At present, in developed countries with a stable economy and a stable political system, as well as developing countries, there has been a heightened interest in planning the development of the main areas of activity of both individual countries and their groups (different combinations of federative and confederative arrangements). This is due to the ever-deepening external integration processes and is associated with the unification of the economic, unified political and military spheres of activity.
These processes, which objectively exist in the present tense (the European Community as an indicator of a single spatial-economic association; NATO is a political-military alliance created to jointly ensure the security of a number of countries belonging to this alliance), make us think about the future: is an association of countries with different political cultures and systems into one macrostate with a single political system and integrated governing bodies or the world community will be limited to territorial integrity with differentiated political spaces? Or maybe the processes of disintegration of individual superpowers (Soviet Union, Canada) by centrifugal force will cause the response of the collapse of other countries with a similar form of government?
It is impossible to answer these questions with absolute accuracy because there is a shortage of information, but an attempt to predict is possible with varying degrees of probability. The relevance of the future “world order” arises from the realization that society is making its own future in the present, using the experience of the past, i.e. the possibility of an impending catastrophe (as was the case in Germany in the 1930s, when the National Socialist Party of Germany received the majority in the parliamentary elections, the leader and ideological inspirer of which was Adolf Hitler) is significantly reduced when society corrects its mistakes in the present and not leaves a chance for their rebirth in the future.
The concept of “the coming world order” is multifaceted and capacious: along with the seemingly obvious question “what is the future political structure of the world?”, Do secondary issues arise as the subject becomes aware of whether the territorial aspect takes place or not? How does the monarchical form of government relate to the republican, which is becoming more and more popular among developing and re-emerging countries? What is the impact of political culture on the development of a country in the future? Of all the above questions, the most important, in my opinion, is the question of political culture and its impact on the development of each individual country, so it seems necessary to have a more detailed consideration of this issue in order to find out what is the “world order” in the present so that say what it will be in the future.
Currently, among the diversity of political cultures and trends that determine (being dominant in a particular country) the development and functioning of the most important state institutions, there are two basic, basic political cultures: the prevailing liberal-democratic and the totalitarian-authoritarian one that is inferior in its popularity.
On the models of political culture
A simple statement of the existence of a complex of elements that could be combined into a category of political culture does not in itself remove the question of how these elements are implemented in a particular political process, the behavior of different groups and segments of the population. The fact is that the same political attitudes, holistic-normative orientations and ideological-political principles of different people and social groups in a particular political behavior are manifested in different ways.
This is especially important to take into account when assessing and characterizing the political culture of different countries and peoples. It is necessary to proceed from the fact of the existence of many regional and national variations of political culture. For example, we can’t talk about a single one for Europe and the Middle East, the Western Hemisphere and the Far Eastern Region, etc. models of political culture.
But still, each socio-political system corresponds to a particular, own basic model (or models) of political culture, which in each specific country manifests itself in national-specific forms. As a rule, the most important elements of each basic model are characterized by universality and are determined by world outlook attitudes and orientations of people regardless of their national statehood. In this capacity, in a generalized, abstracted form, they constitute the system-forming components of political culture and are shared by the majority of the population of the respective countries.
However, these components in each individual country, as mentioned above, manifest themselves in specific national forms. This is natural since both universalistic and purely national-cultural elements are involved in the formation of national self-consciousness, of national identity itself. As noted by the well-known American political scientist S. Cohen, “no political system in any country will be stable unless it is born in this country itself, on its soil as a result of the development of its own political culture.”
So, the socio-historical, national-cultural, geographical, religious and other features of the formation and evolution of each nation and national identity, naturally, left their deep imprint on the content and form of its political culture.
This, in turn, implies the need to identify appropriate models of political culture. It is symptomatic that already the first authors who addressed these problems proposed their own typology of political cultures. Considering both positive and not all acceptable arguments and arguments of all these approaches, it seems possible to formulate our own models of political culture: liberal-democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian. Between them, there is a whole spectrum of all kinds of national or other variants and varieties of political culture.
Liberal-democratic model of political culture
The main factors and stages of the formation and evolution of the liberal-democratic model of political culture, in general, coincide with the most important milestones in the formation and evolution of civil society and the rule of law. Moreover, all these three components together constitute the bourgeois-liberal socio-political system. It is associated with the establishment and legitimization in the process of capitalist development of a new, compared with the Middle Ages, a system of world outlook, where a free individual is recognized as an independent unit of social action. The most important parameters of this understanding of the world were analyzed above.
Here we note only that the idea of pluralism, which constitutes the essential characteristic of both civil society and the rule of law, has become a major component of the political culture formed on its basis. It should also be recalled that freedom presupposes the existence of many centers of power, balancing the absolute power of the state, and, above all, the possibility of economic choice, which, in turn, is unlikely without alternative sources of livelihood. If in totalitarian and authoritarian systems the state dominates society, in the bourgeois-democratic system, on the contrary, society dominates the state and its institutions. Comprehensively developed civil society, in turn, implies a developed political democracy, a legal and pluralistic state.
This is expressed in the fact that, despite the differences – sometimes substantial – in a wide range of ideas and concepts of social and state-political structure, the majority of politically active people in Western countries share the ideas of constitutionalism, individualism, freedom of religion, freedom of speech and press, etc. The observance and implementation of these principles created the prerequisites for the recognition by each of the warring parties of the “legitimacy” of the existence of various conflicting interests, groups, parties, etc.
