Carl Schmitt and the Clash of Civilizations, The Missing Context_Alex Schulman

8/12/2019 Carl Schmitt and the Clash of Civilizations, The Missing Context_Alex Schulman

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Carl Schmitt and the clash ofcivilizations: the missing contextALEX SCHULMAN

Department of Political Science, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA

ABSTRACT Scholarship on Carl Schmitt tends either to contextualize obsessivelyhis Weimar-era work to convict or exonerate vis-a-vis fascism, or effectivelydecontextualize it in the service of buttressing contemporary political theoretical

projects. While both approaches have produced interesting work, this paper arguesthat both have missed key elements. An important and hitherto largely unexaminedcontext for Schmitts enduring series of interwar writings was the widespreadEuropean concern over the threat posed to Western civilization by Bolshevism. This isshown by analysing Schmitts texts from the period both internally, and comparativelywith other influential contemporary writers, who also predicted a European

Bolshevik clash of civilizations as the conceptual order of future politics.

Introduction

Schmitt understood that his only alternative was Hobbesian obedience in exchange for

political protection . . . Is there any other more plausible explanation for Schmitts

unreserved capitulation to Nazi ideology, which even led him to adopt anti-Semitic views he

did not espouse before the Nazi takeover?1

In any case, we need not dwell any further on this.

(Carl Schmitt, abruptly ending his discussion of the Volkssturm units and Werewolf

child-soldiers mobilized at the end of Second World War)2

In the contemporary proliferation of works on Carl Schmitts political and legaltheory one can detect a few common pathways. The current relevance is often saidspecificallyto be the broad emergency powers claimed by the Bush Administrationafter the 9/11 attacks to prosecute its war on terror3 andmore generallyto be thepossibility of opening up liberal constitutionalism to its aporiae, inconsistencies andinadequacies. The recovery of Schmitt, as proclaimed by one of its most dedicatedjournals, could combat the regression to a nave conformist liberalism brought aboutby the pollution of communication theory and the obsessive left-liberal pursuit ofegalitarianism as a super-legal norm.4 Here Schmitts work is apharmakon, both

poison and remedy, ambivalent in itself, and used to tease out the ambiguities and

Journal of Political Ideologies(June 2012),17(2), 147167

ISSN 1356 9317 print; ISSN 1469 9613 online/12/020147 21 q 2012 Taylor & Francis


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antinomies of liberalism.5 Constitutional liberalism is said to be unable, now as inWeimar, to handle the politicaland Schmitts enemy-based conception ofthe political has not stopped sectors of the left from recommending a more

Schmittian approach. Schmitt allow[s] us to acknowledgeand therefore be in abetter position to try to negotiatean important paradox inscribed in the very natureof liberal democracy, that is, the neglect of aspect[s] of democratic politics thatliberalism tends to evacuate.6 Sometimes this has taken a mere sort of know thyenemy tone: here is the lefts chance to learn from its opponents and thereby regain avitality it has lost since retreating into academia.7

But as has been the case with Heidegger and philosophy, anyone who considersSchmitt a fascinating political theorist with much of relevance to say to ouragesomeone who asks hard questions and points to aspects of political life toouncomfortable to ignore8must, one way or another, enquire into his

relationship with Nazism. To that end, a number of excellent works have beenproduced exploring, often in minute detail, the genealogy of Schmitts intellectualrelationship(s) with the Weimar and the then Hitler regime.9 There is an importantcontextual element missing though. In this essay I will argue that Schmittsintellectual relationship to fascism must itself be read in the context of, and asintertwined with, his intellectual relationship to Bolshevismthat is, thespecifically political form of Marxism Schmitt describes as developing in theSoviet Union after the First World War.

To be sure, Schmitt scholars have not altogether ignored Schmitts amplecommentary on MarxismLeninism and the Soviet Union.10 Typically, however,

the focus is on either Schmitts critique of Marxism as a totalizing philosophy whereeconomics trumps politics, or on issues of an internal enemy, the CommunistParty (KPD) in Weimar Germany. Both concerns are certainly present; but I arguethat his alarm about Bolshevism took place on a grander scale. To read Schmittsdecision in favour of Nazi legitimacy following the collapse of the WeimarRepublic as simply a national application of his legal theory misses this broadercontextual element. His thoughts about Bolshevism often take the form of asidesand even footnotes, but they are no less telling for being so presented. An off-the-batcaveat: viewing fascist sympathies and/or ideology as simply a reaction to theinternational communist revolution many feared Lenin had set in motion in 1917has been usedeven somewhat recently, as in the German historikerstreit11to

explain Nazi atrocities, or at least relativize them to an uncomfortable degree. Myresponse to this is that first, I simply seek here to expose a too-obscured element inSchmitt scholarship, rather than add to the by-now lengthy bibliography ofmoralizing, one way or another, about him. But second, one does not automaticallyrelativize Nazi atrocities by accepting that support for fascism in the 1920s and1930s, including fascisms series of alliances with otherwise anti- or at least non-fascist institutions (like churches) and intellectuals (like Schmitt), was intimatelytied to what was then a common assumption: the future of Europe was to be a clashof civilizations between Bolshevism and the West.

This should also then suggest a wider present-day context than the Guantanamo

crisis. For example Louiza Odysseos asks:

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whether, and how, the War on Terror functions according to a [Schmittian] dialectic: the

creation of unity in the Western world, which is threatened and needs securing, and which

excludes those whose assumed fundamentalist tendencies motivate them to act against

freedom.12

The question of having, or perceiving that one has, an enemy that has declared warnot merely against ones policies or control of resources but against ones entireway of life, clearly frames ones treatment of that enemy. Schmitts pre-eminentcontemporary heirmore so than critical legal theory or radical democrats likeChantal Mouffemay be Samuel P. Huntington, who years before 11 September2001 argued that the future promised a global Kulturkampfbetween Islam andthe peoples it borders, and that the decadent fruits of liberalism, soundingsomething like they did in the days of Oswald Spenglerproblems of moraldecline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the Westcould prevent the US

and its European Allies from prevailing.13 Schmitt, too, had mourned the future ofa civilization in which value neutrality . . . is pushed to the point of systemsuicide.14 And when Mouffe, for example, praises Schmitts theory asan important warning for those who believe that the process of globalization islaying the basis for worldwide democratization and cosmopolitan citizenship, sheis making a similar warning to Huntingtons.15

Welcome back Oswald Spengler, neo-Marxists Michael Hardt and AntonioNegri disdainfully wrote of Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations thesisand thelatter did blandly reference Spengler as a historian of civilizations (as opposed to afascist philosopher).16 Perhaps the oddity is actually that it took so long for

Spengler to be welcomed back, with Schmitt and Heidegger now solidlyrehabilitated. Shall Spenglerian remain an insult, when Schmittian orHeideggerian are, in critical theory, now not only respectable but also run-of-the-mill?17 In what follows I will examine Schmitts scattered, but still cohesive,thoughts on the development of MarxismLeninism and its adoption as stateideology by the Soviet Union. It will tie these into his conception of the politicalas it played out in Europe in the modern age, and argue that his critique ofliberalism and embrace of fascism sought justification not only in the legaldilemmas of a single state, Germany, but also in the existential struggles he sawunfolding for European civilization as a whole.

