Carl Schmitt: War! What is it good for?

Crap — now someone is probably going to steal my idea. Another potential line on my CV, thrown out the window because of blogs.

Perhaps blogging is an a priori category, too.

the economic reality does not support war

Well, before we accept this as true, it’s worth asking: the economic reality for whom? It might bear pointing out that elites != countries, and elites’ interests != their countries’ interests, at least not necessarily. Does KBR weep over the federal deficit?

This kind of strict essentialism seems rife in continental thinking, and sometimes analytic philosophy: “Properly speaking, X has nothing whatsoever to do with Y”, which sometimes means only “X and Y are not exactly the same; some Xes are not Y, and some Ys are not X”: whereas there might be a very strong “family resemblance”, statistical overlap, or historical relationship between X and Y .

“Properly” in this phrase seems to mean “speaking appropriately and rightly” but really means “defining these terms as narrowly as possible”.

So I think that Schmitt’s first mistake, one to which philosophical types are terribly successful, was to look for an essence in the first place. But the particular essence he chose seems to show a bias toward conflict and violence on his part.

I haven’t read Otto, but what Kotsko said seems right. You might even be able to make a collection of definitions of this kind.

Sure, abb1, sometimes. I was just pointing out that the occasions when everyone else doesn’t benefit are no proof that no one has, no proof that a war has made no “economic sense” to anybody.

Steven, you’re right of course, nevertheless pointing to the elite as the sole perpetrator is somewhat misleading, I think. They do usually try to share the loot, promise every soldier an estate in Ukraine or something like that. I wonder what the US opinion polls on Iraq would look like now if gasoline was sold today for 20 cents/gallon.

The same argument is made, less loftily but perhaps more entertainingly, in the Jet Li film Hero. For me, the brilliance of the kung-fu makes a good pill-sweetener.

pointing to the elite as the sole perpetrator is somewhat misleading

Not what I was saying, though; merely pointing out the trivial general fact that elite interests do not necessarily coincide with the country’s interest at large.

I wonder what the US opinion polls on Iraq would look like now if gasoline was sold today for 20 cents/gallon.

Greg Palast has a theory about all that. According to him, there were two factions in the administration planning – the “pure” neocons, who wanted to use cheap Iraqi oil to destroy OPEC, and those aligned with oil interests, who wanted to make sure Iraqi oil was not developed so as to keep prices high. Interesting if true.

The point I was trying to make was slightly more subtle than the one I actually did make.

Insofar as it makes sense to discuss of the “friend-enemy” distinction as a priori and fundamental, economic motives will be the reason. You are plopped down in some country and for various ahistorical reasons it will make sense to go to invade your neighbors and come back with some nice loot. Thus, certain people/countries will be your enemies merely by virtue of being where they are and having what they have.

This isn’t necessarily the only reason someone will be your enemy–just that the other enemies will be your enemies for reasons contingent on your specific historical relationship with those people. Most notably, you could be pissed about the last time they came over and took your stuff, regardless of whether it makes economic sense to go try to get your stuff back—Alsace-Lorraine, anyone?

If you look at wars in the modern era, I believe they mostly support this interpretation. Either they take place in area’s where the modern economic system hasn’t integrated sufficiently yet and the “invade-and-loot” method still makes sense (thinking mostly of Africa/ME here) or the wars have pretty direct lineages to prior wars (thinking mainly of all the wars caused by decolonization etc.) There are a few wars that don’t fit this mold, mainly the proxy wars in the shadow of the Cold War, and I am uncertain as to there classification, although I suspect they are somewhat of a combination of the above.

Essentially I think Schmitt is conflating two different understandings of “enemy”. The first is where people are enemies merely because they are–cue the crime lord telling his victim that it is “only business.” The second is where people are enemies because they truly hate the other person. Only the former is really fundamental in the way Schmitt wants it to be and it is also the type which has mostly had its legs cut out from under it by the modern economic system. The latter can still cause wars, but it is also not a fundamental property, as it depends on all sorts of historical peculiarities as a yet more fundamental cause.

