Democratic Self-Defense in Western Europe

The unprecedented success of the far right, which pushes an illiberal agenda, confronts West European democracies with a crucial challenge. How can it organize its self-defense in such a way that liberal democracy can survive, while also acknowledging the dissatisfaction with its functioning that partly underpins the support for the far right. In this paper maps constitutional, institutional, and party-political responses in Western Europe to the rise of the far right in four consecutive phases: that of prevention, containment, resistance, and rebuilding. On the basis of an analysis of legal frameworks and existing studies from a range of disciplines (e.g. history, law, political science), it constructs a typology of West European democracies that distinguishes between strong and weak self-defense systems along two dimensions: the formal safeguards that have been developed, and the way these safeguards are implemented in practice.