Don’t Jump on the Ban-Wagon

Recent attempts to outlaw the DS (Workers Party) raise questions about our current conceptions of democracy, freedom and tolerance



The Czech Supreme Court’s rejection of the government-requested ban on the anti-Roma, far right Workers Party (DS) will doubtless have many ‘liberal’ folk cursing or crying over their fair-trade coffee. However, on closer inspection, supporters of true democracy and freedom may well have reason to cheer what ostensibly seems to be a victory for a fairly reprehensible bunch.

Acting on the advice of the Interior Ministry, headed by well known friend-of-freedom Ivan Langer, the Czech government recently sought to ban the Workers’ Party for violating the constitution in at least four major ways. In the run up to the verdict, The Post reported that Klara Kalibova of Czech NGO ‘Tolerance’ supported a ban despite admitting that the Government presented no serious legal argument. Thankfully, presiding Judge Šimíček didn’t agree, stating that
“The government produced no evidence of the radicalization of the party’s activities with the ultimate goal of seizing power through non-democratic means, or of its violation of the Right to Assembly Act. The proceedings before this court did not show that the Workers’ Party’s activities, as documented by the government, provide reasons to dissolve it.”

Even if Šimíček had upheld the ban, DS Chairman Tomas Vandas had insisted that they would simply form a new party with the same agenda, although under a different name, highlighting the practical difficulties of this approach to dealing with difference in a democracy. Kalibova was undeterred by this and, presumably speaking in the spirit of Tolerance, declared that the fight to ban any such organization would continue, as this is “a battle between right and wrong.”

The ODS Government’s latest attempt to demarcate the acceptable bounds of democratic society and limit the public sphere come against a backdrop that includes the successful banning of the Young Communists (KSM: Komunisticky Svaz Mladeze) in 2008 and talk of trying to ban the main Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM).

Many people, looking back in history, and to its supposed end - when Western liberal market democracy claimed victory over collapsed communism - would cheer these moves. However, it is worth considering what implications banning political parties has for our vision and practice of democracy as well as for our conceptions of politics and freedom in the Czech Republic and beyond.


Widen the lens, narrow the view
Czech Republic is far from being the only country to ban or consider banning political parties, with numerous examples around Europe fuelling the fire of debate on the ethics and efficacy of such moves.

In Germany, there have been repeated attempts by successive governments to ban the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) which is held to represent resurgent neo-nazism and as such violate clause 2 of Article 21 of Germany’s constitution (written by UK and US lawyers and imposed by the allies) which states that

“Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.”

However, no ban has been enforced and in 2003 the Schroeder government suffered a significant humiliation when the constitutional court threw out the case against the NPD because their inner circle had been so comprehensively penetrated by government agents and informants. These agents had also authored several of the key pieces of evidence against the NPD including anti-Semitic texts and the party had, in several instances, been effectively responding to state diktat.

In Belgium, the right-wing, nationalist party the Vlaams Blok was formed in the late seventies, appealing to Flemish concerns about unfair representation and resource distribution and calling for Flemish independence. The Blok grew in popularity, polling progressively higher totals in national and European elections, reaching 11% and 14% respectively, until in 2004 it was banned for “permanently inciting discrimination and racial segregation”. Despite this, a new and similar party, the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) was quickly formed and is, by some measures, the largest in Belgium gaining up to 25% of the vote. The party is kept out of government by a Cordon Sanitaire imposed by mainstream parties, raising the questions of democratic representation. These questions are also reflected in the contradiction between the aforementioned second clause of Article 21 of the German constitution and the first, which reads

“Political parties shall participate in the formation of the political will of the people. They may be freely established.”

In Spain, the banning of pro-independence, left-wing Basque parties drew “concern” from UN special rapporteur on human rights, Martin Scheinin, and followed the 2002 ban on Herri Batasuna, the political wing of ETA. In the UK, while no parties have been banned recently, just last month controversial Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders was prevented from even entering the country and there have been many calls to ostracize Avigdor Lieberman, the right winger who is likely to be Israel’s next foreign minister.


