EUROPEAN CIVILIZATIONAL CHOICE OF UKRAINE: CONTENTIAL AND SUBJECTOBJECT COLLISIONS

Abstract

The idea of Ukraine’s European civilizational choice has long occupied leading positions at the level of both mass and academic consciousness of our country. In fact, a tectonic shift in the direction of the priorities of Ukraine’s European civilizational choice occurred immediately after Ukraine gained state independence: then, for a short time, Ukrainian public opinion was in a state of choosing between two alternatives – representatives of one civilizational paradigm insisted on the expediency of “Ukraine’s joining the cohort of civilized countries of the world”, while representatives of another paradigm proceeded from the need to concretize the abstraction of “civilized countries of the world” at the expense of the European cultural and civilizational area. The dynamic process of European unification in the political, economic, security and humanitarian spheres of the early 1990s turned out to be a convincing argument in favor of the second alternative – and for more than three decades now the idea of a European civilizational choice has reigned supreme at the level of memorandums, declarations, program documents and even legislative norms of Ukraine. However, many experts note a curious specific feature: the quantitative parameters of various “declarations of love to Europe”, multiplied by the quantitative time parameter, which has already exceeded three decades, for some reason does not translate into those qualitative changes supposedly foreseen by the second law of dialectics, which from the very beginning were and continue to be the target reference point of the Tower of Babel of memorandums, declarations, program documents and legislative norms of Ukraine in favor of the idea of a European civilizational choice. The reason for this collision and possible ways to unblock it form the subject field of this article.