Paradigms of social development
NEW TIMES: SHIFTS AND KNOTS OF SHOCKS
Keywords: knots of shocks, globalization, world structure, society, middle class
The fact that the humanity entered the period of deep and qualitative shifts no longer causes serious doubts among experts. However,a lot of questions conditioned on this fact are still unresolved. What is the meaning of the current changes? How important is their scope? What are probable threats that accompany them? Seeking answers to these questions A.Galkin considers in details knots of the shocks that emerged as long ago as at the end of the previous century and pose a serious threat to the established conditions of human existence. Having analyzed the aggregate of the concrete situations he comes to the conclusion that the universal belatedness of the reaction against emerging challenges made overcoming them extremely difficult. The relevant recipes are not ready yet, but postponing the solution to these problems till the emergence of such recipes is highly dangerous. It is necessary to at least temporarily accept palliatives, or the socio-political “first aid” that will preclude further exacerbation of disease.
DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2012-64-1-5-20
“ARAB SPRING” – COURSE OF ACTIONS, ACTORS, TECHNOLOGY, AND INTERMEDIATE RESULTS
Keywords: Arab world, democratization, revolutionary process, opposition, Islam
The article is devoted to the analysis of the events in the Middle East and Northern Africa known as “Arab spring”. Having tracked in details the course of the protests in the Arab world and their preliminary results, the author draws the attention to the serious differences in the character of these actions between the states with monarchic and republican regimes. If within the monarchies that were conducting modernization of the conservative type the protests for the most part resulted in reforms, within the republics that headed for the path of radical changes it often ended up with the overthrow of the existing regimes. According to K.Truevtsev’s conclusion, the relative stability of the conservative regimes towards crisis situations provides them with a potential opportunity of the evolutionary movement in the direction of democracy. As regards the republics that underwent violent change of power, the noticeable strengthening of Islamists within them leaves open a question on how democratization will develop further there and whether it will continue at all.
Ideologies
CONSERVATISM IN THE POST-SOVIET RUSSIA: BETWEEN NOSTALGIA AND UTOPIA
Keywords: conservatism, post-Soviet Russia, mass consciousness, ideology, tradition
The author attempts to determine the distinguishing features of the post-Soviet Russian conservatism and its main currents. According to his conclusion, the modern Russian conservatism has two most important cleavages. The first one is between right (“white”) and left (social) conservatives, the second one – between “spontaneous” (emerging as a result of citizens’ self-organization from below) and “bureaucratic” (formed “from above”) conservatism. Having analyzed the tendencies of the development of the politically shaped conservatism in the post-communist Russia, B.Mantikov comes to the conclusion that over the last 20 years “spontaneous” conservatism is being steadily removed from the political stage and replaced by the “bureaucratic” one.
DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2012-64-1-33-54
Keywords: Goebbels, Russia, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Russophilism, socialism
The article is devoted to the formation of the Russophilic views of young J.Goebbels. Relying upon the early manuscripts of Goebbels that reflect the process of transforming him into the passionate adherent of L.N.Tolstoy and F.M.Dostoyevsky and shaping on this basis the idealized image of Russia, the author analyzes the influence of the Russian writers’ ideas on the development of the political worldview of a future Nazi. Qualifying his attempts to find in the religious-ethical quests of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky answers to the acute problems of the German life as one of the manifestations of the cult of the Russian literature established in the postwar Germany, S.Allenov shows that under the conditions of disintegration of the German social consciousness the perception by young Goebbels of the preach made by the Russian God-seekers led to the radical perversion of its meaning that found its reflection in the early “socialist” views of the chief of Nazi propaganda. In these views he discerns that “heresy of utopism” with which the Russian philosopher L.S.Frank tiedany attempt of establishing the “God’s Absolute Truth on the Earth” that inevitably transforms “into the act of killing”.
