THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL

In March 1927, Carl Schmitt penned The Concept of the Political in a stream of consciousness, finishing it in just under four weeks. Schmitt noted his relief when his wife Duska Todorovic, after an early reading, expressed ‘enthusiastic endorsement'.^[270] The short tract, first published in the prized journal Archiv für Sozialswissenschaften und Sozialpolitik, was a response to a number of press­ing issues in the political landscape of Weimar Germany.

From the outset, in this work, Schmitt's political thought on the state is concerned with the international in two distinct, yet interrelated ways. On one hand, Schmitt's political theory engages directly with the essence of modern global politics and its capacity for transnational orders. On the other, Schmitt constructs the state as just one historically contingent political form in which ‘the political', the relation of man to a potential public enemy, can nestle. Any state's external public enmity requires another political unity against which to direct its antagonism. As long as ‘there will be a state on earth', writes Schmitt, ‘there will be a multiplicity of states'. The political world is ‘a pluriverse, not a universe'.^[272] In Schmitt's telling, any viable international order ultimately ought to stabilise the eternal antagonism inherent in the political within spatially contingent zones of influence.

After reading Schmitt's theories on international order, one of Hans Kelsen's more prominent students, Josef L.

If internationalists like Wehberg and Kunz advocated international cooper­ation, they based their proposals on the conviction that humans share univer­sal values (however thin they may be) on which collective institutions can be erected. Schmitt's raison d’etat fought hard against such assumptions and the political projects they produced, and it was this, more than his direct involve­ment in the Nazi party, which caused internationalists to impute political ambitions to Schmitt. Schmitt became a card-carrying member of the NSDAP only in May 1933, months after Hitler had become chancellor. Public law, Schmitt's bread-and-butter discipline, was, however, not important enough to be given a representative place in the higher echelons of Nazi bureaucracy. And even if it had been, Schmitt was probably an unlikely candidate. His resolutely statist convictions were at odds with the totalitarian state modelled by the Nazis; and Schmitt's insistence well after Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union on the legal validity of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had agreed a spatial division of Eastern Europe, would not win Schmitt favours with party members, either.^[277] However, some of Schmitt's writing, his anti-Semitism in particular, gelled with the right wing sabre-rattling against Weimar's liberal democracy and its burdensome international obligations, the so-called Versailler Diktat.

In Paul Kahn's reading, which perhaps comes closest to Schmitt's, liberalism constitutes a sophisticated pre-political abstraction that ultimately derives the validity of laws from reason alone. Kahn posits this reason-based abstraction against what in philosophical terms may be called a phenomeno­logical one - one that is based, for instance, on most things spatially and temporally grounded that can be experienced. In this way, then, as Schmitt and Kahn would agree, the birth defect of liberal theories of law lies in their desiring generalities to systematise, compare, and structure the world without having experienced it.^[278] For Schmitt, sovereignty is not an abstract category but something to be experienced, for instance, during the theatrical explosion of violence in a civil war. This sits uneasily with liberal theories that privilege reason.

For Schmitt, everything that did not measure up to these high standards of neutrality looked political or at least suspicious. In early 1936, Schmitt alleged in a short article under the confident title The Historic Situation of German Jurisprudence for the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, Germany's leading law review, that liberal state-theory masqueraded its own universalist aspirations as ‘abstract generality'.^[279] Any critique of their hidden agenda was immediately disqualified as irrational or political. Liberals believed, continued Schmitt, that only they could truthfully lay claim to humanity's absolute values (Menschheitswerte) and to rationality. Schmitt elaborated this point further in a slightly more accusatory tone:

They posited themselves as purely juridical, purely scientific and ultimately as solely ‘pure'. In so doing they disqualified as unscientific and ‘impure' every non-liberal, particularly every national jurisprudence.^[280]

What if the last obstacle towards the achievement of what liberal jurists claimed as universal Menschheitswerte was man himself, noted Schmitt smugly.

