Beyond Militant Democracy: A normative inquiry into the EU’s democratic self-defence

This paper argues that, when calling for the EU to become a ‘militant democracy’ out of the concern for defending democratic principles, it is important to take a clear normative stance on what one takes ‘militant democracy’ to mean. Treating militant democracy as a catchy label for all kinds of legal and political forms of countering Member State democratic backsliding may lead to ignoring the normative baggage and tensions that come with this concept. The main historical, normative-theoretical approaches to militant democracy, as well as certain practical, legal-doctrinal applications of it, are actually incompatible with genuine concern with democracy at the core of calls for ‘EU militant democracy’. What is more, while this particular understanding of militant democracy fits the EU’s political nature and integration narratives well on many fronts (e.g. its technocratic nature and the idea that Member States ‘locked in’ their national democracies), this is a decidedly uneasy fit from a democratic point of view. This paper illustrates how militant democracy as originally conceived by its namesake Karl Loewenstein (and continued by some contemporary scholars) plays into the democratic pathologies of the EU and threatens to exacerbate the undermining of precisely the democratic principles that the calls for EU militant democracy, at their core, are concerned with. As a consequence, it proposes to rethink militant democracy and its position within the broader context of democratic self-defence through the normative framework of ‘reflexive democracy’, building upon the political theory of Rainer Forst. In doing so, this paper establishes a normative lens through which different instruments of the EU’s democratic self-defence, from militant (Art. 7 TEU) via punitive (financial conditionality, infringement proceedings) to enabling and decidedly non-militant instruments (monitoring & reporting, checks and balances, funding programmes), are scrutinised.