From Marx to Mongolia

A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe . . .

(Oswald Spengler)

In the 1926 Introduction to The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, CarlSchmitt suggests that it is a sign of the weakness of parliamentary democracy thatthe most convincing reason people can give for supporting it is its preferability toBolshevism.18 Schmitt is known for criticizing parliamentarianism as apurposeless fetish for discussion and deliberation, a perpetual deferral of the

true decision-al fruits of a more existentially attuned agonism. Here, though, he

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surmises, when he asks himself What did parliamentarianism mean to theseGerman liberals and democrats struggling against the imperial political system?(i.e. Max Weber), that it was precisely the emergence of strong leadership, rather

than perpetual deliberation itself, that had been the plan. Essentially and mostimportantly it was a means for selecting political leaders, a certain way toovercome political dilettantism and to admit the best and most able to politicalleadership, the very political dilettantism Schmitt saw in the 19th-centuryromanticism, but that has now infected the bureaucraticconstitutional republic.Whether parliament actually possess the capacity to build a political elite, henow argues, has since become very questionable and politics, far from being theconcern of an elite, has become the despised business of a rather dubious class ofpersons.19

Webers wrestling with the problems of modern legitimacy hovers as a

consistent eminence grise over Schmitts most enduring works; it is no accidentthat the spectres of Lenin and Trotsky haunted Webers Politics as a Vocationlecture.20 There Weber describes two political growths as peculiar to theOccidentthe constitutional state and also the demagogue. Soon one will beat war with the other, in the sort ofWeltanschauung clash during which, Weberadmits, there is little to do but choose sides. The professional politician, nolonger in the personalistic service of a dynast, is described as unique to the West.This character makes politics his life, in an internal sense, either seeking powerfor its own sake or nourish[ing] his inner balance and self-feeling by theconsciousness that his life has meaning in the service of a cause.21 In an

atmosphere of wartime inflation where bulwarks of bourgeois order such asproperty and monetary stability were threatened, Weber surmises that the era of anew, dangerous sort of professional politician awaits among those strata who byvirtue of their propertylessness stand entirely outside . . . the economic order of agiven society.22 Only a firm taming of the soul (not particularly well-specified)will prevent the vocational politician from becoming one of the politicaldilettantes Weber sees at the head of the Soviet dictatorship. Weber foresees inthe Bolshevik or Spartacist adventurer a ruthless proponent of the ethic ofultimate ends, one who suddenly turns into a chiliastic prophet, and whosepremiums consist of the satisfying of hatred and the craving for revenge . . . theopponents must be slandered and accused of heresy.23

The eastern menace haunted Weber even as a young scholar. His 1895 lectureon The Nation State and Economic Policy in Germany spoke a Darwinianlanguage of ethno-cultural conflictone whose focus on comparative birth rates(the sombre gravity of the population problem) makes it recognizable even interms of contemporary European political discourse. The Social Darwinianlanguage of competition, adaptation and selection does not hide Webers warningthat it is precisely not the more advanced group that wins out in this sort ofKulturkampfit is a large number of children, not gradual extinction, thatfollows hard on the heels of a low standard of living. Weber foresaw the victoryof less developed types and the disappearance of fine flowers of intellectual and

emotional life following a geographically destined clash between Germans and

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Slavs. He recommends closing the frontier, and using state policy to facilitateGerman colonization in the east.24 Pessimism infuses these parts of the lecture; itis less about the ability of German culture to advance and adapt than it is about the

sheer numerical pressures coming from outside. This same pessimism aboutGermanys long-term chances versus the multiplying Slavs was a key factormotivating Germanys militarily aggressive policies between 1914 and 1945.The German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg mourned to his son onthe eve of the First World War that there was little reason to plant new trees ontheir estate, since in a few years the Russians would be here anyway; a latercommuniquelaments, The future belongs to Russia which grows and grows, andthrusts on us a heavier and heavier nightmare.25

Webers lecture holds out the possibility that the correctly trained vocationalpolitician could reconcile defeated Germany to parliamentary liberalism. For what

other decent alternative to Bolshevik dilettantism could there be? But Schmitt willhave none of it. Though a reasonable political organization in the 19th century,parliamentary liberalism was fast becoming an anachronism: the development ofmodern mass democracy has made argumentative public discussion an emptyformality. To Schmitt, a belief in parliamentarism, in government by discussion,belongs to the intellectual world of liberalism. It does not belong to democracy.We are at the tail-end of an epochal shift from dynastic to democraticlegitimacy.26 If, in a mass-democratic age, the only legitimating criteria of aparliamentary process should change from an institution of evident truth into asimply practicaltechnical means, then it only has to be shown . . . that things

could be otherwise and parliament is then finished.

27

The replacement of19th-century elite liberalism by 20th-century mass democracy awaits itscorrespondingly new political forms. One was developing to the east.

Bolshevism interests Schmitt in that it has transformed the 19th-centuryphilosophy of Marxism into an authentically 20th-century political movement.Schmitt allows that Bolshevik and fascist claims to embody a genuine form ofdemocracy are legitimate: these forms are certainly antiliberal but notnecessarily antidemocratic.28 Indeed, they are more authentically democraticthan were their origins in Marxism, which was essentially a mirror image ofcontemporaneous post-Enlightenment liberalism; Schmitt reverses the estimationof anyone who has sought to reclaim a democratic Marx from the Bolsheviks.

Marx remained trapped in classical, and therefore bourgeois, political economyand within the rationalist faith of the Enlightenmentbut with Lenin andTrotskys embedding of this philosophy in an expansionist state, Marxism hasbecome an intellectual instrument for what is really no longer a rationalistimpulse.29 By positing an undifferentiated humanity as its subject, Marxism was,like liberalism, anti-political; politics therein becomes devalued . . . somethinginsignificant . . . insubstantial to the degree that such an indifferent equality istaken seriously. Marx was only a schoolmaster and remained trapped in anintellectual exaggeration of West European bourgeois education,30 an educationthe radical socialists of the 20th centurytheorists of violence such as Sorel;

institutionalizers of violence such as Leninincreasingly renounce.


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Schmitt agrees with the communists and their fellow travellers that theBolshevik (or, mutatis mutandis, fascist) dictatorship is more authenticallydemocratic than the Western liberal democracies, though not for the reasons givenby communisms philosophical defenders. Again, this is because liberaldemocracy is something of an oxymoron for Schmitt. Eventually either theadjective or the noun must win out: democracy and liberalism could be allied toeach other for a time, just as socialism and democracy have been allied; but assoon as it achieves power, liberal democracy must decide between its elements.To a true modern mass democracy parliament will invariably appear as aninconceivable and outmoded institution, a debating parlour wherein discussionby independent representatives has no autonomous justification for its existence,even less so because the belief in discussion is not democratic but originallyliberal.31 Liberalism fails because it seeks to universalize itself; real democracy

knows that group struggle is unavoidable. Liberalism is based on an abstractuniversal equality that can never be achieved, while democracy implies a selectiveequality that tends to be the default mode of organization anyway: the principlethat not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally, requiringfirst homogeneity and second . . . elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.32

Whereas in the past this principle has exercised itself in various formshierarchyof character in the Aristotelian polis, difference of religion in the Middle Ages,etc.its signature modern organizational principle is the national unit.

