Elections as a government instrument in the concept of А. Toynby. Historical retrospective: Europe and Ukraine

The article is devoted to a historical and legal perspective of the analysis of scantily explored elements in the state-political concept of the famous British scientist of the 20th century, Arnold Toynbee. Analyzing the civilizational development of specific regions, first of all the one of Western Europe, A. Toynbee concluded that the most successful model of socio-political and economic development of Europe was the model of English statehood of the Modern Period. Studying the stages of state and social evolution of English, and later British society, A. Toynbee emphasized that the leading positions of Great Britain in the late 18th – early 20th centuries (the period of «industrialism») were determined by the set of successful decisions from the previous period, which he defined as «parliamentary governance» (17th – first half of the 18th century). In his opinion, the most effective solution was the application of representative democracy, which was formed in England in the early medieval period on the basis of traditional institutions of the pre-state era, also inherent of other European nations, but was able to add the state and legal achievements of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance and from this combination transformed to a real national state to counterbalance of a feudal one. Gradually, the mechanism of English legal representation was improved and reached its maximum efficiency at the beginning of the 20th century. This allowed Great Britain to win leading economic and political positions in European and world society for a hundred-year period from the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of the First World War. The state and political situation in the world changed after the Second World War – there began the process of the imperial states collapse and the predominance of local, hence national, states. Toynbee expressed doubt that the institutions of parliamentary representation could be an effective response to the transformations of a modern state and social life. The authors of the proposed material concluded that Ukrainian statehood historically belongs to the European state model, but due to the loss of sovereignty and absorption by the Russian empire, got the opportunity to implement the principles of European democracy only after 1991.