Democracy and nationalism in the discourse of modern social and political thinking

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Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University

Democracy and nationalism in the discourse of modern social and political thinking

Bortnikov Valeriy

Doctor of Political Sciences

Professor at the Department of Political Science and

Public Administration

Bortnikova Alla

Doctor of Political Sciences

Senior Lecturer at the Department of World History

Abstract

The aim of the article is political analysis of individual conceptual models, theories and judgments of national and foreign scholars on the compatibility of nationalism and democracy (A. Valitskyi, P Vandych, L. Greenfeld, A. Kappeler, T. Kuzio, V. Lisovyi, L. Nagorna, G. Nadiya, O. Protsenko, and E. Yan). The path of nation-state construction a priori involves a conflict over the coherence of the general and special, public and the particular, the unique and etc. It is obvious that democratic development of a society is impossible without solving a complex of problems related to the coordination of key issues of national and cultural building. Only in the presence of a powerful, democratically organized state it is possible to solve the so-called national issue in a civilized way, to preserve peace and harmony in society. The idea of nationalism in the historiosophical sense is organically linked to the idea of democracy, although this connection is not without controversy. This is due to the fact that the nation is the main subject of democratic and nationalist discourses. The regularity of their organic combination is contained in the very nature ofthese phenomena, derivedfrom the concept of«nation». It is the nation, as an organized whole, that produces forms of social existence based on the principles of democracy.

At the same time, the slogans for the cultural and political self-determination should be seen as the danger ofpolitical forces indifferent to the national interests, national culture and identity of the Ukrainian nation or, on the contrary, they profess the ideals of radical nationalism of a totalitarian nature that is incompatible with the inalienable rights of both: individual and national communities.

A factor contributing to the consolidation of the nation is the external threat to the security and independence of the state. Ukraine, where under the conditions of external aggression there was a unification of the nation on the basis ofpatriotism and national dignity was not an exception. According to sociologists, support for Ukraine's independence clearly correlates with a sense of patriotism: the higher the level of patriotic feelings of the respondents, the more they support the declaration of Independence.

Key words: modern nation, people, nationalism, patriotism, democracy, state, Ukraine.

Бортніков Валерій, Бортнікова Алла

Демократія і націоналізм у дискурсі сучасної суспільно-політичної думки

Анотація

nationalism democracy political

Метою статті є політологічний аналіз окремих концептуальних моделей, теорій та суджень вітчизняних і зарубіжних вчених щодо сумісності націоналізму і демократії (А. Валицький, П. Вандич, Л. Грінфелд, А. Каппелер, Т. Кузьо, В. Лісовий, Л. Нагорна, Г. Нодія, О. Проценко, Е. Ян). Шлях національно-державного будівництва апріорі містить у собі конфлікт на предмет узгодженості загального й особливого, суспільного та партикулярного, унікального тощо. Вочевидь, що демократична розбудова суспільства неможлива без розв'язання комплексу проблем, пов'язаних з узгодженням вузлових питань національно-культурного будівництва. Лише за наявності потужної, демократично організованої держави можливо у цивілізований спосіб вирішити так зване національне питання, зберегти мир і злагоду в суспільстві. Ідея націоналізму в історіософському розумінні органічно пов'язана з ідеєю демократії, хоча цей зв'язок і не позбавлене протиріч. Це пояснюється тим, що головним суб'єктом демократичного і націоналістичного дискурсів виступає народ. Сумісність демократії й націоналізму має історичне підґрунтя й бере свій початок від часів формування модерних націй. Закономірність їх органічного поєднання міститься у самій природі цих явищ, похідних від поняття «народ». Саме народ, як організоване ціле продукує форми суспільного буття, що ґрунтуються на засадах народовладдя.

Водночас за гаслами культурного і політичного самовизначення слід бачити небезпеку приходу до влади політичних сил, які байдуже ставляться до національних інтересів, національної культури та самобутності українського народу або, навпаки, сповідують ідеали радикального націоналізму тоталітарного ґатунку, який несумісний з невід'ємними правами як окремої особи, так й національних спільнот.

Чинником, який сприяє консолідації нації, є зовнішня загроза небезпеці й незалежності держави. Не стала виключенням й Україна, де в умовах зовнішньої агресії відбулася єднання нації на засадах патріотизму та національної гідності. За свідченням соціологів підтримка незалежності України чітко корелює з почуттям патріотизму: чим вищий рівень патріотичних почуттів респондентів, тим більше вони підтримують проголошення Незалежності.