Political Parties
Keywords: party, «United Russia», ruling organs, socio-demographic characteristics
On the basis of the analysis of the socio-demographic composition of the ruling organs of the “United Russia” Yu.Korgunyuk draws the conclusion that the structure of these organs mirrors the structure of the country’s ruling elite: the upper layer is represented by the high-level federal and regional bureaucracy, then we see leaders of the federal parliament and then – heads of the regional legislatures. The representatives of business and intellectuals are also present in this elite, not as independent force, but rather as either dissolved within members of parliament or as auxiliaries that serve the upper layer of the elite as experts and specialists. The research carried out by the author indicates that the “United Russia” despite its numerous rows is a machine with its main purpose being helping bureaucracy to build hierarchic relations with entrepreneurial and intellectual elites rather than a mass party.
Russian regions
Keywords: region, regionalism, discourse, deconstruction, regional agenda, migration
In the article the author explores opportunities of presenting regional problems within the framework of the federal political discourse. Relying on the material of the discourse presented by the concept of “migration”, L.Blyakher demonstrates how virtual homogeneity of the political space eats out the real specificity of regions hindering the elaboration of the regional agenda and conditions for self-awareness. A gap arises between practices and their naming. The established system of names that is supported by political institutions prevents from the emergence of the conceptual row tied to the regional reality and therefore, according to the author’s conclusions, the only possibility to take into account and describe this reality is by provoking and destroying the official discourse, the official system of names.
DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2012-64-1-106-123
PLURAL COMPONENT OF RUSSIAN REGIONAL LEGISLATURES
Keywords: regional legislatures, elections, electoral reform, majoritarian districts, political parties
In the article the author considers immediate and long-term impact of the 2003 electoral reform on the regional electoral systems and plural component of regional legislatures. After analyzing electoral institutions that existed in the regions when the new version of the law «On the main guarantees of electoral rights and the right to participate in referendum of the citizens of the Russian Federation» and those transformations that they underwent right after the reform, M.Grigoryeva shows that the changes caused by that reform in the number of legislators elected by the majoritarian formula and its member composition played their role in the subordination of regions to the federal centre.
Antithesis
“INTUITIVE POLITICS” IN EARLY MEDIEVAL PRE-STATES: AMALFI AND VENICE
Keywords: Amalfi, Venice, state, collective preconscious, social networks, “intuitive politics”
The traditional political science approach does not differentiate between consolidated and “forming” states preferring to consider a state as it is and emphasizing only specific political systems. Claiming this approach principally wrong, V.Sergeyev states a hypothesis that the so called “forming states” are not a state at the full sense of the word being rather a tight clew of social networks in which structure emerging political institutions weakly shine through. On the basis of the analysis of the political development of Amalfi and Venice – two early medieval “pre-states” – he shows that in such entities politics is of the preconscious, intuitive character and develops mostly as trend.
Gubernatorial readings
Seventh Gubernatorial Readings
Keywords: public policy, public, civil society, analytic communities, Tyumen region
The material published here is a report on the Seventh Gubernatorial Readings held in Tyumen, February 7, 2012, under the framework of the joint project conducted by the journal Politeia and the administration of Tyumen region with the topic being public policy in Russia and a lecturer being N.Yu.Belyaeva, Chairman of the Department of Public Policy at the Higher School of Economics.
DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2012-64-1-165-186
Sixth Gubernatorial Readings
Keywords: strategy, choice of priorities, knowledge, self-organization, Tyumen region
The material published here is a report on the Sixth Gubernatorial Readings held in Tyumen, December 13, 2011, under the framework of the joint project conducted by the journal Politeia and the administration of Tyumen region with the topic being strategy of development as art of choosing priorities and a lecturer being V.L.Glazychev, PhD in Art History, Director of the Institute of Promoting Innovations of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, Chairman of the Department of Territorial Development Management at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.
Cathedra
Keywords: state, democracy, political order, corruption
In the article the author justifies a new approach towards the empirical evaluation of the extent of democracy in the existing states of the world. Departing from the interpretation of modern polyarchal democracy as a form of organization of political and state orders that possesses a specific set of institutional mechanisms, Yu.Nisnevich hypothesizes that the integral indicator of continuous quality of realization of political and state orders of polyarchal democracy might be the level of the spread of corruption in public sphere. According to his hypothesis, only those states are rightfully qualified as democracies where two necessary conditions of democracy – free, fair and regularly held elections and change of public officials in accordance with electoral results – are realized, and the spread of corruption doesn’t exceed the minimally acceptable level.