The conclusion of Invisible Fatherland reviews the book’s findings with a view to the rise of Nazism and the concept of militant democracy. Juxtaposing the republic’s constitutional patriotism with Nazi ideology, the author highlights the clash between two diametrically opposed “ways of life.” While Nazism was a violent political order that dehumanized marginalized groups, Weimar democracy embraced plural and hybrid identifications. Although the republic ultimately fell to the Nazi threat, the study argues that its constitutional patriotism remains a positive legacy of Western-style democracy. By reframing the narrative, Invisible Fatherland provides a forward-looking, “glass-half-full” perspective on one of history’s most misunderstood democratic experiments

This chapter focuses on the Democrat Party’s final years in power (1958–60), which followed a debt restructuring agreement with creditors. During these years, Democrat Party leaders attempted to implement unpopular economic policies while still holding on to power. Their main tactic was to create the “Homeland Front,” a mass political organization. Though many people joined willingly, the Democrat-led government relied on high-pressure tactics and propaganda to ensure participation. It also increased pressure on its opposition through both legislation and extralegal actions such as mobilizing mobs to attack opposition leaders. These methods were, I argue, part of a more general shift toward illiberal, less democratic norms of governance among American Cold War allies in the late 1950s. By 1960, however, the Democrat Party’s authoritarian actions had alienated important domestic groups, including academics, bureaucrats, and military officers, which led to its removal from power. Rather than explaining the origins of the May 1960 coup, this chapter reveals how hollowed out the democratic political order had become by the time military officers finally launched their operation.

What does it mean “to tolerate” in a post-Christian and post-secular state? This chapter argues that antecedents of contemporary conflicts over diversity in Europe can be found in early modernity, specifically in early modern practices of toleration, which impacted on both the belonging and the visibility of minorities. New forms of intolerance pertain to the position of religious, ethnoreligious, and sexual minorities in public life, echoing the concerns of the public visibility of minorities inhering in historical Christendom. The political articulation of certain groups as “other” to “the nation” is increasingly mediated through constitutional repertoires, such as constitutional revision and amendments, developments in the hermeneutics of constitutional concepts, or pseudo-constitutional behaviour. This chapter introduces the main themes: tolerance and intolerance, constitutionalism, secularisation, and their significance across the liberal–illiberal divide.

This concluding chapter reflects on the phenomenon of constitutional intolerance, its many faces, its entanglement in histories of toleration, and its implications for discourses on constitutionalism, illiberalism, and secularisation. It argues that the default lines have shifted from secularisation to fundamental questions about the future of constitutional democracy in Europe, considering the fundamental aspects of constitutional intolerance: the articulation of otherness vis-à-vis the political community and the sanctioning of this othering in public space. The conclusion also considers the rise of “cynical democracy” in the instrumental use of constitutional repertoires to further partisan interests, as well as the right wing tendency towards the overrepresentation of formal-procedural legalism, an attachment of legitimacy to legality, and a weakening of the capacity for normative reflection in the highest courts.

This chapter focuses on the role of the family in European culture wars. It analyses the ideological usage of the family by illiberal actors in Poland and Hungary and the EU’s reaction to this kind of illiberal erosion. The chapter argues that recent developments seem to hold potential to increase the constitutional relevance of the family in the EU in ways that could hardly be predicted, by beginning to attract the (LGBTQ) family in the controversial area of the EU’s common values. The chapter claims that looking at the role of family in similar European culture wars and how it reflects on the constitutional relevance of the family in EU law is essential for understanding the contemporary movement.

The radical Right has turned to the Left’s iconic hero Antonio Gramsci for inspiration and guidance on how to launch a counter-hegemonic struggle against liberal cultural and political domination. Gramsci provides a powerful way to understand the globalisation of the Right, and many of Gramsci’s ideas, particularly cultural hegemony, historic blocs, and counter-hegemonic movements have been self-consciously and strategically appropriated by the Right. What radical Right intellectuals call ‘metapolitics’ provides them with a global sociological, ideological, and political framing, as well as a political economy with capitalism and class at its centre. It provides a strategic direction that seeks to mobilise social forces produced and marginalised by liberalism and globalisation by bringing them to self-consciousness, turning them from classes in themselves to politically aware and active classes for themselves. The global Right is not ideologically unified, nor does it have centralised controlling institutions. Instead, their counter-hegemonic ideologies enable diverse actors and agendas to find common cause despite their differences.

