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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
Over the course of the last three years, British Government counter-terrorism policy has shifted significantly to embrace “counter-extremism.” This is justified not only in terms of addressing the underlying causes of terrorism, but also in its own right as addressing the “harm” of extremism. These proposals raise fundamental questions about the limits of religious and other civil liberties. However, the problem of extremism is not new. The German public intellectual and constitutional lawyer Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde reflected extensively on the same problem in the context of German responses to left-wing radicalism in the mid-1970s. His work touched on both concrete legal problems as well as fundamental philosophical assumptions about the nature, characteristics, and limits of the liberal democratic constitutional state. In this article, I seek to retrieve his ideas and arguments for the current British context. I argue that the current discourse of extremism and fundamental British values risks being used as a vehicle for promoting a “progressive” public ideology of individual self-creation. This fails to take moral and religious diversity seriously, and its implementation betrays the foundations of the liberal democratic constitution. It provides striking confirmation of Böckenförde's thesis that the liberal state is perennially prone to a totalitarian tendency to seek to generate its own distinctive ethical community. As Böckenförde recognized, what is needed instead is the recovery of a thin common morality of civic loyalty as shown pre-eminently in obedience to law.
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3 See generally Caldwell, Christopher, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (2010); Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe (2017).Google Scholar
4 See generally Khan, Sara, The Battle for British Islam: Reclaiming Muslim Identity from Extremism (2016).Google Scholar
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(a) [T]he use or threat of serious violence against a person, serious damage to property, endangering another's life, causing serious risk to the health or safety of the public, or interfering with or seriously disrupting an electronic system, which (b) is designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public, and which (c) is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.Google Scholar
Terrorism Act 2000, c. 11, § 1 (UK).Google Scholar
6 The other strands are labeled “Pursue,” “Protect,” and “Prepare.” For further background, see the helpful Briefing Paper by Joanna Dawson & Samantha Godec, Counter-Extremism Policy: An Overview (House of Commons Library, no. 7238, Feb. 5, 2016).Google Scholar
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139 The contrast here is between something like a Rawlsian “thin theory of the good” for public bodies and a fuller conception implicit in, say, devotion to a religious community. Concerns ab out the tendencies to impose “equality and human rights values” simplistically on faith-based welfare organizations are discussed in Julian Rivers, The Law of Organized Religions: Between Establishment and Secularism 276–88 (2010).Google Scholar
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