Fellows - Schmitt K

Schmitt K ADI
1NC/Top Shelf
1NC
Reductions in military presence mask the broader project of
liberal imperialism anti-colonial foreign policy legitimizes
American efforts to produce a global homeland and props up
the empire of bases
Annmaria Shimabuku, 2014 (Assistant Professor, Japanese/Comparative
Literature at University of California Riverside Schmitt and Foucault on the
Question of Sovereignty under Military Occupation Poltica comn Volume 5, 2014
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0005.007/--schmitt-and-foucault-on-thequestion-of-sovereignty-under?rgn=main;view=fulltext)
The power the occupying state draws from is not its own, but that of the occupied state because it is the
existential form of the state which is essential (204). A sovereign can only strengthen his power by strengthening
the field from which his power originates, even if that entails exercising a power that belongs to another state,
power is neither purely foreign, nor domestic, but stems

from the nomos that underlies both. Whether it is an occupatio bellica of a foreign sovereign
rather than his own. Hence,
within a vanquished state, or a state of exception within a domestic setting, sovereignty in both cases is defined by
the ability to decide in a situation that demands extraordinary measures and, thus, breaches the constitution
should obtain, yet with the goal of maintaining the validity of this same constitution (209). Schmitt was compelled
the sovereign power to breach the law has the

paradoxical goal of maintaining the law. Therefore, it need not matter who the sovereign is
foreign or domesticfor he is characterized by his existential form as someone who
suspends the law with the goal of containing the legal, illegal, and by
extension extralegal, under one spatial order that transcends individual
state borders. This points to a transnational network of sovereignties that operate under the cover of each
to place the emphasis at the end:
nation-state. The assumption that a victor-state can assert its will upon the vanquished as reward for proving the
it is not a
question of who rules, or of whether a legitimate or illegitimate sovereign
rules, but a question of the existential form of the jus publicum Europaeum. Compared to
superiority of its power is radically displaced. In both cases, power is not substantive or normative,
Schmitts development of sovereignty in On Dictatorship (1921) in which he analyzed commissarial and sovereign
dictatorship, and Political Theology (1922) in which he sharpened his analysis on the decision, Schmitts emphasis
on the sovereigns need to restore the legal order in The Nomos of the Earth (1950) enabled him to execute a
veiled critique of the rise of American imperialism carried out under military occupation. Schmitt too was an
occupied subject as the Rhineland was occupied by Allied troops and Germanys unconditional surrender after 1945
Both the occupatio of the New World, i.e., colonialism that sealed an
internal European nomos from the outside-in, and occupatio bellica that
reinforced it from the inside-out, were nostalgic descriptions of the jus publicum Europaeum that
collapsed into what Schmitt thought was one spaceless order of an American
imperialism that takes on the guise of military occupation. Schmitt was already
resulted in total occupation.
writing about the development of American imperialism (Modern Imperialism in International Law 31) after the
First World War, and as his commentators have noted, he found parallels between the occupation of Germany and
the fledgling postcolonial order of the newly formed protectorates, mandates, and even independent states in the
non-European world [that] was a continuation of colonialism by other means (Rasch, Anger Management 70).
This sentiment came forth in its most naked form in a political pamphlet he wrote in 1925 entitled The Rhinelands
as an Object of International Politics. In this pamphlet, written with the anxieties of a hideous state of suspense,
he correctly identified an international community in which annexation is

tabooed (14, 4). Instead, he argued that the U.S. promoted an openly anticolonial
foreign policy in the sense that it renounced the open territorial
annexation of the controlled state (The Nomos of the Earth 252). But for Schmitt, this
was nothing but mere camouflage (The Rhinelands as an Object of International Politics 15).
While colonization as annexation in the jus publicum Europaeum had at least the merit of being frank and visible
Schmitt saw nothing but smoke and mirrors in the age of

American imperialism: ... other forms of dominion have come into vogue,
avoiding open political subjection , maintaining the political existence of
(11), by contrast,
the controlled country, nay, creating , if it appears expedient, a new

independent State, whose liberty and sovereignty is expressly proclaimed,
so that apparently just the reverse happens of what might be denounced as
degrading a people into an object of foreign policy . (6) Here, Schmitt remained
skeptically unmoved by the Wilsonian era of self-determination claimed for all
peoples, and instead saw an American attempt to forge a new nomos with
itself at center (5). Following Wilsons universalization of the Monroe Doctrine in 1917, whereupon the U.S.
interpreted interference in its spheres of influence as aggression requiring intervention, the U.S.
succeeded in disengaging the delicate balance of the European nomos
sealed by colonialism. Instead, Schmitt argued that the U.S. espousal of an
anticolonial policy that recognizes sovereignty as regulated by the League of
Nations through mandates, protectorates, trusteeships, and even independent
statehood couched with security treaties that allow the right of intervention have come into
vogue, avoiding open political subjection. (6) A parallel transformation occurred under
military occupation. Occupatio bellica in the jus publicum Europaeum was supposed to first, clearly establish a
direct administration in the occupied area; second, be only provisional and temporary; and third, preserve the
In place of direct
administration, the real master deliberately skulk[ed] in the dark by
prefer[ring] to make the native civil servants their agents (16). Without a clear
purpose, the meaning of occupation is perverted into one of those
deliberately vague categories and dragged on for indefinite periods of time,
leading areas such as the Rhineland to evaporate among the anxieties of
a hideous state of suspense (18, 14). Finally, as we have already seen, the occupier of the jus
existing spatial order. However, what Schmitt saw occurring was the exact opposite.
publicum Europaeum was able to invoke the state of exception and act as the sovereign, but this power did not
belong to the foreign state as it stemmed from the common nomos itself. For Schmitt, the design of this was
intended to circumvent the actual spatial problem: foreign state power in the territory of a continuing sovereign
state (The Nomos of the Earth 207). By contrast, Schmitt protested the encroachment of this Eurocentric spatial
order by what he perceived to be a new Americentric spatial order. He writes in The Nomos of the Earth, ... the
controlled states territory is absorbed into the spatial sphere of the

controlling state and its special interests, i.e., into its spatial sovereignty. The
external, emptied space of the controlled states territorial sovereignty remains inviolate, but the material content
of this sovereignty is changed by the guarantees of the controlling powers economic Groraum. (252) The
The controlled states territory

is left intact while its sovereignty is absorbed into the spatial sphere of
the controlling state. Schmitt is one of the first to identify an American Empire without colonies. No
longer would there be an invasion and occupation of a foreign state, but
now a permanent military occupation established by bilateral security
treaties that combined a right of garrison with a right of intervention
traditional sense of territorial sovereignty is completely destroyed.
(The Rhinelands as an Object of International Politics 8). In a more recent formulation, this is akin to what
Chalmers Johnson has called an empire of military bases: ...in more modern times, unlike many
other empires, we did not annex territories at all. Instead we took (or sometimes merely leased) exclusive military
zones within territories, creating not an empire of colonies but an empire of bases (The Sorrows of Empire 23).
Johnson tells the story of an American Empire of military bases that

compromise the sovereignty of states by calling the controlled state
satellites that he defines as ostensibly independent nations whose foreign

relations and military preparedness revolve around an imperialist power
or another variant...the client state (31).
The alternative is to reject liberal universalism and maintain

the friend/enemy distinction Interrogating representations of
peace is key incorporating alterity into the global order
guarantees endless dehumanization and violence
Sergei Prozorov, 2006 (Professor of International Relations at Petrozavodsk State
University, Russia. Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of
Liberalism Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.35 No. 1, pp75-99)
However, this dissolution of actually existing pluralism is not a mere misunderstanding, a logical fallacy of
presupposing the existence of the unity that is yet to be established. In an invective that we consider crucial for
understanding Schmitts critique of liberal ultra-politics, Schmitt approaches liberal monism with an almost
existential trepidation: What
would be terrifying is a world in which there no
longer existed an exterior but only a homeland , no longer a space for

measuring and testing ones strength freely.45 Why is a world in which there is only a
homeland, a Wendtian world state, posited as outright terrifying, rather than objectionable on a variety of
political, economic, moral or aesthetic grounds? The answer is evident from the perspective of Schmitts ontology of
If alterity is ontological
and thus ineradicable in any empirical sense, then the establishment of a
domesticated world unity, a global homeland, does nothing to diminish the
danger of the advent of the Other, but, on the contrary, incorporates radical
alterity within the homeland of the Self so that the ever-present
possibility of violent death can no longer be externalised to the domain of
the international. The monistic disavowal of alterity, of the existentially different and
alien, is thus terrifying as it enhances the most extreme possibility of killing and
being killed. Schmitts objection to the liberal monism of the homeland of humanity is therefore two-fold.
First, the effacement of ontological pluralism, which subsumes radical
alterity under the universal homeland, must logically entail the suppression
of difference through the establishment of a world autocracy that would
no longer be political due to its disavowal of the constitutive criterion of enmity. The day world politics
comes to the earth, it will be transformed in a world police power .46 This ominous
alterity and the affirmation of the extreme possibility of existential negation.
prophecy finds a perfect contemporary illustration in Wendts argument on the effacement of political enmity in the
it would always be vulnerable

to temporary disruptions. However, a world state would differ from anarchy in that it would
constitute such disruptions as crime, not as politics or history . The possibility of
crime may always be with us, but it does not constitute a stable alternative to a world
state.47 Thus, struggles against hegemony or domination, which indeed have
constituted politics and history as we know them, are recast as a priori
criminal acts in the new order of the world state, calling for global police
interventions rather than interstate war. The adversary is no longer called
an enemy, but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an
outlaw of humanity.48 The exclusionary potential of universalism is evident: theoretically, we may easily
world state: Since even a world state would not be a closed system,
envision a situation where a world state as a global police structure does not represent anything but itself; not
ultimately everyone may be excluded from the world unity