Lastly, I am wary about explaining wars in terms of the interests of the “elites,” especially in democracies. This isn’t to say that it isn’t accurate, but rather that it sounds dangerously close to some Marxian conception of “false consciousness.” This carries with it all the usual problems, not the least of which is that it is very often a self-sealer.

The friend-enemy (or opponent) distinction is not the most basic or fundemental concept, since it simply leaves unexplained what interests lead actors to sort other actors as friend or foe.

Vance, the point was that Schmitt is claiming that it would be senseless to fight for economic reasons, and therefore that the pre-existence of a friend-enemy distinction has to explain modern warfare. I think that it’s nuts to assume that wars are generally conducted for rational reasons, but I also think that people are also prepared to fight wars for economic causes when given only the very thinnest of fig leaves for doing so.

I think wars for “national greatness” are such transparent nonsense that it only makes sense to evoke it when all the participants really believe some more mundane reason exists that, for some reason, can’t be publicly stated.

Lastly, I am wary about explaining wars in terms of the interests of the “elites,” especially in democracies […] it sounds dangerously close to some Marxian conception of “false consciousness.”

Sorry, I meant no such offence by “elites”. Please replace it with any other similiar word. But why “especially in democracies”?

Wars obviously benefit particular groups of people such as military entrepreneurs in the short term, but the war system, broadly speaking, is crucial to the maintenance of the privileges and power of any group that controls the state. Note this is not a Marxist conclusion. The state holders aren’t always or even usually a class.

In a pinch, a government can seek legitimacy by providing benefits to its citizens; but, as I read history, war and the threat of war are the more usual ways that the few have most often convinced the many to freely surrender their liberties, their property, and sometimes their lives. War benefits the state and the interests tied to the state–think of the aggrandizement of state power in Europe that went along with the military revolution of the 16th and 17th Centuries and the dimunition of state power that went along with the pacification of Western Europe in the postwar period.

It’s not for nothing that there haven’t been a heck of a lot of peaceful authoritarians.

The ideal situation for a ruling group is to maintain a system of limited wars that help enforce social hierarchy. People like Frederick the Great and Bismark understood this proviso perfectly. So did military theorists like Baron Jomini who belonged to what amounted to an international military caste. He was terrified of popular war.

The administration also seems to understand that a real, balls-out conflict with a serious enemy would be too much of a good thing. The French demographer Todd has pointed out that the administration’s military adventures have been targetted to contemptably weak targets. Nobody’s going to rile up China or Russia. The War on Terror, aka WWIII or WWIV, is ideal: it has greatly augmented the power of the central government, provided huge winfall profits to Republican clients, but–we hope–will remain small potatoes. Unfortunately, miscalculations are perfectly possible and perhaps likely, especially since the right tends to make some pretty optimistic assumptions about America’s continuing economic and military strength. One of these days they may pick on the wrong enemy.

I think the discussion of “elites” and their motivations for war is a red herring […] Honest or not, some convincing rationale has to be offered up to the public independent of the motivations of those in power.

Well, and by whom is the rationale offered up?

By the way isn’t Schmitt saying, not that the friend/enemy distinction is somehow a fundamental underlying truth, but rather that it’s the magic propagandistic juice that, supervening on existing “antitheses”, gives them real political “energy”?

All of this gets the core of my problem with Schmitt, or more precisely the way Schmitt is treated nowadays. If you want an elegantly written encapsulation of the “sinister and crazy” thinking that gives us wars, Schmitt is your man, just as Lenin is the ideal exemplar for anyone wanting to summarise the thinking behind unconstrained power politics. Their usefulness for these purposes is enhanced by their association with the most disastrous failures of such ideas.

But people seem to want to view Schmitt as theorist about this kind of thinking, with whom it is useful to engage, rather than as an example of it, and therefore an appropriate object of study.

