The Politics of Militant Democracy

Militant democracy, the idea that democracies need to put in place restrictions to defend themselves from extremist threats, has become the dominant point of departure for conceptualizing anti-extremist policies today. As a result, it has effectively silenced competing political perspectives regarding the causes of extremism, its nature and how it should be remedied. Classic militant democrats such as Karl Loewenstein have attributed the danger of democratic subversion to the assumption that the people are vulnerable to emotionalist politics. As a result, they have implicitly blamed the rise of extremism on inclusive and pluralist politics, arguing as a result for the need of anti-majoritarian remedies. However, the central idea of banning extremist parties not only contradicts the core of democratic politics, but also corresponds to a politicized reading of the causes of extremism and a superficial if not temporary solution to the problem. Our aim is to bring out the political contingency of militant democracy as one of several routes to conceptualize and curb extremism. We proceed by discussing competing views of the roots and remedies of extremism, and focus especially on a strand largely neglected by the recent literature on democratic self-defense, that we call ‘social-democratic’. According to this view, extremism is to some extent an effect of social deprivation and thus any attempt to counter it should include efforts to rehabilitate social justice. This model comes in stark contrast to militant democracy, as it points at social rather than psychological causes of extremism and suggests remedies that do not restrict but rather expand the scope of inclusion through targeted social policies. After discussing the pros and cons of each of these two models, we formulate an alternative proposal that is situated between them. In other words, we offer a new justification of democratic self-defence that is neither over-exclusive nor over-inclusive vis-à-vis extremist parties. Further, we illustrate our arguments by drawing on recent developments, taken both from the US and Europe. The modest goal in this paper is to criticize militant democracy as the dominant theoretical model of countering extremism and to re-politicize the discourse on democratic self-defense.