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The banning of political parties in post-Yugoslav states. Croatian and Serbian experience in using militant democracy
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of a classical militant democracy instrument, as banning of extremist parties since the beginning of the political transition in 1990s in post-Yugoslav states. Comparative studies are based on Croatian and Serbian experiences, when since political transition new types of political regimes started developing as part of a boom for national parties that could guarantee consolidation of the state. The methods employed for the analysis are the qualitative analysis of sources. Corpus of sources includes national legislation, official documents, NGOs' reports, and media content related to banning political entities. Conclusions from the study provide knowledge fill the gap in the state of art about circumstances for dissolving anti-democratic entities in the post-Yugoslav states. Moreover, they allow to verify relevant approaches and models of anti-democratic organizations, encompassing the specific types of political culture in Croatia and Serbia.
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The paper aims to determine which political parties in post-communist countries were considered hostile to
the system and evaluate the systems' capacity to eliminate their enemies with political party banning. The
analysis overs Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and
Hungary. The study covers the period from their democratization to 2020.
Ethnopopulism is an elite strategy for winning votes and concentrating power – a common playbook for the erosion of liberal democracy that is empowered and justified by a companion playbook of ethnopopulist and majoritarian appeals. Ethnopopulism is flexible with the truth, and flexible in identifying friends and enemies of “the people”. Ethnopopulist parties manipulate opposition to neo-liberal economic policies and racialize the immigrant threat. Democratic backsliding has unexpectedly taken hold in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, and the very factors that seemed to augur well for liberal democracy may have contained the seeds of its degradation at the hands of ethnopopulist leaders.
MILITANT DEMOCRACIES’ TRAJECTORY OF CONTINUANCEThe theoretical category of militant democracy in Karl Loevenstein’s meaning is described well in world scholarly literature. Notwithstanding, there is no comprehensive typology of militant democracy which would allow for identifying and diversifying various political regimes which meet the distinctive features of the Weberian ideal type of militant democracy. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to formulate a typology of militant democracies which would be a useful analytical tool for studying diverse political regimes. Importantly, this paper contributes to the field by proposing the framework of the theory, i.e., militant democracies’ trajectory of continuance which consists of the types of militant democracies and the relationships between them. It is significant to assume that the subjects of militant democracy use offensive and defensive strategies which are characterised by the following degrees of intensity: low, moderate, and high. Hence, nine types of these strategies’ configurations are determined. They generate nine types of militant democracies. Moreover, there are nine factorial relationships between them, which are useful for assessing whether and how empirical exemplifications of political regimes change. This proposal of the typology of militant democracies is highly applicable to empirical studies and worth developing in a theoretical way on the basis of new criteria such as the potential of regime regeneration.
Introduction – Explaining party bans, political and legal contexts – Banned parties and banning states in Europe, the political context – Nature of banned parties – Nature of banning states – Tolerant and intolerant democracies, the legal context – Evolving rationales for party bans and procedures for proscription – Contemporary rationales for banning parties – Anti-democratic ideology – Non-democratic internal organisation – Party names – Party orientation to violence – Protecting the present order – Evolving rationales for party bans – Weimar and legitimacy paradigms – Conclusions, directions for future research
21st century Serbian nationalism has seen only a few analyses. Most works concentrate heavily on the nineties and the wars of the Yugoslav secession, which have produced an all-consuming selection of varieties of nationalism throughout former Yugoslavia. After 5 October 2000, however, although the Right Wing did somewhat soften in public discourse and popular appeal, strong nationalist tendencies have remained a part of Serbia’s social and political discourses, concentrated around several extreme Right Wing groups, one of which is Dveri srpske, that have been active from the early nineties. After having organized themselves politically, they have refurbished their image and discourse, succeeding even in entering the Parliament in the April 2016 elections. This article analyzes their agenda and their key points, namely their clericalism, their anti-EU stance, homophobia and extreme support for Putin’s Russia, as well as the change in their image and discourse over time.
