Post-liberal Communitarianism in Contemporary Russia: Future in the Legacy of the Past

The address to communitarianism as a system of ideas and a model of the “ideal type” of a public organization can serve as the foundation for scientific and philosophical research of the problems of organizing public dialogue and social consolidation, the implementation of the organic relationship of technological progress with institutional and anthropological conservatism. The issue of communitarianism has a certain tradition in Russian thought of different eras and directions (Slavophilism, philosophy of the “new religious consciousness”, Eurasianism, ethical and anthropological studies in Soviet – orthodox and non–Marxist – philosophy and certain recent historical, philosophical and political science works), which is both indirect and in some cases quite direct. Comparing the approaches of domestic and foreign authors to the factors of transformation of society on the principles of social harmony allows us to conclude that when in Western philosophy communitarianism is simply the criticism of liberalism and the search for a balance between various social forces interests, in Russia it is capable to reach a fundamentally higher axiological and theoretical level within the framework of integration with the conceptual baggage of the Russian idea and the real experience of the state of social justice understanding.

EUROPEAN STANDARDS OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE PRACTICE OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT OF UKRAINE

The article is devoted to the retrospective analysis of some aspects of the application and implementation of European human rights standards in the constitutional proceedings of Ukraine. It is substantiated that the domestic body of constitutional jurisdiction, realizing its role as an instrument for implementing European human rights standards in national legal practice, actively uses the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the practice of the Strasbourg Court as arguments to motivate its decisions. In the future, not only the formal but also the substantive aspect of the use of the Convention and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in the acts of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine certainly needs special attention. The following analysis will allow to reveal the "quality" of the reference to these international sources and the relevance of references to them. In the motivating part of its decisions, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine also uses as an additional argumentation a wide range of other international legal acts and decisions of other international and foreign judicial institutions. This aspect of the practice of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine obviously deserves to be the subject of our further research. Based on the validity of our conclusion in previous publications that the main philosophical basis of modern decisions of the Strasbourg Court are the postulates of liberal communitarianism as a result of a kind of convergence of liberal and communitarian ideologues, we believe that, in turn, these postulates can�t be found in the decisions of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (when it uses the provisions of the Convention and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights for additional argumentation of its own legal positions). At the same time, this hypothesis still needs to be thoroughly proved in the following special research.

The standing of the public interest

Liberal communitarianism holds that a good society is based on a carefully crafted balance between individual rights and the common good; that both normative elements have the same fundamental standing and neither a priori trumps the other. Societies can lose the good balance either by becoming excessively committed to the common good (e.g. national security) or to individual rights (e.g. privacy). Even societies that have established a careful balance often need to recalibrate it following changes in historical conditions (such as the 2001 attacks on the American homeland) and technological developments (such as the invention of smart cell phones).

Canada's Long Road to Nowhere: Why the Circle of Command Liberalism Cannot Be Squared

A school of thought has emerged within constitutional and political theory that a middle road exists between liberalism and anti-liberal communitarianism. This road, which the author terms “command liberalism” permits societies that follow it to bypass the obvious inequities of liberalism while still enjoying the benefits of liberal democracy. The existence of this middle road would be but a piece of intellectual trivia were it not for the fact that for the past two decades it has formed the normative basis for constitution-making in Canada. It has been a root cause of constitutional conflict, intergroup animosity, constitutional paralysis and, potentially, the break-up of the country. Command liberalism is well represented in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In addition, largely as a consequence of the Charter, it was the raison d'etre of the ill-fated Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. For the most part, those who seek to travel this road in Canada do so with good intentions; they point to the appalling conditions of Native reserves, blatant examples of gender discrimination and institutionalized racism and homophobia within liberal democratic society as evidence of the need to construct more pluralistic means of collective representation. But good intentions do not square the circle of command liberalism. Indeed, the problem with this middle road is that it is circular, leading us back to where we started.