Carl Schmitt and the Clash of Civilizations: The Forgotten Context

Alex Schulman, alex19@ucla.edu UCLA Dept. of Political Science Paper given at 2009 WPSA conference Draft do not circulate without permission In the recent proliferation of works on Carl Schmitts political and legal theory one can detect a few common pathways. The contemporary relevance is often said specifically to be the broad emergency powers claimed by the Bush Administration after the 9/11 attacks in order to prosecute its war on terror (e.g. Agamben 2005) and more generally to be the possibility of opening up liberal constitutionalism to its aporias, inconsistencies and inadequacies. The recovery of Schmitt, as proclaimed by one of its most dedicated journals, could combat the regression to a nave conformist liberalism brought about by the pollution of communication theory and the obsessive left-liberal pursuit of egalitarianism as a super-legal norm. (Piccone and Ullman, 1987: 3, 5) Constitutional liberalism is said to be unable, now as in Weimar, to handle the political and Schmitts enemy-based conception of the political has not stopped elements of the radical left (the same, presumably, who denounced Bushs and Cheneys appropriation of exceptional authority precisely to eradicate an allegedly existential enemy) from recommending a more Schmittian approach. Schmitt allow[s] us to acknowledge and therefore be in a better position to try to negotiate an important paradox inscribed in the very nature of liberal democracy, that is, the neglect of aspect[s] of democratic politics that liberalism tends to evacuate. (Mouffe, 1998: 159-60) Sometimes this has taken a mere sort of know thy enemy tone: here is the lefts chance to learn from its opponents and thereby regain a vitality it has lost since retreating into academia. (Piccone and Ullman, 1987: 6) But it can also veer off into become thy enemy, wherein the Weimar comparison would be the ratcheting up of violence among extremist parties, who had to adopt each others tactics or perish. Hence an older, less palatable context, and the second major line of Schmitt debate. As has been the case with Heidegger and philosophy, anyone who considers Schmitt a fascinating political theorist with much of relevance to say to our age someone who asks hard questions and points to aspects of political life

too uncomfortable to ignore (Hirst, 1987: 16) must, one way or another, inquire into his relationship with Nazism. To that end, a number of excellent works have been produced exploring, often in minute detail, the genealogy of Schmitts intellectual relationship(s) with the Weimar and then Hitler regime.1 There is an important contextual element missing though. I will argue that Schmitts intellectual relationship to fascism must itself be read in the context of, and as intertwined with, his intellectual relationship to Bolshevism that is, the specifically political form of Marxism Schmitt describes as developing in the Soviet Union after World War I. To be sure, Schmitt scholars have not altogether ignored Schmitts ample commentary on Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union.2 Typically, however, the focus is on either Schmitts critique of Marxism as a totalizing philosophy where economics trumps politics, or on issues of the internal enemy as regarded the Communist Partys (KPD) activities in Weimar Germany. Both concerns are certainly present; but considering Schmitts omnipresent concern with the international context of politics, I would argue that his alarm about Bolshevism actually took place on a grander scale. To read Schmitts decision in favor of Nazi legitimacy following the collapse of sovereignty in Weimar as simply a national application (whether right or wrong) of his legal theory is justifiable, but it misses this broader contextual element. The focus on Bolshevism often takes the form of asides and even footnotes, but, I hope to establish, they are no less telling for being so presented.3 There is perhaps just as much exculpatory danger here as there has been for the Left-Schmittians. After all, viewing fascist sympathies and/or ideology as simply a reaction to the international communist revolution many feared Lenin had set in motion

1 2

See in particular Balakrishnan 2000 and Kennedy 2004 Scholarly references to the place of Bolshevism in Schmitts theories are not uncommon, but they are generally scattered and unsystematized. A proper estimation of the importance of Marxism and Leninism/Bolshevism in Schmitts theory is suggested by McCormick 1997: 190-2 and 1998: 219-21, 227-8, 230, in the latter of which he concludes, The strategy of formulating a neo-absolutist presidency that can fortify Germany in withstanding the Soviet threat becomes central to his Weimar work. (230) Unfortunately this emphasis is largely missing from McCormicks excellent book-length (1997) study of Schmitt. Gottfried 1990: 89-90 and Kennedy 2004: 110-2 also reference, albeit briefly, a concern with Leninism. Balakrishnans intellectual biography (see esp. 2000: 18, 20, 61) is good here. 3 And it is not my argument that there is anything particularly esoteric or hidden about it; rather that it can be seen as an implicit framework for his Weimar-period political philosophy if all the references are taken together and related to his more well-explored ideas.

in 1917 has been used even somewhat recently, as in the German historikerstreit4 to explain away Nazi atrocities, or at least relativize them to an uncomfortable degree. My response to this is that first, I simply seek here to expose a missing, or too-obscured, element in Schmitt scholarship, rather than add to the by-now lengthy bibliography of moralizing, one way or another, about him. But second, one need not buy into any sort of relativization of Nazi atrocities to accept that the development of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and its series of alliances with otherwise anti- or at least non-fascist institutions (like churches) and intellectuals (like Schmitt), was intimately tied into what was then a rather common assumption: an assumption that the future of Europe would eventually come down to a clash of civilizations between Bolshevism and the West.5 This should also then suggest a wider present-day context than the Guantanamo crisis. Carl Schmitts true contemporary heir may be neither critical legal theory nor radical democrats like Chantal Mouffe nor the armed missionaries (and occasional inquisitors) of the Bush/Cheney war on terror. It may be Samuel P. Huntington, who long before 9/11/2001 argued that the future promised a global kulturkampf between Islam and the civilizations it borders, and that the decadent fruits of liberalism, sounding something like they did in the days of Oswald Spengler problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the West (Huntington, 1996: 304) could prevent the U.S. and its European Allies from prevailing.6 Schmitt, too, had mourned the future of a civilization in which value neutrality is pushed to the point of system suicide. (Schmitt 2004: 48) And when Mouffe, for example, praises Schmitts theory as an important warning for those who believe that the process of globalization is laying the basis for worldwide democratization and cosmopolitan citizenship, (1998: 163) she is making a similar warning to Huntingtons.
4

Cf. Evans 1989. For debate on the controversial interpretation, made most famously by right-leaning German historians, that Nazi atrocities can be explained as reactions to earlier, and parallel Soviet ones see the essays in Baldwin 1990, Knowlton and Cates 1993 and Furet and Nolte 2001. 5 Needless to say the specific anti-Semitic coloration of this view, i.e. that Bolshevism was an essentially Jewish movement, was not something Schmitt shared with the Nazi ideologues. 6 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 Teloss reproduction of Schmitts 1929 lecture The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1993), McCormick refers to Samuel Huntingtons then-current The Clash of Civilizations? essay in the first paragraph, says that Already in 1929 Carl Schmitt outlined a similar analysis of the clash of cultures, (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 (120) to Huntington.

