Una
crítica de Carl Schmitt (Benno
Teschke, 2011)
The publication of Carl
Schmitt's The Nomos of the Earth and his Theory of the Partisan)
has provoked a second wave in the Anglo-American Schmitt reception and beyond. Whereas the first wave of Schmittiana
in the 1980s was largely an exploration of his critique of liberalism and
parliamentary democracy – and thus confined to domestic political theory and
legal studies – this second revival has extended Schmitt's reach to
international political and legal theory.
Paradoxically, Schmitt's double attraction as a modern classic on the
executive state and a significant figure against liberal universalism has led
to a convergence – perhaps in a surprising complexio oppositorum –
between the neo-Conservative Right and the post-Marxist Left…. This has positioned the neo-Schmittian literature simultaneously to the
right and to the left of the predominant Kantian cosmopolitanism in the field
of IR, outflanking the liberal mainstream in a pincer movement
Neo Schmittianos
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neo-Schmittian critique of a
revitalized just war tradition, the re-moralization and juridification of
international politics, and cosmopolitan humanitarian intervention (Zolo
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total war and liberal world-ordering, and the end of interstate politics
and political geography threatened by the ‘spaceless universalism’ of an
Anglo-American imperialism (Žižek
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In addition, it also enabled a
new reading of the return to the politics of the exception (Hardt and Negri
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and a reappraisal of the figure of the partisan, the terrorist, and new
modes of irregular warfare Mouffe
category of the nomos, conceived as a unity of
law and space. Its attraction resides in its apparent ability to function as a
fundamental world-ordering device, enabling a macro-periodization and
interpretation of world history in terms of a succession of distinct nomoi –
from the Conquista and the
absolutist interstate order, via Britain's sea-appropriation and the
US-designed post-Versailles transformation of international law, to Hitler's Großraumpolitik and beyond. Each
new nomos was initiated by, and grounded in, comprehensive world-order
constitutive acts of land-appropriation, referred to as ‘spatial revolutions’. In
each case, ‘spatial revolutions’ reconfigured the relations between the spatial
structure of world politics and the changing role of international law in
mediating inter-spatial relations.
Tesis centrales de Schmitt
1)
political decisionism
(politics of the exception),
2)
concept of the political
(friend/enemy distinction), a
3) concrete-order-thinking (land-appropriations as determinants of changes in
international law and order).
As Schmitt's intellectual preoccupations moved from constitutional to
international law during the mid-1930s, he realized that political decisionism
was insufficient to capture the geopolitics of land-appropriations and spatial
revolutions, which he now privileged as foundational world order… This shift from decisionism
to concrete-order-thinking as a sociologically enhanced new type of juristic
thought was meant to remedy this explanatory vacuum
Críticas
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Yet, Schmitt's rendition of the sociological that drove geopolitical expansion
never incorporated the social sources and social processes that caused
geopolitical conflict, spatial revolutions, and world-order projects.
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This resulted in a gap between
the objectives of his theoretical premises and his de-sociologized and
de-subjectified historiography that regressed into the power-political
reifications of geopolitics as such.
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This suppression and
elimination of social relations was already prefigured in his concept of the
political – an ontologized friend/enemy distinction – that now informed his
concept of the geopolitical
El
muy válido procedimiento de contextualizar a Schmitt
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It situates Schmitt's
intellectual production within his politics and his explicit and ideologically
super-charged view of concept-formation as political combat
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Schmitt's politics of concept-formation – a political sociology of
concept-formation and, ultimately, an ideology-critique. Schmitt's considerations on
concept-formation warrant this procedure as his work is littered with sharp and
apodictic assertions, encapsulated exemplarily in his axiomatic statement that
‘all political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning (in the literal meaning of Greek polemos, i.e. war). They are focused
on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation’
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Elsewhere, Schmitt avers that
intellectual labour invariably involves ‘the forging and re-forging of
scientific concepts as political concepts in a wider ongoing struggle over
existential autonomy, individually and collectively’
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legal innovations and conceptual neologisms that accompany modern American
imperialism, Schmitt notes that ‘he who has real power is also capable of
determining concepts and words… a German legal–political counter-vocabulary was required to regain
spiritual and existential autonomy in a geopolitical struggle for survival.
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For the neo-Schmittian tendency to provide a de-contextualized and
de-politicized account of Schmitt's recasting of international thought,
dissociated from his concrete intellectual project, contradicts and remains
unaligned to Schmitt's own method of concept-formation
Contexto
1: La política como soberanía autoritaria en una situación de emergencia
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Schmitt formulated his definition of sovereignty in terms of political decisionism
as an ultra-authoritarian solution to the intractable crisis of the Weimar
Republic, destabilized by coup d’États, strikes, civil unrest, and
revolutions.