The idea of representation is closely connected with other equally important ideas of the party and election as instruments for the realization of various interests. These ideas, in turn, imply the observance by the government and the opposition of the “rules of the game”, the essence of which is the generally accepted consent to the peaceful transfer of power of one (defeated) party to another (winning) party during the electoral process.
It is important to take into account that it is through the institution of elections, precisely through the electoral process, that political culture has the greatest effect on political behavior. What is characteristic is not only and not so much the fuller participation of the masses in political decision-making, but the open competition with the aim of conquering various government posts and control over the activities of those in power.
The act of participation in the elections itself in itself increases the confidence of citizens in the legality and responsibility of the government. For many of them, the very fact of participation in voting has almost a ritual significance. As political analyst B. Ginzburg notes, not without reason, the influence of participation in the electoral process is similar to the influence of organized religion on individuals who obey the principle of faith in their chosen church. Here the very fact of the departure of faith is more important than the choice of the church in which this act is carried out.
Ever since Aristotle, it has been believed that democratic systems remain viable and function effectively due to the active participation of citizens in public affairs, ensuring a high level of information about the state of public affairs and a widespread sense of civic responsibility. As for the modern conditions of parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage, pluralism of parties and political organizations representing various interest groups, it is clear that no government can win power without the consent and goodwill of the majority of voters. Here, the state of the minds of society, the socially psychological climate, and public opinion is of no small importance.
The liberal democratic model incorporates the principle of “agreeing to disagree” with the opinions and positions of other members or groups of society. In this case, when solving any significant problems, the willful imposition of the position of one part of a society of another part of it is ideally rejected. Where there is no freedom of disagreement, there is not and cannot be a democracy, regardless of how it is called – “popular”, “liberal”, “bourgeois”, “socialist”, etc. The above-mentioned splitting of positions of a significant part of people, on the one hand as individuals, members of civil society, on the other hand, is noteworthy. as citizens of the state, members of the political community.
The splitting of the political and public spheres is evidenced, in particular, by many Englishmen, Americans, French, etc. the gap between how they behave in every day, so to speak, worldly life, and their ideological and political positions. Often, personal tastes, preferences, likes, and dislikes of people in relationships with each other can, sometimes significantly, not coincide with their ideological and party-political positions.
There is no personality totality that is characteristic of a totalitarian society, where, as a rule, the political, ideological, philosophical and just life positions of people are as if merged in an integral unity, as a result of which personal sympathies and antipathies are largely determined by political and ideological attitudes and preferences. . In countries with stable liberal democratic traditions, it is not uncommon for people, being friends in everyday life or close relatives, to belong to different, often competing, and even political parties or camps that are at war with each other.
We do not always understand, for example, phenomena such as the friendship of a representative of left-liberalism and the ideologue of right-wing radicalism in the USA, the belonging of a husband and wife or father and son to different parties, the behavior of English parliamentarians who almost hand-to-hand fight at sessions of parliament, and outside its walls are friends.
Eliminating the monopoly on power by any one person, social group, party, etc., the liberal-democratic model postulates the idea of the widest choice in all spheres of public life. From this point of view, freedom of economic choice is fundamental. Here, the ideas of private property, free market, free enterprise are taken for granted, self-evident postulates.
The most zealous adherents of these ideas regard individualism and free competition in the conditions of the free market as natural laws that are not subject to the actions of individuals and public institutions, political parties and the state. It is believed that freedom, equality, competition, and individualism in a self-regulating market within civil society can ensure social harmony and progress.
In the liberal-democratic model, an important place is occupied by the problem of the ratio of freedom, equality, and justice. There are many contradictions, differences, shades, transitional stages from frank apology of inequality to the recognition of social equality, from the libertarians adherence to the idea of anarchic freedom to the recognition of strict restrictions on individual freedom on the part of states. In general, preference is often given to equality of opportunity, with which justice is identified, over social equality, equality of starting conditions over equality of results.
But at the same time, in the eyes of the bearer of the liberal-democratic model of political culture, the law, the legal system is the guarantor of the freedom of an individual in his choice of moral and ethical values, the scope of their activities. In his opinion, the law is intended to guarantee the freedom of the individual, the inviolability of property, home, private life, spiritual freedom. Society should be dominated by law, and not by people, the functions of the state consist in regulating relations between citizens on the basis of the law.
For him, the self-evident truth is the right to participate in the political process, the observance of certain rules of the game between political parties, various interest groups, rotation of power in the process of general elections at all levels of government, other norms and principles of parliamentarism and pluralistic democracy.
It should be noted that in developed Western countries, the average citizen in everyday life under normal conditions only sporadically contacts the state, often having only a very vague idea of political events taking place in the “corridors of power” and “capitals” outside of their community, village, town. Moreover, for him, the state is something remote, alien, the intervention of which in private affairs is undesirable and guaranteed by custom, tradition, and law. For example, a significant part of Americans is characterized by distrust and even hostility towards the state, state institutions and the policy they identify in general. It is also a well-known fact that Americans prefer state governments over federal governments, local governments over states governments, families, communities and individuals over society as a whole.
