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Carl Schmitt and the Idol of the State

Carl Schmitt and the Idol of the State

Last updated on: March 10, 2010 at 8:06 am by Henry Karlson

Carl Schmitt and the Idol of the State 2010-03-10T08:06:49-05:00 Henry Karlson

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In the debates over the Iraq War, one of the things I have noted time and time again is that Catholic defenders of that war have often said that it was the sovereign of the state who determines when the standards for when the requirements for a just war have been met. This is because it is the sovereign who decides when to go to war. The assumption, of course, is that if a sovereign decides when to go to war, it is because they are looking at just war standards, recognize them as significant, and seek to follow them out. Obviously, as history has shown, this is not the case. Nonetheless, what is interesting is that this line of thinking is strikingly similar to that of Carl Schmitt with one distinction: Schmitt denies the just war tradition. In other words, he reveals the real nature of these debates — that the whole concern is to help defend the state over and against all rivals, including morality, and so that when the state becomes sovereign, just war doctrine must be put aside.

Schmitt bases his understanding of politics on the division between friend and fiend (foe). The point is that every state defines for itself who it sees as its friend, and who it sees as its foe. The foe must be one who is, in some fashion or another, working against the state’s interests. The state, to Schmitt, then has a right to act upon its self-interests, and so must oppose the foe.[1] From here, it is clear where and how war comes into the situation: war is one of the primary means to protect the state’s interests, and since the state’s interest is what matters, the state must be free to engage war when it sees the need. “War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of enemy remains valid.”[2]And it must not be hampered by the idea of the just war. Either one sees one’s war as just and so the rules are met because the state is defending itself, or else, the call for a just war is merely enemy political provocation trying to undermine the power of the state:

The notions which postulate a just war usually serve a political purpose. To demand of a politically united people that it wage war for a just cause only is either something self-evident, if it means that war can be risked only against a real enemy, or it is a hidden political aspiration of some other party to wrest from the state its jus belli and to find norms of justice whose content and application in the concrete case is not decided upon by the state, but by another party, and thereby it determines who the enemy is.[3]

If a state does this, then “it is no longer a politically free people and is absorbed into another political system.”[4] The whole point of war is that it is a struggle against an enemy. Justice is not a concern, because it is war. The only thing which counts is the political entity and its continued self-determination. “The justification of war does not reside in its being fought for ideals or norms of justice, but in its being fought against a real enemy.”[5] The state protects its people, and therefore obliges them to follow its demand.[6] And it is for this reason no one but the sovereign has the power to determine war, and no external figure, such as the pope, has any authority to override the sovereign’s decision.[7]

What is striking here is that Schmitt puts the foundation of the state within the dualistic “with us or against us” notion that we see in many current political debates. He even sees this is the necessary consequent of evil in humanity. This evil is part of what it means to be human, that humanity can, in one fashion, be said to be innately evil. This, he says, must lead us to reject liberalism and its ideals of the innate goodness of humanity.[8] And like such debates, Schmitt silences objections to war based upon justice as being merely enemy propaganda. Indeed, the recognition of a domestic enemy is important: when the group is large, the state itself is threatened and can dissolve into civil war, and so for this reason, it too must be overcome before such a threat to the state can come about.[9]

It might be asked, does the friend-enemy distinction remain as necessity in the world; can there be, for example, some universal humanity which overrides this distinction? Schmitt clearly and in several places says no. The foundation for this is the belief that the friend-enemy distinction will arise due to the fact that the evil within humanity ends up creating such political hostility. And if this is recognized, then the political state is recognized and must be given the freedom to establish its own self-preservation and interests against its opposition. While evil is a factor in the creation of the world as it is, it is clear that he believes that questions of morality fall to the side when the struggle becomes intense. The enemy need not be seen as evil, just the one you are in conflict with — he is someone utterly foreign to yourself which leads to that conflict:

But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third part.[10]

Schmitt, we see, has provided a rather concrete way to justify conflict and war. He also has given an understanding where such conflict can come from: radical difference. It is not surprising that this form of radical differentiation and fear of the other is indeed a normative position within the classical right. Hobbes, to be sure, has played a strong role in this development, because he established political sovereignty as the one who protects against the onslaught of natural evil in the world. It is this fight against evil and the fear of the other which finds itself as the central justification of all kinds of actual evil in the world — because natural evil is seen as needing to be controlled by any means necessary, and morality is no longer the concern in such control. War is hell and unjust, but it is for the sake of self-preservation, which is why anything the sovereign desires can be permitted (and indeed, as the struggle continues, the more likely the conflict will spiral out of control and fall into graver evils, each side justifying such a spiral by the actions of the other). It is not difficult for us to see how this ideology has been used. It establishes the unity between the preservation of the state with the radical destruction of the enemy. Genocide bases itself on these notions. Fascists, though they would be critical of some of what Schmitt said, nonetheless accorded him great respect (and he himself gave that respect back to the state, becoming an adherent of the Nazi Party).[11] And if we look at various groups within the United States, such as the Project of the New American Century, we can see these same values are behind the United States and her current actions in the world at large. It is the politics of state-preservation by means of power and control. This explains the heightened sense of propaganda we get about our so-called enemies, how they are always made to look radically different from us –for this helps keep them strange and seen as a hostile force ready to destroy us and our own ways of life.

Catholics must not accept this radical politicization of humanity. While Catholics are to recognize the authority of their secular leaders, that authority must not be made absolute. It is relative and must always be put under a moral critique. To argue that the state is the one who decides when a war is just is to place the state outside of the realm of morality. This cannot be. This runs contrary to the Church’s teaching on morality, as the Catechism points this out:[12]

Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience. In such a case, ‘authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse’ (CCC 1903).

This is why one must resist one’s sovereign when they override morality and ask someone to commit a great evil like genocide:

Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.

Actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions. Blind obedience does not suffice to excuse those who carry them out. Thus the extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority must be condemned as a mortal sin. One is morally bound to resist orders that command genocide (CCC 2313).

There can be no better answer to Schmitt or many contemporary politicians than these words. The state is not absolute. The state, though it has authority, is only relative. The absolutizing of the authority of the state, though understandable, is idolatry. Wherever it is found, it must be rejected.

Footnotes

[1] “Emotionally the enemy is treated as being evil and ugly, because every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support,” Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27.

[2] ibid., 33.

[3] ibid., 49.

[4] ibid., 49.

[5] ibid., 49.

[6] see ibid., 52. Hobbes is referenced here to support this proposition.

[7] see ibid., 43.

[8] Both sides of the debate are a bit off here. While it is true that sin and evil have entered the world, and the human experience has been corrupted by this, it is not human nature which is evil (for the nature is good), it is the mode of our existence which is fallen and corrupt. So while he is right in saying sin should be considered in the engagement of the world, his understanding of humanity contains an unhealthy ontological error.

[9] see ibid., 46-7.

[10] ibid., 27.

[11] The argument here is not that because Schmitt was a Nazi, therefore everything he said was wrong, or that anything which is similar to his thought is necessarily wrong. It is, however, to show the way his thought leads when put into action.

[12] For a further examination of this subject via the Catechism, read Bishop Botean’s acceptance speech for the Saint Marcellus Award of the Catholic Peace Fellowship Fall Conference in 2003.

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