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The option for defining sovereignty in terms of the exception was not the
result of a dispassionate and scholarly observation on the ultimate locus of
sovereignty, but a politicized and normative intervention into the
jurisprudential debates on the interpretation of Article 48 of the Weimar
Constitution – the scope of presidential emergency powers and executive
government by decree for the restoration of social order.
Contexto
2: La política como distinción entre amigo/enemigo
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Similarly, the attempt to define the political in terms of an
existentialist, ontological, and agonal friend/enemy grouping served the
purpose to unify a fragmented industrial and mass-democratic society as a
homogeneous community against outside threats and to redeem Weimar Germany's
lost right to conduct war.
Contexto
3: surgimiento del Nomos, las “apropiaciones de tierra” y las revoluciones
espaciales
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Equally, Schmitt's
reinterpretation of the history of international law during the 1930s and 1940s
is bound to the concrete situation of the intellectual and political crisis of
legitimacy generated by Hitler's spatial revolution, for which Schmitt offered
the most incisive and comprehensive politico-jurisprudential justification,
grounded in concrete-order-thinking
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Consequently, Schmitt's
research-organizing Leitmotiv
revolves around the central axis of the pre-juridical and
legitimacy-constituting act of ‘land-appropriation’ that establishes a radical
title to land and, by extension, a new nomos
of the earth
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The Nomos, written between 1942 and 1945, and Land and Sea, published in
1942, were conceived as long historico-legal detours to accumulate the
intellectual resources and arguments to legitimize Hitler's Raumrevolution
– a rewriting of history by one of the leading intellectuals of the ascendant
axis-power
La
era dorada del derecho público internacional (1492/1648 hasta 1919) (Schmitt, throughout the course
of the book, progressively shortens the duration of the ius publicum lasting ‘for 400 years’, for ‘300 years’, and
finally ‘for more than two centuries’)
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as a functioning system of legal norms, regulating the excesses of
interstate anarchy in a geopolitical pluriverse without erasing the essence of
sovereign statehood: the public decision to conduct war
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This unity of space and law – termed by Schmitt as nomos in
contradistinction to the universal medieval and liberal-capitalist cosmos –
revolved around the core categories of the state as the only legitimate subject
of war and peace, secularized and absolute state sovereignty, the executive as
the final arbiter over the state of exception, the idea of iustus hostis
(just enemy) and the associated concept of ‘non-discriminatory war’.
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This arrogation of the
monopoly of violence by plural absolutist states formalized a double
distinction – between public and private, de-legitimizing and de-militarizing
private actors (lords, cities, estates, pirates, military orders) while
elevating the public state to the only subject of international law and
politics, and between inside and outside, separating a domestically neutralized
and pacified ‘civil society’ from an international sphere of interstate war and
peace. This dualism fortified the distinction between
public international law and private criminal law.
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This move towards a ‘non-discriminatory concept of war’ entailed, according
to Schmitt, the ‘bracketing of war’ – including its civilization,
rationalization, and humanization – and a clear distinction between
belligerents and neutrals, combatants and non-combatants, states of war and
states of peace
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The ius ad bellum came
to be divorced from ‘just cause’ considerations (iusta causa), which
were declared immaterial for determining the legitimacy of war. This gave rise
to the notion of a ‘non-discriminatory concept of war’, which superseded
medieval just war doctrines. Thus,
juridically externalized, the reasons for war-declarations were placed outside
any legal, moral, or political judgment, implying the retention of the status
of the enemy, even during and after war, as a just enemy, rather than its
demotion to a foe, criminal, or barbarian
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Morality, in that sense, came
to be divorced from politics proper. A destructive moral universalism, as
expressed in the 15th and 16th century wars of religion, was replaced by a
salutary moral relativism in interstate relations. Accordingly, the ius publicum implied a decisive rupture with medieval just war
theories, grounded in the moral universalism of the respublica christiana.
