Appendix A. Van den Bergh's Inaugural Lecture, 28 September 1936

• Author: Paul B. Cliteur
• Pages: 361-391

361

Appendix A

Van den Bergh’s

Inaugural Lecture,

28 September 1936

Paul B. Cliteur

In the United States and other Western countries, there is dis-

cussion about the predicament of liberal democratic societies.

Populist and Islamist Challenges for International Law aspires

to contribute to that discussion. The differences of opinion are

huge, complaints are legion, and constructive proposals on

how to move forward are rare. An exception is a group of

commentators who seek inspiration in the concept of “mili-

tant democracy.”

The basic idea of militant democracy is easy to under-

stand: democracy, if it wants to survive, should be able to

defend itself against the forces that undermine it. In this book,

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Populist and Islamist Challenges for International Law

362

several chapters address militant democracy. Militant democ-

racy teaches that certain limitations on the fundamental values

of free speech and freedom of association may be necessary

to safeguard democracy in the long run. Key figures for mili-

tant democracy include the German-American constitutional

theorist Karl Loewenstein (1891–1973), the Austrian philoso-

pher Karl Popper (1902–94), and (less well-known) the Dutch

constitutional scholar George van den Bergh (1890–1960).

Van den Bergh discussed militant democracy in 1936, three

years after the Nazis seized power in Germany and three years

before the start of World War II. He reflected on the central

question of what constitutional means we have at our disposal

to deflect political catastrophe. We think his ideas are topical.

The contemporary discussion both in the United States

and in Europe is about militant democracy, albeit not under

this name. An example is a 2017 essay titled On Tyranny by

American historian Timothy Snyder, professor of history at

Yale. Snyder refers to Hamlet, the hero of Shakespeare’s epon-

ymous tragedy, who is rightly shocked by the abrupt rise of

an evil ruler.1 Snyder criticizes Americans who had convinced

themselves that “there was nothing in the future but more of

the same.”2 Fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed “dis-

tant traumas” that receded into irrelevance. Snyder coins that

approach as the politics of inevitability, or the sense that his-

tory could move in only one direction—that of liberal democ-

racy. This vision of history is teleological. It is a narration

of time that leads toward a certain, usually desirable, goal.

When communism collapsed at the end of the 20th century,

we drew the erroneous conclusion that rather than “rejecting

teleologies,” our own story was true.3 Snyder implicitly refers

1. Snyder, Timothy, On Tyranny: Twent y Lessons from th e Twentieth Centur y,

Tim Duggan B ooks, New York 2017, p. 117.

2. Id. at 118.

3. Id. at 119.

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