The fortunes of liberal-democratic forms of governance over the past century resemble the trajectory of a roller coaster. Immediately after World War I, monarchies in Europe and elsewhere collapsed (Germany, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire), and missionaries like Woodrow Wilson proclaimed a new dawn for (white) humanity. There were rivals, however: The 1917 Russian revolution and subsequent civil war introduced a different form of democracy, based more or less on Marxist principles, and in 1922, Fascism, putatively based on syndicalist principles, took hold in Italy. With the stock market crash in 1929 and subsequent global depression, doubt about the viability of at least economic liberalism arose, and even liberal theorists (except diehards like Hayek and von Mises) prophesied the “globalization” of planned economies identical with or vaguely resembling the five-year plan model of the Soviet Union. The roller coaster nosed downward. Anglo-Saxon and Russian victory in World War II divided the world in two, between a renewed and refreshed political liberalism (with social democratic or ordo-liberal economic additives), on the one hand, and a triumphant Marxism, which could now claim the vast population of China, on the other. In retrospect, the collapse of liberal democracy’s rival seemed inevitable because it could never replace or link to the global capitalist economy, but “the West” was sporadically rocked by the Soviet Union’s technical feats (developing nuclear weapons, jumping into the lead in the “space race”) and by its own self-inflicted wounds (systematic apartheid in some of “democracy’s” chief representatives, not least the United States, and the failed US invasion of Vietnam). Nevertheless, with the “fall” of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the liberal-democratic trajectory aimed for the sun, moon, and stars. The triumph of global liberalism and the end of history was announced, the “indispensability” of the United States exultantly proclaimed. Thanks to overreaction (2001) and overreach (2003), the intoxicating high did not last long, and now, anno 2019, we see a remarkable deterioration of the global liberal order. To be sure, capitalism still reigns supreme economically, though capitalist regimes seem bent on undercutting their own success with unsustainable income inequality and the specter of global trade wars on the horizon. As a consequence of some or all of the above, what we label autocratic or authoritarian regimes rule some of the world’s largest and most powerful nations, and what we label “populism” propels some of the others, most notably the United States, outdoing its normal immodest global practices by running roughshod over time-honored domestic and international institutions, conventions, and political culture in general. All this too may pass, but adding the anger of Mother Nature (if I may be allowed this capricious personification) into the mix, what will be left in the wake of the opening few decades of the twenty-first century hardly appears promising.
The diagnoses of these phenomena are many and varied. Having done no empirical research among those attracted to and even blindly following “populist” leaders whose promises feed emotionally satisfying but unachievable demands, I feel much too incompetent to weigh in on the issue in any manner that would not embarrass me months, if not weeks from now. But I will venture a cautious peek at the problem through a narrow slit of the work of Carl Schmitt as presented in these pages.
Let us recall Schmitt’s definition of the political as the binary distinction between friend and enemy, in which the enemy defines the friend. Schmitt clarifies first by stating that this distinction is one of many. The moral distinction is good and evil, the aesthetic distinguishes between what is beautiful and what is ugly, the economic domain between the profitable and the unprofitable. In so doing, he clearly channels Max Weber’s notion of multiple, incommensurable value spheres. By “incommensurable” I mean simply that the distinctions are not coordinated in the sense that the profitable need not also be beautiful and so on. The pursuit of beauty can be perfectly worthless, from an economic point of view, and the pursuit of profit may be seen by some as one of the ugliest and most evil aspects of human life, and by others as the epitome of human freedom (such that the 300+/1 ratio of CEO to worker income is seen as evidence of God’s goodness and grace). For society to function properly, each domain must follow its own code. However, Schmitt insists that the political is not a domain; it is an “intensity” that can be found anywhere and transformed into a political antagonism. Within the domains of religion or the economy, for example, disagreements can ignite the fiercest of antagonisms. By positing the potential ubiquity of the political distinction—friend/enemy—Schmitt can assert the primacy of the political. A dispute in any domain can be elevated to one in which a threatening enemy stands over against an uncompromising community of friends.
