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Rebecca SE Tan
1 Feb 2024
Preamble: This was also written for an assignment; to be honest when I was reading Schmitt I was so horrified? Because just reading via his flow kind of made sense - the ideas are built up well but then you zoom out a little bit and get horrified by the kind of implications of his work, and how it makes so much sense in hindsight that he's a Nazi sympathiser. At the same time - I don't know how to theoretically critique his ideas; it just feels like my soul cries out that something is seriously and INNATELY wrong with the argument and yet I can't piece out WHY? That's truly horrifying.
The main argument in Schmitt’s work is that the political is defined by a “friend-enemy” distinction (pp. 26). This criterion is existential for politics – it is the ever-present instance or at least possibility of war that makes politics exist, and the political entity decides who the enemy is (pp. 43). This enemy is public, a “collectivity of men”; it is hostis not inimicus, meaning that it is the pitting of one collective group against another, and not individuals (pp. 28).
With this lens in mind, Schmitt critiques liberalism as being unable to properly distinguish between friends and enemies and is hence too inclusive in its extension of membership. He argues that while liberalism has tried to supplant politics with economics or ethics, it has “failed to elude the political” (pp. 69), as not every conflict can be solved through intellectual deliberation and compromise. Schmitt writes, “Liberalism… has attempted to transform the enemy from the viewpoint of economics into a competitor and from the intellectual point into a debating adversary” (pp. 28). However, failing to define clear enemies leads to depoliticization. Consequently, the liberal political nation is bound to collapse via internal competition or external enemies, who are better prepared to make the friend-enemy distinction. He writes, “a nation [cannot] eliminate the distinction of friend and enemy by declaring its friendship for the entire world or by voluntarily disarming itself. The world will not thereby become depoliticalized … then another people will appear which will assume these trials by protecting it against foreign enemies and thereby taking over political rule.” (pp. 51-52).
Schmitt further argues that liberalism does not produce a 'positive' theory of the state and politics; to explain why the state needs to be created in the first place. He contends that though liberalism proclaims to offer protection for individuals, it is unable to form or sustain such a political community in the first place. As liberalism fails to acknowledge the existential nature of political conflicts, it is unable to defend itself when these conflicts inadvertently occur. By its own logic, demanding any member to kill or sacrifice one’s life would “contradict the individualistic principles of a liberal economic order and could never be justified by the norms or ideals of an economy autonomously conceived.” (pp. 48). As such, the state is delegitimized as its boundaries are not in truth protected.
Schmitt’s line of thought concerns me greatly in its potential to justify very extreme political actions. He details that every state has “the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies”,[1] and, for internal peace, “to decide also upon the domestic enemy” (pp. 46). Should individuals decide not to uphold or support the state’s friend-enemy distinction, these dissidents can then be justifiably suppressed or eliminated. This argument is a slippery slope, particularly in relation to the Nazi regime then, or the various genocides today. Consider the Rohingyas in Myanmar, who have perhaps been designated the enemy on account of looking different (darker skinned) or being associated with a different ethnoreligious identity, and has since suffered from mass rapes, killing and exile. Further, Schmitt asserts that only actual participants can correctly judge if an adversary “intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought” (pp. 27). This absence of external sanity checks or third-party mediation raises serious concerns in our digital age, where misinformation can easily be spread and weaponized. For example, Ashin Wirathu’s inflammatory Facebook post incorrectly claimed that Muslim co-workers raped their colleague, leading to violent anti-Muslim mobs. Indeed, while Schmitt does make a distinction between ethics and politics, I question if it is truly necessary to always scapegoat some particular group in order for states like Myanmar to exist legitimately. And if so, when then would this scapegoating end? Are we to become a homogenous society on every single aspect of our existence – race, class, language, religion, worldviews, physique, eye colour, nail length, and the like?
In conclusion, while I acknowledge Schmitt’s attempt in delineating a realistic appraisal of politics, the implication of his arguments seems extreme in the least, and there perhaps requires a framework or guidelines of sorts to navigate upon the boundaries of a state’s friend-enemy distinction.
[1] Italics added for emphasis.
Reference:
Carl Schmitt. The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). ISBN: 0226738922
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