FEDERALISM AS THE PRODUCT OF WESTERN LEGAL CULTURE

The Article is devoted to justification of the fact that the federalism has a number of features, which are common with the characteristics of liberal democracy. The author proves that both of these phenomena represent the political forms of the organization of society developed by the Western Euro-pean and North American political and legal cultures. The interrelation between federalism and democ-racy is traced in the western legal and political cultures at the conceptual, structural and functional lev-els, these phenomena are caused by typological specifics of the western societies. That means that the diffusion of the public power, competition of social groups, development of institutes of civil society are internally immanent to western political and legal cultures. The integrating elements of federalism are provided with its consideration in three main aspects - as the structurally functional principle characterizing society and the public power, as the way of the political and territorial organization of the state assuming a combination of elements of centralization and decentralization and as a process, characterizing society in aspect of its democratization. Representatives of the American and European political and legal science of the second half of the 20 century came to a conclusion that formation of the democratic state and realization of the princi-ples of federalism are impossible in societies where ideological opposition, lack of uniform political and legal culture, differentiation of society on religious, ethnic, social and to other principles takes place. In their aspiration to solve a problem of theoretical justification of a possibility of implementation of the principles of liberal democracy and federalism in any society, in any cultural and historical condi-tions, the ideologists of liberal democracy go for modification of their concepts. As an example the idea of consociation democracy is considered as some kind of «social dimension of federalism». However, despite such attempts, it is necessary to recognize that in the societies where the political power was in-stitutionalized in others, than in Europe and North America, historical conditions, where in a basis of relationship between the individual, societies and the state lie other principles, where liberalism and lib-eral democracy as concepts weren't a product of the society, and have been introduced from the outside, the principles of federalism in their western, liberal and democratic understanding are inapplicable because of lack of objective social, economic, political, ideological and cultural prerequisites to their real-ization.

form of government, federalism, cultural and historical context, culturological ap-proach, western legal culture, consociation democracy