Preface

Associate Professor, Department of Government The rise of far-right antidemocratic actors in many consolidated democracies today poses a unique challenge. Political parties and leaders who enjoy popular support risk tearing apart the democratic fabric through tactics that appear lawful and are often invisible. What options do democracies have to defend themselves against such actors? Democratic self-defence, i.e. actions aimed at preventing, containing, resisting, or repairing democratic backsliding caused by domestic antidemocratic forces, can take many forms: from restrictions on candidacy rights to hate speech laws, and from street protests to welfare reforms. Political parties may exclude antidemocratic parties from coalitions, or they may choose to include them while seeking to moderate their positions. Alternatively, they may focus on expanding social protections in order to address the structural injustices that antidemocratic actors exploit. Such choices raise difficult normative questions. This book offers conceptual tools for making these choices intelligible and brings to light the principles that animate them. Political theorists addressing these issues have paid a great deal of attention to justifying repressive measures. Militant democracy, which includes the pre-emptive restriction of political and civil rights, has received so much attention in the past decade that one would be forgiven for thinking there is no alternative. This book is partly a reaction to this one-sided engagement with repressive measures. It examines less-known approaches to democratic self-defence that prioritise toleration and social integration respectively, strategies that are used as much, if not more, than militant restrictions. The three rationales of democratic self-defence that emerge –militant, tolerant, and social– are presented as ideal types. Unlike much theorising on democratic self-defence, which is prescriptive and advances a single normative framework, this book adopts a deliberately comparative approach that examines the strengths and weaknesses of each ideal type, as well as their connections and contrasts. It proposes conceptual definitions and analyses the normative justifications underpinning each type. The aim is to clarify the principles embodied in practices of democratic self-defence, enabling actors to better understand the normative commitments behind their choices and to make decisions that are ethically justified, democratically legitimate, and consistent with the values they seek to defend. The book also seeks to move the discussion beyond legal instruments and state responses by bringing broader societal and public actors into view. At the same time, it remains focused on agency: on both defenders of democracy and those who seek to undermine it. In doing so, it resists the tendency to portray democracy as a quasi-natural system whose resilience must simply be enhanced. Unlike many studies framed around the concept of democratic resilience, this book foregrounds human agency and the diverse actors who actively defend democracy across multiple spheres. Decisions about whether and how to confront antidemocratic actors do not fall exclusively on any single category of actor. They concern government authorities, courts, state agencies, municipal leaders, business actors, journalists, academics, and others. Democratic self-defence should therefore be understood as a form of agency distributed across a variety of actors. This book grew out of an article I co-authored in 2017 with my dear colleague Ludvig Norman, ‘Three Models of Democratic Self-defence: Militant Democracy and Its Alternatives’ published the year after in Political Studies. In that article, Ludvig and I challenged the dominance of militant democracy in debates on democratic self-defence by exploring two alternative perspectives: a tolerant approach (which we then called liberal-procedural) and a social approach, which we ultimately defended. This book builds on and substantially develops that tripartite framework in three ways. First, it provides more conceptually refined definitions of the three ideal types. Second, it examines in greater depth the wide range of normative arguments associated with each paradigm. Third, it moves beyond the task of defending one particular approach or justification, instead offering a comparative analysis that enables readers to navigate the normative landscape of democratic self-defence. The reason for adopting this approach is that there is no single solution applicable to all contexts of democratic threat. Developing rigorous analytical frameworks is therefore as important as advancing critical normative arguments about the proper limits and possibilities of democratic self-defence. When I began developing the ideas for this book, the neo-fascist party Golden Dawn had entered the Greek Parliament, and its leadership was soon after imprisoned following criminal convictions. Their convictions were fully justified: after the party’s electoral breakthrough, violent rhetoric and physical attacks against political opponents, minorities, and immigrants, both inside and outside Parliament, had become an everyday phenomenon. Yet their status as elected representatives meant that legal action against them was significantly delayed and, while in pre-trial detention, they continued to hold their parliamentary seats. I found this case deeply puzzling. It revealed a striking dissonance between moral condemnation and legal conviction on one hand and the democratic commitment to political toleration on the other. As this case laid bare, toleration was defensible in principle yet appeared to have produced deeply troubling effects in practice. Still, like many of my compatriots, I was allergic to party bans and restrictions on political rights, and therefore not ready to endorse a militant democratic response that would limit political freedoms on the basis of antidemocratic beliefs. At the same time, it was clear that the rise of Golden Dawn was