Drawing the line between compatriots and antagonists, Schmitt also asserts, is an existential endeavor, not a normative one and not one that can be determined by others. “Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict.” Survival is the issue. “Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence” (Schmitt 2007, 27). Only a collective “We” can determine whether a collective “You” threatens its existence; no collective “They” can prohibit the “We” from making that determination or, conversely, force it to. It is evident that we are talking about grand politics, politics on a regional or global scale, “foreign affairs,” not domestic squabbles. Besides the geopolitical dance all states must perform to defend their autonomy, additional danger arises when domestic disputes rise to the level usually reserved for international conflict. Here, as we have seen, Schmitt worries about civil war.
The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state. The intensification of internal antagonisms has the effect of weakening the common identity vis-à-vis another state. If domestic conflicts among political parties have become the sole political difference, the most extreme degree of internal political tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not the foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive for armed conflict. The ever present possibility of conflict must always be kept in mind. If one wants to speak of politics in the context of the primacy of internal politics, then this conflict no longer refers to war between organized nations but to civil war. (32)
Schmitt’s overriding concern with civil war may strike us as overheated, but in the early and the final years of the Weimar Republic, civil war—violence in the streets between opposed political factions and parties—was an ever-present reality. Then again, in the years to come, it may come to strike us more and more as prescient.
Civil wars differ from state wars in many ways, but for Schmitt the crucial difference was intensity. The post-Westphalian states system (in Europe, not in the conquered colonial realms), labeled by Schmitt as the jus publicum Europaeum, regularized and rationalized the conduct of war between disciplined state armies to a degree that allowed for the development of a “humane” jus in bello, whose eventual principles of proportionality and discrimination were designed to minimize violence, protect the wounded and prisoner of war, and shield noncombatants. What allowed this containment of violence was loyalty to the basic structure, that so-called balance of power, of the European states system. The regularization of violence—the “laws of war”—rested not on Christian moral norms (which, in fact, demanded “just” wars or wars of righteousness) but on participation in an overarching system. The unity of that system, the jus publicum Europaeum, Schmitt rightly or wrongly insisted, was Christianity, despite the post-Reformation riving of its unity. A “civilized,” Christian Europe stood over and against the pagan, “uncivilized” or “semi-civilized” world; thus, despite colonial and continental rivalry, European states treated each other differently (as reflected, for instance, in the conventions of eighteenth-century warfare) than they treated the external world. Alas, fissures in that order were opened up by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and it was fully dissolved during and after World War I.[1] Despite reams upon reams of contemporary “humanitarian” international law, the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have massively violated the jus in bello principles of proportionality and discrimination. Schmitt’s idealized existential state wars of self-defense have become “people’s” wars, imperial wars, just wars of willful and joyous annihilation, in part because of technology (enhancing the destructiveness of warfare), but also in part because no new satisfactory structure has been established to fill the void of the destroyed European states system.
By analogy, then, we may surmise that with the rise of ferociously animated populist movements, something similar has happened internal to the state. We can get at this by examining one aspect of Chantal Mouffe’s theoretical project over the past three decades, her adaptation of Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction for domestic politics. And as above, I rely on the words of the author herself rather than offer a weak paraphrase, though I will add commentary.
Once we accept the necessity of the political and the impossibility of a world without antagonism, what needs to be envisaged is how it is possible under those conditions to create or maintain a pluralistic democratic order. Such an order is based on a distinction between “enemy” and “adversary.” It requires that, within the context of the political community, the opponent should be considered not as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an adversary whose existence is legitimate and must be tolerated. We will fight against his ideas but we will not question his right to defend them. The category of the “enemy” does not disappear but is displaced; it remains pertinent with respect to those who do not accept the democratic “rules of the game” and who thereby exclude themselves from the political community. (Mouffe 1993, 4)
First we note that Mouffe explicitly, if in muted fashion, accepts Schmitt’s “anthropology” of the political, that it must assume the human animal to be a problematic being, a corollary to his—and European modernity’s—rejection of falsely optimistic romanticism. Accepting the necessity of the political—as antagonism[2]—involves accepting the necessary rejection of utopian and chiliastic dreams of peace, love, and understanding (to quote a rueful song title).[3] Second, we note that she doubles Schmitt’s basic distinction by adding friend/adversary to friend/enemy, thereby softening enmity internal to the state to prohibit actual violence and thus civil war. Domestically, we respect our political adversaries as our brothers and sisters with whom we have fundamental disagreements, but also with whom we live under the same structure or set of political rules. Only those who reject the framework of discussion, the internalized “states system,” as it were, are subject to fiercer opposition, including banishment.