Welcome back Oswald Spengler, neo-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wrote (2004: 34) in sarcastic disgust at Samuel Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations thesis and Huntington did, it must be said, reference Spengler rather blandly as a historian of civilizations (as opposed to a fascist philosopher). The oddity, perhaps, is that it took so long for Spengler to be welcomed back, in this age in which the academic left hosts guest lectures from the likes of Schmitt and Heidegger. Should Spenglerian be a insult, when Schmittian or Heideggerian are now run-of-the-mill? Of course Schmitts Anglo-American reputation, especially as reflected by those around the Telos resurrection, is that of a far more subtle and incisive theorist of modernity than the portentous Spengler.7 This could well be right; but there may also be more to the earlier association between Schmitt and Weimars radical-right intelligentsia than has recently been allowed.8 This paper will examine Schmitts scattered, but still cohesive, thoughts on the development of Marxism-Leninism and its adoption as state ideology by the Soviet Union. It will tie these into his conception of the political as it played out in Europe in the modern age, and argue that his critique of liberalism and embrace of fascism sought justification not only in the legal dilemmas of a single state, Germany, but also in the existential struggles he saw unfolding for European civilization as a whole. From Marx to Mongolia A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West In the 1926 Introduction to The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Schmitt 1988; henceforth cited as CPD), Carl Schmitt suggests that it is a sign of the weakness of parliamentary democracy that the most convincing reason people can give for supporting it is that it is preferable to Bolshevism (CPD 2-3). Schmitt is known for denouncing
7

Or in the other case: Schmitts cold realism can be a healthy corrective to the Heideggerian inebriation (Piccone and Ullman 1987: 12). 8 For an attack on the historiography of Schmitt as readable within the Weimar radical right, see Bendersky 1987. For older examples of this association, few of which talk about Schmitt in too much detail, see Mosse 1964: 280-93; Laqueur 1974: 78-109; or Bracher 1973: 185, 317. More recent cogent defenses of the association between Schmitt and the likes of Spengler, Junger, Moeller van den Bruck and others include Herf 1984 and Wolin 1995: 103-22.

parliamentarianism as a purposeless fetish for discussion and deliberation, a perpetual deferral of the true decision-al fruits of a more existentially attuned agonism. Here, though, he surmises, when he asks himself What did parliamentarianism mean to these German 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 most importantly it was a means for selecting political leaders, a certain way to overcome political dilettantism and to admit the best and most able to political leadership, the very political dilettantism Schmitt saw in nineteenth century romanticism, but that has now infected the bureaucratic-constitutional republic. Whether parliament actually possess the capacity to build a political elite, he now argues, has since become very questionable and politics, far from being the concern of an elite, has become the despised business of a rather dubious class of persons. (CPD 4) If Webers wrestling with the problems of modern legitimacy hover as a consistent eminence grise over Schmitts most enduring works, it is no accident that the specters of Lenin and Trotsky haunted Webers Politics as a Vocation (Gerth and Mills 1946: 77-128) lecture in turn.9 Weber describes two political growths as peculiar to the Occident the constitutional state and also the demagogue. (80) Soon one will war with the other, in the sort of Weltanschaung clash during which, Weber admits, there is little to do but choose sides. At the level of the individual, though, it is the professional politician, no longer in the personalistic service of a dynast, who is unique to the West. This character makes politics his life, in an internal sense, either seeking power for its own sake or nourish[ing] his inner balance and self-feeling by the consciousness that his life has meaning in the service of a cause. (83-4) In an atmosphere of wartime inflation where bulwarks of bourgeois order like property and safe, interest-bearing capital were being eroded, Weber surmises that the era of a new, dangerous sort of professional politician awaits: A quite reckless and unreserved political idealism is found if not exclusively at least predominately among those strata who by virtue of
9

For the influence of Webers Vocation lectures on Schmitt see Balakrishnan 2000: 21

their propertylessness stand entirely outside of the strata who are interested in maintaining the economic order of a given society. This holds especially for extraordinary and hence revolutionary epochs. (86) Only a firm taming of the soul, not particularly well-specified, will prevent the vocational politician from becoming one of the political dilettantes (91, 115) Weber sees at the head of the Soviet dictatorship. But Mussolini and Gentile have not named totalitarianism yet, and for Weber, at this point, plus a change: In what but the persons of the power-holders, he asks, does the rule of the workers and soldiers councils differ from the rule of any power-holder of the old regime? (119) Yet Weber can also foresee in the Bolshevik or Spartacist adventurer a ruthless proponent of the ethic of ultimate ends, one who suddenly turns into a chiliastic prophet, and whose premiums consist of the satisfying of hatred and the craving for revenge the opponents must be slandered and accused of heresy.10 (122, 125) Although Weber does not exactly close his famous lecture on a note of resounding optimism recall: No summers bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness (128) he nevertheless holds out the possibility that the correctly trained vocational politician could reconcile defeated Germany to parliamentary liberalism. For what other decent alternative to Bolshevik dilettantism could there be? Schmitt, however, will have none of it. Though a reasonable political organization in the nineteenth century, when legitimacy could still be procured by cordoned-off elites, parliamentary liberalism was fast becoming an anachronism: the development of modern mass democracy has made argumentative public discussion an empty formality. 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 democratic legitimacy. (CPD 30) If, in a mass-democratic age, a parliamentary process only legitimating criteria should
10