Ключові слова: модерна нація, народ, націоналізм, патріотизм, демократія, держава, Україна.

The issue of nationstate building is becoming especially relevant in the context of dramatic events in eastern Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, aggravation of ideological confrontation with apologists of the «Russian world», etc. The formation of Ukrainian modern nation is inseparably connected with the processes of the democratic state development. However, according to the estimations of Ukrainian political scientists in the Ukrainian nationbuilding, the «unfavorable situation» has risen in the Ukrainian nation-creation [7, p. 14]. There are disputes between scientists and politicians about the priority of the state tasks and cultural-national construction;the «language issue» periodically intensifies, there is no consensus and understanding of the Ukrainian nation model content. All these questions are somehow related to solving compatibility issues of nationalism and democracy in the theoretical and practical political dimensions in the whole richness of their forms and manifestations.

Important in terms of understanding by combining cultural and democratic national vectors of statebuilding are the publications of such modern domestic and foreign authors as A. Valytskyi, L. Grinfed, Ya. Grytsak, G. Kasyanov, V. Kymlichko, A. Kolodiy, T. Kuzio, V. Lisovyi, L. Nagorna, G. Nodiya, O. Protsenko, V. Rebkalo, M. Ryabchuk and others.

The purpose of the article is a political analysis of individual conceptual models, theories and judgments of national and foreign scholars on the compatibility of nationalism and democracy.

The path of nation-state construction a priori involves a conflict, which is based on the problem of coherence of the general and special, public and particular, unique, etc. As L. Nagorna notes, national identity is the source of positive emotions for a person. The awareness of belonging to a particular nation creates a sense of security, and is the source of patriotism and national pride. But in a weak, polarized state, it «can cause feelings of discomfort, emotional pain, and provoke moods of protest. The set of negative emotions that arise on this ground is capable of devaluing national values, fuel xenophobia, emigration, irredentist and other manifestations. In this sense, the crisis of national self-identification acts as a conflict-generating factor» [12, p. 67].

Concerning the compatibility of democracy and nationalism, public consciousness in Ukraine remains largely a hostage of the Soviet propaganda matrix, wherein national problems were considered only in the context of class struggle in the categories of «proletarian internationalism», or «bourgeois nationalism.» The axiological approach to these concepts has long been widespread among scholars, wherein democracy has been assigned the role of a positive hero who «has nothing to do with« bad «nationalism» [13, p. 85]. According to V. Lisovyi and O. Protsenko, Ukrainian nationalism in its current dominant interpretation «is held in captivity by a narrow historical and retrospective localization, that is, is burdened by the sins of integral nationalism. Too strong its association with the activities of nationalist organizations in the 1930s and 1940s was an obstacle to be adopted and mastered by other currents of political thought and political movements» [11, p. 14].

Almost axiomatic is the statement that only in the presence of a powerful, independent state it is possible to solve the so-called national issue in a civilized way, to preserve peace and harmony in society. V. Vinnychenko wrote in his «Testament to the Liberation Fighters»: «While humanity is still divided into separate national groups, which are mostly called states, it is obvious that the best means of preserving its life and development of each nation is the statesmanship, that is, the complex of those institutions of economy, politics, culture that operate on the territory inhabited by a national collective, which bind it into a compact integrity, which ensure its development in the present and future. A nation without statesmanship is a crippled human collective organism » [3, p. 302].

V. Lypynskyi, in his turn, argued that without the existence of an independent state, the future of the Ukrainian nation would be threatened, and therefore he suggested the leading layers to unite and focus their efforts on the Ukrainian state constructing: «Without the state of our own, there can be no Ukrainian nation,» but our nation is «politically, ideologically and culturally separated» [9. p. 41, 43].

In the work «Ham and Japheth», marked by sad reflections on the reasons for the failure of the project of the nation-state constructing, written on the slope of his life in 1928, V. Lypynskyi again insists on the priority of solving the problems of state construction: «The state is first of all: Power, Territory, Citizenship. Without these three components, there is no state. Therefore, an organized force is needed to construct the state, which supports the government in the name of the good of the whole land-territory and the whole citizenship. The nation is first of all a spiritual, cultural and historical unity. So, for the birth of a nation it is necessarily a long cohabitation of this citizenship in this territory and one own state. The nation - the unity of the spirit - is always born of the state - the unity of the territorial-political -and not vice versa » [10, p. 65].