ABSTRACT: Objective: Within the part of the public sphere shaped by pro-life Christian organizations, a number of similarities can be observed in comparing two prominent Christian-inspired movements from Serbia and Croatia. In the present paper we will compare the Serbian civic Orthodox movement Dveri – Pokret za život Srbije with the Croatian neoconservative initiative U ime obitelij . Both organizations have garnered significant media attention, in part through their engagement against the “propaganda” and “ideology” of sexual difference in public and institutional spheres. Since 2009, Dveri has organized “family marches” against the annual gay pride parade in Belgrade, while U ime obitelij successfully opposed the new comprehensive sex education proposed in 2012; in 2013, they also initiated a referendum to define marriage in the Croatian constitution as a union between a woman and a man. To best of our knowledge, these two movements have not been compared to date. Method: By comparing a selection of their official publications, bulletins, and media appearances with content analysis, we aim to compare these two groups’ de-secularization processes and anti-government protests related to human rights issues. Serbia we gained access to the media archive Ebart. For Croatia we researched online portals of Croatian newspapers, TV stations, and youtube. Discussion: Regardless of the apparent differences between Catholic and Orthodox denominations – which are some of the main grounds for the perceived civilizational differences between Croatia and Serbia – in both cases, traditional morality is being translated into modern secular terminology in a rather similar fashion. Sexual minorities have been marked as others, and especially during times of economic crisis, they have functioned as perfect scapegoats and targets of anger. Results: In both Serbia and Croatia today, conservative groups claim that economic development and the security of society depend on “healthy families.” The main findings of our comparison of Dveri and U ime obitelji is that “sexual othering” can be promoted from either an anti-occidental (in the case of Serbia) or “middle European” (in the case of Croatia) standpoint, using fundamentally secular or religious modes, without changing the fundamental arguments. Religious morality is, in the case of both countries, basically substituted with majoritarian democratic “values” that are perceived as being under attack by liberal-secularist, sexual, and gender-minority ideologies.
Over the past two decades, the concept of militant democracy-the use of legal restrictions on political expression and participation to curb extremist actors in democratic regimes-has again captured the attention of comparative constitutional lawyers and political scientists. In comparative constitutional law, the old neutral model of liberal democracy, according to which all political views are entitled to the same rights of expression and association, has given way to a general consensus that restrictions on basic rights designed to preserve democracy are legitimate. At the same time, legal scholars attribute the considerable cross-national variation in the formal design and use of such restrictions to the particular historical background of each country. In political science, a large body of work now examines specific militant restrictions on extremist actors. Although this scholarship consists mainly of descriptive analyses, it has begun to advance causal hypotheses explaining variation in important militant democracy policies. Taken together, these developments point to the fact that militant restrictions constitute an important facet of modern democracy and that at the same time, notwithstanding recent advances, our understanding of the phenomenon is still marked by significant gaps, making the legal and empirical analysis of militant democracy an important emerging research program both in comparative constitutional law and political science. This article reconstructs the debate on the concept since its origins in the 1930s and suggests directions for further research in both fields.
It is extremely difficult for a state to survive without international recognition; even so, some de facto states have been established and continue to exist. Others do not, and have been wiped off the face of the earth again. This article looks at one failed de facto state, the breakaway Serb Republic of Krajina (RSK) that existed for five years (1991–1995), before it was overrun by Croatian armed forces in Operation Storm. What did RSK do wrong that the surviving de facto states do right? Research has shown that in order to survive de facto states must have a patron that will protect them and supply them with financial and other resources; in addition, they must engage in state-building (the establishment of functioning state institutions) and in nation-building (fostering patriotism and a common national identity). RSK failed on all three scores. The Krajina leaders did initially enjoy the backing of the Milos˘ević regime, but fell out with it and lost that support. Rather than build strong state institutions they pilfered the state and allowed the society to slide into anarchy. Finally, they never made any attempt to create a sense of separate RSK identity linked to the state. RSK was presented only as the westernmost outpost of Serbdom, and as a temporary structure pending the unification of all Serbs in one state. This is not the stuff successful de facto states are made of.
The author explores the connection that exists between democratization, state-building and war in the cases of Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. It is necessary to examine closely how these processes influence one another because state-building and democratization are not necessarily contradictory and even war might not be an obstacle for democracy. However, in Serbia and Croatia state-building and war influenced democratization negatively, but in different ways. In Serbia, the nationalist mobilization for a state-building programme prevented democratization, while in Croatia democratization was a precondition for state-building, which then impeded democratic consolidation. Further important differences are the lower level of institutionalization, incomplete state-building, and polarized party system in Serbia and a higher level of institutionalization, completed state-building, and moderate party pluralism in Croatia. The war also influenced Croatia directly, while Serbia was only indirectly affected by the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina before the NATO intervention in 1999.