A significant part of the population of Western countries is characterized by an ambivalent attitude toward the state and related institutions. On the one hand, in their eyes, the state is the source and guarantor of law and morality; without a strong state, society can be in the grip of anarchy. There is a tendency to a positive, often even authoritarian attitude towards the state. On the other hand, in their eyes, an overly swollen state may be an instrument of suppression and violation of individual rights. When it is necessary to choose between an individual and a society, a significant part of people adheres to conservative views, society puts first. In their opinion, this is the last, being much wider than the government, historically, ethnically and logically higher than the individual.
The rights of an individual are both natural and social: natural because they belong to a man created by God himself as an integral part of the great plan of nature, and social because a person can realize these rights only in an organized society. The government is a political weapon of society, called to ensure and protect human rights. For the most conservative part of this category of people, power is a prerequisite for all freedoms. Giving paramount importance to law and order, authority and discipline, they tend to speak in favor of restoring authority and prestige of government and government. They are convinced that modern society needs obedience and obedience, and the state has the right to take appropriate measures to achieve these goals.
All this, of course, complicates the identification of political preferences of the main categories of the population, especially with regard to the state and the most important state-political institutions a policy of state intervention in economic and social processes. Achieving clarity in this matter is also hampered by the fact that here contradictions, so to speak, in a horizontal section are combined with contradictions along the vertical line between the ideological and practical, theoretical and ordinary levels of consciousness.
In the liberal-democratic model of political culture, political pluralism corresponds to religious pluralism and ideological pluralism. Here, both religion and ideology, which, for all their differences, are epistemological, essential, and conceptual in nature in terms of a single-order phenomenon, are separated from the state. Parliamentary democracy with its ethnocultural, social, socio-cultural and other forms of pluralism does not accept either a state religion or a state ideology.
Here ideology, as well as religion, is separated from the state, although there does not seem to be any legislation to legitimize this provision. Recognizing the pluralism of interests and parties, religious, ethno-cultural, socio-economic and other differences, it is impossible not to recognize the pluralism of ideologies or ideological trends in each individual country, whose positions on a number of critical issues are the same. This is especially true of the backbone aspects. Such a state of affairs creates the basis of “unity in diversity,” a consensus on the fundamental issues of a state-political system.
With all the differences and contradictions, it would be a mistake to present the matter in such a way that there are clearly demarcated, frontally opposing currents in every political culture, between which there is an insurmountable wall. The fact is that in all the major political parties of industrialized countries, as carriers of the respective political cultures, there is a combination of social democratic, liberal and conservative elements.
In this connection, the fact that the content itself, invested in the notions of “right” and “left”, “conservatism” and “liberalism”, “radicalism”, which received circulation in the socio-political lexicon of the West in 19 20 centuries, their interpretation and interpretation to date have undergone significant, and in some aspects, radical changes. For example, the principle that individualistic values were rigidly attached to the right, conservative flank of the ideological and political spectrum, and collectivist values to its left flank, has already lost its persuasiveness.
All the listed components (a list of them, of course, can be supplemented) together constitute the basic model of a liberal-democratic political culture – a generalized and abstracted ideal type, which manifests itself in each specific country or region, in specific national-historical and national-cultural forms.
If the basic model of a liberal-democratic culture with certain national-cultural modifications is firmly established in the most developed countries of Western Europe and North America, then this cannot be said of the South European region. In the countries of this region, its approval processes (and in a number of countries these processes continue to this day) with significant difficulties. This is primarily due to the peculiarities of the socio-economic and socio-historical development of the region, as well as the special role that traditions, customs, and values inherited from the centuries-old and extremely rich history continue to play.
Belated and uneven, stretching for many decades the approval of the capitalist form of production in Southern Europe, the strong position of the monarchy, the aristocracy, the church in political life, the stability of the traditional, mostly conservative, values in the public consciousness led to a particular inconsistency and lengthy process of the approval of bourgeois social and political structures and relevant parliamentary forms of political life.
Up to the 80s Southern European capitalism, in fact, could not achieve its cultural and ideological hegemony. Here, anti-capitalist attitudes and orientations retain their great significance, “on equal footing” with the bourgeois-liberal scale of values, there is another, pre-bourgeois socio-cultural and ideological-political tradition. However, it is an obvious fact that the whole set of values, attitudes, orientations, etc., constituting the political culture of southern European countries, with their transition – first Italy after the Second World War, and then in the second half of the 70s. Spain, Portugal, and Greece – the path of political democracy and bourgeois parliamentarism could not disappear without a trace and not influence (sometimes significant) the configuration and essence of both the new party-political system and the political culture itself.
The authoritarian-totalitarian model of political culture
In all recent publications, to a greater or lesser extent, there is a desire to clarify the gap between the phenomenon of totalitarianism and the schemes explaining it. Specially concentrates on this issue, Anderson. It seems logical to address the problem by distinguishing between individual aspects or aspects of a totalitarian phenomenon. This will require the introduction of some terminological distinctions, the meaning of which will become quite clear only in the following presentation.
One can try to single out a certain totalitarian principle, the most universal and abstract expression of the nature of the totalitarian phenomenon. The next, richer and more concrete, but universally preserving abstract scheme could be an ideal type or, more precisely, types that are conveniently called totalitarian, i.e. a set of essential features, properties, signs of a totalitarian phenomenon in its various manifestations. Totalitarianism, on the other hand, could be called a more or less consciously affirmed system for realizing this or that totality.
