Militant Democracy: New Challengers and Challenges

Angela Bourne and Bastiaan Rijpkema ‘Militant democracy’ is a concept traced to Karl Loewenstein’s (1937) appeal for robust responses to fascism in 1930s Europe. Often defined as legally-authorized, but exceptional, restrictions of certain basic political rights militant democracy aims to pre-emptively marginalize those purportedly undermining liberal democratic institutions. According to Müller, during the Cold War, ‘the typical object of militant democracy...was an association that declared its intention to replace democracy with something supposedly better, but did not perpetrate violent acts; typical responses were banning political parties and associations and restricting free speech’ (Müller, 2016, 250). Cold War objects of militant democracy were ‘easily recognised by their relationship to totalitarianism, whether fascist or Soviet Communism’ (Müller, 2012, 1255). At the end of the Cold War, the threat from groups working within democracy to subvert democracy – militant democracy’s traditional target – seemed to diminish. Old-style fascist movements were largely seen as illegitimate and the collapse of the Soviet Union severely limited the appeal of orthodox communist movements. The concept of militant democracy, however, re-emerged, propelled by two main developments (Ellian and Rijpkema, 2018). The first context can be found in counterterrorism. In the post-Cold War period, some of liberal democracy’s most important challengers, such as religious fundamentalists or groups using terrorist tactics, largely pursued their goals outside existing institutions. Thus, ‘militant democracy’ seemed to have evolved into a post-Cold war ‘preventive state’ theorised by Sajó (2006). The second, more recent, context is the rise of populist parties and illiberal challengers, including governing parties in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the United States. While their pursuit of power through democratic institutions seems to link them to the traditional militant democracy paradigm, their more ambiguous orientation to democratic politics compared cold war extremists makes this link problematic (Rovira Kaltwasser, 2019). These developments prompted new discussions about militant democracy, including e.g. defences against challenges to democratic practices linked to secularism (Rosenblum, 2008; Macklem, 2012; Tyulkina, 2015; Bligh, 2013); separatism (Weill, 2018; Bligh, 2013; Bourne, 2018; Bourne 2015) and the ‘identity of the state’ (Bligh, 2013). New research sought to address variation across legal and political systems (Bourne, 2018; Bourne and Casal Bértoa, 2017). The normative debate took off with novel and comprehensive normative militant democracy theories (e.g. Krishner, 2014; Rijpkema, 2018; Rijpkema 2019, overview in Müller, 2016), critiques of these positions or militant democracy as such (see e.g. Malkopoulou and Kirshner, 2019; Malkopoulou and Norman, 2018; Invernizzi and Zuckerman, 2017), and explorations of new fields for normative study such as subnational militant democracy (Rijpkema 2020). In short, the field of militant democracy has matured and evolved rapidly in recent years. This workshop aims to shed light on the metamorphoses of the Cold-war concept of militant democracy – and connect those working at its forefront. The workshop invites papers that deal with new challengers (e.g. populism, illiberalism, extremism stemming from conspiracy theories) and new challenges (e.g. empirical studies into the effectiveness of instruments, normative critiques or defences, and conceptual challenges, to militant democracy).