National Values of Ukraine: Essence, Diversity, Consolidation Potential

Abstract

The study is devoted to understanding the essence, set, typology and dynamics of national values of Ukraine in their heuristic meaning for the development of a modern democratic state. Particular attention is paid to the consolidating, unifying, and solidarity functions of national values, while recourse to the historical experience allows us to seek heuristic models of their productive use in modern Ukraine. The Constitution of Ukraine solemnly proclaims that a person, their life and health, honor and dignity, inviolability and security are recognized in Ukraine as the highest social value. Thus, man is the highest national value, for which the whole system of regulatory relations is built both within the state and in its relations with external partners. Man as a national value appears mainly in three hierarchical dimensions: individuals, communities, and the nation as the aggregate content of all citizens of the state. Accordingly, there is a semantic and voluminous load of national values at all three levels, from personal-existential, interpersonal, and inter-group to synergetic requirements of security, development and prosperity. The essential structure of the value being depends on the content of its basic components: axiologemes, predictors, attitudes, domains and the world in general. Ukrainian society has been the object of such influence for many centuries, which resulted in its value domain to have been significantly violated, requiring purposeful efforts of the independent state to revive and harmonize it. Current value trends have been monitored since 1981 in the framework of the European Values Survey and the World Values Survey. Global positive changes in the social development of the world community were identified, in particular the correlation between the values of self-expression and the activity of democratic institutions of civil society. The proposed research model is based on the comparison of indicators of different countries on such principles: traditional values – secular-rational values; values of survival – values of self-expression. From the second half of the 1990s, Ukraine has been included in both projects, which allows identifying positive and negative trends in social transformations to compare them with global trends.