All these terminological distinctions are related to the fact that the totalitarian phenomenon is usually considered in two ways. Attempts are being made to identify him under the name of totalitarianism with the Third Reich, for example, or with the USSR of the Stalin period, and at the same time it would seem that all the same totalitarianism is an ideal type, a set of formal features that manifest themselves in phenomena only partially and with different intensity.
In the first case, the uniqueness of the original phenomenon does not allow any other phenomenon to be recognized as totalitarianism, which is just as unique and peculiar. But it’s not so bad. Many obviously non-totalitarian features of the phenomenon will be inexplicable and will have to be ignored.
In the second case, on the contrary, we can easily find more or less of the features of the ideal type of totalitarianism in a huge number of political phenomena, but even the most complete coincidence of real and ideal features will obviously differ in partial, multiple deviations and voids. Each real phenomenon will only be an attempt to more or less fully show the features of the ideal type. As a result, we cannot recognize any phenomenon as completely totalitarian, which seems to be a disadvantage in comparison with the first case, since there at least one phenomenon is declared to be totalitarian.
Some relativism in the interpretation of totalitarianism is offset by an estimate of the approximation or distance from the ideal type of both individual political systems and their states. It is advisable to distinguish totalitarianism as a phenomenon in which the features of the ideal type or totalitarianism appear with less or more completeness.
There are a variety of judgments about the nature of totalitarianism. Their rather informative review is contained in the article “The Concept of Totalitarianism by Yu. I. Igritsky: Lessons from Perennial Discussions in the West” // History of the USSR, 6,1990, p. 172-190.
The naive-naturalistic view, first of all, captures the most conspicuous external signs of totalitarianism, but at the same time reflects some essential points – a misunderstanding by a totalitarian person or by a system of arguments other than violence and equality of all in total insecurity.
Another, a little more sophisticated understanding is the interpretation of totalitarianism as a closed system of hard functional connections, as a social mega machine, in which every person becomes a cog (Olshansky in the Polis). There is already a total absorption of personality by role, function.
Another understanding of totalitarianism is connected with its consideration as a system of pervasive control and counter, voluntary self-control of the members of a totalitarian whole. Such totalitarian control and self-control are either taken for granted or explained by a perverted and / or historically inevitable form of public consciousness, suppressed by the mythological identification of the part and the whole, content and form, goals and means, inability to distinguish private and common good, to build rational forms of political mediation and participation.
All these three interpretations have something in common homogeneity, the homogeneity of the organization: a cluster of identical human atoms, who know nothing but direct violence, live in the Gobbs utopia of the “war of all against all”; a set of role functions that are equally important and whose carriers are equally unimportant; myths that give rise to the “negotiation” of meanings and a picture of the world where universal identification reigns, where personal and generic are undifferentiated and merged. Thus, the general principle of totalitarianism is the homogeneity of its composition, structure, and organization (system).
Revealing a common totalitarian principle is by no means equivalent to creating an ideal type. Principle alone is not enough for this. It is necessary to clarify what material and how this principle is organized. It can be assumed that the forced imposition of homogeneity on different strata of political reality, the introduction of the totalitarian principle gives a very unique, distinctly different ideal types from each other. Is only the regime of government homogenized? Or does the totalitarian principle permeate the entire structure of the state? What if it is imposed on the entire political system? What happens if homogeneity is imposed not only on politics but on the entire human world, the entire social system, including economics, culture and all other spheres of human relations?
In the first case, we will have the ideal type of totalitarian regime administrative regulation, generally well described by G. Popov under the name of the administrative-command system, but not quite adequately related to the Soviet reality.
In the second case, the ideal type of totalitarian state arises.
In the third case, we have before us the ideal type of party-state, i.e. completely homogenized political system. Finally, in the fourth case, an ideal type of super-totalitarianism or total totalitarianism arises or could arise.
Where does this homogeneity come from? Is it a fatal curse of some nations, as they say, for example, “slanderers of Russia”? Or is it the mystical breakthrough here and there of the tumult of the “ancient birthly chaos”? I would venture to say that the reasons are more prosaic.
First of all, it is far from certain that totalitarization is being imposed politically and politically, that this planting is, as it were, from the top down – the regime, the state, the political system, the universal human world. Rather, on the contrary, non-political spheres, primarily social communities, are fraught with homogenization. No wonder mass character is primarily associated with totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt.
In the conditions of forced modernization, the temptation arises to simply reject the old, “obsolete” political structures and replace them with new ones. As a result, the new structures bear, as it were, a double load: they perform the functions to which they are intended, and those that were carried out by destroyed structures, but which the system “remembers”. It turns out a kind of dedifferentiation.
Dedifferentiated and undifferentiated political structures of modernity are notable for considerable features of similarity. One of the most important is the predisposition to dysfunctions, i.e. destructive or at least counterproductive manifestations of the functional capabilities of the respective structures. Among the dysfunctions of modernization, totalitarian tendencies are most clearly and destructively manifested.