El
Tratado de Versalles termina con la era dorada del derecho público
internacional
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This line of reasoning was
powerfully invoked by Schmitt against the post-World War I (WWI)
criminalization of the German Reich as an ‘outlaw nation’, whose
distinctly political status as a sovereign state was revoked by the ‘Versailles
Diktat’
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As Germany was not admitted to the peace negotiations, and as ‘war guilt’
and ‘war crime’ were not juridical concepts in interstate relations (nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege), their formulation and
intrusion into international law after 1919 transformed public interstate law
into an incipient world domestic law, starting to re-moralize and juridify the
inter-political by introducing a new ‘discriminatory concept of war’
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This move castrated, according to Schmitt, the essence of the political –
the sovereign decision to go to war against an enemy
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Worse, the Wilsonian
invocation of the concept of humanity reconnected post-Versailles conceptions
of international law to medieval just war doctrines that contained a tendency
towards the total negation of the formerly ‘just enemy’ and its degradation to
an enemy of mankind – a non-human
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Correlatively, it generated a
new and distinct liberal way of war – more total in its war aims than the
bracketed and limited wars of pre-1914 Europe – as it aimed, next to the
killing of non-humans, at the direct transformation of politics, society, and
subjectivities: the making of liberal subjects.
Neo-Schmittianos
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and the structural
impossibility of concluding peace in the absence of a legal enemy – a war
without end…war to end all wars’, being paradoxically total in purpose and
unending in space and time
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Beyond this deployment of
Schmitt, some neo-Schmittians re-mobilize, normatively, Schmitt's idea of Großraum
– a greater territorial space or a pan-region – as the elementary building
block for an anti-cosmopolitan, anti-universal organization of international
order, based on a plurality of coexisting Großräume, each one under the
leadership of an imperial nation.
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Against the imminent threat of a ‘spaceless universalism’, pan-regions are
meant to provide guarantees against the homogenization of the world into a
liberal flatland – essential for the maintenance of difference and pluralism –
indeed essential for the very possibility of the political, the friend/enemy
distinction, encased in mutually exclusive regional blocs
Decisionismo, soberanía y emergencia
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Schmitt famously redefined sovereignty from the angle of the emergency
situation, captured by Schmitt's decisionism, forged during the early Weimar
period in his critique of Kelsen's legal normativism
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As legal norms could only function in normal situations, legal normativism
was liable to a de-personalized, apolitical, and ahistorical blindness. Sovereignty, according to
Schmitt, is not invested in the state as an impersonal and objective legal
subject (an aggregate of rules and statutes), but intermittently crystallizes
if and when political crises and social disorder – liminal situations – escape
constitutional norms
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Decisionism captures the idea that sovereignty resides ultimately in that
power that can declare and enforce the state of exception, suspending the
constitution in an emergency, whose declaration cannot be derived from extant
legal norms and standard procedures of decision making
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The
sovereign decision is a self-referential and unmediated act of authority –
singular, absolute, and final. Jurisprudentially, it appears ex nihilo. This discretionary element of ‘political surplus-value’ re-established
the primacy of politics over the rule of law. Legality does not exhaust
legitimacy.
Política como amigo/enemigo y
democracia
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within the inside, that which
had to be externalized. This precipitated a redefinition
of the meaning of democracy. For Schmitt, ‘democracy requires therefore, first
homogeneity and second – if the need arises – elimination or eradication of
heterogeneity’ (Schmitt 1985a, 9), rather
than the ‘perennial discussions’ of parliamentarian democracy grounded in
liberal pluralism
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Democracy, according to
Schmitt, is thus redefined in identitarian terms as the direct representation
of a unified people (Volk) by the political leadership, possibly weakly
mediated by irregular acts of spontaneous acclamation and plebiscitary elements
that intermittently renew the bond between the leader and the led – the
national myth of direct democracy
“Pensamiento ordenado concretamente” y “apropiaciones
territoriales”
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Although Schmitt criticized
through decisionism legal normativism ‘from above’, his growing interest in
international law and geopolitics precipitated a move after 1933 towards an
alternative method – concrete-order-thinking – which attacked normativism and
decisionism ‘from below’
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Neither normativism nor
decisionism had an answer to the question what foundational ur-act of
legitimacy precedes acts of international legality.
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It is premised on a single
thesis, stating that all legal orders are concrete, territorial orders, founded
by an original, constitutive act of land-capture
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act of appropriating,
dividing, and pasturing. ‘Nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social
order of a people becomes spatially visible
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The great land-appropriating powers are the historical carriers of
international law projects. Legal concepts have spatial origins. Might
generates right.
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Schmitt vacillates between
three poles of explanation – the Discoveries (1492), the rise of the absolutist
state (1648), and English balancing (1713).(retener elementos de
emergencia superestructura capitalista) In the
end, he fails to clarify their interrelation and causal hierarchy
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This explanatory vagueness is compounded by an unsure periodicity and an
untenable idealization of the form and substance of early modern international
relations.
