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ABSTRACTMilitant democracy calls for pre-emptive measures against political actors who use democratic institutions to undermine or outright abolish a democratic political system. Born in the context of interwar fascism, militant democracy has recently been revived by political and legal theorists concerned about the rise of authoritarian right-wing populists. A long-standing charge against militant democracy—also articulated with renewed force in our era—is that, as a top-down way to deal with the intolerant, militant democracy is inherently elitist and bears uncomfortable similarities with technocracy (also understood as an intolerant form of governance). But while it is true that militant democracy relies on state institutions to preserve democracy, it by no means excludes citizen engagement: “courts or the people” is a false choice. On the other hand, citizens engaged in militant democracy must take on the difficult task of distinguishing very clearly between democratic essentials under threat and political questions about which citizens might reasonably disagree. While citizen assemblies are not the answer to all of contemporary democracies’ travails, they might be very helpful in clarifying such distinctions for wide audiences.

There is a widespread sense that intermediary institutions which made representative democracy function ever since the nineteenth century—political parties and free media—are presently undergoing profound structural transformations. We partly have trouble judging those transformations—will they destroy or strengthen democracy?—because we lack a set of clear normative standards for intermediary powers. The article suggests such standards: institutions should be accessible, accurate, autonomous, assessable, and accountable. A precondition for these attributes to be realized is financial transparency and the empowerment of citizens other than the owners of concentrated wealth to influence intermediary powers. Accordingly, the article also endorses a scheme to put financing into the hands of citizens themselves via a voucher scheme for both political parties and media.

The article focuses on the fragmented democratic system in Europe. Topics discussed include the challenges faced by the European Union to sustain the economy and resolve the euro crisis, the commitment of postwar leaders in the Western Europe to prevent the recurrence of totalitarianism, and the populism.

This article focuses on the religious ideas in politics. It states that the formation of some liberalized Islam is by self-consciously moderate and democratic Muslim intellectuals should not be seen as a sideshow to the hard-nosed politics of interests. It notes that the story of Christian Democracy yields the political mobilization of the believers does not necessarily result in one-to-one translation of private religious identities into public political identities. The author comments that entering the Democratic arena involves a certain reconstruction of religious identities, largely due to adapt to an inherently pluralist arena.

This essay informs that the European Union (EU) is in crisis. The crisis was provoked by this past spring's rejection of the European constitution by France and the Netherlands, two of the EU's original members. It employs fewer civil servants than a medium-sized European city; it cannot enforce its decisions and depends on member states to translate them into national law; and its budget is well below two percent of European GDP. Most importantly, its institutions are subject to numerous checks and balances that constrain EU institutions in a way that many citizens accept as the benchmark for legitimacy in their own countries. Moreover, it is not obvious that such non-democratic institutions as expert committees and regulatory agencies, which are viewed as legitimate elements of national administration, have comparable legitimacy at a supranational level. Without a shared political culture, a basic sense of what political institutions should generally accomplish, and, above all, a sense of trust, technocratic arrangements can strike citizens as alien impositions, even if they are very effective and subject to checks and balances.

This article analyses the reception of John Rawls's thought by Otfried Höffe, Jürgen Habermas and other political theorists on the German liberal left. It argues that, ironically, as Rawls's theory has become more historically self-conscious and sociologically oriented since A Theory of Justice, Habermas, while denying any fundamental difference between him and Rawls in this `neo-Kantian family quarrel', has moved in the opposite direction. One might even say that there has been some mid-Atlantic convergence in political theory. Nevertheless, there remain peculiarities of German political thought, in particular its more sociological bent, a (positive or negative) fixation on the state, and the persistently felt need finally to reconcile a perceived conflict between liberalism and democracy.

The article discusses the concept of populism which is an anti-pluralist form of politics that is contrary to conventional wisdom. Topics discussed include the controversy over U.S. State Department official Francis Fukuyama's article "The End of History?," a comparison between democracy and populism, populists' creation of their own middle class, a brief history of populism and the threat if populists against liberal elites and racial minorities.