If to mention the peculiarities of the democratic movements that arose on the territory of the former USSR in different national republics, all of them were at the same time the nationalist movements. It is obvious that democratic development of society is impossible without solving the national issue. A valid argument for confirming this thesis is the fact that at the end of the Soviet era, the «National Democrats in Ukraine... were not strong enough to come to power. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, they proved capable of preventing Ukraine from slipping into complete authoritarianism, which became the norm for other CIS countries» [2, p. 51].

The determinant of the democratic nature of the nation is civil society, which is at the same time an indispensable attribute and condition for the existence of modern democracy. Contemporary Central and Eastern European history researcher P. Vandych points out that the difference between citizenship and nationality, which is almost unknown in English and French-speaking countries, has become significant in the CEE. If the presence of civil society has always been a feature of Western civilization, then the civil society has become a stable national figure in the CEE. This was mainly due to periods of foreign rule. Nativeleaning civil society was at the heart of national identity in the face of a threat from a foreign power or a foreign state. As a result, the civil society, which has traditionally defended pluralism and its autonomy from the state interference, and which in this sense can be considered as the most reliable guarantor of individual rights, has become a central defender of the nation in Central and Eastern Europe,» emphasizes the scientist [8, p. 23-24]. In Ukraine, not so much civil society,which, due to historical circumstances, has failed to establish itself, but ordinary people, especially rural residents, as well as representatives of nationally conscious intellectuals in cities, have become Beregynia of national identity despite the fact that the latter were largely Russifyed.

The idea of nationalism in the historiosophy sense is organically linked to the idea of democracy, although this connection is not without controversy. This is due to the fact that the main subject of democratic and nationalist discourses is the people. As the well-known German political scientist E. Jan rightly noticed, both nationalism and democracy are derivatives of «the same fundamental historical idea, namely: the idea of the sovereignty of the people» [16, p. 33]. The presence of fruitful links between the particular content of nationalism as a social phenomenon, its specific manifestations, and the universal content of liberal democracy demonstrates that the awareness of equality within one's nation is a natural prerequisite for ascending to the equality of all human beings, regardless of their nationality, that is, the convergence to the general is successfully accomplished through the particular, the particular [15, p. 195-199].

Understanding the difference between legal, socio-cultural, political, etc. categories, one can say that such concepts as «freedom», «democracy», «people», «nation», «sovereignty», «independence», «national unity» and so on are all synonymous, especially when dealing with modern democratic states and nations. «The criteria by which nations differ may not be universal, but the political unity required for democracy cannot be achieved without people defining themselves as a« nation,» Georgian scientist G. Nodiya emphasizes. [13, p. 89]. On his opinion, the attempts to deny the real state of affairs and the importance of nationalism often stem from a reluctance to acknowledge that the democratic model that appears to be the pinnacle of rational development is based upon the irrational foundation. At the early stages of establishing a democratic model, it is quite clear that the irrationality of political definitions (which determine who exactly enters the concept of «we, the people») becomes a necessary preliminary stage of rational political behavior [13, p. 90].

The domestic political scientists give a number of arguments in favor of the thesis about the historical and practical political conditionality of the modern nation formation processes and the development of liberal democracy.

The first argument is historical. The formation of modern democracy as a social system and political form of government during the 18th-19th centuries coincided in historical time with the formation of modern nations and nation-states, in particular in Europe. This was due to a combination of two historical processes, namely, the bourgeois-democratic secularization of society and the political emancipation of the individual-citizen, on the one hand, and the formation of the nation-sovereign idea as a single collective entity, which determines the legitimacy of power and state through the electoral process on the other hand.

The second argument for the non-alternativeness of democratic approaches in ethno-cultural policy is the effectiveness of democratic practice, in particular the development of methodological approaches and political mechanisms to overcome national and ethno-cultural contradictions.

The third argument concerns the problems of consolidating democracy and is of particular importance to countries in transition from authoritarianism to democracy (including Ukraine) that is on the path of national development. In political theory, it is considered to be an axiom that national unity is a favorable condition for the development and consolidation of democracy [14, p. 631-632].

This understanding of the intersection of nation-building and liberal democracy resonates with the views of the German historian A. Cappeller, who identified the following differences of the modern nation from prenational communities:

In pre-national times, societies were organized «horizontally», for example by status, and nations formed «vertically».