A funny thing happened to Marxism on the way to the Finland Station: itbecame allied with nationalism. We in Central Europe live under the eye of the

Russians, Schmitt announces in the very first line of his lecture,The Age ofNeutralizations and Depoliticizations. Their vitality is enough to seize ourknowledge and technology as weapons, but such vitality owes more than a little tothe fact that They have realized the union of Socialism and Slavism. While wein Europe still live in a period of exhaustion . . . on Russian soil . . . a state arosewhich, despite its distant theoretical claims to be an intermediate stage in theprocess of eliminating the state, is more intensely statist than any ruled by theabsolute princes.33 So it is the Bolsheviks who founded National Socialismonlylater to be appropriated defensively as the Prussian socialism of Spengler or theNational Bolshevism of Goebbels.

The idea that in becoming Bolshevism, Marxism, originally a dyed-in-the-wool19th-century European metaphysics, has also become frighteningly other,unsettles Schmitt. Perhaps Marxism has arisen so unrestrainedly on Russiansoil, Schmitt ventures, because proletarian thought there had been utterly free ofall the constrictions of Western European tradition and from all the moral andeducational notions with which Marx and Engels themselves still quite obviouslylived. When Marxism migrated from the west to the east . . . there it seized amyth for itself that no longer grew purely out of the instinct for class conflict, butcontained strong national elements, breathing new life into the Russian hatredfor the complication, artificiality, and intellectualism of Western European

civilization.34

Schmitt sees the move that the Soviets have made from Marxism to

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Bolshevism as a warning to the West about what a modern politics must do toretain its energies, something that as yet only Mussolini correctly grasped:

It must grasp this struggle as a life instinct, without academic construction, and as the creatorof a powerful myth in which it alone would find the courage for a decisive battle . . . the

energy of nationalism is greater than the myth of class conflict . . . wherever it comes to an

open confrontation of the two myths, such as in Italy, the national myth has until today

always been victorious. Italian Fascism depicted its communist enemy with a horrific face,

the Mongolian face of Bolshevism; this has made a stronger impact and has evoked more

powerful emotions than the socialist image of the bourgeois.35

Whether Schmitt at this point unequivocally admires the Italian jettisoning ofparliamentary liberalism or not, he certainly admires its legitimation tactic:countering the energy of Bolshevism with the energy of a racially framedanti-Bolshevism. Indeed, this is a standby of his most famous Weimar-era works,albeit one that is somewhat hidden.

Crusaders

It is in The Concept of the Political that Schmitt draws his famous description ofthe political as the friendenemy distinction. Though enemy status here neednot imply personal hatredindeed it all may be curiously unemotionalthefriendenemy distinction denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union orseparation, of an association or dissociation. Schmitt is not overly specific about

the content of this drawing of borders. The political enemy need not be morallyevil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor. He isnevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, ina specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in theextreme case conflicts with him are possible.36 Schmitt does not deny that friendenemy distinctions might be made on moral, aesthetic or economic linesbut ifthat occurs to the extent that violent death is admitted as a possibility, then thedistinction has simply flipped over from being whatever it was to being political.This is, as unsympathetic commentators have pointed out, something of atautology.37

Schmitt places death at the centre of political theory not only because death for

him is existentially and conceptually richer than deliberation; it is also becausereal citizens of real states will be called on to fight and die for entities larger thanthemselves, just as they were in the First World War. Knowing better than thepost-Kantian dreamers who thought they had outlawed war following the end ofthat conflict, Schmitt supposes it will happen again sooner or later. What would thecontours be? By Schmitts theory they couldbe anything, of course, since manydimensions of human identity have led to violent struggle over the years and havethus become, on his terms, political. But content-wise, Schmitt seems to have atleast seriously entertained the common interwar European viewpointby nomeans limited to the German radical right, though it found its most intense

expressions therethat the next totalizing struggle would be between the Soviet


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Union and some understanding of the West. And on close examination Schmittswriting contains not only a description of a coming civilizational clash betweenBolshevism and the rest of Europe, but also a sort of moral enthusiasm for it.

Schmitts enemy concept is not limited to the immediate and plausible. But inthe factual sphere, what likely enemy formed the Schmittian adversary whointends to negate his opponents way of life and therefore must be repulsed orfought in order to preserve ones form of existence?38 Perhaps some on theGerman radical right would have emphasized an internal Jewish enemy, butinternationally, the only plausible answer is Soviet Russia, armed with bothpowerful ethnic nationalism and an expansionist ideology. Whereas Westernliberals were presiding over a rotting 19th-century corpse, the ideal of the politicalstate is still real . . . it has received new energies and new life in the SovietUnion.39 Ever since Hegel wandered to Moscow via Karl Marx and Lenin . . . a

new concrete-enemy concept, namely that of the international class enemy hastaken hold, and the USSRs legitimating philosophy transformed itself . . . aswell as everything else, legality and illegality, the state, even the compromise withthe enemy, into a weapon of this battle.40 Bolshevism does not recognizeliberalisms rules, and the liberal states do the world no favours by failing to placethemselves, and everyone else, on this new continuum of friends and enemies.Touring the most intense emergences of the friend/enemy conception in themodern era, Schmitt cites the anti-Catholicism of Cromwells England, theecrasez linfame of Voltaire and the philosophes, and the German nationalistresponse to the Napoleonic Wars; he then cites as their true contemporary

equivalent Lenins annihilating sentences against bourgeois and westerncapitalism.41

Schmitt reads Kulturkampf into the birth pangs of Marxism Leninism,discovering a spectre that would haunt Europe long after Marxs dreams of auniversal proletariat and fading-away of the state were falsified. Thus, Schmittsgloss on the development of Marxism: [Marx and Engels] hatred of the Russianarose from their most deeply rooted instincts and manifested itself in the strugglewithin the First International. Conversely, everything in the Russian anarchist rosein revolt against the German Jew (born in Trier) and against Engels. Whatcontinually provoked Bakunin was their intellectualism.42 But the struggle has

resolved itself and Bakunins untamed barbarian instinct won the day.Bolshevism united the life forces of two spectres in a manner that, to Schmitt, is nocoincidence:

Since the nineteenth century, there have been in Europe two great masses opposed to West

European tradition and education, two great streams crowding their banks: the class

conscious proletariat of the big cities and the Russian masses estranged from Europe. From

the standpoint of traditional West European culture, both are barbarians . . . The fact that

they met on Russian soil, in the Russian Soviet Republic, has a profound justification in the

history of ideas.43

This analysis links Schmitt to other branches of the Weimar radical-right

intelligentsia. It was a position he kept to in his post-war writings, ostensibly more

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detached analyses of the history of international order(s). InTheory of the Partisan(1st German ed. 1963) he still looks back to Leninism as a new theory of absolutewar and absolute enmity, and cites Maistres fear of an academic Pugachev, thedangerous alliance of Western intellect and Russian rebellion that Lenin andTrotsky lived out.44