Webers conclusion seems to be that while revolutionary Bolshevism can look like something new, it will eventually be forced into becoming just another modern bureaucratic state: Emotional revolutionism is followed by the traditionalist routine of everyday life; the crusading leader and the faith itself fade away, or, what is even more effective, the faith becomes part of the conventional phraseology of political philistines and banausic technicians. Soon comes depersonalization and routinization in the interests of discipline. After coming to power the following of a crusader usually degenerates very easily into a quite common stratum of spoilsmen. (125)

change from an institution of evident truth into a simply practical-technical means, then it only has to be shown that things could be otherwise and parliament is then finished. (CPD 6, 8) The replacement of nineteenth century elite liberalism by twentieth century mass democracy awaits its correspondingly new political forms.11 One such form has already started to develop to the east, and Bolshevism is interesting to Schmitt, among other reasons, for the ways in which it has transformed a nineteenth-century philosophy, Marxism, into an authentically twentieth-century political movement. Though there is little normative regard attached, Schmitt allows that Bolshevik and fascist claims to embody a genuine form of democracy are legitimate: these forms are certainly antiliberal but not necessarily antidemocratic. (CPD 16) Indeed, they are more authentically democratic than were their origins in Marxism, which was essentially a mirror-image of contemporaneous post-Enlightenment liberalism; Schmitt reverses the estimation of those who have sought to reclaim a democratic Marx from Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Marx remained trapped in classical, and therefore bourgeois, political economy as well as within the rationalist faith of the Enlightenment only with Lenin and Trotskys instantiation of Marxism in an expansionist state has Marxism become only an intellectual instrument for what is really no longer a rationalist impulse. (CPD 52, 63-4) By positing an undifferentiated humanity as the subject of his philosophy, Marxism was, like liberalism, anti-political; politics therein becomes devalued something insignificant insubstantial to the degree that such an indifferent equality is taken seriously. Marx was only a schoolmaster and remained trapped in an intellectual exaggeration of West European bourgeois education, (CPD 12, 70) an education the radical socialists of the twentieth
11

Balakrishnans analysis of Schmitts potential normative moves is interesting here: The problem with which Schmitt was grappling was how the most radical specters of popular sovereignty could be definitively exorcized he explored a number of alternatives. The first was the ultra-authoritarian view that the Revolution haunting European society needed to be violently exorcized by a counter-revolutionarydictatorship in an eschatologically conceived civil war. The second was the very different idea that the Catholic Church could help stabilize the postwar situation because, as the last significant embodiment of a common West European political civilization, it was uniquely able to play the role of mediator in national and class conflicts; the Roman Church was a bulwark of the European state form, protecting it against the full, politically radical consequences of modernity. The third was, again, another entirely different position: the legitimation crisis of the post-liberal state would be solved not by trying to hold back the rise of the masses but, rather, by the plebiscitary integration of the masses into a homogeneous national democracy (2000: 41). But all of these potential moves, I argue, can only be fully understood by reference to the Leninist threat.

century theorists of violence like Sorel; institutionalizers of violence like Lenin have increasingly come to reject. In a sense Schmitt agrees with the communists and their fellow-travelers that the Bolshevik (or, mutatis mutandis, fascist) dictatorship is more authentically democratic than the Western liberal democracies, though not quite for the reasons that were often given by communisms philosophical defenders. Again, this is because liberal democracy is something of an oxymoron for Schmitt. Eventually either the adjective or the noun must win out: democracy and liberalism could be allied to each other for a time, just as socialism and democracy have been allied; but as soon as it achieves power, liberal democracy must decide between its elements. To a true modern mass democracy parliament will invariably appear an inconceivable and outmoded institution, a debating parlor wherein discussion by independent representatives has no autonomous justification for its existence, even less so because the belief in discussion is not democratic but originally liberal. (CPD 15) But liberalisms surrender to democracy is not solely based on the latters affinity with existential moments of mass action/decision. After all, what are we deciding upon that is so important? Probably not tax credits, workplace regulations, and so forth: the most stultifying parliament could do that well enough. Liberalism fails because it seeks to universalize itself; real democracy knows that group struggle is unavoidable. Here, again, Huntington might be the most admirably straightforward modern disciple: We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against. (1996: 21) For Schmitt, liberalism is based on an abstract universal equality that can never be achieved, while democracy implies a selective equality that tends to be the default mode of organization anyway: the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally, requiring first homogeneity and second elimination or eradication of heterogeneity. (CPD 912) Whereas in the past this principle has exercised itself in various forms hierarchy of 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: it became allied with nationalism. We in Central Europe live under the eye of the Russians,
12

His example here, probably not chosen randomly, is Turkeys ethnic cleansing of its Greek population.

Schmitt announces in the very first line of his The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations lecture. Their vitality is enough to seize our knowledge and technology as weapons, but such vitality owes more than a little to the fact that They have realized the union of Socialism and Slavism. While we in Europe still live in a period of exhaustion on Russian soil a state arose which, despite its distant theoretical claims to be an intermediate stage in the process of eliminating the state, is more intensely statist than any ruled by the absolute princes. (Schmitt 1993: 130-1) So it is the Bolsheviks who first came up with National Socialism only later to be appropriated defensively as the Prussian socialism of Spengler or the National Bolshevism of Goebbels. For Schmitt, of course, there is no pathos here. Nothing was betrayed that did not deserve to be. Yet the idea that in becoming Bolshevism, Marxism, originally a dyed-in-the-wool nineteenth century European metaphysics, has also become frighteningly other, remains to unsettle him. Perhaps Marxism has arisen so unrestrainedly on Russian soil, Schmitt ventures, because proletarian thought there had been utterly free of all the constrictions of Western European tradition and from all the moral and educational notions with which Marx and Engels themselves still quite obviously lived. When Marxism migrated from the west to the east there it seized a myth for itself that no longer grew purely out of the instinct for class conflict, but contained strong national elements, breathing new life into the Russian hatred for the complication, artificiality, and intellectualism of Western European civilization. (CPD 65-6, 74) Schmitt does not guess at whether claims of a new Soviet man have any truth to them, but he certainly sees the move from Marxism to Bolshevism that the Soviets have made as a warning to the West about what a modern politics must do to retain 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 creator of a powerful myth in which it alone would find the courage for a decisive battle. For socialism and its ideas of class struggle there is no greater danger than professional politics and participation in parliamentary business. These wear down great enthusiasm into chatter and intrigue and kill the genuine instincts and intuitions that produce a