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In the opinion of some historians the era of fascism ended with the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler. Yet the debate about its nature as a historical phenomenon and its value as a term of historical analysis continues to rage with ever greater intensity, each major attempt to resolve it producing different patterns of support, dissent, and even hostility, from academic colleagues. Nevertheless, a number of developments since 1945 not only complicate the methodological and definitional issues even further, but make it ever more desirable that politicians, journalists, lawyers, and the general public can turn to "experts" for a heuristically useful and broadly consensual definition of the term. These developments include: the emergence of a highly prolific European New Right, the rise of radical right populist parties, the flourishing of ultra-nationalist movements in the former Soviet empire, the radicalization of some currents of Islam and Hinduism into potent political forces, and the upsurge of religious terrorism. Most monographs and articles attempting to establish what is meant by fascism are written from a unilateral authoritative perspective, and the intense academic controversy the term provokes has to be gleaned from reviews and conference discussions. The uniqueness of this book is that it provides exceptional insights into the cut-and-thrust of the controversy as it unfolds on numerous fronts simultaneously, clarifying salient points of difference and moving towards some degree of consensus. Twenty-nine established academics, mostly German but including several prominent experts working in English, were invited by the periodical Erwägen Wissen Ethik (Deliberation Knowledge Ethics) to engage with an article by Roger Griffin, one of the most influential theorists in the study of generic fascism in the Anglophone world. The resulting debate progressed through two "rounds" of critique and reply, forming a fascinating patchwork of consensus and sometimes heated disagreement. In a spin-off from the original discussion of Griffin's concept of fascism, a second exchange documented here focuses on the issue of fascist ideology in contemporary Russia. This collection is essential reading for all those who realize the need to provide the term "fascism" with theoretical rigour, analytical precision, and empirical content despite the complex issues it raises, and for any specialist who wants to participate in fascist studies within an international forum of expertise. The book will change the way in which historians and political scientists think about fascism, and make the debate about the threat it poses to infant democracies like Russia more incisive not just for academics, but for politicians, journalists, and the wider public.
The political discourse on regulation of extreme speech in Central Europe has shifted in favor of militant democracy, an approach which supports enhanced criminal law restrictions on speech. Developing the conceptual framework of the consequences of militant democracy and applying legal and parliamentary discourse analysis, this article shows whether and how the legal restrictions on extreme speech adopted in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary fulfilled the purpose for which they were adopted. The juxtaposition of justifications for restrictions and their application by judiciaries uncovers how extreme speech became normalized and appeared in more sophisticated forms due to the failure of legal militant democratic measures. Thus, it highlights how without reflecting the contextual specifics in the respective countries, restrictive legal regulation may not achieve the very purpose it was adopted for.
Backes’s article discusses the judgement of the Second Senate of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) of 17 January 2017—not to ban the right-wing extremist party Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD)—in light of recent lively international debates on the protection of democracy. It considers the logic of an examination of proportionality as established by German constitutional law, considering aspects of the legitimacy, suitability, necessity and appropriateness of the party ban. The article shows that the newly introduced criterion of ‘potentiality’ requires an examination of proportionality even if the court itself denies this. Thus the threshold for intervention has been raised, moderately, since a concrete or even immediate threat as defined in police law is not required. The Court links the definition of a free democratic basic order more closely to the established minimum definitions of comparative research and provides clarification that further refutes the (exaggerated) accusation of ‘vagueness’. In doing so it has sharpened the contours of the concept of militant democracy that is widely regarded in international comparative studies. © 2019
Based on the archival materials, press analysis and the review of the relevant works on the subject, the author analyses and presents the ideology of the Croatian Party of Rights (HSP) - not only a pivotal rightism party, but also a right-wing party in the Croatian political life and the party system. Once the multi-party system was established, HSP was rebuilt by former political prisoners and dissidents Dobroslav Paraga and Ante Paradžik. The main party's agenda was the establishment of an independent Croatian state. The article deals with the study of a period of renewal HSP from the early 1990s to 2015. The article is divided into six parts. In the first part, the author presents the contemporary ideology of the radical right. Contemporary radical right-wing political parties are not necessarily anti-systemic, but they are mainly ultra-nationalistic, xenophobic, homophobic and populist. The second part of the article refers to the methodology and objectives of the research. In the remaining chapters of the article, by using the theoretical framework of the Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde concerning the ideology of the radical right made up of nativism, authoritarianism and populism, the author concludes that HSP meets all three criteria of right-wing radicalism, and that it can be considered a radical right-wing party. The analysis confirms the assumption that HSP is a populist option. The author suggests that HSP is best described as a combination of right-wing populists focused on the "dangerous Others", i.e. Serbs, especially the policy of the Serbian political elite in Croatia and Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, and an anti-establishment reform party.