The nature of totalitarianism as the imposition of a political regime, the state or the entire political system of forced homogeneity is associated with an unambiguous interpretation and thus with the distortion of the functionality of such a process as mass production. The forced creation of a homogeneous national (ethnic state of the national socialists) or social (proletarian state of the communists) masses the totalitarian civil society from its roots and origins, paradoxically draws together the most archaic models of communal, primitive homogeneity, provokes the activation of the protopolitical means of the organization, primarily direct forced violence. Thus, totalitarianism should be distinguished as a system of imposed homogeneity, introduced during the forced modernization, and totalitarianism as the initial homogeneity of the proto-political formations of the archaic era.
Totalitarianism can be characterized as a phenomenon of modernity (modernity), directly related to personal alienation and political mass to massification. High, ideally, the limiting degree of the mass of society and the alienation of the personality are its essential features. The trends of sublimation, leveling, corporate, regional, local and other differences in the level of mass distribution were clearly manifested during the creation of nation-states and universal civil societies responding to them, when special grips in the form of national norms were required to ensure the integrity of these gigantic formations language, culture, law, etc., as well as in the form of a new nationwide community – the mass of equal citizens formed by emancipated individual atoms.
It was necessary, of course, to be Hobbes to discern in the events of the English Revolution and the decades preceding it the atomization of individuals and the emergence of Leviathan, the importance of these prerequisites for creating a modern political system, on the one hand, their destructiveness and the threat to turn into a “war of all against all” on the other. . Hence the Gobbess imperative of constant and endless efforts to curb chaos, relentless political improvement in the face of the eternal threat of totalitarianization in the form of the total “war of all against all”, which is meaningful to them.
Even more clearly, totalitarian tendencies became apparent in the years of the Great French Revolution (Jacobin terror) and the post-revolutionary Bonapartist regime (mass production, the creation of a mobilized society, etc.). Clearly, some totalitarian tendencies manifested themselves in Bismarck’s Germany. However, these tendencies are most vividly expressed in this century, when mass society and mass social movements, mass rallies and mass media, mass production and standardized consumption, general education and mass culture form a “one-dimensional person” and equally unambiguous behavioral stereotypes.
In contrast to totalitarianism, primitive totalitarianism is associated primarily with protopolitical formations such as a tribe, a neighboring community or quasi-state autocratic (autocratic) structures that formally reproduce communal relations on a state scale with unconditional submission and a despot-autocrat, and the last representative of an autocratic nation-army generic epic. Vivid examples of such a totalitarian autocracy are the Eurasian army-community of Genghis Khan or the heroic expansion of early Islam.
The common basis of both totalitarianism and totalitarianism is not the only homogeneity but also extremely weakened institutionalization.
Institutions are not given as something eternal and unchanging. In fact, one has to deal with greater or lesser intensity, a manifestation of this or that institution. Institutions are again connected with the process, but this time not in the large-scale perspective of the entire political system, but in its own. Each institution, as long as it mediates, designates as its own, “grasps” one or another action, a role, as if drawn into a series of actions. Usually mediated by institutions are far from being equal, and moreover, they do not fully demonstrate their institutional nature.
Far from everyone, for example, the action of an individual deputy in a certain parliament, and even more so outside of it, adequately corresponds to the set of principles and norms of parliamentarism. On the contrary, it is obvious that the set of his actions is only to a very small extent institutionally mediated. The level of such mediation may increase or decrease. The institute seems to dissolve in the process of institutionalization as an increasing consolidation of actions and roles or in the process of deinstitutionalization as a decreasing consolidation of functions and roles.
For example, a certain president begins with actions that fully correspond to the institution of the presidency, but gradually begins to give them the character of an unauthorized “mastering in his shop” and ends up in self-tyranny. This is a clear deinstitutionalization of the presidency, a kind of political suicide, self-impeachment.
The destruction of subsequent forms leads to deinstitutionalization, the predominance of direct, spontaneous actions, and pre-political relations. Social friendship is more important than formal political order, influence is more powerful than power. In the above example of a president who has become a tyrant dictator, institutionalized political actions are more and more displaced by immediate and spontaneous impulses, reflecting the spontaneous will to dominate this person and his “peer group” (the simplest social community).
Behind the brackets, this is another problem, the question remains to whom and why in this case it is advantageous to use and exacerbate the deinstitutionalization of the presidency. It is important to note only that institutionalization and deinstitutionalization, for all their vital significance for the political dictator directly involved, have a common systemic significance for the whole political whole.
Wide and deepening deinstitutionalization causes anomie, i.e. such a state of the majority of political dictators, when they consistently or involuntarily evade the implementation of the institutionalized rules and norms known to them.
Anomia is, in fact, equivalent to the erosion of the political system, undermining political principles and relations, and the predominance of pre-political, purely social imperatives of behavior. The political community is increasingly degrading into some kind of amorphous community, at best, a gigantic analog of the “peer group” or “small group”, and at worst – a sort of “zone” or even Hobbes “war of all against all.
On the other hand, direct-social narrowly social actions and relations, which are pre-political in nature, are a necessary prerequisite for the formation of political actions and relations themselves, and hence institutions. In this case, socialization, the inclusion of individuals in their own circle (social community), is of key importance. Socialization, however, occurs already in the most simple communities. It extends, of course, to more complex communities, for example, to political communities. In this case, the nature of socialization changes significantly.
It is no longer just about integrating into a certain community, but also about determining one’s place in it, about the attitude not only to the whole but also to individual institutions. In this case, one should speak of political socialization as a completely peculiar phenomenon, essentially different from simple socialization.