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But none of these fragmented
causes, even combined, can explain the nomos-constituting act of the
Discoveries – Schmitt's ur-cause – and link it to the rise of the
Westphalian interstate system. The problem of causality
extends to the very core object of Schmitt's analysis – the European nomos
Primera revolución espacial: la época
de los descubrimientos (1492-1648)
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If this sounds like the
tautological identification of power with legitimacy that generates legality
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If Schmitt's institutional historicism immunizes against the timeless
verities of realist provenance, it embraces simultaneously an asociological and
non-geopolitical stance that fails to decipher the encounter between the
land-appropriating and land-owning group: the nature of 16th Century Spanish
absolutism, the relations between the Conquistadores and the Spanish
Crown
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The native Amerindians remain missing from his account of the regionally
differentiated resolutions of land and property conflicts in the Americas… They are nullified and written out of history
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The concrete processes of land-appropriation, distribution, and
property-relations in the Americas – the geopolitical encounter with the
natives as historical subjects – remain not only off-screen
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Quite paradoxically, that the
Conquests did not precipitate the ‘spatial revolution’ and the subsequent rise
of the new European interstate nomos that he generically associated with the
enclosure processes overseas
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The first repartition of the
oceans after the Discoveries in form of the rayas (divisional lines) meant the territorialization of the
seas and the newly discovered lands. America, the Atlantic (and the Pacific)
remained firmly within the reach of the late medieval pre-global law-governed
cosmos of the res publica Christiana,
including the papal missionary mandate and the just war doctrine over and
against non-Christians
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Schmitt, as an interim result, provides ample evidence – rayas,
scholasticism, res publica Christiana – that the Discoveries, rather
than dissolving the old medieval cosmos, were jurisprudentially assimilated to
prevailing discourses of Christian expansion and aligned to late medieval
practices of conditional territorialization
Segunda revolución espacial: Absolutismo
(1648-…)
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the decisive passage from the ius
gentium to the ius publicum europaeum is now precipitated by the
rise of the state…Schmitt equates the generic
term ‘state’ with the absolutist state.
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And as the absolutist state
was pre-representational or pre-parliamentarian, as it conceived of itself as legibus
absoluta, it provided the ideal-type for Schmitt's theory of the ‘modern
state’, encapsulated in its decisionist nature, that is, the power to decide by
dint of authority and not debate or legal normativity – ‘absolved from law’
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But if Schmitt's account of
the rise of the absolutist interstate system is substantively causally
unrelated to the Discoveries – occasional verbal counter-assertions notwithstanding
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His analysis proceeds at the
level of a de-contextualized interpretation of a selection of political
theorists, eclectically mobilized to construct an ideal-type of absolutism and
the attendant ius publicum.10 The corollary is an idealized,
de-sociologized and historiographically discredited politicist account of
absolutism, supplemented by an à la lettre acceptance of the legal
normativism in international law, which Schmitt condemned so unequivocally in
relation to the Weimar public law, weakly codified in le droit public de
l'Europe
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This pretence to legality by
the Great Powers is characteristically un-Schmittian. Logically speaking, the
legal groundlessness of the subjective decision should have operated in
external relations as much as in internal relations – a conclusion that Schmitt
failed to draw.
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Sovereignty did not belong to the state as a de-personalized and autonomous
sphere of the political, but was a property of the Crown or the ruling dynastic
family – it was personalized
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Sovereignty could never be exercised over and above ‘societal interests’;
rather, absolutism relied on ‘social collaboration’ (Beik 2005) with an increasingly
amorphous ruling class, most notably the regional and court nobility of both
aristocratic and bourgeois origin, including the financiers, tax-farmers,
jurists, and the venal office nobility. This rendered the exercise of absolute
sovereignty dependent on social coalitions and interests: indeed,
re-privatizing its absolutist pretences, as the bombastic court society of
Versailles
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Absolutism was not de-theologized, secularized, and neutralized either. Rather, early modern polities were confessionalized dynastic-composite
states claiming a sacralized form of sovereignty
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Although the age of absolutism
did break with the trans-territorial theological absolutism of the Vatican, it
simultaneously fragmented the unitary confessional papal claims and reassembled
them across the spectrum of a pluriverse of creedal mini-absolutisms post-1555
and post-1648
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did not endorse religious toleration at the level of private subjects, but
sanctioned the right of regional rulers to determine and enforce, if in
internationally agreed form, the faith of the land. In
the French case, the nascent absolutist state did not simply guard over the
de-politicized and neutral character of domestic politics and religion, but
actively established during the Reformation and the Wars of Religion (1562–98)
its catholic absolutism in a violent, directly politicized century-long
campaign, leading to the repression and expulsion of the Huguenots with the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685)
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Yet, even within Schmitt's own
analysis, there is ample evidence that absolutism failed to generate the
distinction between the private and the public, dominium and imperium….princely
“houses”, such as the Hapsburg and the Bourbon, i.e. the great dynastic
families, aggregated various crowns under one power, such as the Bohemian and
the Hungarian, as well as lands, rights of succession, and other legal titles.
