Democracy, Ethics and Democratic Self-Defence

Defenders of democracy mean different things when they use the term ‘democracy’. This affects how they determine what is the core institution worth protecting, who are the main challengers to democracy, and how they should be addressed. For example, militant democrats draw on a broad tradition that prioritises constitutional obligations over popular participation. For them, therefore, political actors who threaten key aspects of the rule of law are designated as democratic enemy number one. Protecting the legal status quo is a priority and the key mechanisms for doing so are constitutional entrenchment and party bans. The first part of this paper provides an overview of how militant, tolerant and social approaches to democratic self-defence rely on fundamentally different conceptions of democracy. Can such differences be reconciled? To explore this possibility, the second part of the paper redescribes the problem of democratic self-defence as a peculiar ethical dilemma. Drawing a parallel with the problem of ‘dirty hands’, it discusses the justifiability of acts of democratic self-defence that leave a moral residue, and the balancing of the responsibility to act against the risks of not acting in defence of democratic institutions. It proposes an ethical algorithm that takes into account the uncertainties, dangers, and risks involved, in order to help pro-democracy actors in different positions navigate dilemmas of action in democracy's defence. The third part brings the two parts of the paper into conversation. It examines whether and how the ethical algorithm proposed in the second part can provide a paradigm for collating the different conceptions of democracy discussed in the first part. The idea is to dissect competing conceptions of democracy, and the practices they give rise to, into smaller pieces that can be made intelligible. The aim is to re-imagine democratic self-defence as a spectrum, where contingent factors rather than rigid definitions are the source of inspiration for different acts of democratic self-defence.