ПОЛІТИЧНІ ПАРТІЇ ТА ПОЛІТИЧНА УЧАСТЬ ЯК ЧИННИКИ ФОРМУВАННЯ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ПОЛІТИЧНОЇ НАЦІЇ У ХХ-ХХІ СТ.: ІСТОРИЧНА РЕТРОСПЕКТИВА І СУЧАСНІ ТЕНДЕНЦІЇ

Abstract

From the moment of their emergence, political parties became one of the main subjects of the formation of nations, the providers of ideas of state-building in the national format. Under the universal suffrage they are the primary mechanism for political participation. articulate the values of the national community at the political level, formulate and implement the national interests. They can perform this function through the work in the state and local governments, as well as through the anti-system activities. In the era of globalization the issue of the formation of nations acquires a qualitatively new relevance. The problem of political stability in Ukraine is not so much in the field of international relations, as in the area of ethnic and national identity of its citizens. Political identity is becoming an increasingly dynamic category. In today's Ukraine the synchronization of the processes of state-building, national development and value-civilizational choice causes the widest range of identities. This creates additional opportunities for Ukraine, but at the same time brings new challenges to which society should be prepared. The purpose of this research is to determine the most important factors of political participation and activities of political parties at different stages of formation of the political nation, to justify the significance of their impact on this process. Since the beginning of the XX century, political parties are the determining factor of formation of the political nation. At different stages of historical development they proposed (and more often imposed) to the society one or another model of political nation. Those nation-building practices depended more on historical circumstances, rather than on ideological backgrounds of the political parties. The attempts to hyperbolize the ethnic factors of formation of the political nation and state-building inevitably lead to the internal split in Ukraine. And the length of this path inversely depends on the openness of society: in a totalitarian one any opposition is brutally suppressed, in an authoritarian one the situation escalates slowly but steadily, in a democratic one the centrifugal tendencies appear quite quickly. In different historical circumstances, the non-systemic and anti-systemic activities of political parties play an important role in the formation of the political nation. Nationalists, liberals, anarchists, communists, greens, autonomists – all of them take an active part in the processes of national creation, challenging, criticizing, destroying the existing state and political system. In the post-Soviet period of Ukraine’s development political parties actively encouraged the formation of the political nation. At the same time they stabilized socio-political processes, including in the context of nation-building. The activity of political parties, mainly the leftists and left centrists, prevented possible distortions in the state-building that could exacerbate conflicts on ethnic grounds. An important factor of the formation of political nation and civil society in Ukraine is the anti-party activities. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Kuchma’s Parties of Power, Orangists, the Party of Regions – all these political forces became powerful irritants of the protest moods. It’s significant, that in each case the conflict went beyond the framework of political conflict and acquired existential characteristics, exacerbating the contradictions to the dilemma: Ukrainian nation: To be or not to be. Today in Ukraine, in fact, the two doctrines of political nation are simultaneously confirmed. Each of them is formulated and implemented by a certain group of political parties. And the future of the political nation largely depends on whether these groups will be able to reach a compromise and develop a unified concept of nation- and state-building, that will get a consensus support in the society.