Spengler, too, was not yet a full-fledged fascist sympathizer when he referred toThose young Russians of the days before 1914dirty, pale, exalted, moping incorners, ever absorbed in metaphysics, seeing all things with an eye of faith evenwhen the ostensible topic is the franchise, chemistry or womens education,naming them modern equivalents to the Jews and early Christians of theHellenistic cities, whom the Romans regarded with a mixture of surly amusementand secret fear.45 And Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, whose book was named

Das Dritte Reich(1923) a decade in advance, also made much of the cultural, as

opposed to or in addition to the political and economic, aspects of the Marxistchallenge. This Marx was a Jew, a stranger in Europe who nevertheless dared tomeddle in the affairs of European peoples . . . Marx is only comprehensiblethrough his Jewish origins. He sought not merely economic upheaval but aNietzschean ressentiment-fueled slave-revolt: Against a background of sinisterpassion there flame through his words the fires of hate, retaliation and revenge. Asthe Jew that he was, national feeling was incomprehensible to [Marx] and as therationalist that he was, national feeling was for him out of date. Marx ignoredthe upper strata of Europe because he did not belong to them and had no clue to thevalues that they had created through the centuries and had handed on as a precious

heritage to their children46

a lamentation on Kulturkampfquite similar to thatmade earlier by Nietzsche concerning the perpetual world-historical struggleRome against Judea, Judea against Rome, which had most recently replayeditself as the assault of democrats and socialists against the finer sentiments of theancien regime.47

Moeller also affirms that Bolshevism, instead of being seen as a Westernizingideology imposed on recalcitrant Slav peasants, should rather be seen as anauthenticvolk-ization of its by-then outmoded Marxist interpretation. It was evena rebuke to TsaristWesternization. Whereas Germany had decided in favour ofwestern parliamentarism, shrinking back from eastern terror-dictatorship at the

post-1918 moment of decision:The Russian bowed his head in patient acceptance of the severe militarism of a new

autocracy. He had shaken off the bureaucrats and police of the Tsars autocracy which

smacked of St. Petersburg and the West, and which had come to seem foreign and hostile.

But he welcomed the autocracy of socialism; he had asked for it; he accepted it, Bolshevism

is Russian, and could be nothing else.48

Moeller hopes that Germany, whose above-mentioned decision was simply forthe lesser of two evils (the disintegrating atmosphere of liberalism, which spreadsmoral disease amongst nations49), could pioneer a third way. Moeller was morenationalist than either Spengler or Schmitt, yet at the end of his tract he implies

that he equates thinking about Germany with thinking about Europe, and that such


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thinking must begin by drawing a line against Asia. His cultural hopes areclosed to them because they possess an infinity of their own, which is not ours,which turns its face towards Asia, away from the west. The German who

understands this works not only for his nation but also for his civilization: he isfighting for the cause of Europe, for every European influence that radiates fromGermany as the centre of Europe . . . The shadow of Africa falls across Europe. Itis our task to be guardians of the threshold of values.50

German nationalists also thought they had good reason to be angry with theFrench, the most enthusiastic imposers of the Versailles settlement and the patronof the new border states to Germanys south and east. Schmitts comments onFrancoGerman relations are very interesting when viewed in the above light. In afootnote Schmitt objects to the practice of calling the payments which armedFrance imposes on disarmed Germany not tribute, but reparations. The latter

appears to be more juristic, more legal, more peaceful, less polemical and moreapolitical than tribute. But Schmitt finds that reparation is more highlycharged and therefore also political because this term is used politically tocondemn juristically and even morally the vanquished enemy. The imposedpayments have the effect of disqualifying and subjugating him not only legally butalso morally. He goes on to compare this question of terminology with a similarone of old, when a German prince enquired as to whether payments made to theTurkish sultan were pension or tribute.51 Arguing that even universalisticreligions adhere, in extremis, to his concept of the political, Schmitt observes thatattempts to find perpetual peace within Christendom were always matched by a

war-like attitude toward those outside it: Never in the thousand-year strugglebetween Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather thandefend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks52so love thy enemycould be at once a moral, but not a political, principle. A footnote here quotesPlatos argument that real war only occurred between Hellenes and barbarians.

Schmitts accusation is that the Western victors of 1918 have not onlymistreated Germany, they have also turned Germans into Turks. A similar readingshould be given to his seemingly offhand remark on Pufendorfs placing allegedlycannibalistic Indians outside the realm of humanity: As civilization progressesand morality rises, even less harmless things than devouring human flesh couldperhaps qualify as deserving to be outlawed in such a manner. Maybe one day it

will be enough if a people were unable to pay its debts.53 Insolvent Germany isbeing treated as if it were an alien civilization; and this at a time when Europeanunity in the face of potential Bolshevik aggression was necessary. Schmitt predictsthat a mix of high-minded Wilsonianism and actual British or Frenchvindictiveness post-First World War leads to the worst of all possible worlds,one where The solemn declaration of outlawing war does not abolish the friend enemy distinction, but, on the contrary, opens new possibilities by giving aninternationalhostis declaration new content and new vigour.54 But even worse,thehostis declaration is being applied to the wrong party: it is the Soviet Union,and not Germany, that emerged from 1918 the true international outlaw

Europes Young Turks, as it were.

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After 1945, under interrogation by the Allies for serving the Nazi regime, Schmittclaimed that he had not sought to achieve but diagnosed totalitarianism. One canquestion the honesty of anything said under such circumstances, but more

interesting is his subsequent thought on what could have led him to such a diagnosis,even pre-1933: This total dictatorship was actually something new. Hitlersmethod was new. There was only one parallel, Lenins Bolshevik dictatorship.The important point as it relates to Schmitts intellectual complicity in the Nazitakeover is his views as to what type of German political organization, surroundedby what sort of European political organization, would best be able to prevail in ashooting Kulturkampf with Bolshevism. Again, this marks Schmitt as havingconcerns broadly similar to Weimars (and then Hitlers) reactionary intelligen-tsiaalso broadly similar to wide swaths of interwar thinkers and politicians.

Clash of civilizations

A common spiritual enemy can also produce the most remarkable agreements . . .55

[It is] among Catholics that the image of the Antichrist is still alive.56

Compare, for example, two contemporaries from each end of the ideologicalspectrum confronting Schmitt: Winston Churchill and Leon Trotsky. As late as1937, in his bookGreat Contemporaries, the former, while expressing only amuted, guarded worry about Adolf Hitlerbut also admiration for the courage,the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy,

conciliate, or overcome, all the authorities or resistances which barred hispath57was still full-throttle against the Bolsheviks, textually eviscerating theby-then fugitive Trotsky. The struggle with the latter remained the trueWeltanschauungskrieg: and the hounded Trotsky is found pathetically supplicat-ing England, France and Germany to admit him to the civilization it has beenand still isthe object of his life to destroy.58 We are now more apt to think of hislater, similar anti-Nazi polemics, but at this point Churchills fulminations againstSoviet communism show every mark of a man who has discovered his existentialSchmittian enemy. The writings of a Lenin or Trotsky represent:

a drill book prepared in a scientific spirit for destroying all existing institutions . . .the mask

of hatreds never before manifested among men. No faith need be, indeed may be, kept withnon-Communists . . . once the apparatus of power is in the hands of the Brotherhood, all

opposition, all contrary opinions must be extinguished by death . . . The absolute rule of a

self-chosen priesthood according to the dogmas it has learned by rote is to be imposed upon

mankind without mitigation progressively forever.59

In Bolshevism, Churchill finds No trace of compassion, no sense of humankinship, no apprehension of the spiritual, a worldview decidedly removed fromthe ordinary affections and sentiments of human nature.60 Spengler too sees noreciprocal comprehension, no communication, no charity in Russian Bolshe-vism.61 These complaints echo Schmitts more dispassionate reckoning with a

democracy that demonstrates its political power by knowing how to refuse or


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keep at bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity.62 Alsolike Schmitt, Churchill paints a picture of a dangerous ideology made even bleakerby its geographical foreignness: a vast process of Asian liquefaction.63