Mouffe’s two distinctions—friend/enemy and friend/adversary—therefore seem calibrated to secure a nonviolent domestic space for a form of politics that is communal but not dependent on either anodyne or forced consensus. There is a space for the political that allows for fierce ideological, ideational, interested nonviolent battle within an inviolably respected ethical framework. “We need to conceive of a mode of political association,” she writes,
which, although it does not postulate the existence of a substantive common good, nevertheless implies the idea of commonality, of an ethico-political bond that creates a linkage among the participants in the association, allowing us to speak of a political “community” even if it is not in the strong sense. In other words, what we are looking for is a way to accommodate the distinctions between public and private, morality and politics, that have been the great contribution of liberalism to modern democracy, without renouncing the ethical nature of the political association. (Mouffe 1993, 66)
Now, I doubt that Schmitt would have celebrated the public/private and political/moral distinctions as liberal achievements, but celebrate them he certainly did. No matter. The type of neo-Schmittian politics Mouffe theorizes, centered on finely structured and structurally hedged disagreement, is what is currently in jeopardy. Domestic politics as an exercise in agonistics has either been forbidden by authoritarian regimes or has escalated into proto–civil war brush fires in many a formerly liberal regime, in which the structure itself is challenged, and seething enmity steps not so lightly over the bounds of mutually agreed-upon antagonism. What has gone wrong?
First, let us examine the notion of a common structure within which political difference can be argued and adjudicated. Mouffe credits Schmitt with acknowledging “that antagonisms can take many forms, and it is illusory to believe they could ever be eliminated,” but also credits the “great strength of liberal democracy,” which, “pace Schmitt . . . provides the institutions that, if properly understood, can shape the element of hostility in a way that defuses its potential.” Referring to Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, she notes that “the parliamentary system exploits the psychological structure of struggling armies and should be conceived as a struggle in which the contending parties renounce the killing of each other and accept the verdict of the majority on who has won.” The majority vote replaces the verdict of battle. “If we accept such a view,” she cautiously notes, “it follows that parties can play an important role in giving expression to social division and the conflict of wills. But if they fail in their job, conflicts will assume other guises and it will be more difficult to manage them democratically” (Mouffe 1993, 5).
Now, Mouffe wrote this in the first flush of post-wall liberal triumphalism to temper rampant post-political, end-of-history conformism. Within and not opposed to the victorious liberal-democratic order, she wished to reinvigorate real political conflict in the face of smug apathy and politics as mere management. Rather than merging at the center, she urged political parties (Tory and Labour in the UK, Republican and Democratic in the United States, CDU/CSU and SPD in Germany, etc.) to represent “social division” and stage “the conflict of wills” in true, vigorous, parliamentary debate on the model of pitched battles with decisive outcomes, not namby-pamby, meaningless compromises that almost invariably favored the moneyed classes. Instead, in “the West,” we got centrist compromise, represented by the brand names Blair, Clinton, and Schroeder. That time has passed, at least for the moment, and once again the liberal-democratic structure, the ersatz battlefield of parliament, has revealed its fragility, and what we have now, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, is something that is called “populism,” a term that the proverbial “liberal elites” use in a derogatory manner. To her credit, Mouffe is not afraid of that term. In For a Left Populism (Mouffe 2018), she embraces it. Most of the essentials remain the same—adherence to the liberal-democratic model of governance, faith in the possible cohabitation of equality and liberty, and belief in the necessity of adversarial conflict as the supreme mode of politics. However, she no longer has faith in the traditional left and center-left political parties (Labor, Democratic, Social Democratic). Instead, she now opts for the articulation of various single-topic social movements and minority parties like Die Linke in Germany, Podemos in Spain, and Syriza in Greece, even if in the latter case one might suspect that the bloom is off the rose. Whereas right-wing populism seems to use the institutions of liberal democracy cynically, Mouffe attacks the political and economic oligarchy from within the political structure that it has so deftly used to cement its power, all the while believing the liberal order can be repurposed for progressive ends. And perhaps she is right. However, if Carl Schmitt’s critique of both the Weltanschauung and the ideology of liberal governance as presented in these pages has any plausibility, something may be missing from the left populist agenda, something that the right has almost always manipulated all too successfully.
