Socio-philosophical insight into the role of elites in modern military escalation

Abstract

This article focuses on understanding both the nature of the current stage of international tension and security crisis, and their main triggers, the interdependence of all actors of the political process. To this end, the authors of the study consider the role of elites, and, above all, the phenomenon of the cult of the leader as an extreme form of a personalist political regime, which acquires new analytical relevance in the context of mentioned above destructive socio-political practices spread nationally and internationally. The conducted historical and comparative analysis of the preconditions and the institutionalization of the cult of the leader revealed a clear interdependence between the strengthening of the regime of sole power and the decline of the ruling class (political elite), the functions of which are narrowed to the primitive transmission of the leader's will and the constant forced demonstration of their total loyalty and absolute devotion to the leader. Thus, the cult of the leader, sanctioned by such toxic loyalty of the political elite, blocks any manifestations of initiatives dissonant with the leader's will, as well as the autonomy of thinking and subjectivity. As a result, the leader's will acquires the status of an absolute criterion of truth and legitimacy, and his/her decisions and actions are subordinated exclusively to the logic of personalized power, its self-preservation and reproduction regardless state demarcation which opens the way to arbitrariness and justification of any crimes. 
Appealing to modern political practices of cults, the authors of the article argue that the loss of subjectivity by the national political elite, its servile nature are among the gravest challenges to international stability and security. The Russian-Ukrainian war vividly illustrates the catastrophic decline of the soft power mightiness and the need for equal use of hard power to control modern growing military trends. Aggressive foreign policy is a natural continuation of unstoppable leader’s lawlessness in home affairs and the international order becomes the object of such leader's arbitrariness and encroachments. Thus, the cult of the leader is a separate and extremely dangerous outcome of the pathology of political elites which goes beyond the domestic political dimension and becomes a factor of global instability, growing conflict factor and has to be discussed by Academia.