This chapter aims at surveying the current terminology of the “extreme/radical/populist right parties,” stipulating criteria for the identification of such parties as a “party family” with its internal differiations, and underlining a set of hypotheses on these parties’ development with particular emphasis on the “political factors” and the general (Europe-wide) and particular (country-specific) timing.
This collection provides an up–to–date analysis of key country approaches to Militant Democracy. Featuring contributions from some of the key people working in this area, including Mark Tushnet and Helen Irving, each chapter presents a stocktaking of the legal measures to protect the democracy against its enemies within. In addition to providing a description of the country's view of Militant Democracy and the current situation, it also examines the legal and political provisions to defend the democratic structure against attacks. The discussion also presents proposals for the development of the Militant Democracy principle or its alternatives in policy and legal practice. In the final chapter the editor compares the different arrangements and formulates a minimum consensus as to what measures are indispensable to protect a democracy. Highly topical, this book is a valuable resource for students, academics and policy-makers concerned with democratic principles.
State weakness is one of the main obstacles for democratic stability. Yet under certain circumstances even a mere electoral democracy may gain stable support from the citizenry. Mere electoral democracy is best understood as a regime of elite governance endowed by a certain support from the citizens but without any ambition of the ruling elite to increase the quality of democratic rule. This article explores the historical reasons of this specific type of political regime in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. Departing from the empirical examples from the Western Balkans, the article comes to some rather general conclusions about the concept and sequence of democratization: Conducting elections too early may produce serious challenges to sustainable democratization. The general population’s primary interest mostly lies in the stabilization of state apparatus and its ability to produce common goods rather than in the fast establishment of electoral democracy and formal democratic institutions. For a better understanding of the real level of specific course and paths of democratic “consolidation,” the democracy rankings like Nations in Transit and Bertelsmann should focus on in-depth analyses of the main actors’ political and economic practices.
Minkenberg tackles a variety of issues in the debate about state repression and examines them in relation to the contemporary radical right in western democracies, particularly Germany and France. He addresses concepts developed mostly in research studies of movements, and reviews more theoretical accounts in an attempt to advance an analytic framework for examining the effects of repression on the radical right. Does the application of state repression have the desired effect on the radical right? Or is state repression rather counter-productive and, if so, under what circumstances? Minkenberg attempts to provide a tentative answer as to whether state repression reduces radical right-wing mobilization (as some have argued) or provokes resistance and a sense of solidarity that undercuts the intended effects (as others have suggested). The case of the German Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (and the failure of an attempt to ban it)—which provides evidence both of the organizational and strategic flexibility of the non-party radical right and of ghetto-formation and a hardening of ideology—raises serious questions about the usefulness of state repression against the radical right. It seems that the damage to democracy outweighs the benefits of state control, particularly when the fight against the radical right is limited to the institutional level of ‘militant democracy’. Instead, alternatives within civil society need to be strengthened both because they can affect the radical right on their own and because they can ‘embed’ state action and thereby render it more effective.
This article analyses the dissolution of the extreme right Workers’ Party by the Czech courts in 2010. It situates the case in the historical development of party closures by militant democracy on Czech territory and explains why the Workers’ Party was the first party to be dissolved in the Czech Republic after the fall of the Communist regime. It also describes the legislative framework in contemporary Czech law for the dissolution of political parties. It details the political and legal repercussions of the ruling and the wider discussions it provoked, not only in political and expert circles but also among the general public. Given the fact that the case was taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the European dimension of the dissolution of the Workers’ Party is also analysed.
This paper surveyed the extreme right scene in contemporary Serbia and discussed four groups – Srpski Sabor Dveri, Otačastveni Pokret Obraz, Krv i čast and Nacionalni stroj – in more detail. It showed that the programmes of these organizations are strikingly similar in that they focus on an exaggerated nationalism centred on the idea of national rebirth and a populist suspicion of democratic values, institutions and processes. The main difference seems to be that the Christian right groups yearn for a renewal of the nation through a return to “traditional values”, among which Orthodox piety, hierarchical social relations and a rural way of life feature most prominently, while the racist right associations strive for a national renaissance based on the alleged supremacy of the white “race”.
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