Therefore, while realizing that liberal governance, like a cat, has at least nine lives, let me cautiously posit that what liberal-democratic structure lacks is what Schmitt called “homogeneity,” and it is this absence that may be the source of contemporary troubles. Put another way, what liberal theory provides is formal homogeneity (integration), not what Schmitt called “substantial” homogeneity. Now, we can all agree that the term itself—homogeneity—ought to be dispensed with. It calls into being specters of what we wish to avoid. The same can be said for “substance.” Nevertheless, the absence of traditional notions of commonality is felt, even longed for by segments of any population. In general, the liberal establishments, the “elites” of so-called Western democracies (Western Europe and some of its former colonial outposts across the globe), no longer officially wish to use race or ethnicity, religion, gender, national origins (for immigrants), or other “substantial” markers of identity as rallying points around which a community may form. What one usually gets instead is a menu of values, a list of intellectual commitments to basic rights and duties of citizenship with perhaps some perfunctory knowledge of an idealized history of the nation-state in question and obeisance to symbols like a flag or national hymns. Currently, however, we seem to witness the weakness of ideological values in various formerly stable nation-states if these norms are thought to infringe on the categories of old. The ability to marshal explicit versions of previous “substantial” markers, especially race and religion, but also, implicitly at least, gender (men vs. women, hetero- vs. homosexual, etc.), proves stronger than evocations of equality, humanity, solidarity, and the like—just as Schmitt predicted. Put more bluntly, it seems that for many white American males, the notion of equality marks a distinct and deliberate demotion, and not every former field officer of Western civilization wishes to enlist as a private in the army of humankind.
If under the label “populism” we witness the desire for plebiscitary (authoritarian) leadership over liberal parliamentary structure, then perhaps it may help us to glance once again at my two non-Hitler models[4] of such attempted leadership, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. How do they differ, and is their difference instructive?
Recall the lineaments of Carter’s speech. First we are confronted with danger, a “fundamental threat to American democracy.” This threat is not aimed at our political system—“our political civil liberties”—nor is it an external military threat. Rather, it is a “crisis of confidence . . . that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will,” a “growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.” He diagnosed a loss of faith in the American people, an ennui, as it were, regarding self-government, and a “worship of self-indulgence and consumption.” The people, therefore, were confronted with a choice. Either the collective would choose not to act communally—that is, choose the path “that leads to fragmentation and self-interest,” which entailed a “mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others,” a “constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility”—or the American people could choose “the path of common purpose,” a path that “leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves.”
If a friend/enemy distinction governs this narrative, it is a distinction found within the people itself, not external to it. True, the global context of the speech was informed by the so-called oil crisis of the late 1970s and the Iran hostage situation, but the problem outlined and the remedy for it were only indirectly, if at all, related to external factors. The call was to renounce internal division, not only to keep the internal friend/enemy distinction within the bounds of the liberal/democratic compromise, but to minimize its effects altogether. The true background to the speech was the bitter civil war over political and economic equality for African Americans, fought during the decades after World War II. Carter was attempting to call the nation to unity, to a “common purpose,” rather than see it disintegrate into individual, self-interested pursuits precisely because large segments of the population refused to recognize a unity that included “heterogeneous” others. If that was in the background of his speech, in the foreground lay the role of the state. Carter’s eloquence resembled the rhetoric I used to explain Lorenz von Stein’s description of the role of the state in its relationship to society, the role of the people as a community walking a common path, working for a common aim, rather that acting as individual agents for personal gain at the expense of their neighbors. The enemy was greed, selfishness, self-interest, the source of social disintegration. The friend that was meant to be evoked by this identification of the “existential” enemy was the “we the people” that supposedly infused the idea not just of the constituent but also the constituted power of the people, the people who were willing and able to govern themselves as a community of common interest. As a plebiscitary leader Carter failed, because people who listened to and watched the speech did not recognize themselves as the people, or rather, did not recognize the “other” as part of the same people to which they belonged. Reagan took advantage of the moment, promised the ur-liberal virtue of self-interest, especially economic but also racial self-interest, and, as they say, the rest is history. Carter’s failure was, as it were, the failure of the state to represent something higher or other than self-interest.