The chapter examines how the radical Right’s counter-hegemonic struggle relates to other struggles for power in contemporary world politics and attacks on the so-called liberal international order (LIO). Drawing on recent literature on struggles for recognition, we show how the radical Right has built powerful transversal, global alliances based on a logic and discourse of difference and diversity rather than claims to Western superiority. We illustrate this through an analysis of an emerging global alliance in defence of the ‘natural family’. The radical Right’s civilisationalism and calls for multipolarity also enable complex, strategic convergences with illiberal states such as China and Russia, as well as states and people in the Global South. The multi-polar, civilisational world order envisioned by the radical Right is not anti-hierarchical and inclusive, but legitimises new differences and new forms of exclusion through its claims to cultural diversity. It is a more sovereigntist vision of the world in which exclusionary illiberal forces would be able to operate with fewer international constraints.

Increasingly, illiberal and authoritarian governments are seizing upon the concept of constitutional identity in order to justify and vindicate their political projects in the face of external criticism. This contribution raises questions about what these invocations tell us about the normative value of constitutional identity. The authors argue that, in the European context of supranational legal integration, constitutional identity should not be seen as an unconditional source of value. Invocations of constitutional identity only deserve recognition to the extent that they serve the ideals of constitutionalism. Where constitutional identity is invoked as a normative argument, the normative expectation of constitutionalism is implied – claims from constitutional identity that stand at odds with the ideals of constitutionalism, in fact, invoke the former ironically and frivolously. Exemplary cases in which constitutional identity is invoked to justify forms of ‘illiberal’ constitutionalism – notably the Polish and Hungarian cases – should be considered abuses of the concept as they do not live up to the normative expectations which they evoke.

Zakat returned to Middle Eastern political discourse in the 1930s, through modern Islamism. It became one of two concrete initiatives distinguishing an Islamic modern economy from economies ostensibly corrupted by secularists and colonialists. The other was Islamic finance. In both cases, the focus was more on the symbolism of Islamizing a secularized sphere than on solving actual economic problems. Islamism tacitly stripped zakat of all but one of its original functions: poverty alleviation. Sidelining zakat’s role in public finance and the protection of property rights, it frittered away golden opportunities to draw from Islam’s rich history universal lessons for economic progress and rule of law. Focusing on the functions that made zakat a pillar of Islam would have initiated a dialogue with secularists inclined to dismiss Islam as a source of backwardness. A similar scenario has played out in relation to Islamic finance. Nowhere has a categorical ban on interest, which is absent from the Quran anyway, been enforced. In any case, it is unfeasible. In making Islamic finance seem interest-free through euphemisms and accounting tricks, Islamism reduces economic transparency and institutionalizes dishonesty. Weakening rule of law, it also compounds mistrust.

This chapter explains the logic behind the choice of institutions that the book highlights. A liberal order is impossible without the capacity to form organizations able to act on behalf of private constituencies. Apart from providing shared goods, private organizations restrain entities capable of repression, including the state. Hence, a section of the book is devoted to exploring the political effects of Islamic and modern waqfs. Whereas the former played key roles in keeping civil society anemic, the latter is now invigorating civic life. Religious repression has been ubiquitous in the Middle East. In inducing preference and knowledge falsification in broad domains, it conceals doubts about policies promoted in the name of religion. In the process, it impoverishes and distorts public discourse. For these reasons alone, religious freedoms are also essential to liberal governance. Economic freedoms are pivotal because they shape political incentives and capacities. Private property rights, the freedom to invest, and predictable taxation are among the determinants of private political capacities. So are characteristics of the available forms of economic organization. Institutions that limit the scale, longevity, and complexity of Middle Eastern enterprises have reduced the political reach of private economic actors.

Islam’s historical institutional complex has delayed a liberal order in the Middle East, not blocked it permanently. The institutions primarily responsible for the region’s historical trajectory are either gone or, under new conditions, they no longer inhibit liberalization. The infrastructure for an effective civil society is in place. Apart from private associations, it includes perpetual enterprises. And no absolute barrier exists to reinterpreting illiberal readings of Islam. By and large, the institutions that sustain the region’s repressive regimes are mutually supporting. For example, religious illiberalism facilitates associational repression, and vice versa. In any one context, the interlinkages among various institutions may work against liberalization, because change depends on appropriate movements in complementary institutions. The half-full part of this glass is that altering a single institution can destabilize others, possibly unleashing a cascade of mutually reinforcing reforms. Yet there is probably no quick fix to the prevailing illiberalism. Many patterns must change for the Middle East to reach advanced standards of liberty. Although specific changes can stimulate one another, each involves adjustments to interpersonal norms, organizational rules, and state laws. Some would upset longstanding status rankings and hierarchies. Learning civic skills requires communal practice. Vested interests are already organized.