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Palgrave Macmillan

Historical Perspectives on Democracies and their Adversaries

  • Book
  • © 2019

Overview

  • Explores how democratic regimes have dealt with anti-democratic forces in society, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century
  • Takes a historical rather than a theoretical approach to show how the state and oppositional groups have interacted across a wide range of case studies
  • Argues that these threats to democracy and the actions taken against anti-democratic groups have elicited new definitions of democracy within society

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Political History (PSPH)

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Introduction

  2. Conclusions

Keywords

About this book

This book historicizes the debate over how democratic regimes deal with anti-democratic groupings in society. Democracies across the world increasingly find themselves under threat from enemies, ranging from terrorists to parties and movements that undermine democratic institutions from within. This compilation of essays provides the first historical exploration of how democracies have dealt with such anti-democratic forces in their midst and how this impacted upon what democracy meant to all involved. From its inception in the nineteenth century, modern democratic politics has included fundamental debates over whether it is undemocratic and dangerous to ban parties with anti-democratic objectives and whether democracies should defend themselves, if necessary with violence, against perceived anti-democratic forces. This volume shows that implicit conceptions of democracy and democratic repertoires become explicit, fluid, and contested throughout these confrontations, not only withindemocratic parties, but also among their adversaries. Both sides have, at times, used force or limited the expression of ideas, thus blurring the lines between who is democratic and who is not.  

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Joost Augusteijn

  • Institute of History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Constant Hijzen

  • Independent Researcher, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Mark Leon de Vries

About the editors

Joost Augusteijn is Senior Lecturer at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He is the author of Patrick Pearse: The Making of a Revolutionary (2010) and the editor of several volumes.

Constant Hijzen is Assistant Professor of Intelligence Studies and Head of the Intelligence and Security research group at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

Mark Leon de Vries completed a PhD in 2015 at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and now works in online professional education.


Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Historical Perspectives on Democracies and their Adversaries

  • Editors: Joost Augusteijn, Constant Hijzen, Mark Leon de Vries

  • Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Political History

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20123-4

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: History, History (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-20122-7Published: 24 August 2019

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-20125-8Published: 25 August 2020

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-20123-4Published: 07 August 2019

  • Series ISSN: 2946-5176

  • Series E-ISSN: 2946-5184

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIII, 297

  • Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Modern History, World History, Global and Transnational History, Political History, Social History

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