Professional strengthening of the Ukrainian parliament: features, strategic orientations

Abstract

The professional strengthening of the parliament is considered as a problem of ensuring the democratic choice of Ukraine in the bifurcation space of the 21st century. It has been found that the parliament and society are those components, the interaction of which decisively depends on the success of political modernization in Ukraine. The representative form of government serves both for parliamentary and professional activities as a means of realizing the potential of reason, honesty and justice that exist in the country. All actions of parliamentarians should be imbued, according to J. Stuart Mill, with «constitutional morality», that is, the unity of legal and ethical principles. In the context of the challenges of the 21st century, the tasks to be solved by the national parliament are significantly more complicated, the bar of requirements for parliamentarians is noticeably raised, the problem of humanizing the political dialogue both in the parliament and in society is acute. Realization of the country’s development potential requires the parliament to find such forms of its work that would take into account not only the positive experience of European countries, but also the important fact that the starting conditions and development paths of various societies to democracy are significantly different from each other. In Ukraine, in particular, mass consciousness is still far from the legal consciousness of citizens of developed countries. Ukrainian society must simultaneously make transitions from traditionality to modernity and from modernity to postmodernity. Accordingly, the dialogization of parliamentary communication is an important strategic guideline, because it is difficult to implement a constructive dialogue between the government and the opposition both in the parliament and in society as a whole. Intolerance, passion, uncriticalness – these signs of a bipolar stereotype – are being overcome in Ukraine extremely slowly, the usual «black and white» thinking, perception and assessment of others according to the formula: «ours and strangers», «we are democrats – they are anti-democrats» are preserved. Deafness to objections from real life is especially dangerous, considering that ahead is a long and difficult work to rebuild the country precisely together, by the whole society after the tragic consequences of wartime. The project of the future should mature precisely in the co-creation of the state and society on the path of democratic governance, with the recognition of the moral imperative and the leading role of the parliament, which in itself will mean effective parliamentarism, testifying to the level of the culture of parliamentarism. The ability and will to reach agreements, conscious rather than forced compromises, are essential elements of the culture of democracy, the culture of parliamentarism. Any reform of the political system must be based on the need to ensure a balance between presidential power and parliamentary control. The systematic and high quality of laws, verified not only in the legal and economic sense, but also in the psychological sense, is the way to restore trust in the Ukrainian parliament. Determining the nature of the interaction between the state and society as co-creation is of key importance, because it opens the way to understanding the importance of the culture of parliamentarism, high professionalism based on positive science, education, culture at every workplace in the process of democratic transformations in Ukraine.