without any consequences for the continuing deployment of this abstract
universality as an instrument of legitimation. In Zygmunt Baumans phrase, the
international community has little reality apart from the occasional
military operations undertaken in its name.49 Thus, for Schmitt, if the monistic project of
liberalism ever succeeded, it would be at the cost of the transformation of the world into a terrifying dystopia
of a self-immanent, totally administered world without an outside and
hence without a possibility of flight. At the same time, the practical implementation of such a
project is hardly conceivable as encountering no resistance. The project of world unity and the
effacement of exteriority is therefore bound to have its own enemies , insofar as alterity is
ontologically ineradicable. Letting the Other into the global homeland
does not eliminate the most extreme possibility of violent conflict but
makes it impossible to manage it through the pluralistic disjunction of the Self and the Other. In
the world in which there is only a homeland, radical alterity has no place, both literally and
figuratively. In this setting, conflict appears no longer merely possible but
actually inevitable, as the Other is certain to resist its violent inclusion into
the homeland of liberal humanity. Yet, having disposed of genuine political pluralism, liberalism finds
itself lacking in any instruments to protect its universal homeland other
than the absolute existential negation of the Other that parallels the conceptual
negation of alterity in liberal monism. Thus, the universalisation of the liberal
disposition to embrace the entire humanity actualises the most extreme possibility
either by exposing the Self to the resentful violence of the Other or by annihilating the Other to
eliminate the former existential threat. It is here that enmity, foreclosed in the
symbolic register of liberalism with its monistic universalism, returns with a vengeance, since the
sole consequence of the deployment of the concept of humanity as the
referent of the liberal political project is the inevitable designation of the
adversaries of this project in terms of the negation of humanity as, in a strict sense, inhuman
beings: When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity,
merely anyone, but
but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. At the
it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as

one can misuse peace, justice, progress and civilisation in order to claim
these as ones own and to deny the same to the enemy.50 Indeed, denial is a central
category in the discursive transformation of the enemy into the foe through manifold gestures of
denial the enemy is reduced to the purely negative figure that reminds us of
Agambens homo sacer, a bare life that is both worthless and undesirable : The enemy
is easily expropriated of his human quality. He is declared an outlaw of humanity. The
absolute enemy encounters an undivided humanity that regards him as
already always proscribed by God or by nature.51 The effect of the liberal
foreclosure of enmity, i.e. its bracketing off from the political discourse, is ironically the debracketing of violence, its deregulation and intensification, whereby the
enemy is absolutised as the inhuman monster, the negative pole of the distinction, [that]
expense of its opponent,
is to be fully and finally consumed without remainder.52 In line with Zizeks diagnosis of ultra-politics,
depoliticisation brings about nothing other than an extreme politicisation, which can no longer be contained within
the symbolic dimension of potentiality but must pass into the actuality of existential negation: Depoliticisation is a
It is thus the liberal peace project itself that

produces its own opposite or perhaps reveals its own essence in the guise
of its antithesis. As Schmitt notes, the practice of the constitution of the foe through the exclusion
of concrete Others from the abstract category of humanity lends itself
political act in a particularly intense way.53
to infinite replication and generalisation : while one of the justifications for the extermination
of American Indians consisted in the attribution to them of the crime of eating human flesh, as civilisation
progresses and morality rises, even less harmful 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.54 In the following section we shall discuss the way in which Schmitts prophecy is being fulfilled through the
proliferation of categories of population, whose acts and properties are deemed to be proscribed by nature itself.
Framework
State Based Policy Fails

Vote neg to produce better IR scholarship state based policy
frameworks fail cant account for spatial relations and justify
interventionism
Michael Salter, 2012 (Professor of Law, Lancashire Law School, UCLan, Preston
UK Law, Power and International Politics with Special Reference to East Asia: Carl
Schmitts Grossraum Analysis Chinese Journal of International Law (2012), 393
427 http://chinesejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/3/393.full.pdf)
acceptance of Grossraum analysis is a precondition for a
viable and realistic form of international law scholarship : one that is
receptive to substantive spatial questions and capable of addressing a
demarcated or fenced-off coexistence on a sensibly divided-up planet. 53
Unlike abstractly universalistic and cosmopolitan alternatives devoid of spatial differentiations, such analysis
is able to both recognize and adjust itself to geopolitical tendencies that
first emerged within the early 20th-century context . Here, according to Schmitt,
81. Schmitt insists that
several difference spheres (Grossraume) of international law appeared on the scene, at the same time that the
great problem of a new spatial order of the earth from the West from Americabecame evident.54 Indeed,
whilst the Monroe Doctrine provided an early indication of the shape and
nature of the idea of international law specific to a Grossraum, this
innovation was not at this time widely registered or adopted within other
continents, least of all within Africa, Europe and Asia .55 82. According to Schmitt,
Grossraum analysis can be usefully applied to the ongoing consequences of
what he considers to have been a 20th-century revolution in spatial
awareness and imagination. The implications of this transformation have been analogous to what
occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries, stemming from both various scientific insights and the Europeans
We thus need to interpret Grossraum

analysis less as an abstract theoretical model, than as an effort to come
to terms with empirically ascertainable historical trends. Such analysis
seeks to clarify these trends profound implications for our interpretation
of the meaning, scope and rationale of international law and transnational
relations within an increasingly post-statist epoch.57 Here, the 19th-century model of
discovery of what was, for them, the New World.56
the sovereign State has, according to Schmitt, been increasingly dethroned by 20th-century developmentsand
scholarship
needs to recognize that it is the actions of regional power blocs
functioning under the hegemonic control of a dominant State that have
become the de facto creators of international law. 83. Here, it follows that traditional
and still dominant interstate ways of thinking within international law
scholarship, whose spatial concern is focused exclusively upon State territory, have
even, in some respects, made impotent and obsolete.58 In this new historical context,
now become unacceptably conservative, even anachronistic .59 In response,

SchmittianGrossraum theory seeks to accomplish its central cognitive goal
of providing an adequate model for interpreting the meaning and
implications of contemporary trends by articulating reworked categories and ordering
principles. These principles appear more appropriate to such historical trends than either traditionalbut now
outdatedState-based approaches, which are predicated on the self-sufficient sovereignty of individual States, or
imperialistic superpower approaches that, for reasons already discussed, exhibit contradictory tendencies. 84.
The abstract universalistic orientation of such imperialistic approaches also disregards

concrete spatial relations and territorial borders altogether. It does so by interpreting
the world beyond its own borders as an open frontier for its legally
unrestrainable intervention. It thereby misses out on what merits particular recognition as key
themes for international law scholarship.60 85. In one sense at least, Grossraum analysis of
concrete and extended spatial orders seeks what could be called a third
way: one that is irreducible to the familiar, if false, either/or alternatives
between State-centric and imperialistic orientations . Schmitt further argues that, by
the mid to late 1920s, international politics had begun to change to the point where a spatial reordering upon the
basis of a small number of Grossraume largely held in equilibrium by a balance of power, had become a real
possibility.61
Policy Making Bad

Policy-making frameworks emphasizing peace reify a legalistic
regime of violence interrogating representations of
statehood, enmity, and peace are a pre-requisite to addressing
perpetual state war
Necati Polat, 2010 (professor of IR at the Middle East Technical University Peace
as War Alternatives: Global, Local, Political Vol. 35, No. 4, 2010, pp. 317-45.)
power enables knowledge, is an insight introduced by
this
understanding forms a clear contrast with the modern discourse on
knowledge, in which knowledge is invoked as the very opposite, the antithesis, of
power. Knowledge, pure and present, is understood within modernity as a negation of anything other than itself.
What is negated primarily is power, which, constantly lurking behind, seeks to
manipulate knowledge and smuggle into the system of the production of
knowledge various forms of partisanship and interest, a move aborted in modernity by the correct method
That, far from being negated by knowledge,
Foucault into the study of the systems of the production of knowledge. As is well known,
and by the objective procedures of the validation of knowledge. This modern assumption on knowledge has been
resisted by two separate but related traditions, both extending roughly from the second half of the nineteenth
century: a critical social scholarship, with the analysis of capitalism at the forefront, increasingly sensitive to the
operations of power; and a new strain in philosophy with emphasis on ontology rather than epistemology .
Reflecting on the nature of knowledge within the converging point of

these two traditions, Foucault recognizes power as both power to control
and as an enabling, constitutive power. The latter is simply an ineluctability, an ontological
condition. Accordingly, rather than repelling each other, power and knowledge are
the sides of one and the same coin. This insight by Foucault has been exceptionally rewarding in
appraisals of power, of power politics constitutive of the epistemological orders
of modernity, which seem significantly to underwrite the present-day social
structures. By the same token, assessments of power as a condition of knowledge
on peace, the epistemology of peace, quite apart from the power or
authority on which peace inevitably relies, may have to be treated as vital
for a proper understanding of peace in the relations among states. A wellunderstood manifestation of this power is the power of ideology in
interstate relations in its normalizing, domesticating effect, via
knowledge, of peace, produced in alignment with power . This effect not only
conceals a structure of power and domination that is at work but also seeks constantly to reproduce and maintain
spectacles of peace, from the victors peace

to the more recent, purportedly non-state-led peace, may have to be
considered as simply discourses of peace, indicating various
governmentalities in historically specific alignments of power and peace .
that structure. By this account, the assorted
This is a view of peace that departs markedly from the mainstream vision in which diverse discourses are perceived
as phases in an evolving, progressive, Whig-like line of increasing freedom from violence and increasing
The mainstream assumption is in full keeping with the liberal

postulate of tenable social harmony, a society conceivably at peace with
itself. The idea of politics that Foucault introduces aims precisely to try and unpack this elementary liberal
emancipation.
gesture that relies on possible harmony in society in the face of irreducible diversity. Incredulous of this gesture that
posits a power-free, conflict-free idea of politics, Foucault famously describes politics by inverting the definition of
war offered by Clausewitz.57 Politics, he asserts, is war by other means. The notorious
statement by Clausewitz, redefining war as politics, is often understood as an attempt to license war, violent
confrontation between states, by linking war to politics. Foucault seems to disagree, arguing that Clausewitz
himself may have in fact inverted a historically earlier thesis, one that is paramount for modernity:
politics is
the continuation of war by other means.58 The idea of politics as war emerged, Foucault
observes, as politics came to replace war from the sixteenth century with the
birth of the modern state. The advent of the state brought about a state
monopoly on war, with the inevitable, day-to-day warfare in the social
space substituted by politics.59 Politics as the continuation of war in this genealogical sense means,
Foucault argues, that, first, a war fought is always and necessarily followed by a
silent war. This muted war occurs to reinforce the relations of force
established in war, allowing those relations steadily to diffuse in the social
body under the guise of a civil peace.60 Second, a corollary to this, Foucault adds, is that
peace and its institutions following a war are indistinguishable from the
war itself. Third, he notes, politics continuing the last real war can only be reversed
by another war; the continuity in politics, inclusive of both war and peace, can only be broken, that is, via,
not smooth transition, but plain violence, a trial by strength in which weapons are the final judges.61 It is in war
in close keeping with this genealogical meaning of the idea of politics as war in the history of the modern state, war
as a matrix for techniques of domination, that Foucault finds the primary event, the general form of power
relations encompassing all conflict, antagonism, rivalry, confrontation, and struggles between individuals, groups,
The institutions, practices, and techniques of war may have to be