also a symptom of Greece’s profound economic, social, and institutional turmoil. Addressing these underlying conditions seemed essential to reversing the appeal of far-right politics. The dilemma of whether to ban or tolerate antidemocratic parties thus appeared to provide an insufficient framework for thinking about democratic self-defence, while potentially diverting attention from the deeper social roots of the problem. This book and its theoretical framework are my attempt to reflect systematically and critically on these intuitions, by offering a sympathetic yet critical reconstruction of each of the three approaches. Unfortunately, the experience of autocratising pressures that gave rise to these intuitions is now shared by many people around the world. Democracy defenders everywhere seek to navigate the dilemma of how best to confront antidemocratic actors. My hope is that this book will help them recognise the rationales that shape these confrontations and reflect more clearly on their normative implications. Writing this book became possible thanks to a large number of colleagues and friends who have supported me throughout this process. I owe an incredible amount of gratitude and intellectual debt to all of you. Two persons were pivotal from start to finish. My good colleague at Uppsala, Sofia Näsström, has been a constant source of inspiration, encouragement, and warmth, sharing her insightful advice on various aspects of the book project. Often visiting Uppsala, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser offered his generous feedback and clever suggestions at various stages throughout this journey. He was also a wonderful host at the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, where my family and I spent two unforgettable months during my sabbatical year. As a member of several research projects, I was lucky to receive essential material and intellectual support for this book. I am indebted to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for granting me a one-year sabbatical to finish the manuscript. Thanks also to the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, which funded our project ‘Democratic Self-defence: The social model’, and to the project members Sofia Näsström, Paula Blomqvist, and Ben Moffitt for our wonderful collaboration. I am equally grateful to the Carlsberg Foundation for generously supporting our project ‘Populism and Democratic Defence in Europe’, and to project members Tore V. Olsen, Juha Tuovinen, Angela Bourne, Aleksandra Moroska Bonkiewicz, Bénédicte Laumond, and Fabio Wolkenstein for genuinely engaging with my ideas. Mid-stage in this book, I was humbled to be selected for the Book Manuscript Workshop Award by the York Centre for Political Theory. I would like to thank the directors of the centre for organising the manuscript workshop on 12 September 2022, as well as the faculty that participated in the workshop. I especially thank Monica Brito Vieira, Alasia Nuti, Jonathan White, and Udit Bhatia for serving as constructive commentators on four chapters. The manuscript was greatly strengthened by their feedback and critique and I felt genuinely honoured by the depth of their engagement. Many thanks are also due to colleagues who engaged with parts of the book at seminars and workshops in Brussels, Berlin, Covilhā, Dublin, Munich, Nicosia, Paris, Princeton, Santiago, Singapore, Gothenburg, Lund, Stockholm, Uppsala Department of Law, and conference panels of ECPR, APSA, IPSA, MANCEPT, and the World Congress of Constitutional Law. Thanks also to Corrado Fumagalli and Malin Holm for offering invaluable comments on individual chapter drafts. I am also deeply thankful to Ludvig Norman, my co-author of the article ‘Three Models of Democratic Self-defence: Militant Democracy and Its Alternatives’ (Political Studies, 2018), which lay the ground for the framework developed in this book. His constant support and creative engagement with my ideas made a transformative difference. Four scholars of militant democracy have been immensely influential in shaping the central ideas in this book: Jan-Werner Müller, Alexander Kirshner, Bastiaan Rijpkema, and Benjamin Schupmann. This book’s modest aspiration is to continue the conversation that they kickstarted and energised with their brilliant and pioneering work. I also want to thank colleagues at the Department of Political Science at Lund University, where I spent two years at the start of this project. My colleagues at the Department of Government at Uppsala University, especially the political theory crowd, Siri Sylvan, Gina Gustavsson, Jörgen Ödalen, Johan Tralau, and Sverker Gustavsson, are to be credited for creating a wonderful and friendly milieu for intellectual debate and critical commentary that helped this project, and myself as an academic, grow. Thanks also to colleagues responsible for the Shut-Up-and-Write sessions, which genuinely helped to get things done. Many thanks to Dominic Byatt and Lucy Jarman at Oxford University Press for their expertise, patience, and efforts in bringing this project to completion. I would also like to thank Purushothaman Govindhasamy at Integra for coordinating the entire production process for this book’s publication, and Stephen Blinder for proofreading. Their meticulous work, thoughtful suggestions, and keen attention to detail greatly contributed to bringing this book to its final form. The manuscript also benefited from the suggestions offered by the anonymous reviewers, for which I am very grateful. Last but certainly not least, a shoutout to close friends and family for their love and support. That I managed to stay grounded and happy throughout this project is thanks to my joyful young children, Orestis and Maya, and my husband Pep, who kept me nourished, loved, and entertained through all the phases of this project. This book is dedicated to you, my darling, with all my love and affection, and with the hope that our children will inherit better democracies than the ones we have today.