They became and remained, into the 18th
century, the true agents of European politics and, thus, also the subjects of
international law… These sovereign persons created and sustained the ius
publicum europaeum, thereby maintaining their mutual relations with one
another as human individuals, clearly not as small men, such as private
individuals dominated by the state, but as “great men” and personae publicae
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Furthermore, the rise of the ius
publicum was internal to European politics, resting on a double narrative
of spatio-temporally diverging Anglo–French developmental trajectories,
geopolitically articulated and synchronized from 1713 onwards.
Tercera revolución espacial: equilibrio
inglés (1713…)
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had transformed the European
terrestrial order by introducing the antithesis between firm land and free sea,
opening up two distinct spatial orders. They were characterized by regulated
interstate wars on terra firma and anarchy ‘beyond the line’
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While this initial period undermined Spanish maritime supremacy and
hardened a tough-minded amphibious national character, England only fully embraced this
‘maritime existence’, based on its ‘sea-appropriation’, at Utrecht….England alone took the step from a medieval
feudal and terrestrial existence to a purely maritime existence that balanced
the whole terrestrial world. (…) England thereby became the representative of
the universal maritime sphere of a Eurocentric global order, the guardian of
the other side of the ius publicum europaeum, the sovereign of the
balance of land and sea – of an equilibrium comprising the spatially ordered
thinking of international law
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Schmitt
concludes with a broad analogy: ‘There is a historical and structural relation
between such spatial concepts of free sea, free trade, and world economy, and
the idea of free space in which to pursue free competition and free
exploitation’
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In this sense, the new ‘beyond the line’ only extended prevailing practices
of militarized trading routes – armed merchant-men and convoy-sailing tactics –
characteristic of the age of mercantilism. This did not imply free economic
competition, governed by competitiveness and market-pricing, but free
politico-military competition, creating a morally and legally unencumbered
state of nature ‘beyond the line’. Free
trade across open seas had to wait until the 19th century.
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But if
capitalist free trade was not the inner secret of England's 17th Century
‘spatial revolution’, the island was, according to Schmitt, decisive in
dissolving the terrestrial-Christian order and in altering and co-determining,
from 1713 onwards, the ius publicum – a rupture that opens up an
explanatory vacuum amply filled with geo-elemental reifications and
mythological allusions. ‘So it came
that England became the heiress, the universal heiress of that great change in
the existence of the European nations. How was that possible’
Emergencia
de la Guerra total y el universalismo liberal
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This thesis
was encapsulated in his notion of a non-discriminatory concept of war among iusti
hostes – a claim that ties the rise of ‘total war’ to the liberal
universalism of the French Revolution and, more decisively, to the
Anglo-American age of liberal international law
La época dorada del derecho
público internacional fue en realidad un período de intensas y prolongadas
guerras
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Although the demise of medieval feuding through the arrogation of
sovereignty and the ius belli ac pacis by multiple dynasties had
decisively transformed the subjects and nature of warfare, it simultaneously
augmented its magnitude, frequency, duration, intensity, and costs
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In addition, absolutist sovereignty gave military conflict an unlimited,
irrational, and de-humanized character that could not be controlled by the
amorphous collection of texts (treaties, diplomatic protocols, juridical
treatises) that constituted the ius
publicum
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These developments have prompted scholars of early modern Europe to characterize
the age of absolutism as the age of the ‘military revolution’, the
‘permanent-war state’ and the ‘fiscal-military state’ – an age organized for
warfare
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But in
contradistinction to what the neo-Weberian literature tends to argue – war made
states and states made wars – the mismatch between public resources and
military expenses changed in the longue durée the sociopolitical
complexion of anciens régimes and ultimately destroyed the very
financial-fiscal foundations of the absolutist interstate system. Its
dynamics did not lead to a self-reinforcing dialectic between war and modern
state-making, but to a destructive downward spiral driven by military overstretch,
financial bankruptcies, and social revolt – the unmaking of the absolutist state
(Teschke 2003). This was linked to the superior
military-fiscal and economic capacities of the capitalist constitutional
monarchy of balancing Britain
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It finally
prepared, in conjunction with the Britain-monitored and balanced ‘Concert of
Europe’, the 19th Century Hundred Years’ Peace – an empirical result un-noted
by Schmitt, which also counters his thesis that this century belongs to the
liberal era of ‘total war’ (criticar)
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Inflation in numbers, in conjunction with innovations in weapons
technology, translated into a new quality… For example, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, casualty figures in the
Prussian Army stood at 180,000 soldiers, which was the equivalent of two-thirds
of the Prussian army, and one-ninth of the Prussian population
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Scale and intensity, in turn, were radicalized by the frequency of war.
