A Defensive Democracy

According to Tõnis Saarts, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at Tallinn University, defensive democracy is a rare form of contemporary democracy that prioritizes existential and national security over democratic rights and liberties, but, while doing so, it still adheres to the core principles of democracy. [This] doctorine asserts that in order to preserve the country's very existence and the democratic system itself, it may be necessary to curtail certain democratic freedoms and rights of specific social groups on some occasions. [A] second feature of a defensive democracy is that because the very existence of the country and democratic order is depicted as being under constant threat, the securitization of various policy areas and societal domains gradually becomes a new normality and necessity. In international relations "securitization" is defined as the process in which state actors transform subjects from regular political issues into matters of "security," justifying the extraordinary means to encounter those new threats (Switching into the defensive democracy mode in the Baltics, The Baltic Times 2025 Winter-Spring Edition, p. 26).