These may have been Churchills wilderness years, but the apocalyptic attitudewas shared across broad swaths of the British political spectrum. Edgar Vincent, orLord DAubernon, British ambassador to Germany in the early Weimar periodamong other government postings, likened the Soviet threat to Britains worldposition to a cataclysm equalled only by the fall of the Roman Empire.64

DAubernon wrote a book about the 1920 Polish defeat of the Red Army calledThe Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World(1931). In it he compares MarshallPilsudskis stopping of the Red Armys advance at Warsaw with, in turn, CharlesMartels defeat of expansionist Islam at Tours, the Greek triumph at Salamis, andthe Christian victory over Ottoman forces at Lepanto.65 Warsaw 1920 was a battle

not less decisive than Sedan and the Marne in its influence on the culture of theworld, on its science, religion and political development. If anything, its termswere far more those of a clash of civilizations than the Western Front in the FirstWorld War: The civilizations in conflict were radically different, the objectivesand methods of the combatants were violently opposed; it was in no sense an inter-tribal squabble, but rather a trial of arms between two fundamentally divergentsystems.66 By implication, it was more the bloodshed on the Marne that signifiedan inter-tribal squabble. The description of the battle (whose outcome, unlikeMartels victory at Tours, would soon be reversed) is in a Gibbonian register:

Had Pilsudski and Weygand failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the

battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a disastrous reverse, but thevery existence of Western civilization would have been imperilled. The Battle of Tours

saved our ancestors . . . from the yoke of the Koran; it is probable that the Battle of Warsaw

preserved Central and part of Western Europe from a more subversive dangerthe fanatical

tyranny of the Soviet.67

But the most recent comparison, albeit one looking back centuries to the verybeginnings of Europes world ascension, would be Lepanto, after which Europemight well have been overrun by barbarous hordes from Asia Minor and reducedto the sterile nakedness of all the lands which fell under the devastating rule of theOttoman Sultans.68 The enmities following on the First World War, DAubernon

pleads, risk preventing a similar European unity in the face of a new existential,annihilatory threat.

Trotsky, for his part, echoes Churchills rhetoric on the other side, an ex-RedArmy commissar pushed to advocating European unity against what he comes tosee as the existential enemy to civilizationin this case, fascism. The SovietUnited States of Europe, he exclaims, that is the only correct slogan which pointsthe way out of the splintering of Europe, which threatens not only Germany but allof Europe with complete economic and cultural decline.69 For Trotsky theproletarian unification of Europe is now less an iron law of historical developmentthan a very important weapon in the struggle against the abomination of fascist

chauvinism, an aspect of the defense of culture before barbarism.70

Fascism

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broke the boundaries of materialist analysis: it was a crusade, a stranger, morefantastic, more discordant one than the peasant crusades of the Middle Ages.71

Trotskys diagnosis as Weimar collapsed is rather close to Schmitts in outlook:

Isnt the conclusion self-evident that, faced with difficulties and tasks too great for it, the

democratic regime is losing control? . . . when vital interests collide, rifles and cannons

come to the center of the stage instead of treaty provisions . . .Some may regret this, bitterly

reproach the extremist parties for their inclination toward violence, hope for a better future.

But facts are facts. The wires of democracy cannot take too high a social voltage. Such are,

however, the voltages of our time.72

What is more, Trotsky criticizes the Stalinist USSR for lacking the politicalimpetus to join Western Europe in an anti-fascist crusade. Here, too, his criticism

is a cousin to Schmitts on liberalism: in the opportunistic bureaucracy of

Stalins Thermidor, the apparatus has converted political leadership intoadministrative command.73

Both figures were prophetic, in their own waywhile Trotsky did not live to seean alliance between the USSR and the West defeat Nazism, Churchill did live tosee and shape the contours of the renovated Western Alliance, with a rehabilitatedGermany, that once again made Soviet communism its existential enemy.The baseline point, however, is that portents of a coming Weltanschauungskrieg

form an unavoidable intellectual context for political thought of the Weimar years,and the context is not only Germanys internal disorders. Such concerns stayedwith Schmitt, though they were adapted to changing political needs, as his

relationship with the Nazi regime developed.Take SchmittsThe Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes(1938), an

exegetical work that veers in oddly tangential directions given the subject,concerning Schmitts historiography of European culture war. The villain isJewry; unsurprisingly, perhaps, if Schmitt was in part trying to re-ingratiate

himself with the regime. Still, the content of the prosecution ranges beyond thefamiliar material of Nazi propaganda. It develops in Schmitts iconoclastic riff onHobbes title beast. The Leviathan monster becomes symbolic of Jewish fearan

image of heathenish vitality and fertility, the great Pan that Jewish hatred andJewish feelings of superiority have transformed into a monster74to be then

transformed byressentimentinto a cultural-sphere slave revolt. No longer are wein the realm of coldraison detatanalysis: here modernitys political trajectory isexplained via the machinations of secret societies and secret orders, Rosicrucians,freemasons, illuminates, mystics and pietists, all kinds of sectarians . . . and,above all, the restless spirit of the Jew who knew how to exploit the situation bestuntil the relation of public and private, deportment and disposition was turnedupside down.75 Representative among the responsible intellectuals, moving pastHobbes, was Spinoza, the Jewish philosopher who pushed this incipient form[i.e. the modern contractual state] to the limit of its development until the oppositewas reached and the leviathans vitality was sapped from within and life began to

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That Schmitts newfound anti-Semitism in theLeviathanbook takes the form ofan aggressive historiography of culture war marks iteven if the bigotrys contentwas wholly opportunisticas a logical development from his earlier, moreapparently realist works. The most available context to a man of Schmittsbackground was indeed a famous confessional Kulturkampf, Bismarcks; thoughthe anti-Jewish purchase of Schmitts experiences stemming from a Catholic,petty-bourgeois and provincial background in an age of Prussian Protestant-nationalist ascendancy are not self-evident.77 Now Schmitt describes theformation of the national-bureaucratic state in modern Germany as a product ofJewish cultural infiltration:

Since the Congress of Vienna, the first generation of emancipated younger Jews broke into

the mainstream of European nations . . . penetrated the Prussian state and the Evangelical

church. The Christian baptismal sacrament provided him with not only a ticket of entry into

society, as was the case with the young Heine, but with an identity card that admitted him tothe sanctuary of the still respectable German state. From high governmental positions he was

able to confuse ideologically and paralyze spiritually the core of this commonwealth,

kingship, nobility, and the Evangelical church . . . castrating a leviathan that had been full of

vitality.78

Later in the book the story of Jewish cultural infiltration fades away, and the moreobvious sense of European religious war returns, with contemporary develop-ments redolent of the struggle that the English nation waged against the papalchurchs and the Jesuits claim to world hegemony . . . the world historicalstruggle that Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Roman Catholics waged against each

other.79Following on his friendenemy historiography inThe Concept of the Political,

Schmitt suggests that contemporary geopolitics remains an echo, conscious or not,of the friendenemy decisions made by Oliver Cromwell:

Some sober sentences and disconnected phrases of the poor Florentine humanist served to

give the world the moralistic horror picture: Machiavellism For more than a century it

remained an effective summons to battle waged by the Evangelical north against all Catholic

powers, especially against Spain and France. The experiences of the World War

(19141918) waged against Germany have shown that the propagandistic striking force of

this image is also useful against other powers. By gathering moral energies that permit

themselves to be mobilized in the struggle against Machiavellism, the shapers ofAnglo-Saxon world propaganda and American President Wilson were able to stage a modern

crusade of democracy and direct it at Germany.80

Commentators have long debated the significance of Roman Catholicism inSchmitts work. For our purposes here, the sincerity of Schmitts religious beliefsis not as important as his view of the position of Catholic Church as a player, byturns aggressive and defensive, in EuropeanKulturkampfone much longer andwider than the specific Bismarckian battle that gives us the name. Schmitt says atthe beginning ofRoman Catholicism and Political Form(1923) that Cromwellsdemonic rage was inherited, via the Enlightenment and Voltaires ecrasez

linfame, by liberal rationalism. Since the 18th century, the argumentation has

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become ever more rationalistic or humanitarian, utilitarian and shallow; still, it isthe lingering fear of the incomprehensible political power of Roman Catholicismthat has driven Western modernity.81

Schmitt looks to Roman Catholicism as a potential political saviour, he says,because it stands as an antithesis to the economictechnical thinking dominanttoday, the thinking he sees as central to both Marxism and liberalism.82 Thissounds remarkably similar to later defences of fascist nationalism as a bulwarkagainst the various tyrannies of both Western liberalism (equated to American-or Jewish-capitalist dominance) and Eastern Bolshevism (equated to Russian orJewish-communist dominance). The difference, of course, is that Schmitt sees inthe Roman church a trans-national entity that could potentially unite Europe, notonly Germany, and thus fight a clash of civilizations more like the medieval onesin which Europe eventually prevailed. (This European focus may help explain why

Schmitt was, unlike many otherwise like-minded countrymen, unenthusiastic atthe prospect of war in 1914).83 Catholicism stands as a third option betweenliberalism and his other early bogeyman, political romanticism, potentiallyovercoming the dichotomy between a rationalistic mechanistic world of humanlabor and a romanticvirginal state of nature, both of which are totally foreign tothe Roman Catholic concept of nature. In Catholic eyes:

human labor and organic development, nature and reason, are one . . . Just as the Tridentine

Creed knows little of Protestant rupture of nature and grace, so Roman Catholicism

understands little of the dualisms of nature and spirit, nature and intellect, nature and art,

nature and machine, and their varying pathos.84

Catholicism may thus be an inoculation against fascism even as it agrees withportions of the fascist critique of liberalism. Even within Christendom, Schmittfinds that Catholicism had a good record of fighting on the reasonable side ofcultural conflict, going back to the Middle Ages when it suppressed superstitionand sorcery and magnificently succeeded in overcoming Dionysian cults,ecstasies, and the dangers of submerging reason in meditation.85 One thinks ofThomas Manns novelistic likening of Germanys Nazi period to possession by anevil sorcerer. It is as an intervention in Webers political typology that Schmittpraises the Pope as one who precludes all the fanatical excesses of an unbridledprophetism, a figure independent of charisma and not the functionary and

commissar of republican thinking.86 Recall Schmitts gloss on the culturalconflict that drove the early development of Marxism above: it now makes perfectsense that he ends the book by praising the Catholic Churchs position inthat remote skirmish with Bakunin, where the Catholic concept of humanitystood on the side of the Idea and West European civilization, closer to Mazzinithan to the atheistic socialism of the Russian anarchist.87

So Schmitts vision of Catholicism points a way not only to victory inKulturkampf, but also to the potential repudiation ofKulturkampfas a mode ofpolitical relationship. If Schmitt values the papalimperial order of the MiddleAges, this is partially because he sees in it a civilization that could manage internal

conflict without descending into Civil War. Indeed, as Schmitt suggests in


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The Nomos of the Earth (1950), European civilization since the decline of theMiddle Ages has in some sense enacted a never-ending Civil War, one that hassimply shuffled its actors on and off the stage (Cromwell vs. Spain, the

philosophes vs. the old regime, liberalism vs. nationalism and/or Bolshevism)without ever reaching denouementor peace. There were wars among Christianprinces throughout the Middle Ages of course, but they were bracketed wars,conflicts that were distinguished from wars against non-Christian princes andpeoples and that thus did not negate the unity of the respublica Christiana.Schmitt makes much of the Holy Roman Emperors status as katechonrestrainerthe decisive historical concept of medieval order and continuity.

Restraint being thus presupposed, the papalimperial power struggle differedessentially from the later problem of the relation between church and state, a typeof conflict more clearly reflected in the vituperations of a Cromwell, Voltaire or

Lenin:

The medieval struggle between emperor and pope was not a struggle between twosocietates,

whether one understandssocietasin terms of a society or a community; it was not a conflict

. . . similar to a Bismarckian Kulturkampfor to a French laicization of the state; finally, it

was not a civil war similar to the one between white and red, in the sense of a socialist class

struggle . . . Neither for an emperor, who had a pope installed and removed in Rome, nor for

a Pope in Rome, who released the vassals of an emperor or a king from their oath of

allegiance, was the unity of the respublica Christiana ever brought into question.88

Surveying a wrecked Europe, Schmitt has little hope that its place in the new worldorder will be anything other than spectator-cum-canvas to the triumphant

periphery, the two victorious superpowers, both recognizably European but alsorecognizably other. As Schmitt writes, the axis of power that had created theconcept of war in European international law became unhinged, as power in theEast and in the West came to dominate European states no longer certain ofthemselves.89 As Bolshevism was now vindicated by victory rather than mired inrevolutionary chaos, 1945 was even more a repudiation of Europes place in theworld than the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Whereas European conferences inpreceding centuries had determined the spatial order of the earth, at the Paris PeaceConference, for the first time, the reverse was the case: the world determined thespatial order of Europe. But (and note the hyphenation) then The European