moral decision 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. (CPD 71, 75) Whether Schmitt at this point unequivocally admired the Italian jettisoning of parliamentary liberalism or not, he certainly admires its legitimation tactic: countering the energy of Bolshevism with the energy of a racially framed anti-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 (Schmitt 1996; henceforth cited as CP) that Schmitt draws his famous description of the political as the friend-enemy decision. Though enemy status here need not imply personal hatred indeed it all may be curiously unemotional the friend-enemy distinction denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. On his account Schmitt needs tell us nothing too specific about the content of this drawing of borders. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor. 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. (CP 26-7) Schmitt does not deny that friend-enemy distinctions might be made on moral, aesthetic or economic lines but if that occurs to the extent that violent death is admitted as a possibility, then the distinction has simply flipped over from being whatever it was to being political.

This is something of a tautology.13 But Schmitt wishes to put death, or the risk of death, back at the center of political theory not only because death is for him conceptually richer than discussion or deliberation; it is because real citizens of real states will be called on to fight and die for entities larger than themselves, just as they were with results more horrific than anyone had foreseen in World War I. Knowing better than the post-Kantian dreamers who thought they had outlawed war following the end of that conflict, Schmitt supposes it will happen again sooner or later. What would the contours be? By Schmitts theory they could be anything, of course, since many dimensions of human identity have led to violent struggle over the years and have thus become, on his terms, political. But content-wise, Schmitt seems to have at least seriously entertained the common interwar European viewpoint by no means limited to the German radical right, though it found its most intense expressions there that the next great struggle would be between the Soviet Union and the West, or at least some understanding of the West. And though it is always hard to tease out the normative from the descriptive in Schmitt, I argue that in Schmitts theory is not only a description of a coming civilizational clash between Bolshevism and the rest of Europe, but a sort of moral enthusiasm for it. What likely enemy could Schmitt be thinking of when he speaks of the adversary who intends to negate his opponents way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve ones form of existence (CP 27)? Perhaps some German ultra-nationalists would at this point have cited an internal Jewish enemy, but internationally, the only plausible answer is Soviet Russia, armed with both powerful ethnic nationalism and an expansionist ideology.14 Whereas Western liberals were
13

For example: A religious community, a church, can exhort a member to die for his belief and become a martyr, but only for the salvation of his own soul, not for the religious community in its quality as an earthly power; otherwise it assumes a political dimension. Its holy wars and crusades are actions which presuppose an enemy decision, just as do other wars. (CP 48) Schmitt can always defend his concept of the political as that for which one dies against allegations that people die for all sorts of reasons by redescribing those other reasons as, through that very willingness to die, political. Mark Lilla seems to me correct that Schmitt does not arrive at this view inductively by 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 (2001: 58). 14 This is not to say that German revanchisme did not harbor resentments, and even expect another war, against the Western victors of 1918, France in particular. But the view as it developed, and eventually was espoused by Hitler, was that a settling of accounts in the West would be an ordinary war fought to correct boundary and/or economic disputes, while a war in the East would be a total struggle for domination, colonization and perhaps extermination.

presiding over a rotting nineteenth-century corpse, the ideal of the political state is still real it has received new energies and new life in the Soviet Union. (CP 40n) Ever since Hegel wandered to Moscow via Karl Marx and Lenin a new concrete-enemy concept, namely that of the international class enemy has taken hold, and the USSRs legitimating philosophy transformed itself as well as everything else, legality and illegality, the state, even the compromise with the enemy, into a weapon of this battle. (CP 63) Bolshevism no longer plays by liberal rules, and the liberal states do the world no favors by failing to place themselves, and everyone else, on this new continuum of friends and enemies. Touring the most intense emergences of the friend/enemy conception in the modern era, Schmitt cites the anti-Catholicism of Cromwells England, the ecrasez linfame of Voltaire and the philosophes, and the German nationalist response to the Napoleonic Wars; and then cites as their true contemporary equivalent Lenins annihilating sentences against bourgeois and western capitalism (CP 67-8). Schmitt sees kulturkampf even in the birth pangs of Marxism-Leninism, and thus sees a specter that would haunt Europe long after Marxs dreams of a universal proletariat and fading-away of the state were falsified. Schmitts interesting gloss on the development of Marxism, and the enduring symbolism of its various heresies, deserves to be examined at some length: The insurmountable antipathy both these men of the western half of Germany [i.e., Marx and Engels] harbored for Ferdinand Lasalle, who stemmed for the eastern half, was more than an unheeded whim. But their hatred of the Russian arose from their most deeply rooted instincts and manifested itself in the struggle within the First International. Conversely, everything in the Russian anarchist rose in revolt against the German Jew (born in Trier) and against Engels. What continually provoked Bakunin was their intellectualism. They had too much of the idea, too much grey matter he rightly suspected the claim to authority, discipline, and hierarchy. To him, every type of cerebralism is hostile to life. (Schmitt 1996a [Hereafter RCPF]: 36)