The proposed arguments do not mean that the lower, pre-political layer could be neglected. That would be a naive and unforgivable mistake. The pre-political element is not only not discarded but is completely preserved, penetrating into all the pores of the political system. It is, of course, somewhat transformed, rationalized and “civilized” in doing so. Moreover, the social element significantly affects the integrity of the political system. Specific examples were revealed in Karl Schmitt’s description of the meaning of his / someone’s opposition in politics, although this opposition has an undoubtedly pre-political nature.
The fear of anomie, on the one hand, and the pressure of too high demands on a political person, on the other, give rise to various political neuroses, the most typical of which is “flight from freedom” (E. Fromm). Fascism and other forms of totalitarianism provide many examples of this kind of escape from freedom. The process of recovery from such political neuroses is associated with the development of the personality principle in politics. On the other hand, the development of a modern personality is impossible without using the potential of political participation. No economic sophistication or cultural sophistication is able today to compensate for the lack of ability to freely operate with political norms and roles, to use political rights and freedoms effectively. These abilities are an indispensable attribute of modern man.
Both by virtue of the inherited tradition and by virtue of their essential properties, the state and civil society from the very beginning of the modern era sharply outlined the opposite of their aspirations, an open and explicit contradiction was manifested between them.
For more than two centuries, political thought has been struggling with the problem of resolving this contradiction. Proposed final and uncompromising ways to solve it: the nationalization of society (statism, state socialism) or, on the contrary, the socialization of the state (extreme egalitarianism, anarchism, the Marxist “dying off of the state”). With the complete antithesis of their ideological traditions and moral aspirations, both these tendencies converged in refusing to recognize the rationality of the separation-unity of the state and civil society. Ultimately, both extremes, both trends agreed on the approval of various versions of totalitarianism.
Much more logical and promising is the recognition of the naturalness and rationality of the separation-unity of the state and civil society. From this point of view, the problem is not to resolve the contradiction by destroying one of its sides (the way of thinking typical of primitive power politics), but to regulate this contradiction, to use it as a political tool. For this purpose, various ways were proposed and used: the introduction of mediating institutions, in particular, intermediate state-social systems (new-born corporations, trade unions, local communities, party systems, etc.).
Of course, a third approach is also possible: the forced transformation of hegemony into absolute domination. This is done, for example, by identifying the interests of the working class with national interests, or by constructing a certain phantom national interest and its party (national socialism and other versions of fascism). Thus, a one-party system emerges as pure and unconditional hegemony-domination.
Domestic totalitarianism has probably given one of the most distinct and vivid manifestations of the successive change of various types of totalitarianism. To a large extent, this is due to the fact that modernization was extremely forced, one-sided and superficial, as well as the fact that significant totalitarian precipitation remained not only below (the peasant community), but also above (the undivided power), as well as throughout the political system (autocratic principle).
Overcoming totalitarian dysfunctions of modernization primarily involves the restoration and maximum enrichment of the potential diversity of political actions, roles, institutions, and in general, symbolic forms of mediation. This process is democratization. The name is probably not the best, because it unwittingly focuses attention on a complex of political phenomena associated with the direct, minimally mediated participation of the entire population of citizens (the masses, formed on the model of the pre-political social community, kind) in making political decisions by their nature. And this is exactly what parasitic totalitarianism.
Democratization and modern democracy in its essence is a combination of all possible and somehow tested forms of political mediation of actions and forms of organization. This idea was somewhat paradoxically pointed out by W. Churchill, speaking in the British Parliament on November 11, 1947. “Democracy,” he said, “is the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tested from time to time.” Democracy is bad for its omnivorous (pluralism, tolerance). This entails many inevitable costs, for example, for example, multiple duplications of functions, elaboration of many alternatives, etc. As a result, the system, by definition, cannot be effective enough to, say, “catch up and overtake” or “carry out a radical reform”, forcing in a couple of years the country into the framework of K. Marx’s type of capitalism.
Totalitarianism is suitable for the effective solution of such problems. According to Churchill, he or similar “unambiguous” systems that claim to maximum efficiency are just subjected to verification. It usually confirms the effectiveness of the “unambiguous” system, but immediately shows the destructiveness, or even the senselessness of the goals set – driving, running into some kind of dead end, conquering a new “living space”, almost lost what was, striving for ” free market “, we risk to force total disorganization. From the point of view of Churchill, it is better not to tempt fate in pursuit of unprecedented and super-efficient forms of government, but to be content with the “worst” mix of what works and allows us to solve practical problems slowly but surely.
From the above, it is possible to draw conclusions both about the pernicious influence of totalitarianism on the development and growth of public relations and about its benefits, compared with the liberal-democratic model of political culture, in the aspect of management and control (albeit a total) of a country. So, obviously, the increased number of crimes after Russia’s withdrawal from total politics to democratic principles of government and the official proclamation of liberal freedoms.
But with the liberal-democratic model of political culture, there is a clear increase in industry, the well-being of the population, with a marked increase in crime rates. So which model is preferable for the future? If it was possible to combine the liberal-democratic model of political culture, with its benefits and advantages, with the totalitarian-authoritarian model, thereby compensating for the growth of the criminal element, then that model of the future, the ideal and the basis for the future world order, ensuring a stable development of the world community without the conflicting forces separating it.