Schmitt looked at the international through antagonistic relationships. This stemmed from his anthropological understanding of the nature of man. The most dominant property of man, contended Schmitt, lies in his aggressiveness. Public law, which regulates the relationship of a citizen with the state, has to be seen solely in this light. This view is totally at odds with contemporary approaches like global constitutionalism, global administrative law, and international public law. Yet, even proponents of such, arguably more progressive, approaches do not overlook the role conflict plays in societies. Historically speaking, one could even claim that the emergence of the individual as a state subject and a bearer of natural rights took hints from raison d’etat theorists. Statists had long argued that the principle of absolute sovereignty was hospitable for the emergence of contractual relations between states - a state of nature par excellence. Bringing this international principle back to the level of the individual within a singular state prompted much of the natural law thinking amongst legists in post-Renaissance Europe.

What truly distinguished all these thinkers and approaches from Schmitt was that, for the latter, antagonism was central. It was not a footnote to social life, or a side effect that could be treated using robust mechanisms of peaceful resolution or arbitration. Schmitt went so far as to say that the state's ability to wage war against another state constituted the most important point for thinking about international order. If in his work Schmitt considered other mundane human concerns like friendship, cooperation, or for that matter even understanding, it was mainly in order to increase a state's fighting capacity. In the following, we survey some of these ideas from Schmitt's work, making an excursus into some of the most potent twentieth-century concepts of political action - both on an individual and on state level - as well as tapping into a long-standing tradition in the history of political thought.

Schmitt's Concept of the Political attracted considerable controversy. Just a few years after its first publication in 1927, it had been debated in a wide range of domestic and international academic journals, from political science and public law, to history, religion, philosophy, and even theoretical economy. It is thus not surprising that Schmitt's thought influenced law-makers in Germany and public policy thinking abroad, both at the time and since. The friend­enemy distinction Schmitt lionised has gone mainstream. In an editorial published shortly after the September 11 attacks, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, the political theorist Georgio Agamben swiftly linked George W. Bush's reaction (‘you are either with us or against us') to a wider Schmittian undercurrent in US politics.^[282]

For Schmitt, a single dualism explains the essence of politics. He famously writes: ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.'^[283] Schmitt derived this dualism from a number of straightforward anthropological assumptions. Humans have always organised themselves in collectivities. In these collectiv­ities they need a space to validate and affirm their existence. Ultimately, they can only do so when facing the actual possibility of killing and dying for their collectivities. Schmitt is not inclined to justify these assumptions any further.^[284] In Schmitt's understanding, they are ‘self-evident' social facts deeply rooted in human nature. Hans Morgenthau agreed with Schmitt on this point, and ventured to develop this thought further, most prominently in his work On the Derivation of Politics from the Essence of Man, which in time turned into a surprisingly durable chipboard in international relations theory.^[285]

However, Herbert Marcuse, among others, was not convinced. In 1934, Marcuse elaborated his qualms at length in an essay for Max Horkheimer's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, by then being printed from exile in Paris.

Rather, antagonism and violence, as Schmitt elaborated, were seinsgemäße (existential) facts.^[288] But if this was the case, Marcuse reasoned, philosophical existentialism, in its new political avatar, had just jumped into the conceptual justification-gap to legitimise and validate violence.^[289] Similarly, Hannah Arendt, when first encountering Schmitt's existential explanation for killing and dying, intuitively put a big question mark next to Schmitt's remarks.^[290] Schmitt trumpeted that his definition of the political was ‘neither war­endorsing nor militaristic, neither imperialistic nor pacifistic'.^[291] ‘It is barbaric', Arendt scribbled into her copy.^[292] But Arendt and Marcuse's bewilderment about Schmitt's thesis would hardly have triggered a response. In Schmitt's view, he did not bear the burden of proof for describing reality. If anyone wanted to alter it by striving towards a political ideal, the burden of proof was on them.