viewed, Foucault believes, directly or indirectly, as the nucleus of political
institutions, with notions of strategy, developed within the historical
art of war, serving as tools for the analysis of power relations.63 Politics as
or classes.62
war along these lines opens to doubt, questions, as Vivienne Jabri notes, a host of conventional lines of
dissemblance and differentiation, such as the inside and outside, the domestic and the international, the zone of
civic peace and the zone of war, the sovereign state and the anarchic outside,64 boundaries at the center of the
liberal imagination. This notion of politics not only exposes the liberal affectation of a power-free, violence-free
concept of politics, it also bonds with the more basic, common-sense vision of politics as operating on power, as
crucially enabling and disabling, and as such not infrequently a matter of life and death, hence irreducibly violent.
Peace, a mere instance of politics, becomes in turn a variety of war . Isnt

power a sort of generalized war which assumes at particular moments the forms of peace and the State? Foucault
the State a means of waging it.65 As a technology

peace is set off from conventional war only for being a form
of biopolitics that does not use conventional threats . As biopolitics, peace seems to
present a regime of suppression, of violence, through the very idea of order, just as law. Law is not
pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the
mechanisms of power, even in the most regular . War is the motor behind institutions and
order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way,
we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore
at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society,
continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on
one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someones
adversary.66 It is a state of permanent war in which the state and peace , the
pacification that produces the state and that, as peace, is simultaneously
centered on the state, are simply forms assumed by power. This is a perspective
that once again links the peace of peace activists, the purportedly benevolent
peace, to the domestic monopoly of violence, the sheer authority constitutive of the state,
with power assuming two arch forms as required in its specific operations .
asks. Peace would then be a form of war, and
of power in this sense,
If one basic form is the state, the negating, Hegelian individual in interstate relations, implying a constant state of
war, then peace may be conceived to be the other equally primary, and perhaps not less insidious, form.
Link
Japan Legalism
The affirmatives unipolar reinterpretation of international
legal principles legitimizes liberal imperialism and the
repression of occupied populations
Schmitt also maintains that, at the start of the 20th century and for its own
imperialistic reasons, the USA encouraged Japan to take on the role of an
East Asian superpower. This was to be largely at the expense of China, because
Japan was to exercise the role of a leading power within a spatially
defined region akin to that of the US Grossraum within the American continent under the Monroe
62.
Doctrine:30 As long as Russia was Englands enemy, there were nevertheless no objections to the deployment of an
Asian Monroe Doctrine by Japan. As early as 1905, [US] President Theodore Roosevelt, is supposed to have
encouraged the Japanese Viscount Kaneko to transfer the Monroe Doctrine to Asia. Roosevelt obviously based [this
such a transference would ensure the economic

development of East Asia by American capital, that is, the application of the
world-economic methods of Anglo-Saxon imperialism to East Asia , especially to
suggestion] on the idea that
China. An East Asian Monroe Doctrine with this sense and content would thus have been nothing other than the
opening of China for exploitation by Anglo-Saxon capital, that is, the transformation of China into an American-
exhibiting the hypocrisy and

double standards that are often characteristic of US imperialism, this
apparently principled position remained implicitly conditional. One
condition was that its practical results must continually serve the current
economic interests of American capital, particularly with respect to economic colonization of
China. Hence, once changing patterns of international relations, including
the geopolitical realignment of Russia and Japanese territorial claims of
Manchuria, meant that this material function was no longer the case, then
US support for a Japanese-centred East Asian Grossraum abruptly
reversed into outright opposition. Far from being a progressive, post-imperialist principle of
universal application that led the rest of the world, US ideologists within international law
writings rapidly reinterpreted the Monroe Doctrines core elements as
somehow the exclusive property of the USA. In turn, this regime could
exempt itself from governance by such supposedly universal principles
wherever this proved politically expedient: Yet no sooner did it become evident that there
English colony. This was perfectly acceptable.31 63. However,
was an essential difference between this Anglo-Saxon capital interest in China, on the one hand, and Japans
political claims upon Manchuria and [interest in] a reform and reorganization of China, on the other, than the
aforementioned literature took up the cause and attempted in various ways to cast doubt upon the transferability of
Within the USA,

international law scholars and political scientists were , according to Schmitt,
acting as the foremost propagandists for their regimes ideological
reversal of stance. In line with their States imperial interests, they supplied a number of
ideological justifications in apparently no less principled terms than
those that were advanced before to support the very opposite case . However,
the Monroe Doctrine and the admissibility of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine.32 64.
this timeand in keeping with a more general exploitation of semantic elasticity within international treaties
these court scholars conveniently added that the USA alone retained the
right to be arbiter of the meaning, scope and applicability of such
supposedly universal international law principles : These advocate with great energy
the position that the Monroe Doctrine is a monopoly of the United States of America, and that it cannot be
transferred to other political and geopolitical situations, or can only be so transferred with the [express] permission
and approval of the United States.33 65. According to Schmitt, the unstated and underlying premise behind the
ideological defence of the USAs rejection of an East Asian Grossraum was that only economic-capitalistic
The imperialist
subtext was that the USA is entitled to advance its material interests by
reference to the practical meaning of supposedly universal legal, political
and moral principlesunless and until these exhibit negative implications .
Where such implications arise, these principles can then be reinterpreted
strategically as essentially particularistic. In any event, the USA reserved to
itself the exclusive right to decide whether, in any particular case, these
principles are to be taken as either universally applicable or
contextually specific.
imperialism American-style should have the right to appeal to the Monroe Doctrine.34
Occupation/Failed States
The affs attempts to stabilize regional politics via withdrawal
legitimizes liberal global occupation and administrative
violence
Peter Stirk, 2004; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics, School of
Government and International Affairs, University of Durham, Carl Schmitt, the Law
of Occupation, and the Iraq War Constellations Volume 11, Number 4, 2004
Yet there is another, more positive evaluation of occupation in Schmitts work. In the concluding chapter of Nomos
der Erde he drew on a contrast between land warfare and maritime warfare, with the latter supposedly dominating
the conceptions of the interventionist Anglo-Saxon powers. This was a well-established theme in Schmitts work.
the sheer fact of the occupation of enemy territory

gave the occupying power an interest in the maintenance of law and
public order in the occupied territory. Here, writes Schmitt, the immediate
connection between protection and obedience becomes evident .4 Earlier, in the
The core of the argument is that
brief section headed Occupatio bellica im jus publicum europaeum, he develops a number of themes in less than a
dozen pages on the law of occupation, which he describes as the last achievement in international law of the jus
This law seeks to grasp the curious phenomenon of the

effective exercise of power by one state over the territory of another
without there being any change in sovereignty, regime, or constitution . That
publicum europaeum.5
exercise of power is held, moreover, to be legitimate by virtue of a legal title derived directly from international law.
Effective power and international law figure prominently in the two themes on which Schmitt ends this brief
treatment of the law of occupation. The first is what he calls the striking parallels or the notable substantive
affinity between belligerent occupancy and the state of siege or state of exception within a state. The second is
that this phenomenon breaks through the dualistic conception of domestic and international law, exposing it as
Schmitt associates the law

of occupation with two key elements that run throughout his work: the
state of exception and the relationship between domestic and
international order. In both cases, he claims that European jurisprudence had experienced great
only a formal-juridically interesting question of secondary order.6 Here
difficulty in coming to terms with the phenomenon of occupation. It is worth elaborating on exactly what is at stake
in these two cases. With respect to the striking parallels between belligerent occupancy and state of siege or the
state of exception, there is a temptation, especially in the light of the current occupation of Iraq, to see the parallel
in Schmitts concept of sovereign dictatorship.7 Yet this cannot be what Schmitt meant, for he specifies that
occupation entails no change of constitution. Strictly speaking, that is true only where there is a common
constitutional standard. Where there is no common standard, as in Russian occupation of Ottoman territory in
1877, a new legal order has been introduced, but by the same token this is not an instance of occupatio bellica. 8
What Schmitt had in mind is evident in an early article on dictatorship and the state of siege. Written during the
First World War, it was part of a wider debate on whether or not the state of siege created an independent right to
issue directives unconstrained by the rule of law. Schmitt appears to make some concession to the critics of such an
independent right. The separation of powers continues in this condition, for the military commander does not claim
to execute laws he has made. Schmitt adds, however, that there is a concentration within the executive. The
meaning of this becomes clearer when Schmitt elaborates .
He takes up the distinction between

legislative and executive power, where the former, as the true expression
of the sovereignty of the people, is accorded supremacy and the latter is
interpreted simply as the arm of the legislative brain. He then strikes: But with
such antitheses one does not do justice to the significance of the administration. Administration is
more than the mere execution of positive legal definitions , the law is only
the framework within which the creative activity of administration takes
place. Also, the historical development did not occur in such a way that first the law . . . was declared and then
its execution was taken in hand. In the beginning all state activity is administration;
legislation and jurisdiction separated out later. . . . This primeval condition ,

remains administration . . . 9 This image of
undifferentiated power recurs throughout Schmitts work, sometimes breaking
through other key distinctions, including that between commisarial and sovereign dictatorship.10 It is a
power guided by the technical, objective demands of the situation in
which general laws are irrelevant or where laws can no longer be
distinguished from administrative decrees. Yet it is still a political situation
in which protection is offered and obedience expected . It is the situation which
if it is permitted to use this word,
prevails both in the state of siege and belligerent occupation. Schmitt was not being eccentric in this approach to
occupation. The same general traits were identified in a substantial study of the occupation of the Rhineland by
Ernst Fraenkel. According to Fraenkel, Occupation
represents not a constitutional