Banning demeans us all
The argument for banning largely follows the line taken by the German constitution, that ‘extremist’ parties threaten the state itself or the nature of democracy within it. In the Czech case, this has been the line taken over the KSM and that has been proposed in the past in relation to the KSCM, largely for their commitment to returning the means of production to public ownership. With regard to the DS, the situation was less clear as, despite their ties to the NPD and other foreign right-wing groups, they were largely brought to court over their anti-Roma stance and overtly xenophobic views. While reprehensible, it is interesting to note that the Czech state felt itself incapable of defending Roma rights and freedoms through normal judicial mechanisms.

When a party is banned for the reasons given above, the government is in effect saying that these views are not admissible to the public sphere: that they are dangerous to the very practice of democracy itself and threaten both the state and the people in it. As Klara Kalibova put it, the DS was dangerous because it was “getting [to] some of the so-called real Czech people”.

Disregarding Kalibova’s de-Czechification or de-personification of those who hold different views to herself, this is reminiscent of the shutting down of the public sphere under Husak’s project of ‘Normalisation’, as is the unwillingness to seriously consider why the KSCM still gets 20% of the vote or why only 25% of young Czechs think life is better now than under Communism.

This reasoning supposes that we, the people, are easily led sheep, incapable of acting as democratic citizens and differentiating between a political plurality and the vicious views of xenophobes and wannabe dictators. It assumes that enough of us actually hold extreme opinions or are all too easily swayed by the weasel words of those who do. Therefore, for our own individual and collective good, we must be protected from these opinions and those who hold them, lest they activate our latent greed, stupidity and prejudice.

This view only gains traction if the demos has become so disenfranchised, disengaged and de-politicised as to see these extreme views as offering a better representation of themselves and their view of people and society than any of the other options on the political table. This is in fact where the true danger lies, as this depoliticisation is exactly one of the unfinished projects of ‘end of history’ neoliberal, post-political governance. Such governance disguises large political decisions behind facades of naturalized economics portrayed as science, managerial - technocratic decision making or otherwise takes decisions out of the contestable realm of politics on the grounds of security. This, combined with the convergence of political parties in many parts of the world around a ‘centre’ that has shifted quite dramatically to the right in the last 30 years, leaves people feeling disconnected and with the feeling that politics is a game played elsewhere, by other people.

Win the argument, don’t ignore it
However, this project is indeed incomplete and by getting engaged, holding our politicians to account for what they promise and demanding that politics should not be reduced to tactical voting for ‘the least bad option’, we can defeat both patronizing control and dangerous extremism.

On practical grounds, we should also oppose the banning of political parties or of the airing of apparently abhorrent views. The philosopher Judith Butler has argued that banning or censoring often has the effect of actually propagating the views that the banning authority was trying to restrict and that the attempt to censor endows them with a power and a platform that they otherwise lacked. The example of Geert Wilders, who until recently was a largely unknown figure in the UK, is a case in point with Wilders becoming a martyr for free speech and his xenophobic opinions being aired on national television.

This is not to deny the potentially destructive and exclusionary power of language, or of particular discourses, which can make people feel like outsiders and make it more likely that they will live in fear or identify themselves as an under-class, with fewer freedoms and opportunities than others. These are the real dangers that are posed by the views of the DS. The question of who has the authority to outlaw certain views and why they do so also becomes pertinent here. It is chillingly ironic to imagine a new control society in which first they came for the communists and we did not stand up, then they came for the fascists and we did not stand up and when they came for us, there was no one or no grounds to stand up for us.

However, rather than banning views or parties, we need to engage ourselves in continually thinking about what our views actually are and asking ourselves why we think what we think and believe what we believe. We need to then take these views into the public, political sphere to discuss them with others who may share some or none of opinions. This is the beginning of reclaiming politics for the people and demanding real representation instead of merely complying with the current consensus of corporate interests that has filled the post-89 political vacuum. This public, political engagement based on private, personal reflection will allow us to win the arguments against proponents of xenophobia, exclusion and anti-democracy, rather than perpetrating these intolerant attitudes in the name of defeating them.

Originally Published in The Prague Post on 16/04/2009