Rechtsstatelijke cultuur en weerbare rechtsstaat

Constitutional culture and militant constitutionalism Recent years have shown a shift in thinking about the functioning, stability and resilience of the democratic legal order, in terms of both the structural and cultural pre-conditions of its existence. Reports and articles on this topic, however, show three deficits. First, ‘militant democracy’ and ‘militant constitutionalism’ are not clearly distinguished from each other. Second, the concept of militant constitutionalism is often given a very minimalist or ‘narrow’ interpretation: militant constitutionalism as a safeguard only against intentional or deliberately pursued horizontal forms of constitutional regress. A final deficiency concerns the question of the cultural pre-conditions for a stable democratic legal order. What are these cultural pre-conditions, and can a democratic constitutional state guarantee these conditions of existence? These questions have not been clearly answered in recent literature. This article addresses these three deficits in order to contribute to increasing our knowledge about the phenomenon of militant constitutionalism.