THE INFLUENCE OF THE RIGHT OF AUTONOMOUS CITIES ON THE FORMATION OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL REGIMES IN THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION AND MODERN EU LAW ACCORDING TO THE STATE-POLITICAL CONCEPT OF A. TOYNBEE

Abstract

The article reveals specific political and legal aspects of Western European state-building, formulated in the historical and philosophical work of the famous British scientist Arnold J. Toynbee "A Study of History". His voluminous work became the basis of the popular conception of the civilizational development of human society, which became widespread in the middle and second half of the twentieth century.In particular, the attention paid to the role and place of European city-states in the formation and development of the modern bases of Western European democracy. The appearance of autonomous cities in medieval Europe in the 12th-15th centuries was considered by A. J. Toynbee as a direct succession of the ancient democratic tradition of poleis. However, the British researcher showed the nonlinear development of Western European civilization, therefore he did not reduce the origins of modern European democracy only to the reproduction of forms and norms invented in the ancient era. He points out that, depending on external factors, the ancient tradition in European conditions was implemented in a different degree. The Italian city-states were the closest to this tradition, in the Hanseatic League and the Swiss city-states it was noticeably weaker. In other autonomous cities, German, Dutch and Eastern European, it was almost non-apparent. Hence, the relatively democratic regimes of city-states (as for that time), according to A. Toynbee, became the main, but not the only factor in the formation of political democracy in the industrial era.It was found that the most important role of city-states, both in the ancient era and in the transitional period from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, was their introduction of democratic methods of governance as opposed to aristocratic-oligarchic ones, as well as the formation of stable legal norms as opposed to vague customary unwritten law. The combination of the democratic tradition of autonomous cities with national statehood, first applied in England in the second half of the 16th – first half of the 17th century, became the guarantee not only to its economic growth, but also to its political leadership in Europe and the world, at least until the beginning of World War II.