The Idea of a Law-based State and Ukraine a historical, cultural Experience)

Abstract

The article deals with the problems of the evolution of the idea of a law-based state during the antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the New Ages. In the antiquity this idea was bound up with the Aristotle‟s attempt to separate the „just and unjust“ state forms while taking the state‟s orientation on the welfare of all citizens as the main criterion of the justice of the state system. In the Middle Ages this direction of the idea was developed while the temporal power was emancipating from the Church, and in the time of the Renaissance – while propagating the liberal ideology: relation between the nation and the state was based on the agreement presuming the equality of the parties of contract, the autonomy of an individual, the individual criminal responsibility, the tolerance of religion. In the New Ages these ideas were developed by J. Locke, I. Kant and etc. The recognition of the legal equality of all members of the society independently from their social position had a large significance for the evolution of the idea of a law-based state. Later this whole ideological West orientation was described by „the law-based state“ term. It is also consolidated in the Constitution of Ukraine, which 1 article establishes that Ukraine is the social law-based state. This statement is valuated more in the ideological than legal aspect in the article.
The evolution of the self-dependence of the Ukrainian state system is analysed from the point of a law-based state emphasizing that „the union“ of the law and the state has no historical support in the history of the self–dependence of the Ukrainian state system. It is one of the cultural, psychologic reasons which complicates the creation of the law–based state in Ukraine at present. Besides, it is emphasized that the uncritical reception of the model of the Western state, which was created in the different sociocultural environment, can cause the other and undesirable consequences in that country, which historical experience was developed in the other direction. The ideals of a law–based state and open society don‟t correspond with such cultural, historical experience of the state which was based on the tradition of the hierarchic structure of the society. The exploitation of the concept of the liberty, while not corresponding with the concept of the responsibility, stimulates more destructive than creative tendencies. The general conclusion is done that the conception of the law-based state in Ukraine can be accepted so far not as the programme of the practical activity, but only as the programme of the state legal education.