Nevertheless, these models will not be complete if the role of religion and its influence on public political consciousness is not covered in terms of both a separate socio-political formation and the world as a whole.
The religious aspect of political culture
It is significant that the formation of a particular nation is often the case, its entry into the social and historical arena is justified by reference to not some kind of divine providence. In search of arguments, they often turn to the Bible, especially where it is said that God not only rules the world but also elects only one from among all nations, endowing him with his grace. Extreme forms of this myth assign to other peoples and countries only the role of the background against which the history of this or that God’s chosen people unfolds. The history gives many examples testifying that the idea of greatness and God’s chosen people was inherent in almost every great nation, especially during its ascent.
This can be shown on the example of the Russian and American peoples. Thus, the author of “The Tales of the Princes of Vladimir,” speaking of the continuity of the world monarchies of the most ancient kingdoms to the Roman Empire, derived the foundations of his modern authority from the Roman emperor Augustus. According to this legend, Russia is the legitimate heir of all the ancient world monarchies. Naturally, Rurik, who initiated the dynasty of Rurik, who ruled Russia until the ascension to the throne of the Romanov dynasty, originates from the Roman emperors themselves. Gradually, the idea of Moscow as the third Rome was created by the successors of Rome and Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.
It is significant that, along with the symbols of autocracy and nationality, the Orthodox Church played an important role in the formation and strengthening of the Russian state and the conquest of new lands, countries, and peoples. It provided the Russians with spiritual support in order to oppose the Muslim East and the Catholic West, which at some historical stage posed a threat to their religious and state existence. In general, although the principles of faith did not prevail over political ones, religion was often used to substantiate the power and claims of the Russian princes first, and then of the Moscow tsars.
Promoting a grandiose concept that viewed Moscow as “the new Eternal City, the heir to Rome and Constantinople,” the church hierarchy constantly warned the kings about their sacred duty to turn Muscovy into a “new Christian empire,” without any clear indication of its borders. It should be noted that this doctrine played an important role in the expansion and consolidation of the multinational Russian Empire in the vast expanses of the Eurasian continent.
Therefore, it can be argued that in the formation of ideas about the greatness of Russia, its scale, patriotism, and devotion to the fatherland – Mother Russia, the special way of Russia, etc., constituting the most important components of the political consciousness of Russians, the Orthodox faith played an important role. In this regard, it is impossible not to mention that many of the attributes and symbols of the Orthodox Church became at the same time symbols of the Russian statehood. Here you can mention, for example, St. Basil’s Cathedral, towering on the main square of the country next to the Kremlin, and the temples in the Kremlin itself, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior blown up by the Bolsheviks, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Optina Pustyn. It is symptomatic that the church raised to the rank of holy eminent persons who in the strict sense were not its ministers. It is, for example, about Cyril and Methodius Equal to the Apostles, of St. Vladimir, Alexandra Nevsky, and others.
As for the United States, from the very beginning of the formation of the American national consciousness, its most important component was the conviction of America’s special development and its role in world history. It seemed that the very nature and worldview of the epoch intended the English colonies in North America for a “great experiment.” Like earlier utopias, in the imagination of the Europeans of the 17th – 18th centuries. America seemed to be a fabulous island, separated from the rest of the world by seas and oceans.
Historians and spiritual leaders of the first colonies, and then of an independent American state presented the matter in such a way that the Americans from the very beginning pursued a clear and conscious goal to put into practice the idea of divine providence, to build a divine “city on a hill” on American soil as an example to all other nations of the world. . Ultimately, a grandiose religious philosophy of history and progress was formulated, according to which America represents the highest stage of human development and the last best hope of all people.
Characteristically, in justifying America’s exceptional place in world history, the author of the United States Declaration of Independence, America’s third president, T. Jefferson, in 1785 proposed that the image of the sons of Israel taken from the Bible following the sun be depicted on the country’s national emblem. Almost all of the founding fathers of America were deeply convinced that she had a special destiny, a special, divine mission.
Many researchers directly associate American republican and democratic institutions with religion. As the well-known French public figure and historian A. de Tocqueville stated, the church was the true school of republican virtues in America. According to him, religion was the first of American political institutions. It was a republican and democratic religion, which included not only republican values but also gave the first lessons on how to participate in public life. According to Tocqueville, more than laws or physical circumstances contributed to the success of American democracy, and mores are rooted in religion.
Attention is drawn to the fact that religious and socio-cultural traditionalism often go hand in hand with socio-philosophical and ideological-political conservatism. Religion has always served as a source of traditional values. In the end, religion is closely linked to cultural tradition as part of the way of life in general. When this way of life is endangered, its religious and moral components are pivotal points of protection of the existing system and habitual way of life.
Therefore, the tendency among certain categories of the population to complain in certain situations about the decline of traditional values such as law and order, discipline, restraint, consensus, patriotism, etc. is quite understandable. In connection with the above, it is noteworthy that the confessional factor often outweighed in the past and in some countries continues to outweigh the social class commitment. It is the influence of clericalism and confessionalism on public consciousness and, consequently, a political culture that led to the emergence of clerical parties of different orientations in many countries of Western Europe, whose role and significance cannot be unambiguously assessed.