Asiatic Great Power, the Soviet Union, was absent.90

Not so in 1945: the Red Army had not only reversed the 1920 victories ofViscount DAubernons heroic Poles, but they had also reversed the eastwardWanderlustof Teutonic peoples, the rejuvenation of which Hitler described ashis bedrock foreign policy goal as early as Mein Kampf. As the Cold War settledinto a global standoff with Germans on either side, Schmitts thoughts about whathad happened to bring Europe to such a pass became obfuscatory, undermining hisabove-quoted self-conception as observer but not enthusiast. His Theory of thePartisan, a typically erudite and wide-ranging examination of conceptions ofguerrilla warfare since the resistances occasioned by Napoleonic occupation, is

especially remarkable for what it does not say. (Here I return to the abrupt silence

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adduced in the epigraph.) Partisan warfare, theoretically mobilizing the wholepopulation against a total enemy, takes humanity into the realm of another, realenmity, which intensifies through terror and counter-terror until it ends in

extermination.91 He still gives Russia a central role, referencing Tolstoysmythmaking about 1812 and comparing it with Stalins linking of communistfervour to nationalism during the Second World War; and he says it was Leninwho transformed the revolutionary partisan into a significant feature of nationaland international civil war.92

Strikingly, Schmitt claims that Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 withno concept of partisan warfare.93 In fact not only the SS police and exterminationunits in conquered territory, but also the Wehrmachtat the front, had orders toshoot all Soviet political commissars immediately as irreconcilable enemies.Elements of this infamous commissar order agreed almost verbatim with

Schmitts previous estimation of Bolshevism. Among its rationalizations was thatIn the battle against Bolshevism, the adherence of the enemy to the principles ofhumanity or international law is not to be counted on. And the originators ofbarbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. Even a generallater implicated in the 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler told his troops that the waragainst Russia was the old battle of Germanic against Slavic peoples . . . thedefence of European culture against Moscovite Asiatic inundation, and therepelling of Jewish Bolshevism.94 After the war Schmitt praised the limitedwarfare of the post-Congress of Vienna era as against the brutality of religiousand factional wars, which by nature are wars of annihilation wherein the enemy is

treated as a criminal and a pirate, comparing the latter with colonial wars . . .

pursued against wild peoples.95 But Schmitt only views the apocalyptic natureof Nazi policy in Operation Barbarossa through a dark mirror: the 19441945Volkssturm, he reports in the lectures only reference to the totalization of warfarein the east, were treated as soldiers and taken as POWs by the Western powers,but simply shot by the Red Army.96

One need not ignore the now well-established terroristic and genocidal record ofLeninism to see here a rather callous exercise in blaming the victim. Whatever hisknowledge of the actual documentary record, it is highly implausible that Schmittwas unaware of the type of warfare the Nazis had brought to the east. The goal wasto establish Germany as an empire of agriculture colonies in the breadbasket of the

Western Soviet Union, murdering, enslaving or expelling (to beyond the Urals) theexisting populationHitler made frequent comparisons to the European conquestof North America.97 After the war Schmitt described European internationallaw as based on the great land-appropriations of the 16th and 17th centuriesand now coming to an end; it had been preceded by the so-calledVolkerwanderung, which was not so much a migration of peoples as a series ofgreat land-appropriations. Such land-appropriations could either proceed withina given order of international law or uproot an existing spatial order and establisha new nomos of the whole spatial sphere of neighbouring peoples.98

This was written less than a decade after an actual instantiation of a war of

extermination (described by its architects in the language ofVolkerwanderung);


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what is more, it was the kind of total ideological war Schmitts imagination hadattributed to a future of Wilsonianism and/or Leninism. Recent scholarship hasenabled us to see a fuller picture than the one previously dominated by a focus on

the Jewish Holocaust. If the German war against the USSR had gone as planned,a historian writes, thirty million civilians would have been starved in its firstwinter, and tens of millions more expelled, killed, assimilated, or expelledthereafter. As many non-Jews as Jews were killed in the East (and about 80% ofJews killed in the Holocaust were from Poland or the ex-Soviet Union), largelythrough starving Soviet POWs and civilians and shooting Polish civilians.99 Onehundred times as many Poles died in the Warsaw uprising as did French in theconcurrent liberation of Paris, a snapshot of the bigger picture where losses on theeastern front were nearly nine times those in the west. Total casualty estimatesdiffer, especially due to decades of Soviet secrecy and shifting propaganda needs,

but a recent consensus is something like 27 million total dead, up to 14 million ofwhom were civilians.100 Schmitts insightful and disturbing writings on thedomestic and international political will endure, but here it is his silence thatspeaks volumes.

Notes and References

1. R. Cristi,Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism: Strong State, Free Economy (Cardiff: University ofWales Press, 1998), p. 11.

2. C. Schmitt,Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L.Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2007), pp. 3839.

3. For example, G. Agamben,State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress, 2005).

4. P. Piccone and G. Ulmen, Introduction to Carl Schmitt,TELOS, 72 (1987), pp. 3, 5.5. L. S. Bishai and A. Behnke, War, violence and the displacement of the political, in L. Odysseos and

F. Petito (Eds)The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis ofGlobal Order, Chapter 6 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 107.

6. C. Mouffe, Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy, in D. Dyzenhaus (Ed.)Law as Politics:Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 15960.

7. Piccone and Ulmen,op. cit., Ref. 4, p. 6.8. P. Hirst, Carl Schmitts Decisionism,TELOS, 72 (1987), p. 16.9. See in particular G. Balakrishnan,The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt(New York: Verso,

2000) and E. Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar(Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2004).

10. Scholarly references to the place of Bolshevism in Schmitts theories are not uncommon, but they aregenerally scattered and unsystematized. A proper estimation of the importance of Marxism andLeninism/Bolshevism in Schmitts theory is suggested by John P. McCormick,Carl Schmitts Critique of

Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997), pp. 190 192, and in John P. McCormick, The dilemmas of dictatorship: Carl Schmitt andconstitutional emergency powers, in Dyzenhaus,op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 21, 227228, 230, in the latter ofwhich McCormick concludes, The strategy of formulating a neo-absolutist presidency that can fortifyGermany in withstanding the Soviet threat becomes central to his Weimar work. P. Gottfrieds CarlSchmitt: Politics and Theory(New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 8990; D. KellysThe State of thePolitical: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz

Neumann (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 212216; and Kennedy, op. cit.,Ref. 9, also reference, albeit briefly, a concern with Leninism. Balakrishnans intellectual biography (seeespecially Balakrishnan, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 18, 20, 61) is also good here.

11. Cited from R. J. Evans,In Hitlers Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape From the

Nazi Past(New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). For debate on the controversial interpretation, made most

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famously by right-leaning German historians, that Nazi atrocities can be explained as reactions to earlier,

and parallel Soviet ones see the essays in P. Baldwin (Ed.),Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and

the Historians Debate (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990); J. Knowlton and T. Cates (Ed. and Trans.),Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning

the Singularity of the Holocaust (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993); and F. Furet andE. Nolte,Fascism and Communism, trans. Katherine Golsan (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,

2001).

12. L. Odysseos, Crossing the line? Carl Schmitt on the spaceless universalism of cosmopolitanism and the

War on Terror, Chapter 7 in Odysseos and Petito (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 5, p. 129.