But the struggle has resolved itself and Bakunins untamed barbarian instinct (RCPF 37) has seemingly won the day. It has united the life forces of two specter-haunters in a fashion that, to Schmitt, is no coincidence: 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. Where they have a sense of their own power, they proudly call themselves barbarians. The fact that they met on Russian soil, in the Russian Soviet Republic, has a profound justification in the history of ideas. However dissimilar and even antagonistic the two groups, however inexplicable the process in terms of all previous ideological constructs and the history of Marxism, the alliance is no accident of world history. (RCPF 38) Again, this is not necessarily a fascistic sentiment: an ordinary aristocratic conservative might harbor similar fears. But at the very least, the Hitlerian view that Germany, and Europe around it, had reached a point of decision in some sense destined finds a distant Schmittian echo. This analysis links Schmitt, at least partially, to other branches of the Weimar radical intelligentsia. Spengler, too, was not yet a full-fledged fascist sympathizer (an attachment he shed relatively early on, anyway) when he referred to Those young Russians of the days before 1914 dirty, pale, exalted, moping in corners, ever absorbed in metaphysics, seeing all things with an eye of faith even when the ostensible topic is the franchise, chemistry or womens education, naming them modern equivalents to the Jews and early Christians of the Hellenistic cities, whom the Romans regarded with a mixture of surly amusement and secret fear (Spengler 1928: II, 193). And Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, whose book 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 Marxist challenge. In an analysis similar to Schmitts above if a

bit less nuanced, the author reminds us that Marx was a Jew, a stranger in Europe who nevertheless dared to meddle in the affairs of European peoples Marx is only comprehensible through his Jewish origins. Thus he sought not merely economic upheaval but a sort of Nietzschean slave-revolt ressentiment: Against a background of sinister passion there flame through his words the fires of hate, retaliation and revenge. As the Jew that he was, national feeling was incomprehensible to [Marx] and as the rationalist that he was, national feeling was for him out of date. Marx ignored the upper strata of Europe because he did not belong to them and had no clue to the values that they had created through the centuries and had handed on as a precious heritage to their children (Moeller van den Bruck 1934: 43-4) a lamentation on kulturkampf quite similar to that made by Nietzsche (1967: First Essay, Section 16) concerning the longstanding world-historical struggle Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome, which had most recently replayed itself as the assault of democrats and socialists against the finer sentiments of the ancien rgime. Moeller also affirms that Bolshevism, instead of being seen as a Westernizing ideology imposed on recalcitrant Slav peasants, should rather be seen as an authentic volk-ization of its by-then outmoded Marxist interpretation. It was even a rebuke to Tsarist Westernization. Whereas Germany had decided in favor of western 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. (Moeller van den Bruck 1934: 29, 72) Like Spengler, and perhaps like Schmitt, Moeller hopes that Germany, whose above-mentioned decision was simply for the lesser of two evils (the disintegrating atmosphere of liberalism, which spreads moral disease amongst nations [76]) could pioneer a third way. The salient difference here would be Moellers intense nationalism, which the internationally-minded others sometimes drew back from. Yet at the end of his tract Moeller, too, implies that he equates thinking about Germany with thinking about Europe, and that such thinking must begin by drawing a line against Asia.

His cultural hopes are closed to them because they possess an infinity of their own, which is not ours, which turns its face towards Asia, away from the west. If the German understands this he works not only for his nation but for his civilization. At the same time he is fighting for the cause of Europe, for every European influence that radiates from Germany as the centre of Europe, he declares at the finale. The shadow of Africa falls across Europe. It is our task to be guardians of the threshold of values. (263-4) Of course German nationalists also thought they had good reason to be angry with the French, the most enthusiastic imposers of the Versailles settlement and the patron of the new border states to Germanys south and east. Schmitts comments on FrancoGerman relations, then, also become extremely interesting. In a footnote Schmitt objects to the practice of calling the payments which armed France imposes on disarmed Germany not tribute, but reparations. The latter appears to be more juristic, more legal, more peaceful, less polemical, and more apolitical than tribute. But Schmitt finds that reparation is more highly charged and therefore also political because this term is used politically to condemn juristically and even morally the vanquished enemy. The imposed payments have the effect of disqualifying and subjugating him not only legally but also morally. He goes on to compare this question of terminology to a similar one of old, when a German prince inquired as to whether payments made to the Turkish sultan were pension or tribute. (CP 31) This comparison is important because it echoes sentiments expressed elsewhere. In arguing that even universalistic religions adhere, in extremis, to his concept of the political, Schmitt observes that attempts to found perpetual peace within Christendom were always matched by a warlike attitude toward those outside it: Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks (CP 29) so love thy enemy could be at once a moral, but not a political, principle. A footnote here quotes Platos argument that real war only occurred between Hellenes and barbarians. Aside from being one of Schmitts many interesting forays into the historiography of legal terms, this can simultaneously be read as a wounded civilization-al jaccuse: the Western victors of 1918 have not only mistreated Germany, they have turned Germans into Turks. A similar reading could be given to his offhand remark on Pufendorfs

placing of allegedly cannibalistic Indians outside the realm of humanity: As civilization progresses and morality rises, even less harmless things than devouring human flesh could perhaps 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. (CP 54-5n) Insolvent Germany is being treated as if it were an alien civilization; and this at a time when European unity in the face of potential Bolshevik aggression was necessary. Schmitt predicts that a mix of high-minded Wilsonianism and actual British or French vindictiveness post-World War I 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 an international hostis declaration new content and new vigor. (CP 51) But even worse, the hostis 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. After 1945, under interrogation by the Allies, and taunted with the accusation that he had propagandized on behalf of Nazism, Schmitt replied that he had not sought to achieve but diagnosed totalitarianism. One can question 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. Hitlers method was new. There was only one parallel, Lenins Bolshevik dictatorship. There are by now mountains of writings, from the purely empirical to the openly polemical, comparing Nazi to Bolshevik totalitarianism, mostly with a view to which was worse? For our purposes here, though, the more important point as it relates to Schmitts intellectual complicity in the Nazi takeover is his views as to what type of German political organization, surrounded by what sort of European political organization, would best be able to prevail in a shooting kulturkampf with Bolshevism. Again, this marks Schmitt as having concerns broadly similar to Weimars (and then Hitlers) reactionary intelligentsia but also broadly similar to wide swaths of interwar thinkers and politicians. Clash of Civilizations

