The Concept of Militant Democracy

Abstract

This chapter describes what ‘militant democracy’ is and discusses controversies surrounding its meaning. In the classic definition, attributed to Karl Loewenstein, militant democracy is the principle that permits democratic states to impose pre-emptive restrictions on basic rights and liberties in order to protect themselves from internal subversion. Yet, some scholars use a more expansive definition that stretches the concept to cover not only rights restrictions but any type of action that aims to defend democracy. The chapter pushes back against such trends and narrows the conception of militant democracy to a specific ideal type of democratic self-defence centred on exclusion, exceptions to regular rules, and the perception of the threat as extraordinary. At the same time, by contrasting a ‘principled account’ of militant democracy with the more conventional ‘legal’ account, it demonstrates that, understood as a normative framework, the concept has a much broader range of institutional applications. Militant democracy thus manifests itself not only in the legal domain—as a practice of rights restrictions—but also in the political and societal domains—as practices such as cordon sanitaire, media censoring, and social media deplatforming. With the help of the principled account of militant democracy, the chapter examines which initiatives qualify as militant democratic and why.