ABSTRACT
How to deal with extremists has been one of the main problems of mass democracies, both historically, as many democracies had to cope with the emergence of totalitarian parties and movements, and recently as new forms of political radicalism have emerged to challenge the stability of both old and new democratic regimes. Constitutional lawyers and political theorists have dealt variously with the difficult dilemma of the ‘tolerance for the intolerant’ raised by the presence of radical political associations or parties in many democracies. In general, they have taken an intermediary position between the two poles of ‘no freedom for the enemies of freedom’ and ‘real freedom is freedom to dissent’ (e.g. Agnoli and Brueckner 1967; Lippincott 1965). As an international law scholar put it: ‘to strike a reasonable balance between safeguarding the substance of the rights enunciated to the greatest extent possible, on the one hand, and forestalling any abuses, on the other, has become one of the most delicate issues in a liberal state’ (Tomuschat 1992: 33).