government characterised by a balance of powers but rather a sort of
emergency government in which all forms of power are concentrated in
one centralised body.11 He even warns against an excessively liberal occupation statute, lest it tempt
the occupying power to bend it to suit the circumstances of the moment, as had in fact been in the case in the
occupation of the Rhineland. The main thrust of Fraenkels argument is, however, to question the more extreme
assertions of unlimited discretion, particularly that associated with the French chairman of the Inter-Allied Rhineland
Commission, Paul Tirard. Fraenkel notes that Tirards position was an extension of the power claimed for the Reich
government by Schmitt at the time of the Prussian coup of 1932, namely an unlimited power to act as required by
the circumstances of the moment. In the case of Tirard, Fraenkel continues, this amounted to the claim that the
occupying power can do whatever is necessitated by his interests.12 A more overtly ideological commentary on
occupation was offered by Schmitts contemporary critic, Werner Best, albeit without any explicit reference to
Schmitt. Best plays on the etymology of the German word for administration (Verwaltung). He writes that
administration had originally signified a broad power of ruling (Walten) that had gradually been narrowed down to
signify execution of the commands of others or mere bureaucratic activity. Administration (Verwaltung) had in
experience of
occupation had demonstrated that this trend had to be reversed and
administration (Verwaltung) restored to its original meaning of comprehensive
rule (Walten) over all public affairs.13 Schmitts claims about the analogy between the state of siege
and belligerent occupation are closely tied to his assertion that the latter exposes the
fragility of the dualistic approach to domestic and international law . Time
and again he plays on the exceptional nature of intervention by one state
in the affairs of another to draw the parallel. In part this is simply a matter of noting that
particular been separated out from politics and subordinated to it. According to Best,
the controls over Germany or other states were supposed to be exceptional in some form or another. More
the principle of intervention a question of international law

always presupposes some specific conception of the constitutional order
within states a question of constitutional state law. Both the Holy Alliance
and the Monroe Doctrine reveal how closely the two are entwined .14 In Nomos
der Erde Schmitt gives a somewhat different, but related account: The real state of affairs is this, that the
military commander of the occupying power steps into a direct
relationship with the population of the occupied territory . . . . That is the
indisputable reality, but it is incompatible with the dogmatic exclusiveness
of the so-called dualistic theory of internal and external relationships . For
it is neither pure domestic law nor pure international law. The population of the
occupied territory does not count as a legal subject. . . . 15 In other words, the occupied population is
subject to the holder of undifferentiated power without even the
protection afforded to it indirectly by pure international law, for it is not a
legal subject. At this point Schmitt refers to the striking parallels between military occupation and the
broadly, Schmitt argues that
state of siege or exception.
Privileging The Other

Assigning moral privilege to the other represses political
agonism and generates the need to eradicate alterity on an
international scale
Linda S. Behnke, Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International
Relations at the University of Reading and Andreas Bishai, Senior Program
Officer in the Education Program at the United States Institute of Peace, in 20 07
(War, violence and the displacement of the political, in The International Political
thought of Carl Schmitt, eds. Louiza Osysseos and Fabio Petito, pg. 119- 21)
One can try to deny,
suppress, or displace the political, yet one can never abolish it . The problem is in
what fashion the political emerges in different ideologies. As Gary Ulmen has pointed out, for Schmitt, the key
to the concept of the Political is . . . not enmity but the distinction itself
(Ulmen 1987: 189). The political is therefore based on the reality of difference and of
plurality in international society. One should not exaggerate this point and romanticize this reality
too much. Neither identity nor difference can claim moral or ethical priority as
such. Hence, no moral privilege can be assigned to the other , as some postmodern ethics have tried to do. The main concern for realists like Schmitt is instead to limit
the inherent violence in a system of difference that has no recourse to a
higher political, judicial or moral authority. Irreconcilable differences abound, and
violence is thus a systemic condition, always implicated in the decisions
between self and other, friend and enemy, and always a potentiality in the rela-tions between these
entities. For Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy establishes a limit
for conflict by associating it with what William Con- nolly has called agonistic respect
From a Schmittian perspective, nothing of this should come as a surprise.
(Connolly 1994: 166167). In Schmitts terms, according to traditional international law, war finds its right, its
honour and its dignity in the fact that the enemy is no pirate and no gangster, but a state and a subject of
The recognition of sovereign equality, and the

concomitant recognition that the only universally acceptable norm is the
absence of universal norms, imposes a modicum of restraint upon the
exercise of violence, as it divests states of morality and truth as
legitimizing resources. Again, if agonistic respect sounds too romantic in this context, one might
justify the restraint imposed upon the exercise of force against other states by the prudent recognition that our
ideas, values and principles may not be the solution to the problems in
other places. Moreover, and in regard to the liberal fondness for liberating
oppressed people, the right of self-determination that is at the heart of
the democratic entitlement vests in none other than the people , and . . . it is
they not some foreign power that they have similarly not elected who must determine their
own destiny. (Byers and Chesterman 2000: 291) Against this, liberalism identifies violence
as the by-product of the continued presence of otherness in the international
system. Consequently, instead of limitation, its goal is elimination. Or more
precisely, perhaps, violence is to be channelled so as to abolish itself , by reserving the
legitimate right to exercise it to liberal democracies. Violence becomes justified and
legitimate when it is used by these states to eradicate its own sources , that
international law (Schmitt 1988: 4849).
is, the presence of otherness . At best, non-democratic regimes can hope for toleration itself a
form of ontological violence (Connolly 1994: 43) by democratic states. Ultimately, however, their presence,
which keeps history from fulfilling itself, needs to be terminated. Accordingly, war takes on a different notion. For
realists, it is the extension of the political, an expression of a systemic condition in which irreconcilable differences
In the absence of an authority to decide the

justness of such causes, war is purely instrumental in settling the score .
For liberals, war becomes discriminatory, as it is legitimate when
exercised by the right agents for the sake of democracy and peace . War on
the other hand deteriorates into pure aggression and criminality when conducted by the other. Given that
the other is the source of residual conflict and violence in the
international system, war is ultimately about the eradication of otherness, not about the settling of scores between different entities. As long as this is not accomplished, war is but
might have to be settled by force.
suspended. The distinction between war and peace therefore becomes blurred, as the presence of the other
constitutes a permanent threat. Peace and peaceful means of diplomacy and statecraft become the extension of
war, as the imminent end of history and the coming of a world of liberal states can afford no lasting peace and
If the realists have it right, we can expect the world to

continue to offer resis-tance to this liberal eschatology. The problem with this is
that it will most likely simply make liberalism double its efforts and raise
the level of violence further. As long as war is exercised for the sake of the
ascetic ideal of its own abolition, it will continue to eliminate its limits.
recognition of the other.
Statehood/Unilateral action
Unilateral representations of statehood as legitimate or
illegitimate pave the way for American Imperialism and
constant intervention
The Stimson Doctrine thus asserted that the USA possessed an
unrestricted, even universal, right to deny recognition to any government
that came to power through means other than those favoured by current
US constitutional doctrines.36 The irony of denying recognition to States created in a way that
67.
mimics the revolutionary historical origins of the USA itself appeared to be lost on these ideologists. The Stimson
Doctrine also gave effect to earlier presidential statements justifying a legally unrestrained US interventionismas
if this were a principle of international law itself. Taken together, these developments helped open the door for US
interventions around the globe justified by reference to law enforcement, even justifying the USAs involvement in
the Korean war as a police action.37 In short, the Stimson Doctrine firmly, if implicitly, established the idea that
this State alone remained entitled to sit in judgment upon all othersas a self-appointed global judge of the legality
and legitimacy, justice or injustice, of their actions; however, and in keeping with imperialistic imperatives, without
of course itself accepting any reciprocal measure of legal obligation and accountability:38
The English-
American claim to [the mantle of] global judge [Weltenrichters] is expressed for example in the
Stimson Doctrine, which reserves [for these powers] the recognition or non-recognition of
territorial alterations. ... The note from the American Secretary of State Stimson from the 7th of January
1932 to the governments of China and Japan includes the declaration that the government of the United States will
neither admit the legality of any de facto situation nor recognize treaties concluded between Japan and China which
The subtext here is that

a possible violation of US material interests anywhere in the world is a
matter for the USA alone to both decide and act upon. This is because it defines
such interests as global since the USA both embodies and rightly speaks
for humanity as such.40 For Schmitt, this unilateralist and anti-democratic ideological worldview
involves the taken-for-granted identification of Anglo-American interests with those of international law as such. It
was in this way that the device of selective recognition (and hence nonrecognition) of State borders, and of statehood more generally, became part
of the resources of US imperialism operating within both international law
and international relations. 69. At this time, US ideology in relation to Japan and China rested,
violate the treaty rights of the United States or of its citizens in China.39 68.
according to Schmitt, on an incoherent mixture of the premises of legal positivism and natural law, each pushing in
a different direction. More specifically, this ideology was grounded in a status quo-oriented insistence upon the
centrality of territorial ownership and respect for existing treaties reflecting the negotiated power of the
participants, and upon moral and legal principles rooted in its own neo-liberal ideology but (mis)represented
ideologically as somehow universal: It rests upon a peculiar connection between simple argumentation from
ownership and [from] the nature of treaties currently in force [Vertragslage] (pacta sunt servanda), that is, [from] a
bald treaty-positivism[, on the one hand,] and [on the other] the basic ideological principles of a liberal democratic
and liberal-capitalist Weltanschauung [worldview].41 70. For present purposes, the crucial factor shaping these
transformations in US transnational law doctrines was the idea of China as an open door for economic
colonization either by means of Japanese cooperation as a US proxy, or in resistance to Japanese foreign policies.
Insofar as Japan remained willing to facilitate such Anglo-American colonization and the securing of Chinese raw
materials through capitalistic market mechanisms, then its claims to regional superpower status, akin to a
Japanese Monroe Doctrine, would be recognized by the USA. However, once Japan threatened, by means of the
projection of its own political and military power, to block American access to such raw materials in violation of the
claims and requirements of Anglo-American neo-liberalism, then, according to US ideologists within international
law, the situation was reversed. In particular, Japan forfeited its rights to be recognized under international law as a
regional superpower. 71. For Schmitt, such rhetorical arguments seek, for their own purposes, to firmly distinguish
between the USAs Grossraum hegemonic control over Latin America (citing Mexico as a typical example), and
analogous Japanese claims and interventions within East Asia concerning the Manchurian region. On close
the US stance here and its would-be justification in international

law terms was clearly problematic, not least as a rationalization of hypocrisy
and double standards. For example, these arguments conveniently gloss over
clear historical similarities concerning the role of US military intervention
in the emergence of the republics of Cuba and Panama. These, according to
examination,
Schmitt, were similar in kind to Japans later projection of military and political hard power within Eastern Asia
during the 1920s and 1930s.42 Acting like a monopolistic corporation jealously defending its inventions through
international patent and copyright litigation, the USA claimed that it alone had the right to emulate US-style
the American rationale for this denial of a

