Corruption in Ukraine and the World as a Trigger for the Weakening of the State

The article analyzes corruption as an extra-legal phenomenon that destroys the morality and values of society, threatens democracy and human rights, deforms the functions of state power, discrediting it both within the country and in the international arena. It is noted that the formation of dysfunctions in the sphere of public administration is not the main socio-political danger of corruption.The threat of "corrosion" and gradual destruction of social ties in the system of state regulation, public control and the functioning of social institutions is creating. The sociological and legal interpretation of corruption made it possible to study it as a trigger that weakens statehood, to reveal the social mechanism of the influence of corruption ties on state institutions, to assess the political, economic, legal, socio-structural and psychological factors of its spread. The authors characterize foreign and domestic “models” of corruption and ways of counteracting it from the standpoint of the ontological approach; she also has identified social markers that reflect its specificity in Ukraine; a real assessment of the degree of effectiveness of anti-corruption actions in Ukraine are presented; the expediency of analyzing corruption in the international aspect, especially the mechanisms, forms and methods of Ukrainian corruption spreading in the world corruption services and the penetration of transnational corruption into the Ukrainian political and economic space; it is also revealed the effect of the social mechanism of corruption in the structure of the state, as a result of which the process of state regulation loses its morality and social value. It is shown that the stable, actively "mutating", adaptive to the majority of social changes, the nature of corruption in Ukraine does not only forms and reproduces the tolerant attitude of government and a significant part of the public, but it also actively inhibits democratic transformations and deforms the public consciousness of Ukrainians. It is emphasized that "salus populi" is the most pragmatic option among the systemic models of fighting corruption (totalitarian, authoritarian, liberal).