Humanity Or Enmity? Carl Schmitt on International Politics
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International Politics, 2007, 44, (531–551) r 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1384-5748/07 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/ip Humanity or Enmity? Carl Schmitt on International Politics Roland Axtmann Department of Politics and International Relations, School of Humanities, Swansea University, Wales, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK. E-mail: [email protected] This article reviews Schmitt’s analysis of international politics from the period of the Weimar Republic to the early years of the German Federal Republic. It highlights the importance of Schmitt’s opposition to Woodrow Wilson’s policies and ‘liberal’ universalism more generally for his understanding of and engagement with international politics. Confronted with the decline of the state (the Ende der Staatlichkeit), Schmitt develops a concept of the political that is not tied in with the existence of the state. Schmitt embraces the fascist stato totalitario as a model for a ‘qualitatively’ strong state and the distribution of the earth into hegemonic Grossra¨ume as the new nomos. International Politics (2007) 44, 531–551. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800213 Keywords: Carl Schmitt; humanity; enmity; the political; war; state; universalism Introduction: Carl Schmitt in his Time Still not a widely known figure in international relations theory, Carl Schmitt has come to be recognized as one of the most controversial as well as most influential political thinkers of the 20th century.1 Many political and intellectual critics and opponents of democracy in Germany tooktheir arguments from Carl Schmitt. But as Jan-Werner Mu¨ ller (2003) has recently shown, Schmitt has been a towering intellectual presence in post-war European thought as well. Schmitt’s voluminous writings have produced thousands of items of interpretative literature, most of them in German, but also in Italian, Spanish and French — with Anglo-American scholarship on Schmitt catching up at great pace over the last two decades or so (Bendersky, 1983; Caldwell, 1997; Dyzenhaus, 1997; McCormick, 1997; Cristi, 1998; Dyzenhaus, 1998; Mouffe, 1999; Scheuerman, 1999; Balakrishnan, 2000; Mu¨ ller, 2003; Kennedy, 2004). While there is no arguing about Schmitt’s centrality in conservative- nationalist and authoritarian-fascist thought past and present, the degree to which his thinking has also influenced the democratic left, and the question as to the legitimacy of any incorporation of Schmitt’s thought into any ‘left’ Roland Axtmann Carl Schmitt on International Politics 532 theory and politics, are highly controversial. Schmitt has rightly been perceived to be one of the 20th century most profound critics of liberalism, and the liberal notions of democracy and of politics in particular. Since liberalism as an ideology, theory and practice has been the beˆte noir of conservatism and socialism alike since the 19th century and well into the second half of the 20th century, the endeavour of either side to draw on Schmitt’s arguments is understandable. A lively scholarly debate about the validity and merits of Schmitt’s critique of liberalism should therefore be no surprise. What has caused disquiet, consternation and recrimination within the scholarly commu- nity is the fact that Schmitt developed his critique not from a position of dispassionate scholarly disengagement, as an intellectual endeavour of showing up the shortcomings of a particular theory, but as a committed political intellectual who did not only wish to critique liberalism but demolish the political and social system to which it has given rise and bestowed legitimacy — and who did not shy away to consort with the Nazis after 1933. It is the situatedness of Schmitt the man and thinker in a concrete historical time and place, the way in which he gave meaning to ‘his’ world, the political consequences that for him followed from his critique, and the anxious question of those who find much to applaud in this critique as to whether it can be utilized for developing a non-authoritarian alternative to ‘liberal’ society and democracy, that fan the heated debate. How best to deal with the ambiguous legacy of this ‘dangerous mind’ (Mu¨ ller, 2003) exercises both politically engaged intellectuals and scholars. Born in 1888 and died in 1985, Schmitt’s life spanned four different political regimes in Germany, the Wilhelminian Reich, the Weimar Republic, National Socialism and the Federal Republic. In the Weimar Republic he moved within the horizon of political Catholicism and supported the policies of Heinrich Bru¨ ning, the leader of the Catholic Centre party. In the later years of the Weimar Republic, he argued for the parliamentary system to be replaced by a presidential system, advocating the use of presidential discretionary powers in cases of emergency to protect the constitution against its critics. Once the Nazi had come to power, he accommodated himself with the new regime quickly, publishing an infamous article in 1934 under the title ‘The Fu¨ hrer protects the Law’ (Fu¨ hrer, 1934).2 His fall from favour in 1936 brought to an end eventful 3 years in which Schmitt had moved into influential positions within higher education and the legal profession. Arrested in 1945 by the Allies but released without charge, he was not allowed to return to academia, but remained influential among the generation of legal scholars who had been socialized into the profession in the late 1920s and during the Nazi years as well as among a new post-war generation of law, political science and philosophy students, some of whom would achieve high positions within West German society’ in the universities and in the legal profession, including judge in the Constitutional Court (Laak, 2002). International Politics 2007 44 Roland Axtmann Carl Schmitt on International Politics 533 The title Schmitt gave to a collection of his essays in 1940 indicates the concrete historical situations to whose challenges he wanted to face up, ‘Positions and Concepts in the Struggle with Weimar, Geneva, and Versailles’. ‘Weimar’ stood for the new liberal-parliamentary regime whose fundamental problems of constitutional and political order, the problems of sovereignty, legality and legitimacy had not been satisfactorily addressed and whose ambiguous embrace of liberalism had led to a misapprehension of the true character of ‘the political’. ‘Versailles’ signified the defeat in the First World War and the collapse of the Hohenzollern Empire, the ascription of war guilt to the German people and the imposition of reparation payments, the occupation of the Rhineland and revisionism. ‘Geneva’ signified the rise of idealism in international politics and its concomitant moralization, the decisive ultimate step away from the ius publicum Europaeum that had regulated the interaction of states for the last four hundred years or so to a new order whose contours were not yet clearly discernible. The emerg- ing new global constellation as a result of Germany’s defeat in the Second World War became a central concern in Schmitt’s writings after 1945. If we wish to identify the focal point of reference for Schmitt’s thought, then it would be the experience and fate of the ‘vanquished’ of 1918 and 1945 (Willms, 1991). ‘Just War’ or ‘Just Peace’: Schmitt’s Critical Engagement with Wilsonian Universalism My desire is y that America will come into the full light of the day when all know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity. Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states. The readers of this journal are likely to know whose words have just been quoted. The first quotation is taken from President Woodrow Wilson’s Address on Independence Day in 1914. The second quote is a passage from Wilson’s Address of 2 April 1917 in which he recommended the declaration of a state of war between the United States and the Imperial German government. At stake in this war, Wilson proclaimed, was ‘the ultimate peace of the world’, International Politics 2007 44 Roland Axtmann Carl Schmitt on International Politics 534 a world that had to be ‘made safe for democracy’. Clearly, a principle was at stake as well, namely, that ‘the right is more precious than peace’ (in Scott, 1918, 65, 281, 284, 287). Wilson asserted in his Address on the Conditions of Peace on 8 January 1918 that this ‘final war for human liberty’ had its only justification in upholding ‘the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak’. Upon this principle, ‘the structure of international justice’ was founded. According to Wilson’s 14 Points, acting on this principle required the acceptance of the principle of national self-determination, and hence the territorial reconfiguration of Europe (and the colonial world). It also required that a general association of nations ‘be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’ (in Scott, 1918, 354–363). To the extent that Wilson endorsed the notion of human rights, he embraced the idea of an abstract humanity. To the extent that he argued for a ‘league of nations’ whose members would be states ‘great or small’, Wilson accepted, rhetorically, the reality of a pluriverse of sovereign and hence, in legal terms, equal states and thus the reality of a politically differentiated humanity.