Japanese-led East Asian Grossraum highlights how material gains over
Chinas raw materials secured through economic means were being
ideologically defined as essentially peaceful and non-political . By contrast,
Japans more openly political and military methods of securing the same
goals were judged as unacceptably geopolitical in nature . Schmitt emphasizes the
irony that such one-sided ideological interpretations by US ideologists , which
apparently promote pacifist and humanitarian agendas, themselves signify an opening salvo of
just war propaganda: one that, in turn, has operated as a preface to actual
military conflict justified in terms of the USAs moral superiority : Here one sees
with what self-evidence the liberal-capitalistic interpretation of economic imperialism depicts its
specific methods of expansion and domination as essentially peaceful and
natural, not only in order to deprive the political opponent of [any appeal to] the Monroe Doctrine and to
reserve [this doctrine] exclusively [beschlagnahmen] for itself, but also as intellectual armament for
just war.43 73. The upshot of Schmitts critical and realist analysis of the historical relations between China,
imperialistic practices. 72. Schmitts critique of
Japan and the USA, is to encourage a critical stance to the latters general tendency to advance supposedly
universalistic arguments relating to neo-liberal variants of human rights, freedom, democracy and even
peace. It draws attention to the operation of imperialistic subtexts and monopolistic power claims, even within
the apparently technical and non-political sphere of international law doctrine. 74. He further suggests that one of
the USAs pre-imperialist international law doctrines, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, understood as a possible blueprint
for a federated regional world order, contains principles of continuing relevance to the postCold War era. Whilst the
original version of this doctrine exhibited a reasonable logic of spatial separation, the later imperialistic policies
that displaced it represented the USAs ideological claim to world interference.44 75. The debate over the
international legal significance of the Monroe Doctrine, both in itself and as a precedent for the theory and practice
what is at issue here is elementary question of

an international legal coexistence of peoples and states. These confront
the alternative of an opposition between a clear spatial order based on
the non-intervention of extra-regional powers, and a universalistic
ideology which transforms the entire Earth into the battlefield for its
interventions.45
of Grossraum more generally, shows that
Terror Reps
Representation of an existential terrorist threat calcify the
asymmetrical structure that underlies ontological liberal
violence
The present hegemony of liberal ultra-politics is well illustrated by the contemporary phenomenon of the global
war on terror. The war on terror offers a fruitful site for inquiring into the politics of enmity for two reasons. First,
the widely perceived undecidability of the category of terrorism to the extent

that it is frequently attributed to the very same states that have launched the war on terror illuminates
starkly the contingency of the friendenemy distinction. This contingency, i.e. the
absence of both essence and necessity to any particular empirical form of enmity,
points to the permanent gap between the transcendental function of the
friendenemy distinction and its particular historical modality . The deployment
of the ultra-political objectification of the enemy as a terrorist rogue is a purely contingent
option, made possible by a fundamental asymmetry that endows the subjects
of the war on terror with what Derrida terms the reason of the strongest, an
epistemico-moral selfcertitude that itself has something roguish about it: [T]hose states that are
able or are in a state to denounce or accuse some rogue state of violating
the law, of failing to live up to the law, of being guilty of some perversion or
deviation, those states that claim to uphold international law and that take the initiative
of war, of police or peacekeeping operations because they have the force to do so, are
themselves, as sovereign, the first rogue states. This is true even before any evidence is
gathered to make a case against them, however useful and enlightening such a case may be. There are always (no)
more rogue states than one thinks.70 Secondly and consequently, the war on terror is of particular interest, insofar
as the perception of this fundamental inequality is arguably constitutive of the very subject-position of the terrorist
contemporary terrorist violence may be grasped as a retort of the

foe, a paradoxical refusal of the subject-position, imposed on the enemy of
liberalism, through its assumption in a hyperbolic and excessive manner, whereby the foe acts out, with a
vengeance, an identity attributed to him or her. Let us suggest that the specificity of terrorist
violence is not derivative of extra-political factors that may function as its
background motives (poverty, economic inequality, underdevelopment, lack of education, etc.), but is
rather a direct expression of a properly political grievance, a retort
against the humiliation, incurred in not being recognised as a legitimate
enemy. Our demonstration of the monistic nature of liberal pluralism and the artefactual character of liberal
foe. Indeed,
naturalism points to the fact that the subject-position of the foe is preconstituted in the political ontology of
liberalism, insofar as the appropriation of the capacity to adjudicate what is human and what, within humanity, is
natural makes exclusion and stigmatisation a permanently available option for dealing with expressions of dissent.
The image of the terrorist foe is thus both entirely contingent from the standpoint of a Schmittian transcendental
While the
motives for particular acts of terrorism might be distinct in each particular case,
we may suggest that all these acts, first, take place in the preconstituted
subject position of the enemy of liberalism and, secondly, target
precisely this subject position as a priori inferior. Terrorism is little more
and nothing less than the resentful acceptance by the Other of the ultrapolitical terms of engagement, if only because there is no other way that the
function of enmity and always-already articulated within the ontological edifice of liberalism.
present global order can be legitimately opposed : the refusal to be liberalisms noble
savage inevitably turns one into a barbarian. If our enemy can only be a monster, should we be surprised that the
acts of our enemies are so monstrous? The uncanny effect of the liberal negation of pluralistic antagonism is that in
the eyes of its adversaries liberalism may no longer be opposed other than by murderous and meaningless
destruction. To the oft-cited empirical claims that contemporary terrorism has been produced as an effect of Cold
terrorism is the practical

expression of that mode of enmity which the liberal West has constituted
as the sole political possibility due to its appropriation of both nature and
humanity. The war on terror is not an accidental deviation from the maxims of Western liberalism but rather
War policies of Western powers, we must add a conceptual thesis:
an exemplary model of the only kind of war that the liberal foreclosure of political enmity permits, i.e. a war
against an a priori unjust enemy. It should therefore not be surprising to see this model generalised beyond its
original articulation, whereby it becomes a standard response to the worldwide expressions of anti-liberal dissent.
For this reason, one gains nothing by attempting to battle terrorism either
on its constitutive ultra-political terms or, as much of critical thought suggests, on the
extra-political fronts of development, poverty relief, civic education,
democratisation, etc. Instead, any authentic confrontation with terrorism must
logically pass through the stage of questioning what confrontation,
struggle and antagonism actually mean today, who we fight, how we fight and, possibly,
whether we still have any meaningful willingness to fight. During the 1970s, Foucault frequently lamented that the
proverbial class struggle tended to be theorised in critical thought in terms of class rather than struggle, the
latter term functioning as a mere metaphor.71 The same problem is still with us today the proliferation of
metaphors (culture wars, wars on drugs, fight against poverty) is increasingly obscuring the reflection on the
concrete meaning of antagonism in contemporary political life. In the interbellum of the 1990s, one frequently
encountered discussions of who the new enemy might be after the demise of the Soviet Union. As subsequent
events have demonstrated, it is entirely redundant to attempt a theoretical deduction of the concrete enemy, which
is after all always constituted in a political decision. However, while the who question may be entrusted to history
what requires reflection is a question of how enmity is to be

managed. Should we maintain the present ultra-politics of the foe despite its evident boomerang effects on our
and politics,
societies, or should we attempt to return to the structure of legitimate enmity of the Westphalian era, expanding it
beyond the European system to the entire international society? Should we put our trust in and surrender our
freedom to the governmental apparatuses of homeland security or should we heed Schmitts warning that no
security may ever be attained as long as our sense of the world is that in which there is only a homeland? This
article has demonstrated that it is impossible to evade these questions by the plethoric yet repetitive discourse on
answers to these questions

require an interrogation of many ontological assumptions that frame the
conduct of modern liberal politics. We have seen that the desire to dispense with enmity as such,
overcoming enmity in the chimerical project of world unity and that
arising out of liberal epistemicomoral certitude, has not brought about a universal friendship but rather produced a
limited but universalistic community, which permanently feels threatened due to its incomplete embrace of the
The escape from the murderous

ultra-politics of the foe is impossible unless it passes through the stage of
an ontological critique of liberalism, hence the present importance of
Schmitt.
globe and, for the same reason, threatens everyone outside itself.
Withdrawal
The Affs selective condemnation of war via withdrawal
legitimizes Americas claim to universal moral authority and
criminalizes resistance to peaceful liberal expansion
Peter Uwe Hohendahl 08 (Teaches European Lit and theory at Cornell,
Reflections on War and Peace after 1940 Ernst Jnger and Carl Schmitt, Cultural
Critique 69, Spring 2008)
By 1937, Schmitt was convinced that the era of the nation-state had come to an end and would be succeeded by a
politics of Grorume, i.e., a politics of supranational formations controlling larger areas of the globe (Schmitt,
Staat, Groraum, Nomos, 225480; Gottfried, Carl Schmitt, 83122). The globe would be divided among a small
number of hegemonic powers, each of which could try to reach supremacy. This new regime would clearly affect
both international relations and the conduct of war. In Land und Meer (1942), written as a historical tale for his
daughter, Schmitt focuses on the difference between land powers such as Germany and Russia and sea powers
such as England and, more recently, the United States. The fundamental division between land and sea powers that
Schmitt stipulates in Land und Meer determines not only the outlook of the people inhabiting specific spaces but
Schmitt detects the unique

character of maritime warfare only in the early modern age when the use
of cannon makes battles possible where the ships remain at a distance .
also the nature of war conducted in these spaces. But it seems that
Technological change, i.e., the development of a new type of warship, coincides with the crucial spatial revolution of
the new concept of global space is

the basis for European expansion, the era of Landnahme, commonly called
colonialism. What is critical for the understanding of warfare in modern Europe is the distinction between
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to Schmitt,
wars conducted between European states in Europe and those conducted between the same states outside of
The norms and conventions developed for the conduct of interstate