Hm, this thread motivated me to pick up my copy of Political Theology and read it (pamphlet-sized work that it is).

If you define “sovereignty” in a manner that precludes anything but an authoritarian sovereign personality, then it is not too surprising that you conclude that only such an entity can exercise sovereignty.

The guy was certainly smart, but put me down with the Lenin-comparison comment above, until I read something else of Schmitt’s.

If you want an elegantly written encapsulation of the “sinister and crazy” thinking that gives us wars, Schmitt is your man

Well, I think he’s a bad writer, but the following doesn’t strike me as particularly sinister or crazy (from before and after John Holbo’s second quote):

No program, no ideal, no norm, no expediency confers a right to dispose of the physical life of other human beings. […] There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. If such physical destruction of human life is not motivated by an existential threat to one’s own way of life, then it cannot be justified. Just as little can war be justified by ethical and juristic norms. If there really are enemies in the existential sense as meant here, then it is justified, but only politically, to repel and fight them physically. (p46)

I can’t find Schmitt to be “placidly untroubled”, in John’s phrase, by war here. Obviously there are arguments to be had about what constitutes an “existential threat”, and Schmitt might have a sinister notion about that somewhere else, which wouldn’t surprise me given his history. But this particular text isn’t very ambivalent about the desirability of war in general.

JQ – I still can’t see where any of John H’s or my quotes necessarily promote irrational hatred: what I just cited appears to say clearly that war, though it often arises through irrational hatred, is only justified in the presence of a real “existential threat” (defined howsoever).

I guess one’s reading hangs on whether one thinks of Schmitt as being descriptive (lamentably, although there are rarely good reasons for war, unjustified wars happen anyway because irrational hatred is stoked up) or normative (irrational hatred is a good reason for war). On the surface, the passages here cited seem to me to be saying the former. I don’t see a good textual reason to read them otherwise. I would hesitate to decide my interpretation on some such basis as “He was a fascist, so he must have meant the latter.” (Not that I am accusing you of doing so.)

But perhaps the problem is that his prose does not really distinguish clearly between descriptive and normative modes. He may even, of course, be obscuring the difference deliberately, encoding a hidden message for initiates à la Strauss.

I must admit, I don’t see the problem with saying “He was a fascist, so he must have meant the latter.”, at least if you substitute “Nazi” for “fascist”. It’s absurd to postulate an anti-war Nazi, so only the pro-war reading is left.

So, the “existential threat” language could be read to mean that only purely defensive war is permissible, but if Schmitt had meant that he would have ended up in Buchenwald or exile. Alternatively, it could mean something like a maximal Lebensraum doctrine – the existence of the Aryan race is incompatible with anything less than absolute power in Europe. My money is on this interpretation.

I guess the hidden message interpretation is also possible, but then which is the esoteric and which the exoteric?

This links to the more general problem of whether a philosopher’s views can/should be linked to their political actions. Heidegger is the obvious problem case – I’ve been thinking about a post on this.

I guess the hidden message interpretation is also possible, but then which is the esoteric and which the exoteric?

I guess that my or abb1’s surface readings would be the exoteric, and yours – on your very plausible interpretation of what he actually means by “existential threat” – would be the esoteric. But it is awfully turgid stuff in any case.

By the way, I don’t know his other work enough to judge whether it might also be possible that Schmitt was one of those who supported the Nazi party in 1932 (when this was written) without assuming that a world war would be part of the package, and changed his mind to become explicitly pro-war later? If so, that would not retroactively invert the apparent meaning of this text.

“Brad DeLong has suitably bloodthirsty quotes”

One of those is from Genghis Khan, not Schmitt, though DeLong suggests they’re soulmates.

I just read Martin Van Creveld, ‘The Transformation of War’. It contains a chapter ‘What War is Fought For’ that struck me as a plausible interpretation of Schmitt’s view (Van Creveld doesn’t explicitly cite Schmitt, but he appears in the bibliography), while being much more accessible than Schmitt himself. Worth checking out in this context.