LEGAL CULTURE AND STATE-BUILDING: CORRELATION SPECIFICS IN MODERN UKRAINE

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to identify the main theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the legal culture of the domestic society in modern conditions and to show its correlation with processes of building the democratic Ukrainian state. The methodology of research is a combination of general scientific and philosophical-legal methods, approaches and principles. Thus, the method of philosophical-legal reflection contributed to rethinking the latest experience of domestic nation-building and determining the role and place of legal culture in it. The structural-functional approach has become the basis for understanding the trends and problems in building a democratic state in Ukraine and the formation of an activist type of the legal culture in the national society. The scientific novelty of this work is the comprehensive disclosure of the interaction of nation-building processes and the establishment of the democratic legal culture in Ukraine. The study emphasizes that values of the legal culture of domestic society are actualized during nation-building and, vice versa, the democratic progress of our country contributes to the formation of legal knowledge, legal skills, positive legal stereotypes in public sense of justice. Conclusions. The development of the Ukrainian state is in dialectical unity with the development of the legal culture of the domestic society. A democratic state as an institution for the realization of democracy requires the existence of an activist legal culture of a democratic kind in the subjects of social relations. To date, Ukrainian citizens have gained a real opportunity to increase their influence on making decisions at the level of local self-government through the implementation of the reform of power decentralization. Such structural changes in the organization of power objectively contribute to the development of the legal culture of subsidiarity, which involves the rational distribution of powers and resources between central and local government, more active and responsible attitude of citizens towards socially significant issues. At the same time, the development of the legal culture and democratic progress of our state are hampered by the ineffectiveness of the judiciary and the law-enforcement system, confusion in legislative norms and regulations, corruption of state officials, the lack of legal education for young people, the influence of criminality on business and politics, the peculiarities of the mentality and the historical past of our people, etc.