war in Europe do not apply, as Schmitt notes, to colonial wars. The era of Landnahme
is characterized by bitter and brutal wars among the European nations
that are in the process of dividing the rest of the world. These wars outside the
European space are carried out with utmost ferocity and without consideration for noncombatants. The point
Schmitt wants to make is that maritime warfare plays a decisive role in this era and it
follows conventions that leave little protection to the civilian population
because there is [End Page 26] no neutral ground for noncombatants. As Schmitt
Europe.
stresses, in legal terms we are dealing with different orders that correspond to two different political realities.
While land powers seek control of their own space and defend it against
intruders, sea powers claim that the sea is an open and free space to be
used for commerce and expansion. Their interests lead them to a specific
interpretation of international law and different rules of warfare. It is ultimately impossible,
Schmitt suggests, to separate the validity of their norms and the strength of their material interests. While Land
und Meer presents the difference between land and sea powers in the form of a narrative without the force of a
theoretical grounding, Der Nomos der Erde (1950), while holding on to a historical organization of the material, is
driven by questions of international law. At the center of the study, we find the analysis of public European law as
the legitimation of the European nation-state and its relationship to other European nation-states. Schmitts
presentation focuses on the slow disintegration of this nomos (order) during the late nineteenth century and its
It is in this context that the transformation of warfare

comes into view, but not so much as a technical or cultural question but as
a legal issue. In Schmitts opinion, international public law underwent a decisive and consequential
breakup following World War I.
transformation in the wake of the Great War. The Treaty of Versailles, in which German responsibility for the war was
What had begun as a war between equal

nation-states turned into a war against a nation under criminal leaders.
codified post factum, changed the status of the war.
Schmitt reads the return of the concept of the just war as a serious and ominous setback, namely a re-emergence
of premodern norms of war. The interstate war between equal nations was transformed into a discriminating war in
which the defeated nation is treated as a criminal. To argue his point, Schmitt specifically refers to Article 227 of the
The intended
criminalization of the enemy (the monarch as the symbolic leader) undercuts the very
idea of traditional interstate war in which, according to Schmitt, moral
questions remained outside the concept of war. While Schmitt acknowledges that the
Versailles treaty, in which the German emperor is defined as a war criminal.
initial debate about Germanys responsibility for the war was inconsistent and remained inconclusive, he interprets
the later development within the League [End Page 27] of Nations as an extension of the trend that began in 1919:
the introduction of norms defining war of aggression (Angriffskrieg) as a criminal act. At the same time, he notes
that the Geneva Protocol of 1924 still resists a radical interpretation of the war of aggression and minimizes the
rhetoric of criminal wars. European international law was still too much entrenched to follow the direction of public
For Schmitt, it remains important to

carefully distinguish between aggressive military acts, a war of
aggression, and a criminal war, although he is aware that in the public discourse of the 1930s
opinion (especially American public opinion) to outlaw war.
these distinctions do not play a significant role. By defining Angriff (attack) in terms of military rather than political
strategy, he can neutralize the term aggression so that it is not automatically seen as a punishable offense (Nomos
the abolition of war as a means of

politics received more attention. War was to be replaced with peaceful
change supplemented by disarmament and security agreements. In this context,
the emphasis was placed upon the concept of the just war, a concept that
of the Earth, 249). Within the context of the League of Nations,
logically implied condemnation of unjust wars.
Although Schmitt does not agree with the
the problematic nature of

the discourse. It leads to discrimination against the state that opens the
hostilities. From the legal point of view, Schmitt therefore urges the strict separation of the question of attack
direction of this discussion, he follows its results to expose what he feels is
and the question of a just war. At the same time, he realizes that public opinion (in Europe) was less interested in
legal distinctions than a real and effective ban of war. A fundamentally political problem could not be solved by
legal formalisms as they were defined in the 1924 Geneva Protocol. According to Schmitt, the failure of the protocol
as a defense line against war is the failure of Europe to determine its own understanding of war and peace.
Internationally, it was replaced by the American approach as it was articulated in the 1928 Kellogg Pact. He notes:
The Kellogg Pact changed the global aspect of international law. . . . The Western Hemisphere now took its place,
The change of
meaning to which he alludes is the condemnation of war, a condemnation
that amounts to the criminalization of war. Criminalization now took its course (280). [End
and determined further development of the transformation of the meaning of war (280).
Page 28] Schmitts statement raises two questions. First, why is the American intervention of 1928 so important for
Schmitt and, second, what are the stakes in regard to the condemnation of war? The American intervention of 1928
turned out to be crucial in 1945 when the American understanding of justified war and, more broadly speaking, the
The American
approach, Schmitt argues, contained a stronger condemnation of war than the
European understanding and therefore a much harsher treatment of the defeated German Reich. For
American conception of international law supplemented and revised the European concept.
Schmitt, the American position is not simply a strong articulation of a moral stance but at the same time the
expression of specific national interests. He specifically argues: Ever since, the Monroe Doctrine and the Western
Hemisphere have been linked together. They define the sphere of the special interests of the United States. They
encompass a space far exceeding the boundaries of the state propera Groraum in the sense of international law.
The traditional American interpretation of this doctrine has been that juridically it constitutes a zone of selfdefense (281). In this manner, Schmitt links the political construct of a Groraum in which the hegemomic power
defines the rules with a specific construct of international law. The linkage is perceived as mutual dependence.
While the legal theory legitimizes the political construct, the political order of the Groraum gives concrete meaning
to the legal theory, for instance, the right or the duty to intervene in political and military terms. Schmitts
interpretation has far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, it introduces the concept of the Groraum as an
element of a legal discussion, which means that the American position on war is seen as the articulation of
the condemnation of war reflects, broadly

speaking, American interests within its own hemisphere . On the other hand, the
definition of a Groraum in which a hegemonic power defines the norms relativizes the legal theory. The
Americas special interests. Put differently,
American condemnation of war, for instance, is grounded in the concrete

development of the American Groraum legitimized by the Monroe Doctrine. The flexibility of
the doctrine, which allows either a defensive or an offensive reading, can serve the policy of the United States in
Schmitt wants to demonstrate that

the strong condemnation of [End Page 29] war, first articulated in the Kellogg Pact, is closely
connected to the Monroe Doctrine and its theological background . The claim for
different situations and different moments of its history.
isolation from Europe and the refusal to acknowledge European intervention is rooted in American exceptionalism.
After this new line was drawn, what was the status of the Western
Hemisphere from the standpoint of the European order of international
law? It was completely extraordinary, even predestined. It would not be too much to say, at least for extremely
consistent opinion, that America was considered to be a refuge of justice and
efficiency. The essential significance of this time of elect may lay much more in the fact that only on American
He notes:
soil did conditions exist whereby meaningful attitudes and habits, law and freedom were possible as a normal
According to Schmitt, the logic of American exceptionalism

provides the legitimizing context for the ultimate assessment of war and
peace, since in America, given the right conditions, the true distinction between good and evil, law and crime is
situation. (289)
finally possible. The new West, the American hemisphere, claims to be the better Europe and has therefore also the
right to set the new standards and norms. It is worth noting that Schmitt is willing to go along with this claim with
regard to the nineteenth century when European politics, especially after 1848, were dominated by conservative, if
not outright reactionary, considerations. However, he stresses the transformation of the United States around 1900
Yet it is not the

formation of an American Empire that Schmitt wants to criticize; instead, it is
the geopolitical change that he wants to highlight , namely the discovery of
the Pacific and of East Asia as the new West, demanding a rereading of the Monroe
Doctrine. In Schmitts view, the rereading has to focus on the intensified dialectic
of American isolation and intervention, i.e., the need to remain pure and the need to purify
when the United States entered its imperialist phase in the Spanish War of 1898.
others. The historical transition from the nation-state to the Groraum implies the necessity to acknowledge and
relate to a number of Grorume (in the sense of Realpolitik), but also the continued need to uphold the status of
The unresolved antagonism results in contradictory positions

within American politics. It moves back and forth between neutrality with
regard to foreign interstate wars and morally motivated decisions to
intervene in the name of a just war. Schmitt argues that the concept of the just war legitimized
moral exception.
[End Page 30] the intervention of the United States during both world wars, transforming them from European wars
to global civil wars.
Alternative
Solvency - Okinawa
Only the alternative can solve failing to analyze the
convergence of Japanese Colonialism and Liberal imperialism
in American basing reproduces the Okinawan state of
exception and makes colonial occupation inevitable
Annmaria Shimabuku, 2014 (Assistant Professor, Japanese/Comparative
Literature at University of California Riverside Schmitt and Foucault on the
Question of Sovereignty under Military Occupation Poltica comn Volume 5, 2014
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0005.007/--schmitt-and-foucault-on-thequestion-of-sovereignty-under?rgn=main;view=fulltext)
the State Department ultimately dismissed proposals
for an Asian Marshall Plan. Whereas European states were able to benefit from reconstruction, the
former Japanese colonies primarily needed political and economic
development. In short, Europe was able to draw on the legacy of the jus publicum Europeaum that left a
However, different from Europe,
developed economic infrastructure in place whereas the former Japanese colonies were not as richly developed.
Japan needed an additional value as the profit-yielding institutional

framework x became more pronounced. This value was the U.S. military, an
institution (even as a foreign one) that cannot be separated from the production
of sovereignty in the Asia Pacific. As early as 1945, military planners announced
the need for a network of U.S. military bases that dotted the peripheries
of the Pacific: Japans former South Pacific Mandate, the Ryukyus, and Japan.[3] Plans for this
network must be contextualized by two pivotal events that also took place in 1947.
First, the promulgation of Japans Peace Constitution that stipulates under
its famous Article 9 the Japanese renunciation of war and a standing army.
Second, the Emperors Message in which the Japanese Emperor Hirohito offered
Okinawa to occupation authorities to serve as a U.S. military outpost in
exchange for the recuperation of Japanese sovereignty (Gabe 51). This set the
stage not only for a recuperation of Japanese sovereignty, but for the recuperation of a
network of sovereignties in the Asia Pacific that reproduced the
infrastructure of the Japanese Empire through the installation of a
constellation of U.S. military bases in the region. In this way, the U.S.
restored the sovereignty of Japan, Okinawa, and the mandates through
the respective formations of independence, residual sovereignty, and strategic trusteeship,
while making sure that each formation was configured in a way that
facilitated the presence of the U.S. military. Accordingly, Japan became independent
through the 1952 San Francisco Peace Accords with an accompanying U.S.-Japan Security Treaty that stipulated the
administrative rights over