A common spiritual enemy can also produce the most remarkable agreements Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy it is among Catholics that the image of the Antichrist is still alive. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form Compare, for example, two contemporaries from each end of the ideological spectrum confronting Schmitt: Winston Churchill and Leon Trotsky. As late as 1937, in his book Great Contemporaries, the former, while expressing only a muted, guarded worry about Adolf Hitler but 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 his path (Churchill 1937: 228) was still fullthrottle against the Bolsheviks, seeing fit to textually eviscerate the by-then fugitive Trotsky. The struggle with the latter remained the true weltanschauungskrieg: and the hounded Trotsky is found pathetically supplicating England, France and Germany to admit him to the civilization it has been and still is the object of his life to destroy. (167) We are now more apt to think of his later, similar anti-Nazi polemics, but at this point Churchills fulminations against Soviet communism show every mark of a man who has discovered his existential Schmittian 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 with non-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. (169) In Bolshevism Churchill finds No trace of compassion, no sense of human kinship, no apprehension of the spiritual, a worldview decidedly removed from the ordinary

affections and sentiments of human nature (170). Spengler too sees no reciprocal comprehension, no communication, no charity (1928: II, 193) in Russian Bolshevism. These seems to be a more emotional denunciation of Schmitts more dispassionate reckoning with a democracy (broadly understood) that demonstrates its political power by knowing how to refuse or keep at bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity. (CPD 9) Also like Schmitt, but in purpler tones, Churchill paints a picture of an already dangerous Western ideology made even bleaker by its geographical foreignness: For all its horrors, a glittering light plays over the scenes and actors of the French Revolution. The careers and personalities of Robespierre, of Danton, even of Marat, gleam luridly across a century. But the dull, squalid figures of the Russian Bolsheviks are not redeemed in interest even by the magnitude of their crimes. All form and emphasis is lost in a vast process of Asian liquefaction. (Churchill 1937: 173)15 These may have been Churchills wilderness years, but the apocalyptic attitude was shared across broad swaths of the British political spectrum. Edgar Vincent, or Lord DAubernon, British ambassador to Germany in the early Weimar period among other government postings, likened the Soviet threat to Britains world position to a cataclysm equaled only by the fall of the Roman Empire. (Quoted in Brendon 2008: 333) DAubernon wrote a book about the 1920 Polish defeat of the Red
15

Schmitt at one point says of the Bolsheviks, this is the old Jacobin argument (CPD 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. Elsewhere Schmitt refers to Marxisms continuation of the Enlightenments educational dictatorship, philosophical Jacobinism, surmising that the rationalist faith of the Enlightenment has been vastly outdone and taken a new, almost fantastic jump The result must be, as with all rationalisms, a dictatorship of the leading rationalists. (CPD 52-4) Schmitt also echoes Churchills limited pathos about the passing of the Jacobin in his conflicted elegy for the eighteenth century culture warrior: As long as the idea of humanity preserved a spontaneous power, its representatives also found the courage to succeed with inhuman power. The humanitarian philosophers of the eighteenth century preached enlightened despotism and the dictatorship of reason. They are self-assured aristocrats. Thus they base their authority and secret societies (i.e. strictly esoteric associations) on the claim that they represent the idea of humanity. In this, as in every esoteric construct, lies an inhuman superiority over the uninitiated, the common man, and mass democracy. Who today has such courage of conviction? (RCPF 33-4) Schmitt and Churchill seem to agree as to that questions answer.

Army mostly a collection of his diary entries from the conflict zone, interspersed with military history called The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World (DAubernon 1931). In it he compares Marshall Pilsudskis stopping of the Red Armys advance at Warsaw to, in turn, Charles Martels defeat of expansionist Islam at Tours, the Greek triumph at Salamis, and the Christian victory over Ottoman forces at Lepanto (8-11). Warsaw 1920 was a battle not less decisive than Sedan and the Marne in its influence on the culture of the world, on its science, religion and political development. If anything, its terms were far more those of a clash of civilizations than the Western Front in the First World War: The civilizations in conflict were radically different, the objectives and 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 divergent systems. (7-8) By implication, it was more the bloodshed on the Marne that signified an inter-tribal squabble. The description of the battle (whose outcome, of course, unlike Martels victory at Tours, would soon be reversed) for DAubernon deserves rhetoric similar to that used by Gibbon. 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 the very existence of Western civilization would have been imperiled. 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 danger the fanatical tyranny of the Soviet. (9) But the most recent comparison, albeit one looking back centuries to the very beginnings of Europes world ascension, would be Lepanto, after which Europe might well have been overrun by barbarous hordes from Asia Minor and reduced to the sterile nakedness of all the lands which fell under the devastating rule of the Ottoman Sultans. (11) The enmities following upon 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-Red Army commissar pushed to advocating European unity against what he comes to see as the existential enemy to civilization in this case, fascism. The Soviet United States of Europe, he exclaims, that is the only correct slogan which points the way out of the splintering of Europe, which threatens not only Germany but all of Europe with complete economic and cultural decline. (Trotsky 1971: 71) For Trotsky the proletarian unification of Europe is now less an iron law of historical development than a very important weapon in the struggle against the abomination of fascist chauvinism, (72) an aspect of the defense of culture before barbarism. (264) He still speaks something of a class-based terminology, in which the motley masses of the petty bourgeoisie have rallied around the swastika, the latter representing the party of counterrevolutionary despair; but the end results breaks all reasonable bounds of economic self-interest (Trotsky was certainly more sophisticated an observer of fascism than the contemporaneous Moscow party line, with its crude reductions to the supposed interests of finance capital), and becomes a crusade, a stranger, more fantastic, more discordant one than the peasant crusades of the Middle Ages. (59, 265-6) 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? In the relations among states also, when matters of secondary importance are involved, the rules and usages of protocol are more or less observed. But when vital interests collide, rifles and cannons come to the center of the stage instead of treaty provisions. The internal and external difficulties of the German nation have heated up the class struggle to the point where no one can or wants to subordinate it to parliamentary conventions. 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. (267-8)