13. S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1996), p. 304. John P. McCormick, again, has tantalized us with this sort of an interpretation but

not really fleshed it out. In his introduction to the journal Telos reproduction of Schmitts 1929 lecture

The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations [Carl Schmitt, The age of neutralizations and

depoliticizations, TELOS, 96 (1993), pp. 130142], McCormick refers to Samuel Huntingtons then-current The clash of civilizations? essay in the first paragraph saying that Already in 1929 Carl Schmitt

outlined a similar analysis of the clash of cultures (p. 119), and surmises, Schmitts lecture might even be

an indirect source of Huntingtons thesis, since there may be a clear line from Schmitt, via Hans

Morgenthau (p. 120) to Huntington.14. C. Schmitt,Legality and Legitimacy, Jeffrey Seitzer (Ed. and. Trans.) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2004), p. 48.

15. Mouffe,op. cit., Ref. 6., p. 163.

16. M. Hardt and A. Negri,Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin

Press, 2004), p. 34.17. For an attack on the historiography of Schmitt as readable within theWeimar radical right, see J. Bendersky,

Carl Schmitt and the Conservative Revolution and Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg, TELOS, 72 (1987),

pp. 2742, 97107. For older examples of this association, few of which talk about Schmitt in too much

detail, see G. L. Mosse,The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York:Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), pp. 280 293; W. Laqueur,Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918 1933(New York:

Putnam, 1974), pp. 78109; or K. D. Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, andConsequences of National Socialism, trans. Jean Steinberg (Harmondsworth: Penguin University Books,

1973), pp. 185, 317. More recent cogent defences of the association between Schmitt and the likes of

Spengler, Junger, Moeller van den Bruck and others include J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology,Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1984) and R. Wolin, Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas (Amherst, MA:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 103122.

18. C. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1988), pp. 23.

19. Ibid., p. 4.

20. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (Ed. and Trans.),From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1946), pp. 77128. For the influence of Webers Vocation lectures on Schmitt seeBalakrishnan,op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 21. More generally see the relevant sections of Kelly, op. cit., Ref. 10, and

A. Kalyvas,Democracy and the Politics of Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

21. Gerth and Mills,op. cit., Ref. 20, pp. 80, 8384.

22. Ibid., p. 86.

23. Ibid., pp. 91, 115, 119, 122, 125.

24. M. Weber, in P. Lassman and R. Speirs (Eds),Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge and New York:Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 514.

25. D. C. Copeland,The Origins of Major War(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), Chapters 3 and 5;

quotes on pp. 64, 83.

26. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 30.27. Ibid., pp. 6, 8.

28. Ibid., p. 16.

29. Ibid., pp. 52, 6364.

30. Ibid., pp. 12, 70.31. Ibid., p. 15.

32. Ibid., p. 9. His example here, probably not chosen randomly, is Turkeys ethnic cleansing of its Greek

population.

33. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 14, pp. 130131.


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34. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 18, pp. 6566, 74.

35. Ibid., pp. 71, 75.

36. C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,1996), pp. 2627.

37. Ibid., p. 48. Mark Lilla seems to me correct in saying that Schmitt does not arrive at this view inductivelyby surveying the bloody record of political history. He is making an anthropological assumption about

human nature that is meant to reveal the true lessons of history. M. Lilla,The Reckless Mind: Intellectualsin Politics(New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001), p. 58.

38. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 36, p. 27.

39. Ibid., p. 40n.40. Ibid., p. 63.

41. Ibid., pp. 67 68.

42. C. Schmitt,Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G.L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

1996), p. 36.43. Ibid., pp. 37 38.

44. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 4959.

45. O. Spengler, The Declineof the West, 2 vols., trans. C. F. Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1928), Vol. 2, p. 193.

46. A. Moeller van den Bruck, Germanys Third Empire, trans. E.O. Lorimer (London: G. Allen and Unwin,1934), pp. 4344.

47. See F. Nietzsche,On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, W. Kaufmann (Ed. and Trans.) (New York:

Random House, 1967), First Essay, Section 16.

48. Moeller van den Bruck,op. cit., Ref. 46, pp. 29, 72.

49. Ibid., p. 76.50. Ibid., pp. 263264.


52. Ibid., p. 29.

53. Ibid., pp. 54 55n. For the cannibalism accusation as a dividing line between warring European empires andindigenous people see also C. Schmitt,Land and Sea, trans. Simona Draghici (Washington, DC: Plutarch

Press, 1997), p. 40: One kind of abuse was missing, though, the one which they would hurl at the Indians.

Among themselves, the Christian Europeans did not accuse each other of cannibalism.


55. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 75.56. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 42, p. 15.

57. W. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (New York: Putnam, 1937), p. 228.

58. Ibid., p. 167.

59. Ibid., p. 169.60. Ibid., p. 170.

61. Spengler,op. cit., Ref. 45, Vol. 2, p. 193.


63. Churchill,op. cit., Ref. 57, p. 173. Schmitt at one point says of the Bolsheviks, this is . . . the old Jacobinargument (Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 29), but the Asiatic aspect of their revolution is emphasized in

Schmitt too, albeit with a bit more sympathetic interest than is the case with Churchill.64. Quoted in P. Brendon, The Declineand Fall of the BritishEmpire, 1781 1997(New York:Alfred A. Knopf,

2008), p. 333.

65. E. Vincent [Lord DAubernon],The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World: Warsaw, 1920 (Westport, CT:

Gibson Press, 1977), pp. 811.

66. Ibid., pp. 78.67. Ibid., p. 9.

68. Ibid., p. 1.

69. L. Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), p. 71.

Emphasis added.70. Ibid., pp. 72, 264.

71. Ibid., pp. 59, 265266.

72. Ibid., pp. 267268.

73. Ibid., pp. 274275.74. C. Schmitt,The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: The Meaning and Failure of a Political

Symbol, trans. G. Schwab and E. Hilfstein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 89.

75. Ibid., p. 60.

76. Ibid., p. 57.

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77. Cited from Balakrishnan,op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 1112, 5.78. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 74, pp. 6970.79. Ibid., pp. 83 84.80. Ibid., pp. 84.

81. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 42, p. 3.82. Ibid., p. 8.83. Balakrishnan,op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 16.84. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 42, pp. 1011.85. Ibid., p. 14.86. Ibid., p. 14.87. Ibid., p. 39.88. C. Schmitt,The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L.

Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), pp. 5962.89. Ibid., p. 280.90. Ibid., pp. 240241.91. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 11.92. Ibid., pp. 12, 49.93. Ibid., p. 33.94. See C. Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (New York: Knopf, 2007),

pp. 2526; M. Mazower, Hitlers Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008),pp. 142ff.; see more generally O. Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941 45: German Troops and the

Barbarization of Warfare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).95. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 88, p. 142.96. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 3839.97. T. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), Chapter 5;

A. Schulman, Testing ideology against neorealism in Hitlers drive to the East, Comparative Strategy,25 (January March 2006), pp. 33 54.

98. Schmitt,op. cit., Ref. 88, pp. 8082.99. Snyder,op. cit., Ref. 97, pp. ixx.

100. Mazower, op. cit., Ref. 94, p. 3; N. Davies, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 19391945(New York: Viking, 2007), pp. 364368.


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