Okinawa were handed over to the U.S. through the San Francisco Peace
Accords, and the island was occupied under the premise that its sovereignty
was residually[4] present in Japan and hence did not constitute a
colony. Finally, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was placed under a U.N. strategic trusteeship
conditions under which the U.S. military could remain in Japan. In turn,
administered by the U.S. until deemed mature enough for self-governance, while the U.S. carried out atomic bomb
the U.S. resurrected the legacy of the Japanese

Empire and established a network of military bases that operates under
testing in the Bikini Atoll. In this way,
the cover of national sovereignty. Understandably, there is much ambiguity as to exactly what
kind of Empire this is: an American one, a Japanese one, or better yet, a joint U.S.-Japanese one where both
states work together collaboratively while somehow maintaining the autonomy of their respective sovereign
The political left in both the U.S. and Japan favor a

critique of American Empire while more well-read authors might suggest a pecking order in which
the U.S. bullies Japan into bullying its former colonies. But if there is a colonial aspect to the
U.S. military presence in the Asia Pacific, it is not merely an American one,
but one that also encompasses the legacy of Japanese Empire . The fact
that Okinawa today bears the burden of 74% of all U.S. military bases in the
state of Japan even though it only makes up 0.6% of total Japanese state
territory attests to the collaborative nature of this arrangement. The military
in Okinawa may certainly be an American one, but it is the sovereign right of the
Japanese government that not only chooses to station military forces
there, but also generously covers 78.9% or $5.0 billion in basing costs to
maintain them. This figure is unprecedented in the world, making it impossible
spheres even if only in theory.
for the U.S. not to maintain U.S. military bases in the Japanese state
(Department of Defense). Yet to what extent can we say that the U.S. military violates the sovereignty of Japan
when the inauguration of Japanese sovereignty is predicated on the re-colonization of Okinawa as an American
Even if Japan is ultimately subordinate to the U.S.,

this is a position from which it has profited greatly. Japan grew into the
worlds second largest economy by 1968 (currently third after being surpassed by China in
military outpost in the first place?
2010), followed by the U.S. However, the sheer size of the economy, calculated in terms of its Gross National
Product does not take into account the fact that Japan is a country smaller than the state of California and
has/contains half the population of the United States. When calculated in terms of per-capita GNP, the Japanese
The
system of sovereignty fabricated under practices of military occupation
that both Schmitt and Foucault illustrate in their very different trajectories with remarkable
points of agreement is just as relevant today as it was in Europe in the past. Occupatio bellica perhaps
economy in fact surpassed the United States in 1986 (Ito 3). 5. Folding the Postwar into the Postcolonial
comes the closest to exposing Schmitts definition of sovereignty as tenuously predicated on a common nomos, or
in other words, a grammatical structure evoked in the constitution of sovereignty as a performative speech act. For
however, this tight field, grid of intelligibilit y, or homogeneity

is not achieved through a docile submission to sovereign
performances, it is achieved through a series of rebellions superficially
coded as opposition that actually (re)produce the internal grammatical structure as an effect (Society
Must Be Defended 208, 228, 208). Indeed, it is precisely the cry of sovereigntys violation
that reinforces the discursive field of sovereignty as an effect . After Japan
regained its sovereignty in 1952, a number of U.S. military bases still
remained within its territory. Many from the political left charged that this was
an ongoing manifestation of American imperialism. As a result, the
Marines in Gifu Prefecture and Yamanashi Prefecturebases geographically closer to the volatile Korean
Peninsulawere shifted to the much more distant Okinawa in 1956 (Yara 58). The proportion
of U.S. military bases continued to decrease in Japan while increasing in
Okinawa after 1972 when Okinawa formally reverted to the Japanese administration (Arasaki 26-27). It was
precisely this charge of a violation of Japanese sovereignty that
(re)produced a U.S.-Japanese system of sovereignty in which Okinawa
came to occupy a semi-extralegal space that falls through the cracks in
international law and is constantly subject to a series of legal exceptions by
both states. Hence, in a curious turn, the continuity between Japanese Empire and postwar U.S. military
Foucault,
of...discourse
occupation breaks down the dogmatic exclusiveness of the so-called dualistic theory of the relation between
internal and external as Schmitt had originally characterized it, but in a slightly modified form. In other words ,
if
the constitution of Japanese sovereignty is predicated on a U.S. military

presence, then Okinawa is the simultaneous convergence of four vectors :
1) Japanese colonialism 2) American military occupation with 3) intrastate
law (within Japan) 4) interstate law (between Japan and the U.S.).
Okinawa dissolves into a void precisely at the point in which any
discursive strategy attempts to separate these threads . For Okinawa, it
matters little who the sovereign or colonial master is foreign or domestic, American
or Japanesefor sovereignty is characterized as the power to subsume the
extralegal space back into the fabric of this law.
Alt Key Imperialism

The alternatives recognition of spatially organized power
blocs opens up critical paths to resisting American imperialism
and assimilatory repression
78. Schmitt developed his Grossraum theory from 19391941, with modifications and nuances contained in various
post-war publications, particularly The Nomos of the Earth. The historical context of Schmitts argument includes
the claim that, by at least the third decade of the 20th century, the era of independent nation States has largely
traditional system of so-called international law but actually

Eurocentric transnational law, which focuses upon relations between and among
formally equal nation Stateshas been eclipsed. It has been partly
overtaken by a historical reality that requires a focus upon relations
between and among different Grossraumeunderstood as regional power-blocs.49
This eclipse is happening for a variety of technological, military and geopolitical
reasons, including imperialistic forms of Americanization disguised
strategically as liberalization (the freeing of markets) and globalization. And yet, at
the same time, the democratic idea of a distinct peoples right to exercise
political self-determination has become increasingly entrenched. Schmitts key
concern is that forms of US imperialism deploying universalistic rhetoric of
freedom actually operate, in practice, to diminish the collective freedom of
nation States to determine for themselves their chosen modes of
government and principles of both political and economic organization. 79.
Schmitts Grossraum analysis is not, and for reasons already discussed, essentially cannot be,
politically neutral. On the contrary, it is specifically geared up to combat this
imperialistic form of assimilation that diminishes a peoples right to
exercise political self-determination and popular sovereignty. Against the familiar
arrogance of imperialist disregard for the integrity of other States
expressed in a stance of righteous unilateralism concealing its own
hegemonic power, Schmitts Grossraum concept projects the principle of
national respect as a doctrine that ought to operate as a key doctrine of
international law.50 80. Hence, a Schmittian could argue that the Grossraum element has
to come to the fore as a realistic and pluralistic alternative to imperialistic
assimilation into a US-led unipolar world order.51 The latter promotes an
unmediated liberal individualism, together with an equally unmediated collectivism of humanity
as such. This takes place at the expense of various intermediate and mid-level
categories, such as highly particularistic national identities, cultural
come to a close.48 The
traditions, subcultures and peoples.
Solvency Bracketing Violence

The Friend/Enemy distinction effectively brackets violence and
creates space for limited expressions of power thats the only
way to prevent perpetual war against alterity
Schmitts work on international relations has
persistently articulated both a possibility and the actual historical
existence of such a common ground. The most famous example is of
course the Westphalian states system and the juridical arrangement of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum, which established a structure of managing antagonism that Schmitt
termed the bracketing (Hegung) of war: its limitation through rationalisation
and humanisation.27 The Westphalian system delegitimised the recourse to the
theological discourse of just war, responsible for the intense violence of the
wars of religion, and instead relegitimised interstate war , as long as both
sides in such a conflict approached each other as a just enemy (justus hostis),
existentially equal to the Self. The mutual recognition of the principle of sovereignty
among European powers created the possibility of limiting the violence and
intensity of military conflicts by virtue of the absence of any possibility that either
party could appropriate the title of just war for its own actions and thereby stigmatise,
demonise or criminalise the enemy, depriving it of equal status and
permitting its indiscriminate treatment. War was therefore by definition treated as just on
both sides and whatever was permitted to one party was also permitted to the other: The essence of
such wars was a regulated contest of forces gauged by witnesses in a bracketed
space. Such wars are the opposite of disorder.28 What interests us in this modality of the friend
In contrast to Zizeks diagnosis,
enemy distinction is the explicit requirement of equality between opponents in the common space of the regulated
contest of forces. Indeed, the ontological equality of the self and the enemy is a fundamental characteristic of
Schmitts thought that strongly contrasts with the asymmetric constellation of the selfother interaction in the
poststructuralist ethics of Levinas and Derrida.29 While for the latter the asymmetrical relation, whereby the Other
calls the Self in question, is a prerequisite for the assumption of a genuinely ethical responsibility, for Schmitt
any asymmetry, privileging either the Self or the Other, paves the way for
absolute enmity and the actualisation of the most extreme possibility of
existential negation. For Schmitt, being called in question by the Other is not in itself an ethical but
simply a horrifying experience of the possibility of violent death. What makes the encounter with the Other
contingently ethical is precisely the possibility of the resolution of this asymmetry in the establishment of an
empirical equality that actualises the equality that is always already inscribed in the transcendental function of the
any two subjects are equal

simply by virtue of being wholly different from each other .30 Schmitts normative
preference for the Westphalian modality of enmity is therefore conditioned both by its
correspondence to the ontological condition of equality-in-alterity and the
desire to avoid the absolutisation of hostility that is inherent in any
asymmetrical selfother interaction. What made possible the actualisation
of ontological equality in the Westphalian period was the exclusion of all
substantive (moral, economic or aesthetic) criteria, on the basis of which the
friendenemy distinction: after all, in Schmitts ontology of radical alterity
properties or actions of any party could be deemed unjust, thus permitting the
appropriation of the justa causa by the other party. In contrast, the ultrapolitical
constellation, discussed by Zizek, is marked precisely by the presence of positive
normative content in the positions of the opponents , whose
incommensurability precludes the existence of a common ground between
them. In this constellation, the Self inevitably perceives the Other not as a
legitimate existential equal, but as a pure negation of the normative
principles of the Self, the otherness of the Other reduced to a mere denial of the Self. Insofar as these
normative principles are treated by the Self as unproblematic and unchallengeable, the enemy, viewed
in solely negative terms of their refusal, becomes not merely the
adversary in a regulated contest but an object of hate and revulsion, or, in Schmitts
terms, an inimicus rather than a hostis. Schmitt makes a distinction between hostis and inimicus to stress the
specificity of the relationship of a properly political enmity. The concept of inimicus belongs to the realm of the
private and concerns various forms of moral, aesthetic or economic resentment, revulsion or hate that are connoted
by the archaic English word foe, whose return into everyday circulation was taken by Schmitt as an example of the
collapse of the political into the moral.31 In contrast, the concept of hostis is limited to the public realm and
concerns the existential threat posed to the form of life of the community either from the inside or from the outside.
the enemy (hostis) is what we confront, fight and seek to defeat in