Whats more, Trotsky criticizes the Stalinist USSR (in which his name would cover a repressive state of exception far more brutal than the Nazi purges after 1933) for lacking the political impetus 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 into administrative command. (274-5) Both figures were prophetic, in their own way while Trotsky did not live to see an alliance between the USSR and the West crush Nazism, Churchill did live to see and shape the contours of the renovated Western Alliance, with a rehabilitated Germany, 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 stayed with Schmitt, though they were adapted to changing political needs, as his conflictual but at least somewhat conciliatory relations with the Nazi regime developed. Thus Schmitts The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938), an ostensibly exegetical work that veers in oddly tangential directions, especially given the subject, concerning Schmitts historiography of European culture war. The villain is Jewry; unsurprisingly, perhaps, if Schmitt was in part trying to reingratiate himself with the regime. Still, the content of the prosecution ranges beyond the familiar material of Nazi propaganda. They develop in Schmitts long, iconoclastic riff on Hobbess title beast, which is not readable as a straightforward metaphor, familiar to a Biblically literate readership. Schmitt delves into interpretations that arose in the Middle Ages, in which the unique, totally abnormal condition and attitude of the Jewish people towards all other peoples became discernible, a condition than cannot be compared with that of any other people. Here we are confronted by political myths of the most astonishing kind and by documents often fraught with downright magical intensity. They are produced by cabbalists and have naturally an esoteric character. (Schmitt 1996b [Henceforth LST]: 8)

The Leviathan monster becomes symbolic of Jewish fear an image of heathenish vitality and fertility, the great Pan that Jewish hatred and Jewish feelings of superiority have transformed into a monster (LST 9) to be then transformed by ressentiment into a gradual, cultural-sphere slave revolt. Now less amenable than earlier in Schmitts career to cold raison detat analysis, political developments in the modern age become explicable through 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 best until the relation of public and private, deportment and disposition was turned upside down. (LST 60) Representative among the intellectuals, and going past Hobbes, was Spinoza, the Jewish philosopher who pushed this incipient form [i.e. the modern contractual state] to the limit of its development until the opposite was reached and the leviathans vitality was sapped from within and life began to drain out of him. (LST 57) That Schmitts newfound anti-Semitism in the Leviathan book takes the form of an aggressive historiography of culture war marks it even if the bigotrys content was wholly opportunistic as a logical development from his earlier, more apparently realist works. The most available context to a man of Schmitts background was indeed a famous religiously-based kulturkampf, Bismarcks (cf. Balakrishnan 2000: 11-2); though the potentially anti-Jewish purchase of Schmitts experiences stemming from a Catholic, petty-bourgeois and provincial background (Ibid. 5) in an age of Prussian-Protestantnationalist ascendancy are not self-evident. Here, though, he describes the formation of the national-bureaucratic state in modern Germany as a product of Jewish 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 to the sanctuary of the still respectable German state. Form 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. (LST 69-70) Later in the book the story of Jewish cultural infiltration fades away, and the more obvious sense of European religious war returns, with contemporary developments redolent of the struggle that the English nation waged against he papal churchs and the Jesuits claim to world hegemony the world historical struggle that Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Roman Catholics waged against each other. (LST 83-4) Following upon his friend-enemy historiography in The Concept of the Political, Schmitt intimates that contemporary geopolitics remain echoes, conscious or not, of the friend-enemy 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 (1914-1918) 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 of AngloSaxon world propaganda and American President Wilson were able to stage a modern crusade of democracy and direct it at Germany. (LST 84) Commentators have long debated the significance of Roman Catholicism for Schmitts theories. For our purposes here, the sincerity of Schmitts religious beliefs are not as important as his view of the position of Catholic Church as a player, by turns aggressive and defensive, in kulturkampf one much longer and wider than the specific Bismarckian battle that gives us the name. Schmitt avers at the beginning of Roman Catholicism and

Political Form (1923) that Cromwells demonic rage has been inherited, via the Enlightenment and Voltaires ecrasez linfame, by liberal rationalism. Since the eighteenth century, the argumentation has become ever more rationalistic or humanitarian, utilitarian and shallow; still, it is the lingering fear of the incomprehensible political power of Roman Catholicism (RCPF 3) that has thus, in a serious sense, driven Western modernity. Schmitt looks to Roman Catholicism as a potential political savior, he says, because is stands as an antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today (RCPF 8), the thinking, that is, he sees as central to both Marxism and liberalism. This sounds remarkably similar to later defenses of fascist nationalism as a bulwark against the various tyrannies of both Western liberalism (equated to American- or Jewishcapitalist dominance) and Eastern Bolshevism (equated to Russian or Jewish-communist dominance). The difference, of course, is that Schmitt sees in the Roman church a transnational entity that could potentially unite Europe, not only Germany, and thus fight a clash of civilizations more like the medieval ones in which Europe, at least eventually, prevailed. (This European focus may help explain why Schmitt was, unlike many otherwise likeminded countrymen, unenthusiastic at the prospect of war in 1914 [Balakrishnan 2000: 1616]). Catholicism also stands, for Schmitt, as a third option between liberalism and his other early bogeyman, political romanticism, potentially overcoming the dichotomy between a rationalistic-mechanistic world of human labor and a romantic-virginal state of nature, both of which are totally foreign to the 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 (RCPF 10-11). Catholicism may thus, for Schmitt, be an inoculation
16

Balakrishnan is also good on the national/European dichotomy as it relates to Catholicism: This tension between national and European frames of reference is the most distinctively and enduringly Catholic element of Schmitts thought. Indeed, he was instinctually prone to see the crisis of his own state in a larger Western European context. Spread across his work is a distinctive vision of the history of Europe culminating in the catastrophic crises of the interwar era. Europe as he imagined it was structured in concentric zones: a divided Franco-German core, an Italo-Hispanic semi-periphery, an uncanny Russian periphery, and an anomalous, often mythically conceived Britain (2000: 65). But I would argue that the uncanny Russian periphery vastly outweighs everything else as a focal point in Schmitts interwar writings.