Like Carter, Wilson was also an Evangelical Christian. Each, one could say, was a missionary, but Wilson was far more imperially so. As we saw, Wilson too was communally minded, seeing in the plebiscitary leader the catalyst for national unity of purpose and ultimate greatness. But his context was war, a war that did not affect the United States “existentially,” that did not call the United States into question, did not force the American people to confront their own survival. The war was not forced on the United States by an enemy but by its president. Whether as a necessary consequence of this fact or as a subsidiary means of calling the people to arms, the external friend/enemy distinction became an internal one as well. The external German enemy became the German-American enemy, followed by a host of other domestic foes who needed to be combated, all hyphenated Americans (e.g., Italian-Americans, etc.), speakers of foreign languages (especially German), German cultural artifacts (e.g., Beethoven’s music, the playing of which was banned), religious pacifists, conscientious objectors to selective service, socialist critics who saw imperialism in the declaration of war, Jews who were associated with the socialist enemy, striking workers and miners, African Americans, and on and on. The external war became also a civil war, a state-incited civil war, promoted by governmental and private agencies. For a short period (the duration of his second term), Wilson’s call to unity through division was successful, even if the intoxication wore off after his death.
But the pattern lived on. I submit that successful “populism,” whether state sponsored (and the grand example of course is Hitler’s) or aimed from the outside against the liberal state apparatus, operates as civil war, identifying domestic enemies, often aligned with perceived external threats. The menu is large. Look around you. Who are the enemies? Depending on where you live, each reader can devise her own list, though currently there are some constants—for example, Muslim immigrants from the Middle East or Africa, and then by extension descendants of families who immigrated decades, even a half century or more ago, and, in the United States, Hispanics and of course African Americans, who are told to go back to their imagined origins, even though in most cases they can trace their ancestry in North America further back than can the majority of European Americans.
Schmitt, who in the late 1920s and early 1930s sounded more like the Jimmy Carter of 1979, ended up enlisting in Hitler’s manufactured civil war. The homogeneity of friends was constructed by an explicit heterogeneity that included the internal enemy. Inclusion was based on exclusion not just of the external world, but of the external within the internal. The friend/enemy distinction was domesticated, and “the people” became a unity by expunging those who were presumed not to share the same physical, intellectual, or cultural space of the populace of populism. In such a situation, no preaching of integration, pluralism, tolerance, global citizenship, or humanitarianism—no evocation of a “common path”—has any effect. In a situation such as this, the common path is explicitly rejected, or rather, it is reserved for the chosen few, and if this is what is happening in the contemporary, twenty-first-century world, then no glib articulation of values (no matter how valuable), no well-framed Leitkultur (leading or guiding culture) can act as substitute.
Perhaps this time the world really is moving on. Perhaps the liberal economy and private pursuit of wealth by the wealthy, which will undoubtedly survive, may finally scrape off for good the barnacle that is the state. Or, conversely, the state will no longer be the carnival fun house of liberal mirrors, but the director of a perpetual war of some against some. The populace of populism will cheer loudly and lustily. By now, the reader of these pages will be able to anticipate what word Lorenz von Stein would use to describe either of the two alternatives. What Carl Schmitt would say is up for grabs.
See Bell, The First Total War (2007), and Rasch, “Against Perpetual Peace” (2018).
Mouffe has developed the agonistic/antagonistic pair to distinguish legitimate (with a given political structure) from illegitimate domestic conflict. Here I will follow the distinction she uses in the cited paragraph—enemy/adversary.
Nick Lowe’s “(What’s so Funny ’Bout) Peace Love and Understanding?” The answer to the musical question is of course that there is nothing wrong with peace, love, and understanding, but, again, see Schmitt on the “anthropology” of the political.
Avoiding Hitler’s model is to avoid the nuclear option. It would obliterate the possibility of making fine, or even crude, distinctions. Hence Wilson and Carter.