“Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who you are” - 23 May 1949
Carl Schmitt was fascinated by distinctions. In his 1932 book The Concept of the Political, he wants to define exactly what makes something “political”.
He starts by discussing politics as the antithesis of religion, culture, economics, law, or science. Politics is defined by what it is not, what it is set in opposition to. For Schmitt, a way of looking at the world is defined by what it allows you to distinguish.
“Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists.”
A couple of sentences later, Schmitt states that: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
Schmitt is keen to specify exactly what he means by an “enemy”:
“The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.”
For Schmitt, states do not exist independently, they only exist in relation to (and in competition with) each other.
“For to the enemy concept belongs the ever present possibility of combat... A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics.”
Politics is war - sometimes by other means.
Schmitt’s concerns were not merely philosophical. During the 1930s, he was the prime legal mind behind justifying the Nazis’ efforts to seize and maintain power, to liquidate their enemies, and to persecute Jews. By 1937, his Catholicism had made him suspect to the more fanatically “pure” elements of the SS and he was denounced as an opportunist. He lived a quiet(ish) life after the war and he went to his grave defending his work in the 1930s.
Carl Schmitt was a terrible human being. Unfortunately his work seems depressingly relevant to our current situation. Political polarization leads to an obsession with sorting the world out into “Friends” and “Enemies”. A Schmittian politics obsessed with division.
Schmitt had no time for humanity: “Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet… Humanity is not a political concept, and no political entity or society and no status corresponds to it.”
For Schmitt, any appeal to humanity is simply a mask to hide the speaker’s own nefarious interests.
“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon's: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.”
In a similar fashion, Schmitt is suspicious of liberalism’s fear of warfare:
”In a very systematic fashion liberal thought evades or ignores state and politics and moves instead in a typical always recurring polarity of two heterogeneous spheres, namely ethics and economics, intellect and trade, education and property… In case of need, the political entity must demand the sacrifice of life. Such a demand is in no way justifiable by the individualism of liberal thought.”
Sometimes Schmitt’s critiques bite: “War is condemned but executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and measures to assure peace remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity” Liberal pieties do not allow us to repeal repression, simply to hypocritically relabel it.
However, I ultimately reject Schmitt’s view of the world. I am not naive enough to imagine that everyone is my friend. But I reject his assertion that naming your enemies is all that matters. I have quoted him at length not to agree with him (mostly) but rather to hold him up as worst practice. If you find yourself uttering a Schmittism, you probably need to have something eat, go for a walk, have a little lie down, pet a dog, chat to your neighbour.
For all his obsession with distinguishing friends and enemies, Schmitt has little to say about friendship. A friend for Schmitt is simply someone who is not an enemy. And your enemies are where are the action is. For Schmitt, if we lack enemies, do we even exist? He rewrites Descartes as odi ergo sum.
The obsession of despotic regimes with identifying enemies is existential. Without enemies to “protect” your people against, how can you justify your own terrible behaviour? Hence the need to make enemies up.
Following his own logic, Schmitt’s enemies tell us a lot about him. Liberalism seeks to carve out spaces for the individual to think and speak and act separate from the group of which they are a part. It blurs the friend/enemy distinction. And Schmitt is all about bright lines.
Even worse, liberalism wants to talk about personal ethics or freedom to pursue other goals such as economic activity. All of which further blur the lines of identity that Schmitt wishes to enforce.
Schmitt has nothing to say about the complex world of frenemies that we live in, where ties of blood and money and love bind and separate us at once. And his heirs can only offer the placebo of division.
The world is more than enemies. And making distinctions is not always good for you.