Nazism, Communism, and Islamism

• Author: Paul B. Cliteur and Adam D. Duncan
• Pages: 45-96

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2

Nazism, Communism,

and Islamism

Paul B. Cliteur and Adam D. Duncan

One of the most significant characteristics of the rise of right-

wing movements is the attention their leaders give to the nation-

state. It might not be an exaggeration to speak of a spectacular

rise of nationalism. In the United States, nationalism may not

be a thoroughly discredited ideal, but it has definitely been dis-

credited in Europe by its association with Nazism. However,

this had yet to happen in 19-century Europe. The German phi-

losopher J.G. Fichte (1762–1814) wrote his Addresses to the

German Nation in 1807/081 to glorify nationalism with pro-

gressive tendencies. It was in fact a call to defend the nation-

state against foreign invasion by the Napoleonic troops.

More recently, nationalism is invoked against mass

immigration and the growing influence of Islam in Western

1. Fichte, Johann G ottlieb, Address es to the German N ation, translated by R .F.

Jones and G.H . Turnbull, The Open Cour t Publishing Company, Ch icago and Lon-

don 1922.

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Populist and Islamist Challenges for International Law

46

nation-states. Populist leaders vow to defend the nation-state

against takeover by foreign forces. And they do so because

they see their activities not as harmful to democracy but as

essential for its defense. Some of these leaders today include

Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Viktor Orbán in Hungary,

former Czech President Vaclav Klaus, Matteo Salvini in Italy,

and Jarosław Kaczy ´nski in Poland. What distinguishes their

conception of democracy from that of their competitors is

that they claim to be militant. In our times democracy must

be militant to survive, they claim. In this chapter we hope to

show how this militant conception of democracy is used to

bolster national sovereignty and healthy nationalism.

The irony is that the concept of militant democracy is

used both by and against contemporary populist leaders. The

populists claim to defend national democracy against ille-

gal immigrants who, they say, bring with them cultural atti-

tudes that are hard to reconcile with democratic values. The

Islamist belief that sharia law is superior to democratic laws is

an example of such an attitude. But populist leaders combine

their struggle against what they see as the corrosive influence

of undemocratic forces with a politics that uses undemocratic

means itself. Populists wage war on the freedom of the press,

the independency of the judiciary, and other important demo-

cratic values and institutions. In the chapters of this book we

provide ample examples of this.

Militant democracy is about preventing the destruction of

democracy by use of democratic means, the undermining of

democracy “from within.”2 The notion of militant democracy

was developed and presented by the Dutch social-democratic

theoretician George van den Bergh (1890–1960) in a lecture

2. Rijpkema, Ba stiaan, Militant Democracy, Routledge, London and N ew York

2018. Ellian, A . and Rijpkema, B.R ., eds., Militant Democracy—La w, Political Sci-

ence and Ph ilosophy, Springer Verlag, Berl in, Heidelberg, New York 2018.

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Nazism, Communism, and Islamism 47

in the 1930s. His theories were developed during the rise of

Nazism (or fascism),3 and that leads to the presumption that

the significance of his ideas lies merely in forming a counter-

strategy to a possible resurgence of Nazism. A question for

this chapter is thus whether Van den Bergh’s ideas, and in par-

ticular his concept of militant democracy, apply generally to

any rise in extreme, right-wing ideologies (nowadays often

identified as “populism”). If that is the case, the concept of

militant democracy can be used against right-wing populist

leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salivini,

or Geert Wilders.

However, those populist leaders claim not to demol-

ish democracy but to save it. They think mainstream poli-

tics and mainstream political parties are a threat to Western

democracies. The reason is those mainstream political par-

ties make common cause with the ideologies that undermine

Western civilization. They unwittingly destroy the borders of

the nation-states, thereby evaporating national cultures and

forcing nation-states to welcome influences that undermine

democracy.

We believe that the concept of “militant democracy”

is applicable beyond the context in which it arose (i.e.,

in the struggle against Nazism and communism) because

the most significant challenge to modern democracies, the

rise of Islamism, is not unlike the rise of Nazism, fascism,

3. N azism (developed in Germ any) and fascism (developed in It aly) have simi-

larities and d ifferences. Nazism and f ascism are both antidemocr atic and anticom-

munist. Th ey are both based on a leadership cu lt. However, an essential dif ference

is that fascism , as it developed in Italy, was not so much c ommitted to biologic al

racism as Nazism was. See Payne, Stanley G., “Fasc ism and Racism,” in Terence Bal l

and Richard B ellamy, eds., The Cam bridge Histor y of Twentieth- Century Polit i-

cal Thought , Cambridge Universit y Press, Cambridge 2 003, pp. 123–51. For the

theme of this ch apter (militant democracy an d the Islamist challenge), th e similari-

ties are more imp ortant than the d ifferences. I wil l use the terms interc hangeably

because the c entral question: is how ca n we prevent the erosion of the demo cratic

system “from wit hin”? And there both Nazism and fa scism posed the same ty pe of

quandaries.

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