Quincy Wright noted an uninterrupted rise in the incidence of major battles
during this period, before we see a significant reduction in the 19th century (Wright 1964, 641–44). This was compounded by their prolonged duration.
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In this
context, war aims were not ‘limited’, but assumed an imperial, totalizing
character, as Europe was regarded by dynastic rulers as a kind of property-map…the
horizontal need to accumulate territories – led to intense re-distributional
conflicts among the personalized owners of sovereignty in zero-sum conflicts
over limited European territory. The divisions of Poland exemplify this
totalizing logic
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Wars were
not ended by rational design, but by mutual exhaustion and financial-military
attrition, leading to unsustainable public debts and, repeatedly, to public
bankruptcies.
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These deepened the concessions that rulers had to make to their nobilities,
tax-farmers, and financiers. But as absolute sovereignty was essentially
a contested institution – relying on an unstable compromise between dynasties
and their nobilities – war-endings also blended quickly over into prolonged
civil wars
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The conduct of war was not humanized, either in terms of ius in bello,
or in terms of a clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants. The effects of war on civilian populations were devastating. As
war-logistics were not properly developed and soldiers lacked permanent
provisioning, early modern armies lived ‘off the land’, either from looting and
pillaging on foreign soil, or by way of sequestration and ransom
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The absence of a clear set of rules and powers of enforcement concerning
the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants implied their ransom for money or
other prisoners, if they were not killed outright
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Forced
conscription of civilians was a common practice. Any sociology of contemporary
armies shows that in spite of all the (Weberian and Foucauldian) emphasis on
the increasingly rationalized, professionalized, and disciplined character of
the new standing armies, soldiers were generally not salaried bureaucrats, but
‘in pay’ of noble officers who had usually themselves bought their military
commissions. Armies were not public armies, but precisely ‘the king's armies’;
yet, essentially beyond their disciplinary control
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War was not, as Schmitt suggests, an intermittent, temporally limited, and
formalized affair of a polity's outward relations, neatly divorced from the
inner constitution of pre-existing entities, but the central preoccupation of
early modern polities that directly penetrated their internal constitution and
their very raison d’être… Schmitt's metaphorical depiction of early modern warfare as a gentlemanly
‘duel’ – a civilized affair – is a mystification. It is grounded in an
abstract-literal reading of the ius publicum
¿La época del liberalismo
universalizante? (1918…)
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For the
inclusion of the Monroe-Doctrine into the Covenant did not only exclude the
Western Hemisphere from the League's jurisdiction
-
the League
also lacked authority to deal with relations between states within the Western
Hemisphere who were also League members (Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Panama,
Nicaragua) and with relations between them and European states
-
This strategy, according to Neil Smith, presented a political project of
global domination – the rationalization of global space driven by a
non-territorial capitalist imperialism for American ‘economic Lebensraum’.This rested on the central insight
that economic expansion could be de-coupled from territorial aggrandizement,
divorcing political geography from international accumulation….Where
Schmitt excavates the roots of the new universal order, he is pressed into an
analysis of the IPE of American world order – falsifying his axiomatic
statement that every international legal order is grounded in an original act
of land-appropriation
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But although
liberal international institutionalism and a capitalist world market were
clearly designed to restructure the Continent, this did not and could not
precipitate a turn towards a non-political ‘spaceless universalism’ as it did
not erase the European interstate system. Schmitt overlooked the
qualitative difference between an America-centric universal empire and an
America-supervised European interstate system…. In fact, Mussolini's turn
towards a mare nostrum
conception and Nazi Germany's progressive construction of an autarchic economic
Lebensraum and security zone
are the clearest examples of the limits of the apolitical ‘spaceless
universalism’ ascribed to the American project.
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What
Schmitt, contrary to his own diagnosis, was witnessing in the interwar years
was the making of an inter-spatial European regionalism, territorially
re-configured at Versailles, transnationally better integrated,
constitutionally assimilated and internationally codified in the League,
supervised from afar by a politically absent isolationist US and, closer to
home, by the weakly committed powers of France and Britain. No spaceless universalism was on the
historical agenda. Schmitt had to
wait until after WWII, when the combination of US-American political and
economic presence on German soil – military occupation plus Marshall Plan plus
Truman Doctrine – moved Europe a step closer to the spacelessness that he had
already envisaged for the interwar period. But even this did not generate a state-cancelling universal empire
Crítica
al decisionismo
-
Analytically,
Schmitt's notion of the extra-legal decision that instantiates the politics of
the exception is little more than a passe-partout that can be ‘applied’
to an indiscriminate range of polities under duress that turn to emergency
powers.