The idea of a nation in the modern day is becoming an essential part of an integrating ideology. In earlier times, «the ethnic self-awareness was such a component, but not so important. Religion, class division, dynasty and other components mattered more.»

A modern nation is a mass, not an elitist phenomenon; its emergence is connected with the participation of the masses of the population in politics, with democracy.

Nation is a phenomenon of modern times [6, p. 274].

The original approach to the compatibility of democracy and nationalism is demonstrated by Harvard University Professor of social sciences L. Grinfeld. Democracy, on her opinion, « was born, to a certain extent, with nationality. They are both inextricably linked and neither can be fully grasped beyond that link. Nationalism was a form within which democracy emerged, contained in a national idea just like a butterfly in a cocoon. Initially, nationalism developed as a democracy: where the conditions for such initial development remained, the identity between them coincided. But as nationalism spread under different conditions and the emphasis in the national idea shifted from a sovereign character to the uniqueness of the people, the original identity between it and democratic principles disappeared» [4, p. 695].

Based on the analysis of the historical experience of England, the USA, France, Russia and Germany, the scientist proposes to classify types of nationalism (individualistic-liberal; authoritarian-collectivist; civil and ethnic) on three grounds: a) on the relation between nationalism and democracy; b) by the method of determining the principle of the sovereignty of the people and the individual; c) after the way in which belonging to the national community is determined. Types of nationalism:

Table of interaction of different types of nationalism

Source: [4, p. 697].

The liberal conception of the nation, which is substantiated by the Polish scientist A. Valitskyi, reasonably argues for the possibility and even the regularity of the organic unity of nationalism and democracy at the appropriate stage of the society development. No group within the nation should strive to monopolize national values, says the scientist, the liberal conception of the nation «requires respect for the individual, the ability to understand others and not absolutize their own judgments, to maintain a certain distance in interpersonal relationships and to refuse the enforcement of moral unanimity» [1, p. 816].

It is known that the factor contributing to the consolidation of the nation is the external threat to the security and independence of the state. Ukraine where there was the nation unifications on the principles of patriotism and national dignity in the conditions of the aggression from outside the Russian Federation, was no exception. Thus, according to a poll conducted by the «Rating» Group in August 2019, 83% of Ukrainian citizens considered themselves to be patriots of their country (almost as much as in 2018). Only 11% had the opposite opinion, 6% could not answer. Compared to previous studies, the highest number of those who answered unequivocally answered this question (60%). In all macro-regions of Ukraine, the total number of patriotic citizens exceeded 75%: in the West, 86%, in the Center - 85%, in the East - 79%, in the South - 78% accordingly. During the research period, the largest number of those who would support the proclamation of Ukraine's Independence if they had made such a choice today - 82% (in 2012, it was 62%). Only 12% said otherwise, 6% hesitated. Most of those who would support the proclamation of Ukraine's Independence are in the West (92%). Such respondents in the Center 85%, in the South - 75%, in the East - 69%. The most of those who had the opposite opinion were in the southeastern regions (2% to 23%).

There are also relatively more of those who would not support the independence of our country today among the older generation and the poorer segments of the population. The Independence support is clearly correlated with feelings of patriotism: the higher the level of patriotic feelings of the respondents, the more they support the proclamation of Independence of Ukraine [5].

Thus, the compatibility of democracy and nationalism has a historical basis and dates back to the days of the modern nations' formation. The regularity of their organic combination is contained in the very nature of these phenomena, derived from the concept of «people». It is the people, as an organized whole, that produces forms of social existence based on the principles of democracy. The main tasks of the Ukrainian state today are to uphold its independence, to ensure social peace and harmony between people, to overcome national intolerance and hostility. The latter is possible on condition of social consent, fair distribution of material and other resources, including socio-cultural and power ones. In addition, after the slogans of ethno-cultural and political self-determination one should see the danger of political forces indifferent to the national interests, national culture and identity of the Ukrainian people or,which, vice versa, shrive the ideals of radical nationalism of a totalitarian variety that is incompatible with the inalienable rights of both individuals and national communities. The solution to the urgent problems of national-state construction is possible only through the development of a strategy that would take into account all the richness of the traditions and experience of political, socio-economic and cultural development of the country and become legitimate in the eyes of the majority of Ukrainian citizens.

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