In any case, Schmitt claimed that, in a utilitarian sense, his antagonistic concept of enmity was far more humane than mainstream ‘ethical-moral' calls to arms which, when challenged, necessarily conjured up the image of an absolute enemy to be ‘destroyed and eradicated'.^[293] His was not a philosophy of indiscriminate slaughter and dehumanising enmity. Internationalists were just misguided, Schmitt claimed, when they thought that war could be outlawed through international law. Foremost amongst such activist historians was the director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a pacifist with the unfortunate name James T. Shotwell. On i March 1927, during the inaugural speech for the Carnegie chair at Berlin's recently established Hochschule für Politik, Shotwell showcased the results of a major research project on the consequences of the First World War and feverishly anticipated what he called a ‘turning point in the history of the world'.^[294]

Working together with a number of prominent historians, Shotwell had reached the conclusion that the social and economic effects of the First World War had cut far deeper than anything previously known to mankind. From time immemorial up until roughly the age of enlightenment, people's lives had chiefly been ordered by repetition in accordance with the ‘routine of nature', for instance the imperative to ‘sow and reap'. Then industrialisation hit with its ‘conquest' of time and space.^[295] The routine of nature suddenly decreased in importance. Mankind moved from a static-repetitive world to one of change and dynamism, which ushered in ‘speedy shipment of... products', lessened travel times, and promoted science - in short, the ‘Industrial Revolution' turned the world upside down.^[296]

For Shotwell, this mighty transformation required new political forms, and a new ‘law of the world community'.^[297] This involved rethinking the concept of war. In pre-modern times, European states had waged wars within fixed limits. Wars were ‘controllable' and ‘a legitimate exercise of sovereignty, the final argument, the ultima ratio of governments', with a well-defined place in political theory.^[298] But in the modern age war had lost its raison d'etre. The world had moved so closely together in economic, social, and cultural terms that the ‘losses inflicted upon an enemy' quite frequently ‘turned out to be one's own'. Through technological advances in war machinery, Shotwell proclaimed, the ‘[v]ictor and victim may suffer a common disaster'. For these reasons any aggressive war fought for the sake of national policy should be criminalised.^[299]

Rather unexpectedly, such ideas crystallised in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, popularly known as the Pact of Paris. Article I of the Pact provided that all signatories ‘condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies' and ‘renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another'.^[300] Schmitt was furious that Germany had joined the Pact, which, to him, was to Germany's political disadvantage. In a lecture given a couple of years later, on the same premises of the Hochschule für Politik, Schmitt complained that ‘with this kind of jurisprudence, it has become impossible to know what war is'.^[301]

Schmitt argued that, while the outlawing of war was the declared aim of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the participating states had accomplished precisely the opposite. Violence in retaliation against a pact-breaking country had just been legitimised as police action for the infringement of a transnational contract.^[302] And this situation, Schmitt worried, might quickly descend into an endless

war, in which liberal powers would portray lawbreaking countries (almost in theological terms) as absolute enemies of humanity that had to be eradicated from the face of the earth.^[303]

Even decades later, Schmitt noted in his diary how ‘fatal' Shotwell's lecture had been for Germany's destiny.^[304] If one were to look for a precedent, according to Schmitt, the lecture was as devastating as Schelling's Berlin seminar of 1841 (in which an old Schelling had attempted to root out the zealous urge to action that Hegel had sparked in the hearts of some of his student followers).^[305] By endorsing the abolition of wars of aggression, Shotwell

was, for Schmitt, trying to set in stone Germany's territorial disadvantage after the First World War. The whole outlawry movement, sniffed Schmitt, was a power-political move of the victors to preserve the status quo and stifle the legitimate territorial ambitions of up-and-coming nations, Germany in par­ticular. For Schmitt, the real question that internationalists like Shotwell failed to answer was the following: ‘Just because war has ceased to be calcul­able, has it ceased to be?'^[306]

A ‘Realpolitik of peace', as Shotwell envisaged it, Schmitt wrote disdain­fully, with its holy trinity of Locarno, the League of Nations, and the Permanent Court of International Justice, was but a sleight of hand to distract from the central place of enmity in politics.^[307] Even more critically, Shotwell had confused technological progress in the ‘dynamic age' with some form of collective moral advancement. As Schmitt remarked, a man who replaces his postilion with an imported motorcycle does not necessarily turn into a flag­swinging pacifist.^[308] Technological progress had nothing to do with either moral outlook or ethical behaviour.