-
The
application of Schmittian concepts to the exception can only descriptively
confirm a posteriori an already instituted state of affairs as a fait
accompli, whose explanation is outside their remit and whose critique
cannot be formulated from within the Schmittian vocabulary
-
As Schmitt's method is bereft of any sociology of power, decisionism lacks
the analytics to identify what balance of sociopolitical forces activates in
what kind of situation the politics of the exception and fear
-
For the state of exception is never a non-relational creation ex nihilo
– a unique and self-referential event equivalent to the miracle in theology –
as it remains bound to the social by an indispensable act of calculation
preceding its declaration with regard to its chances of implementation, public
compliance or resistance by those upon whom it bears – the social relations of
sovereignty. The exception remains quintessentially inserted in a relation of
power whose reference point remains the social.
-
Schmitt's concept of sovereignty remains not only de-socialized, but
curiously de-politicized, as he seeks to identify an Archimedean point not only
outside society, but equally outside politics conventionally understood,
super-insulated from any sociopolitical contestation, in order to govern not
only against society, but to neuter domestic politics altogether –
ultra-sovereignty. This extra-political vantage point is
deliberately chosen – and here political theology and hyper-authoritarianism
converge – to pinpoint that chimerical location that re-stabilizes social
processes from nowhere – ex nihilo – yet with overwhelming force
-
Sovereignty
defined in terms of the exception constitutes a legal–political category and
cannot explain what provokes and comprises concrete states of emergency as real
historical phenomena
Crítica
al “pensamiento ordenado concretamente” y las “apropiaciones territoriales”
-
Yet,
concrete-order-jurisprudence fails to provide guidance as to what processes
drive the politics of land-appropriation, enemy-declarations, and
world-ordering, leading to an asociological and curiously non-geopolitical – in
the sense of geopolitics as an inter-subjective encounter between polities –
stance
-
Schmitt's law-antecedent act of land-appropriation, which generated the
meta-juridical legitimacy upon which international legality is erected, is
itself divorced from any further theoretical determinations. The ‘concrete’ is
largely the factual
-
And if the nomos-constitutive acts of conquests are socially disembowelled,
the relevance of land-appropriations was already historically overtaken by the
largely non-territorial and concrete-order-transcending nature of the
US-American form of capitalist hegemony, which rendered Schmitt's
concrete-order-jurisprudence anachronistic already at the time of his writing
Crítica a la política como
distinción amigo/enemigo
-
And as
Schmitt's definition of the political referred to the intensification of
unspecified antagonisms only – as it refers to the quality of antagonisms and
not to a specific political process or substances (economic, cultural, ethnic,
constitutional, etc.) – it lacks any
indication as to which dynamics activate and intensify latent geopolitical
differences to the point of open friend/enemy distinctions – or, indeed: forms
of international accommodation and cooperation
-
Which
sociopolitical interests and conflicts around the control of the state and the
direction of public policy – beyond an elementary and ontologized notion of
existential national autonomy – politicize, de-politicize, and re-politicize
geopolitical differences as liminal situations that call for emergency powers
and the declaration of states of war
-
Schmitt's thought contains no categories to capture the sociopolitical
(civil war, revolutions, coup d’États) and geopolitical crises (war,
terrorism, irregular warfare) against which he developed his vocabulary of law
and order ‘from above’….Ultimately,
Schmitt is taking politics and geopolitics out of his concept of the political.
The content of the analysis lies outside his notion of the political
Crítica
a la interpretación actual neoschmittiana
-
But this
attempt to read the history of 20th century international relations in terms of
a succession of confrontations between the carrier-nations of liberal modernity
and the criminalized foes at its outer margins seems unable to comprehend the
complexities and specificities of ‘liberal’ world-ordering, then and now
Ejemplo 1: Alemania fascista
contra eeuu liberal
-
For in the cases of Wilhelmine, Weimar and fascist Germany, the assumption
that their conflicts with the Anglo-American liberal-capitalist heartland were
grounded in an antagonism between liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany
outside its geographical and conceptual lines runs counter to the historical
evidence. For this reading
presupposes that late-Wilhelmine Germany was not already substantially
penetrated by capitalism and fully incorporated into the capitalist world
economy…It also assumes that the
late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards the construction of an autarchic German
regionalism – Mitteleuropa or Großraum – was not deeply
influenced by the international ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but
premised on a purely political–existentialist assertion of German national
identity
-
Against a reading of the early 20th century conflicts between ‘the liberal
West’ and Germany as ‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal modernity
and its political exterior, there is more evidence to suggest that these
confrontations were interstate conflicts within
the crisis-ridden and nationally uneven capitalist project of modernity.