against fascism even as it agrees with portions of the fascist critique of liberalism. Even within Christendom, Schmitt finds that Catholicism had a good record of fighting on the reasonable side of cultural conflict, going back to the Middle Ages when it suppressed superstition and sorcery and magnificently succeeded in overcoming Dionysian cults, ecstasies, and the dangers of submerging reason in meditation (RCPF 14). One thinks of Thomas Manns novelistic likening of Germanys Nazi period to possession by an evil sorcerer. It is as an intervention in Webers mostly pessimistic political typology that Schmitt praises the Pope as one who precludes all the fanatical excesses of an unbridled prophetism, a figure independent of charisma and not the functionary and commissar of republican thinking (RCPF 14). Recall Schmitts gloss on the cultural conflict that drove the early development of Marxism quoted above: it now makes perfect sense that he ends the book by praising the Catholic Churchs position in that remote skirmish with Bakunin, where the Catholic concept of humanity stood on the side of the Idea and West European civilization, closer to Mazzini than to the atheistic socialism of the Russian anarchist (RCPF 39). So Schmitts vision of Catholicism points a way not only to victory in kulturkampf but also to the potential repudiation of kulturkampf as a mode of political relationship. If Schmitt values the papal-imperial order of the Middle Ages, this is partially because he sees in it (as we alluded to above) a civilization that could manage internal conflict without descending into Civil War.17 Indeed, as Schmitt suggests in The Nomos of the Earth (1950), a major treatise written after the wreckage of the Second World War, European civilization since the decline of the Middle Ages has in some sense enacted a never-ending Civil War, one that has simply shuffled its actors on and off the stage (Cromwell versus Spain, the philosophes versus the old regime, liberalism versus nationalism and/or Bolshevism) without ever reaching dnouement or peace. There were wars among Christian princes throughout the Middle Ages of course, but they were bracketed wars, conflicts that were distinguished from wars against non-Christian princes and peoples and that thus did not negate the unity of the respublica Christiana. Schmitt makes much of the Holy Roman Emperors status as katechon
17

We might see the gravitation to center-right Catholic governance in non-Soviet Europe after 1945 as evidence for Schmitts instincts even if we also see the wars outcome as an at least partial repudiation of his skepticism about the vigor of liberal democracy.

restrainer the decisive historical concept of medieval order and continuity. Restraint being thus presupposed, the papal-imperial power struggle differed essentially from the later problem of the relation between church and state, a mode of problem more clearly reflected in the vituperations of a Cromwell, Voltaire or Lenin. The medieval struggle between emperor and pope was not a struggle between two societates, whether one understands societas in terms of a society or a community; it was not a conflict similar to a Bismarckian Kulturkampf or 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. (Schmitt 2003: 59-62) Surveying wrecked Europe, Schmitt appears to have little hope that its place in the new world order will be as anything other than spectator-cum-canvas to the triumphant periphery, the two victorious superpowers, both recognizably European but also recognizably other. As Schmitt writes, the axis of power that had created the concept of war in European international law became unhinged, as power in the East and in the West came to dominate European states no longer certain of themselves (Schmitt 2003: 280). As Bolshevism was now vindicated by victory rather than mired in revolutionary chaos, 1945 was even more a repudiation of Europes place in the world than was the Paris Peace Conference, captive though it was to the fantasies of President Wilson.18 Yet there was no shortage of Americans Nomos was published the year the Korean War began eager to take up the mantle of Western anti-communist crusade. Some were politicians decisively in Webers charismatic mold, in their own minds at least, and some intellectuals with Schmitts own characteristic mixture of victory-at-allcosts passion and icy realism. For certain of the latter, indeed, an alleged training within
18

Of 1918-1919: Whereas European conferences in preceding centuries had determined the spatial order of the earth, at the Paris Peace Conference, for the first time, the reverse was the case: the world determined the spatial order of Europe. However, and note the hyphenation, The European-Asiatic Great Power, the Soviet Union, was absent (Schmitt 2003: 240-1).

the Schmittian world-picture has lent such involvements a controversial air, right down to the present day. References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Balakrishnan, Gopal. 2000. The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt. New York: Verso. Baldwin, Peter (ed.). 1990. Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians Debate. Boston: Beacon Press. Bendersky, Joseph. 1987. Carl Schmitt and the Conservative Revolution and Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg. TELOS no. 72, Summer 1987. Bracher, Karl Dietrich. 1973. The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Consequences of National Socialism. Translated by Jean Steinberg. Penguin University Books. Churchill, Winston. 1937. Great Contemporaries. New York: Putnam. Dyzenhaus, David (ed.). 1998. Law as Politics: Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Evans, Richard J. 1989. In Hitlers Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape From the Nazi Past. New York: Pantheon Books. Furet, Francois and Ernst Nolte. 2001. Fascism and Communism. Translated by Katherine Golsan. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Gerth, H.H. and C. Wright Mills. (ed. and trans.). 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Gottfried, Paul. 1990. Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory. New York: Greenwood Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press. Herf, Jeffrey. 1984. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hirst, Paul. 1987. Carl Schmitts Decisionism. TELOS no. 72, Summer 1987. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kennedy, Ellen. 2004. Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Knowlton, James and Truett Cates (ed. and trans.). 1993. Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? : Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Laqueur, Walter. 1974. Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918-1933. New York: Putnam. McCormick, John P. 1998. The Dilemmas of Dictatorship: Carl Schmitt and Constitutional Emergency Powers. In Dyzenhaus 1998: 217-52. --- 1997. Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur. 1934. Germanys Third Empire. Translated by E.O. Lorimer. London: G. Allen & Urwin.

Mosse, George L. 1964. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Mouffe, Chantal. 1998. Carl Schmitt and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy. In Dyzenhaus 1998: 159-78. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Piccone, Paul and G.L. Ulmen. 1987. Introduction to Carl Schmitt. TELOS no. 72, Summer 1987. Schmitt, Carl. 2004. Legality and Legitimacy. Translated and Edited by Jeffrey Seitzer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. --- 2003. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press. --- 1996. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. --- 1996a. Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Translated by G.L. Ulmen. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. --- 1996b. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: The Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Translated by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. --- 1993. The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations. TELOS no. 96, Summer 1993. --- 1988. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Translated by Ellen Kennedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Spengler, Oswald. 1928. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Knopf. Trotsky, Leon. 1971. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press. Wolin, Richard. 1995. Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.