As mentioned earlier, Schmitt takes the readiness of a polity to engage in an armed conflict against another polity as the starting point for public law. Both domestic public law and international law collapse and remain trapped in Schmitt's core thesis. They can only be understood, interpreted and practised in the dim light of the possibility of armed conflict. If Schmitt's concept of the political were to be pitted against the state, Schmitt's money is on the former.^[309] In Schmitt's reading, the state, understood in its conventional form as a political unity of a people, provides one convenient shell in which the political can house itself but, if need be, the institutional shell can always be swapped with another organisational form that fares better at institutionalising enmity. Schmitt thus flipped the conventional relationship between the state and politics upside down, and challenged much of the inherited knowledge of state theorists; a truly Copernican stroke.

The most seminal move of the Concept of the Political remains its defin­ition of the political as the most intense human relationship. In slightly more technical language, Schmitt views the political as modal or phenomenal. The intensity of that relationship results from the fact that a potential combative encounter allows for legitimate killing. Recent scholarship has highlighted Schmitt's intellectual debt to Morgenthau, who, in his doctoral dissertation Die Internationale Rechtspflege: Ihr Wesen und ihre Grenzen, criticised the clear conceptual boundaries that Schmitt had drawn in the first edition of Der Begriff des Politischen between the economic, moral, and political Lebenswelten. Morgenthau argued that the division into detached fields did not serve Schmitt's argument well, and was unnecessary. Therefore, according to Morgenthau, it made much more sense to brand any conflict as ‘political' if and when the two former opponents or competitors were willing to slip out of their corporate uniforms to engage in the act of killing. Any conflict could thus transform into a political one. Politics was a question of intensity, not a wholly different sphere. Schmitt quietly adopted these insights in his 1932 edition.^[310]

Schmitt further emphasises that the friend and the enemy concept ‘are to be understood in their concrete and existential sense, not as metaphors'.^[311] From a constructivist point of view, the enemy is more important to Schmitt than the friend.^[312] This is evident from the extensive space Schmitt devotes to the enemy in his writings. Friendship plays a marginal role and Schmitt's under­standing of it remains limited. When he does evoke the concept, it is usually in the context of a group's homogeneity, or some other form of close-knit association and togetherness, for instance a Volk (a people).^[313] The concept of the enemy is defined far more exhaustively. The enemy is not necessarily an outsider. In a state of civil war, the enemy could also come to be another faction, a ‘domestic' or ‘internal' enemy, or just any group rebelling against the polity.^[314]

One might ask, why exactly does the concept of the state depend on the concept of the political? According to Schmitt, the friend-enemy distinction is an ontic dictum, whereas the state is only one among several possible institutional forms of an eternal friend-enemy relationship. This does not downgrade the role of the state. On the contrary, Schmitt celebrates the state as a huge civilisational achievement. In the modern age, he argues, the state can lay claim to two important functions: as a polity, on the inside it over­comes deadly conflict and shields its people from it, on the outside, it civilises this conflict.^[315] In essence, the state succeeds in resolving a political crisis by producing political unity and exercising effective leadership over a homoge­neous people. The true political, however, is confined to the state's relation­ship with other states. In this international arena, the state may not be able to directly overcome conflicts in the same way as through the production of internal cohesion, but it can channel antagonism into a civil Gestalt.