Ejemplo 2: relación de
occidente con estados autoriatrios en Asia y Arabia
-
For how can
this optic explain that the ‘liberal West’ coexisted (and keeps coexisting)
with a large number of pliant authoritarian client-regimes (Mubarak's Egypt,
Suharto's Indonesia, Pahlavi's Iran, Fahd's Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi's
pre-intervention Libya, to name but a few), which were and are actively managed
and supported by the West as anti-liberal Schmittian states of emergency, with
concerns for liberal subjectivities and Human Rights secondary to the strategic
interests of political and geopolitical stability and economic access?
-
Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now, Libya, the
idea that Western intervention has to be conceived as an encounter between the
liberal project and a series of foes outside its sphere seems to rely on a
denial of their antecedent histories as geopolitically and socially contested
state-building projects in pro-Western fashion, deeply co-determined by long
histories of Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial legacies
Ejemplo 3: ¿creación de
sujetos liberales o apropiación de recursos?
-
Similarly,
it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering and the
production of liberal subjectivities can actually explain why Western
intervention seems improbable in some cases (e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or
Syria) and more likely in others (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya).
Ejemplo 4: ¿política exterior yanqui como un
multilateralismo kantiano?
-
For Schmitt diagnosed the turn towards a multilateral, if US-directed,
liberal institutionalization of world politics during the interwar years as the
key mechanism for the realization of his age of neutralizations. However, 21st century United States unilateralism seems to negate this
diagnosis frontally, activating Schmitt's politics of the exception. If
Schmitt's original position was articulated as a critique of the
Kantian–Kelsian project,… or whether United States unilateralism can be
squared with the Kantian project of liberal international law
-
The Bush
Doctrine and its ideological underpinning, Neo-Conservatism and the ‘Project
for a New American Century’, were articulated against a liberal Kelsenite
legalization and institutionalization of interstate relations, embracing the
distinctly Schmittian idea of the selective transcendence of the liberal rule
of domestic and international law – states of exception
-
the Neo-Conservative project, Schmitt and Kelsen combine to form a
paradoxical (mis-)alliance, as the political use of Schmitt is reserved for the
US state, supervising a Kelsenite international institutional arrangement for
the lesser partners within the liberal zone of peace. Liberalism is, by definition, a
broad concept, but it cannot be indefinitely expanded beyond breaking point
without loosing some sense of terminological coherence
-
Whereas
Schmitt articulated his concepts against capitalist crisis to defend German
state autonomy domestically and internationally, the neo-Conservative ideology
sought to defend the domestic autonomy and international primacy of the United
States state in the context of its own capitalist crisis…But neo-Conservatism
was not originally articulated as a response to international terror and
foreign policy considerations. It was conceived in the 1970s as an alternative
state strategy for the management of domestic disorder – analogous to the
original function of Schmitt's decisionism in Weimar Germany – as the long economic
downturn in the United States, the fiscal crisis of the US state, and the rise
of the post-welfare state precipitated the turn towards Schmittian
prescriptions
-
Yet, neo-Conservatism reaches beyond a static friend/enemy dualism by
adding an ideologically super-charged discourse of democracy and freedom
promotion – redefined as polyarchy – that transcends the mere articulation of
geopolitical differences to formulate a dynamic theory of American imperialism.
-
The
Schmittian net result during Bush's neo-conservative presidency, sketched in
the Bush Doctrine and executed in the global War on Terror, includes, inter
alia, the strengthening of executive prerogatives, the doctrine of
pre-emptive war, the abrogation of basic civil liberties, secret renditions and
indefinite detentions, the use of torture, war crimes, the refusal to apply the
Geneva Convention to prisoners of war, and the disregard of basic human rights. These measures diverge from the
normal liberal conception of the domestic and international rule of law and are
more in line with decisionist prescriptions for their suspension and
supercession – legibus absoluta. Significant differences in
policy-formation and strategy disappear from view if Bush junior is equated
with Woodrow Wilson.
Even Habermas, who once opined that ‘Carl
Schmitt will [not] have a similar power of contagion in the Anglo-Saxon world’
[as Nietzsche and Heidegger] (1989, 135), now renders his reflections on world politics in terms of an
elementary opposition between the Kantian project and Schmitt's ultra-realism
Schmitt derived the argument about the
separation between the economic and the political and its international
extension, the separation between a geopolitical interstate system and a
transnational capitalist world market, from Karl Marx
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