Theoretical Approaches to Democratic Defence in Europe I

Abstract

About a decade after Member State democratic backsliding became salient in both political and academic discourse, the issue still remains a hot one. Over the past years, a large part of the legal and political-science literature on the topic has been focused on enforcement, making various proposals for what the EU should do to counter illiberal trends in Hungary and Poland in particular. However, any such proposals also and inevitably bring with them the broader question of the EU’s constitutional and normative authority, both regarding what it is already doing and what it is called upon to do in the face of contemporary challenges to democracy in its political space – a question that can only be answered from an interdisciplinary perspective. This panel proposes to take a step back and put the various (at times deeply transformative) legal and political developments in the EU that occurred in the light of democratic backsliding into the broader perspective of legal and political theory. The contributions explore the normative tensions that underlie the EU’s democratic self-defence and the constitutional path-dependencies that some of them entail. How to square the fact of pluralism in the EU’s political space and the EU’s own commitment to respect it with a decisive enforcement of democratic principles? What are the trade-offs between different approaches to the EU’s democratic self-defence, from ‘militant democracy’ to more tolerant political and legal forms? And lastly, how to affront the latest challenge of ‘democratic frontsliding’, that is supporting Member States like Poland in (re-)establishing more resilient and more genuinely democratic government?

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