Democrația militantă și „lecția Weimarului” în România: aspecte juridice și politice
Militant democracy and the ‘Lesson of Weimar’ in Romania: legal and political elements

Summary/Abstract: The article places Romania’s recent experiences with ‘militant democracy’ in the conceptual and contextual framework of comparative law and comparative legal history. A first part of the argument analyses the paradigmatic core of militant democracy, the party ban, regarded as the presumptive ‘lesson of Weimar’. Emphasis is placed on interwar German historical experiences and German post-war practices under the Basic Law. The concept as such of militant democracy as well as the specific constitutional instruments deriving from it are a German ‘patent.’ A second part of the study discusses a conceptual offshoot of militant democracy, ‘individual militant democracy.’ This was the type of militancy practiced by the Romanian Constitutional Court, albeit under false pretences. A third part discusses militant democracy in the EU framework and the EU as a supranational militancy layer, engaging with the interesting taxonomy proposed by Danish-British scholar Signe Rehling Larsen. The underlying argument of this article is that militant democracy is an instrument that needs to be handled with extreme care. History proves that it does not work well, if at all. The constitutionally (liberal-democratically) recognizable causes of radical discontent should be addressed primarily or at least in conjunction with carefully targeted, procedurally and substantively disciplined militancy.

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