, say, the Germans of East Prussia, but rather saw in civil society a necessary condition for achieving interethnic peace. Likewise, the goal of politically consolidating democracy today does not supplant other urgent issues of national-cultural revival. The issue is one of its modern contextual interpretation. A developed understanding of democracy goes much deeper than the simple inarticulate unity of a given ethnic stock.
"The inarticulate unity of ethnic stock," which at perestroika rallies seemed to give democratic consent to the expression of a common national will, can no longer suffice today, when it is necessary to go further in developing our model of political behavior. It can only serve, and now serves as a basis for the "new" nomenklatura, which came to power using slogans of "culture-making" to impose its partial, imperfect, narrow, and partisan vision of social and cultural phenomena. Thus, one part of the all-Ukrainian community, heterogeneous in its cultural and ethnocultural features, is placed in opposition to others.
All theories of developed democracy maintain that it is based not simply on natural ethnic unity. The basis of democracy lies in a developed public dialog (communication) of representatives of various political orientations. Such communicative acts can in no case be limited to a blind and dumb national-cultural identity. True national identity itself is merely a developed outcome of historical connections, a result of rational argumentative communication17 among representatives of a single political nation which can be composed of various national and other subcultures.
The loudest appeals to the idea of democracy in postcommunist Ukraine can often be heard from politicians who view the social significance of their parties and movements from the "national-democratic" perspective. However, both /66/ practical abidance by that self-designation and political understanding of social goals in the notion of "national democracy" are fraught with a real threat of an "eternal coming back to the same" (Nietzsche): an incessant admiration for proto-democratic features of Ukrainian community and, hence, political narcissism and constant repetition of outdated romantic slogans taken from the period of miraculous national liberation.
In this context the critical analysis of language and modes of understanding is of great importance, for they form the semantic culture of postcommunist discourse and are consciously or unconsciously utilized by the new regime as its primary public means of self-legitimation.
8. B. A. Hayevsky, F. M. Kyrylyuk, and M. I. Obushny, Conceptual Foundations of Ukrai- /350/nian Political Science (Kyiv, 1993), pp. 1, 5 (in Ukrainian). The authors of these "conceptual foundations" are Kyiv Shevchenko University Professors.
9. Ibid., p. 7.
10. D. Tkachuk, Ukrainian Nationalism (Prague, 1940), p. 10 (in Ukrainian).
11. Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytzkyj, Sketches on the History of Modern Ukraine (Lviv, 1991), p. 62 (in Ukrainian).
12. D. Tkachuk, op. cit, p. 5.
13. Ibid., p. 8.
14. "Political rule is the self-government of free and equal people." — Jurgen Habermas, Demokratia. Razum. Nravstvennost': Lektsii i Interviu (Moscow, 1992), pp. 31, 66 (in Russian).
15. See: Jurgen Habermas, "Legitimation Problems in the Modern State," Jurgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (London, 1976), p. 178.
16. Immanuel Kant, "The Idea of General History in the Universal-Civic Perspective," in Kant, Collected Works in Six Volumes (Moscow, 1969), vol. VI, p. 21. For the universalist — general civilizational — foundation of the idea of democracy as it is advocated for by theoreticians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see: I. Yu. Solovev, and I. Kant, Vzaimodopolnitelnost Morali i Prava, (Moscow, 1962), pp. 19-27.
17. The standard work on this issue is Jurgen Habermas, "The Problem of Legitimization in the Modern State," in: Habermas, op. cit, pp. 178-206. In this connection it should be noted that the notion of consensus in its exact definition as a special procedure of reaching general agreement in the process of public discussion is not consistent with the one referred to above as "proto-consensus" — the silent ethnocultural unity of people.
See also:
Yevhen Bystrytsky. The Selected Bibliography