According to Schmitt, the state constitutes post-enlightenment man's most mature political form for the exercise of violence. Even against the back­ground of Germany's distinctive statist tradition, Schmitt's emphasis on the state is noteworthy. The state may even have been the single most important reason for the Nazi party's scepticism of Schmitt. Their emphasis on the people's movement (Volksbewegung) did not correspond well with Schmitt's more statist approach. After a number of heavy attacks in Das Schwarze Korps, the Sicherheitsdienst der Schutzstaffel (secret police) sourced expert opinions to curtail Schmitt's in fluence on Hitler's cabinet through Hans Frank, a minister. On 17 December 1936, in a secret evaluation of Schmitt's continued political suitability as Preußischer Staatsrat, once a powerful position but under Nazi rule a ceremonial post, a prominent public law professor, Felix Genzmer, denounced Schmitt as an opportunist whose state theory was too Catholic, too statist, and, to convince even the last spook in the Sicherheitsdienst der Schutzstaffel, considerably tainted by Jewish thinkers. It was, Genzmer concluded his scorching report, ‘astounding to the whole academic community' how a man of dubious reputation like Carl Schmitt had ‘acquired party membership' and even the ‘respected title of Preußischer Staatsrat'.^[316] About a week later, Hermann Goring, the then Minister President of Prussia, had to personally intervene to silence the attacks.^[317]

Schmitt's concept of the state is narrow. It is not exactly what Max Weber would have called an ‘ideal type'. As a classificatory category, Schmitt's concept of the state operates chiefly as a polemical concept. For Schmitt polemic does not equal bad writing. It is not an aesthetic category. Rather, polemic constitutes the only meaningful way of adopting any stance at all. In stuffing the state concept with his belligerent understandings of the political, Schmitt attacked the mainstream state theories that were circulating at the time. When states started collapsing in the latter part of the twentieth century, Schmitt was quick to add to the preface of his 1963 edition that the ‘era of statehood had come to an end'. But Schmitt never elaborated this thought. Ernst Forsthoff, a loyal disciple of Schmitt and a legal theorist in his own right, developed it further. In 1971, he trumpeted, somewhat surprisingly, that the Federal Republic of Germany was not a true state. For Forsthoff Germany constituted little more than a by-product of the Cold War, constantly in danger of being extinguished by a whiff of history.^[318]

With his assumption of the fundamental aggressiveness of man, Schmitt positioned himself in a long tradition in European political thought. He repeat­edly traced his intellectual genealogy to Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. Historically speaking, as Schmitt substantiated his negative anthropology, all communities that had shunned the doctrine of original sin - which for Schmitt equals men's innate aggressiveness - had ended in disaster.^[319] Aggressiveness is so important to Schmitt that he notes in the Glossarium: ‘With every child a new world is born. For God's sake, then every new-born child is an aggressor!'^[320]

For Schmitt, aggressiveness is not just important for its ontic premise but also for the dynamic element it provides. While Schmitt expresses objections to bellicose or militaristic readings elsewhere, stressing that ‘[w]ar is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics', war always remains an ‘ever present possibility'; it is always ‘the leading presupposition'.^[321] Schmitt's anthropological assumptions offer plenty of grounds for disagree­ment. A less bleak reading of human nature could highlight mankind's extraordinary potential for cooperation, an assumption that is supported by many sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists.^[322]

Like Schmitt's anthropological premise, more optimistic theories fore­grounding man's cooperative behaviour have blind spots, too. But today the institutional advancement of an international common good is hardly based on such romantic visions of man. Conflict theories, too, can acknowledge the value and possibility of continuous cooperation. Immanuel Kant, most prom­inently, employed a sceptical anthropology as the very foundation of his universalistic proposals for perpetual peace. Pleading for international institu­tionalised cooperation does not equate to promoting pacifism in any straight­forward sense. Similarly, acknowledging the creative dynamic of conflict does not imply adopting enmity as the essential human relation to understand human behaviour, domestic public law, or public international law. Much of the advancement and cooperative developments in the European legal space in the aftermath of the Second World War would have been simply impossible in Schmitt's thinking.^[323] But it seems that Schmitt would be content to counter that his was not a debate on the nature of humans. Instead, it was an attempt to provide a juristic and epistemic framework for the state of exception.