There were and there are conservative and even reactionary confessional parties and organizations, but there were and there are those that spoke from the standpoint of social reformism (for example, social Christianity). Nowadays, Christian painting has helped the CDU – in Germany, the CDA – in Italy and similar parties in other countries to win over many believers. In addition to the conservative ones, there are centrist and liberal factions that advocate for reform (for example, the so-called “social committees” in the CDU).
An important place in the political culture is ideology. This is natural since the problems of ideology are difficult to separate from the problems of authority, power, power relations, etc. It is designed to give importance to institutional relations between people, to explain political realities in concrete historical conditions. However, in the broad sense of the word, ideology, as noted by D. Manning and T. Robinson, cannot oblige a person to act in a certain way, as legal norms do. Not a commitment to ideology, but membership in a party that acts in the name of ideology, obliges its adherents to make a political decision as it is. In contrast to the party, there are no leaders or subordinates in the ideology; it has only adherents.
Without the discipline linking the party, the ideology advocate risks being involved in an eternal debate about what exactly ideology prescribes. The arguments of “partnership” and “fraternity” cannot by themselves help the ideology loyalists to create a new society, but they can give their party preferences, efforts, activities a certain significance. Ideology provides with categories and concepts with the help of which certain political institutions, actions, political course, etc. are justified or rejected. But it cannot substitute a political culture as such. Under the conditions of a single political culture, several ideological, ideological and political currents conflicting with each other can coexist, although, as in the case of totalitarianism, there are situations when ideology tends to crush political culture completely.
An integrated model of the political culture of the future
Above, we reviewed the main features of typical models of political cultures: liberal-democratic and totalitarian-authoritarian. Summarizing the main points contained in each of them, the following conclusions can be made: the prevailing model of political culture in the total number of existing countries * is liberal-democratic, while an insignificant number of countries leave for the totalitarian-authoritarian political culture. The liberal-democratic camp includes such countries as America, Russia, France, Norway, etc. These countries are characterized by powerful political power, the presence of their own army, capable of military actions not only within internal borders but also beyond its borders, sufficient for an independent the existence of the cumulative intellectual potential of civil society, etc. Each of these countries is included in at least one of the existing military or economic unions.
Such are the characteristics of the countries of the liberal-democratic camp, what can be said about the countries of the opposite political camp? It is not strange, but in principle, they are characterized by the same features as the first, with the only difference being that they are dominated by totalitarian or authoritarian foundations of state power. Countries with a totalitarian-authoritarian political culture are also included in economic or military alliances, often even in alliances of a purely liberal-democratic camp, which in principle does not affect the internal totalitarian-authoritarian atmosphere in these countries.
All the above allows us to outline the main features of the model of the political culture of the future. All emerging alliances indicate that in many countries mutual integration processes have gone so far that it is sometimes difficult to figure out where one country ends and where another begins. This does not concern exclusively the transparency of borders, all this also applies to the main areas of activity of states – in the field of economics, politics and the military sphere. Thus, in the present tense, it is rather difficult to determine the borderline of Luxembourg with Belgium within the framework of a single European Community, and in the near future, with the commencement of the circulation of a single European currency, separate one economic space of the corresponding state from another.
The European Community is a union of purely European states, however, what unites it with the United States located on the American continent? The answer is one – NATO; a military and political alliance of the North Atlantic bloc countries. Thus, there are two unions, each of which has no relation to each other, but at the same time unites two times more countries than each of them individually.
Such processes affect an increasing number of countries that form more and more new alliances for various reasons, each of these countries, together or separately, are included in associations of a different kind, and these in turn cover countries from other blocks. Hence all the prerequisites for the fact that in the future, all countries are so integrated into the systems of countries of similar unions that a single macro-state will arise, which already cannot be called a state, because there are no typical signs of a state — sovereignty and a single territorial structure.
As for the commitment of this macro-state to one or another model of political culture, it is likely that it will choose an integrated model of political culture that combines the benefits of the liberal-democratic model with the benefits of a totalitarian-authoritarian political culture.
In the future unification of countries, religion will show itself as a possible conflict element and countries with a state religion will be especially dangerous, i.e. countries where the state assumes the functions of popularization and protection of religious foundations, as well as the right to punish its citizens for not observing them.
Thus, countries with a Muslim religion now (especially countries with extreme Muslim foundations) are following the path of separating and separating themselves from other countries, sometimes even by military actions (the Taliban movement in Afghanistan). It is in such and similar cases, the benefits of a totalitarian-authoritarian political culture just in time. A strong and unshakable political will can coerce irreconcilable religious movements in a single global community.
Conclusion
So, the ways to achieve the “future world order” were quite clearly reflected above: exclusively by political methods that preserve the independence and autonomy of the individual, using the natural aspiration of the people for joint peaceful coexistence in a single global space. Although, presumably, the path of integration will be rather long and thorny (even wars are likely), the author expresses hope for the exclusively peaceful integration of states as political cells of the world community into a single co-ordinated organism of macro-state standing guard for the rights and freedoms of each member, for the concept “ citizen ”,“ foreigner ”,“ stateless person ”is no longer appropriate here – the entire population of the planet is its participants.
P. S. Although the future in the outlined work seems clear, without a haze of fog of mystery, let us leave some room for maneuvers of His Majesty Providence and say: the future, but who will understand it …