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Characteristics of the Borderland Legal Conscience: the Ukrainian Variant of the Idea of Federalism
ing to Ronald L. Uotts’s definition, “the new paradigm should take us from the world of
sovereign nations-states to the world of the limited state sovereignty and development of
interstate relations of mainly federal character”
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. The modern idea of federalism is based
on essentially different views about the purposes of the federal structure which existed as
early as the beginning of the XX century. The European Union can serve as a good exam-
ple. In Ukraine the stage of the change of idea about the character of interstate relations
which Europe is currently going through, will be a prospect for the years ahead.
It is necessary to distinguish between two different concepts of federalism: federalism
which arises in a polyethnic state formation with the elements of rigid centralization of
authority, based on the idea of isolation of the territory, and federalism which is gener-
ated by the necessity to protect general interests of small ethnopolitical social formations
connected with the processes of integration into a uniform state of powers which were
independent before.
The first version of federalism corresponds to the epoch of struggle for the expansion
of rights and personal freedoms. The overall objective of such federalism is to preserve
the uniqueness of each cultural-political community. This is “the federalism of the unique”
genetically close to the idea of protection of individual rights and freedoms. It is the first
step in the generalization of the idea of rights of a person connected with the strengthen-
ing of rights and freedoms of nations
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as a voicer of special, individual, unique mentality,
way of life,
cultural tradition,
social structure,
legal consciousness, etc.
The main idea of this particular kind of federalism is the protection of rights of mi-
norities. Liberalism of the Õ²Õ century generated the formula of the organization of a state
system which meets the requirements of provision of individual freedom: the basis for
personal freedom is the autonomy of the national group. This principle operated equally
in almost all countries of Europe in the Õ²Õ century. Even England in the second half of
the Õ²Õ century faced the problem of discussion of Wales’ cultural-political autonomy.
Home rule for ethnic groups which might have dissolved in the uniform nation as the
founder
of the world colonial empire, became problem number one.
The acuteness of this problem in other great empires of Europe was intensified by the
system of mutual relations of ruling and subordinate nations. In the second half of the
XIX century Austria and Russia faced the ethnic question at the level of demands of the
constitutional restriction of the monarch rights and the reform of the state system which
provided for the federal organization of the state.
The second version of federalism arises from the opposite position. Processes of glo-
balization of economic, cultural, political relations necessitated integration of small state
formations into a federation in order to overcome isolation and expand opportunities for
each member of society in the realization of their rights to use civilization achievements.
Within the framework of this current one more tendency was been observed, namely,
the removal of problems of greater sociopolitical associations which limit the rights of
territorial communities. The way of solving the problem is to transfer a part of imperious
powers to the level of local self-government. Federalization of this kind works if one uses