Book Review: Joanna Rak, Roman Bäcker (Eds.), Neo-militant Democracies in Post-communist Member States of the European Union, Routledge, London and New York 2022, pp. 268

Karolina Owczarek, University of Adam Mickiewicz (Poland)
2022 Polish Political Science Yearbook  
Neo-militant Democracies in the Post-Communist Member States of the European Union, edited by Joanna Rak and Roman Bäcker, is a collection of texts that can help us understand the differences between neo-and quasi-militant democracies. This volume consists of three parts divided into thirteen chapters. The book opens with an introduction that outlines the common methodology for all chapters and explains the most relevant concepts and the differences between them. The next ten chapters are a
more » ... iled analysis of all post-communist member states of the European Union (EU). The last two chapters are devoted to the conclusions drawn by the editors of this publication regarding the victories and failures of quasi-militant democracies, as well as a comparative constitutional law perspective to the analysis of neo-militant democracies in Europe by Agnieszka Bień-Kacała. This book considerably expands the knowledge of the crisis-driven present countries and reveals their political systems. The authors present reflections on the state of democracies in the analysed countries and the directions they are heading, but they also leave room for future researchers to extend their study after the end of the coronavirus pandemic (cf. Rezmer-Płotka, 2020b). Militant democracy is a concept that took shape in the 1930s when Karl Loewenstein (1937a, p. 242) compared democracy to a "Trojan horse by means of which the enemy enters a city". Nevertheless, today's neo-militant democracies differ from Nazi Germany (Loewenstein, 1937b) , as the authors point out in the introductory chapter. As the authors write, the measures used in earlier years would not have shown such effectiveness due to technological developments, among other things (Rak, 2021) . Thus, the means of (neo-) militant democracies define the distinction between Loewenstein's militant democracy and its contemporary variant (p. 4) (see also: Rezmer-Płotka, 2020a; Rak & Bäcker, 2019) . It is also important to mention that the authors use the term neo-militant democracy to distinguish between restrictions imposed before and during World War II and the present
doi:10.15804/ppsy202226 fatcat:ikhdjzmtanaf3bhsyup62twu6e