Schmitt holds that true insight requires thinking from an exception. While the fight for life and death is not omnipresent, to Schmitt, it is a probable scenario which, because of its seriousness, needs to be taken as the decisive starting point for conceiving everything else. ‘That the extreme case appears to be an exception does not negate its decisive character but confirms it all the more.'^[324] With these premises, the decisive human relationship to ground politics is enmity. As with Hobbes, it is omnipresent as long as there is no common legal order backed up by a muscular institution. True order in this sense is by necessity concrete order. For Schmitt, the institutional structures underpinning international law were too thin, and lacked any means of coercion. Cognitive, semantic, reputational, or symbolic means of inter­national institutions could not make up for international public authority.^[325] In Schmitt's world, the protector has to be obeyed. Schmitt elevates the Hobbesian link between protection and obedience to constitute the necessary, one might say even ‘eternal', basis for order: protego ergo obligo.^[326] In this light, international law and in particular international institutions appear insur­mountably weak. At best, conceptions of an international public law and international authority are romantic pipedreams.

For Schmitt, the very possibility of statehood is predicated on conflictual relationships between these states. According to the logic of protection and obedience, order would vanish as soon as protection became superfluous. Following this logic, the plurality of states causes an external threat, thus providing for social integration and hence for the viability of states. The state ‘presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity'.^[327] This encourages states to channel their aggressive potential and to employ it creatively to stimulate the dynamism of history.

In addition, the plurality of states has normative value in so far as it is the precondition of different ways of life, allowing as it does for diversity or identity in today's parlance. This is another kernel of realist thought, and it is an important reason for war. ‘Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence'.^[328] Schmitt's interpretation of otherness is bellicose in nature; ‘stranger' can almost always simply be replaced with ‘enemy'. He writes, ‘The political enemy... is... the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien.'^[329] Accordingly, theorems of transitional, let alone cosmopolitan citizenship, are lacking any foundation.^[330]

Schmitt's ideas of international order could hardly be more at odds with these theorems. On i April 1939, two weeks after Nazi troops had marched into Czechoslovakia, Schmitt lectured at the Institut für Politik und Internationales Recht in Kiel on how to reorganise the spatial order in international law. The prevalent models of liberal jurists, mourned Schmitt, were all ‘inauthentic and outdated'.^[331] The Covenant of the League of Nations was itself deeply flawed in his opinion. On the one hand, it celebrated the principle of sovereignty and the integrity of state borders, yet, on the other, ‘regional understandings' like the Monroe doctrine remained anchored in article 21 of the Covenant, if only as measures to ‘secur[e] the maintenance of peace'.^[332]

In Schmitt's telling, the Monroe doctrine was functionally operating to keep ‘spatially alien powers' out of the US's wider sphere of influence in the Americas. This formed the nucleus of Schmitt's thinking about the Großraum (great space). Schmitt's Großraum stood in sharp contrast to British imperialism, as the latter rested, at least in theory, on the ‘universalistic- humanitarian concerns' stemming from ‘individualistic-liberal' premises. According to Schmitt, if states were horizontally equal in an international arena, the vertical universalistic and missionary overgrowth had to be entirely shaved off for international relations to function properly.

What made the Großraum intuitively intelligible, Schmitt reasoned, was a state's duty to protect its own people dwelling outside its borders in relative geographic proximity. The significant German minority in Middle and Eastern Europe therefore drastically extended the German Reich's zone of influence and responsibility over these smaller states. ‘Spatially alien' states, just like the Monroe doctrine had long established, were prohibited from intervening in the Großraum. The Großraum s borders could thus be drawn much wider than those of the Reich. In flowery language Schmitt styled the Großraum as a concrete geographical space ‘in which the sun of the Reich may rise'. Schmitt presented his theory as a kind of salvation for the insur­mountable problems of current international law, which had become, for Schmitt, allergic to the very principle of statehood, labouring instead to secretly abolish the state concept through the ‘universalistic-imperial' register of a singular world law. In Schmitt's eyes, the Großraum did justice to more practical ‘planetary demands' of spatially dividing up the world. It spoke to the hegemonic realities of international relations. And now that Germany had emerged as a ‘powerful Reich', it was ready to ‘design, support and carry' this spatialised international law.^[333]