the public realm, to which it also belongs, while the foe (inimicus) is what we
despise and seek either to transform into a more acceptable life-form or to
annihilate. Contrary to Zizeks attribution of the ultra-politics of the foe to Schmitt, he persistently
In simple terms,
emphasised that the enemy conceptually need not and normatively should not be reduced to the foe: The enemy
in the political sense need not be hated personally.32 In Schmitts argument, during the twentieth century such a
reduction entailed the destruction of the symbolic framework of managing enmity on the basis of equality and the
[Presently] the
war is considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity . Such a
war is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending
the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy
into moral and other categories and is forced to make of him a monster that must
not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. In other words, he is an enemy who no
consequent absolutisation of enmity, i.e. the actualisation of the most extreme possibility:
longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only.33 Thus, it appears impossible to equate Schmitts notion
of enmity with the friendfoe politics that was the object of his criticism. The very antiessentialism, which Zizeks
reading recovers in Schmitt, brings into play a plurality of possible modalities of enmity. To argue, as Schmitt
certainly does, that enmity is an ontological presupposition of any meaningful political relation, is certainly not to
What is at stake is the need to

distinguish clearly between what we have termed the transcendental
function of the friendenemy distinction (and in this aspect, Zizeks own work on politics,
particularly his recent Leninist turn,34 remains resolutely Schmittian) and the empirical plurality of
historical modalities of enmity. Schmitts philosophical achievement arguably consists in his
valorise any specific construction of the friendenemy distinction.
affirmation of the irreducibility of the former function and the perils of its disavowal, an achievement that is not
tarnished by a plausible criticism of his historical excursus on the Jus Publicum Europaeum as marked by a
conservative nostalgia for a system that, after all, combined the sovereign equality of European powers with the
manifestly asymmetric structure of colonial domination.
Impact
Dehumanization
Liberalism expands via naturalization and the violent
eradication of alterity as inhuman
Liberalism Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.35 No. 1, npp75-99)
The radical innovation of liberal governmentality, which emerged as a critique of the
theory of police science and the practice of police states of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, is the
reinscription of the social order in terms of socio-economic processes , which,
in the episteme of classical liberalism, are deemed to be natural, self-regulating,
antecedent to authority and as having an intrinsic logic of their own that
is not fully transparent to state knowledge: Inscribed within the very logic
of liberalism is a certain naturalism.55 From this epistemic principle follows the central tenet of
liberal government: the suspicion that one always governs too much.56 The liberal solution to this problem
consists in adapting the techniques of government to the principles found in the naturalised reality of the social and
At the same
time, liberal policies of laissez-faire are not a passive abandonment of an
aboriginal reality to its own devices, but an elaborate activist and
interventionist course that secures natural liberty by taking necessary
measures to correct its perversions. This corrective aspect points to what Mitchell Dean and
making government itself accountable to these principles of the system of natural liberty.57
Barry Hindess have respectively termed the illiberality of liberalism and the liberal government of unfreedom.58
liberal government has historically identified

manifold categories of the population, whose properties or acts were
contrary to nature and had to be rectified through governmental
intervention, which historically has taken manifold forms, from the confinement of madmen to the correction
Within the natural realm of the social,
of juvenile delinquents.59 It is in this possibility of governmental re-naturalisation, which we have elsewhere

described in terms of the pedagogical technology of liberalism60 that we may locate the condition of emergence
of the figure of the foe as the enemy of liberalism. The centrality of pedagogical interventions to liberal
governmentality demonstrates that despite its avowed naturalism, liberalism remains conditioned by the
constitutive, asymmetric and individualising pastoral power that Foucault has famously identified as the condition
of emergence of modern governmentality as such.61
What unites all the objects of liberal
corrections, irrespectively of whether they are deemed to be evil, mentally disabled, morally deficient or
simply irrational, is their functioning in the liberal discourse as beings, whose
existence is deemed to be contrary to nature. On the one hand, these individuals and
groups belong to the social realm, cast as ontologically and axiologically prior to government in the liberal
their practices are not in accordance with the

liberal vision of natural liberty and thus require corrective interventions
episteme. On the other hand, however,
of liberal government, whose modus operandi is itself adapted to the natural processes of the social. Natural
liberty is therefore not an aboriginal property of the subject, but an effect of governmental intervention. The
Other, who was so generously let into the global liberal homeland, is
endowed with liberty only on condition of his or her subjection to the corrective
interventions that eradicate his or her alterity. This Foucauldian thesis parallels Schmitts
critique of the educational theory involved in the valorisation of liberal democracy: The people can be brought to
recognise and express their own will correctly through the right education. This means nothing else than that the
educator identifies his will at least provisionally with that of the people, not to mention that the content of
education that the pupil will receive is also decided by the educator. The consequence of this educational theory is
a dictatorship that suspends democracy in the name of a true democracy that is still to be created.62 Thus, liberal
government finds its condition of (im)possibility in the generalised illiberality of pedagogical interventionism, which
manifestly violates liberalisms own naturalist presuppositions but is nonetheless essential to its existence,
functioning in the manner of the Derridean supplement, a strange difference which constitutes [liberalism] by
breaching it.63 In Deans argument, this paradox makes liberalism a potentially total modality of government,
because its program of self-limitation is linked to the facilitation and augmentation of the powers of civil society
and its use of these powers, in conjunction with the sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical powers of the state itself,
to establish a comprehensive normalisation of social, economic and cultural existence.64 The naturalisation of a
certain artefactual conception of the social permits perpetual interventions in the name of its natural values,
At the heart of
liberal government we may therefore observe the aporia whereby the
naturalist ontology is always contaminated by the logic of supplementarity
and every natural liberty bears traces of governmental corrective interventions.65 This
disavowing the constitutive and frequently violent character of governmental practices.
relationship is at work not only in liberal domestic politics, but also, and with an even greater intensity, in the
liberal governmentality is deployed in such diverse

contexts as military interventions in the name of democracy, neoliberal
programmes of development assistance and economic restructuring, and
even the global campaign for the promotion of human rights . As William Rasch
argues in his reading of the discourse of human rights as a form of geopolitics, the term human is
not descriptive, but evaluative. To be truly human, one needs to be
corrected.66 It is this object of liberal corrective interventions, whether domestic
or international, that epitomises the figure of the foe a not truly human being
proscribed by nature itself. The incomplete humanity of this creature
renders it infinitely inferior to the fully liberal rights-holders , which
justifies the deployment of asymmetric subjectobject relations in pedagogical
international domain, where
practices of correction, while the unnaturality of this creature provokes a degree of apprehension: even if the foe is
any engagement with him is dangerous, as one never knows

what these monsters are capable of. To recall our discussion in the previous section, the fear
infinitely weaker than us,
of the Other that animates Schmitts discourse on enmity does not disappear in the liberal political ontology of
it is supplemented with a violent project of eradicating

this dangerous alterity that liberalism has itself incorporated into its
universal homeland through manifold corrective, disciplinary and punitive
practices, which have no rationality whatsoever in the Schmittian pluriverse of irreducible alterity. The foe
is therefore, as it were, a double enemy: both a transcendental Other that is intrinsically dangerous in
monistic naturalism. Instead,
Schmitts sense of radical alterity and an empirical Other, whose dangerousness is established by his or her actual
resistance to the efforts of liberal government to purge this alterity.
Perpetual War/Intervention
The affs liberalism justifies vastly more interventions via the
ideology of Just Wars
Linda S. Behnke, Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations
at the University of Reading and Andreas Bishai, Senior Program Officer in the
Education Program at the United States Institute of Peace, in 20 07 (War, violence
and the displacement of the political, in The International Political thought of Carl
Schmitt, eds. Louiza Osysseos and Fabio Petito, pg. 119- 21)
It might appear paradoxical to find a political ideology usually concerned with the possibility of order in the face of
a plurality of world-views engaged in the theoretical and political exorcizing of the other. What this peculiar
articulation of liberalism within the international context therefore reveals are the boundaries of liberalism itself, the
limits it imposes on plurality and difference, and the outline of the fundamental unity, the common trunk from
which diversity may branch out (Connolly 1995: 93). Underlying the liberal project to rearticulate the logic of
international politics and to overcome the effects of anarchy are two central assumptions about the identity of its
referent subjects and about the logic of history. Both assumptions impose severe limits on the expressions of
plurality that liberalism can tolerate. First, liberal
ideology holds that individuals

everywhere are fundamentally the same, and are best off pursuing selfpreservation and material well-being. . . . Thus all individuals share an interest in
peace, and should want war only as an instrument to bring about peace (Owen
2000: 344). And further, liberal States are believed to be reasonable, predictable,
and trustworthy, because they are governed by their citizens true interests, which harmonize with all
individuals true interests around the world (ibid.: 353354). Difference, in other words, is but an appearance that
hides a deeper, underlying harmony and identity of mankind. Politics is therefore first and foremost a matter of
bringing this harmony about.
Any mechanism preventing this from happening the

is by definition
anarchi-cal structure of the international system, international law and institutions
illegitimate. It is this assumption of metaphysical identity that war-rants the claims by liberal states to speak
for You, the people (Byers and Chesterman 2000), to suspend their right to self-determination, as circumstances
do not permit it to be exercised by the people themselves. Concomitantly, this harmony provides a telos for the
liberal project. The story told by liberals like Fox, Reisman and Slaughter is one of an approaching world of liberal
International institutions are paying increasing attention

to standards of human rights and democracy in countries, even authorizing interventions
states (Slaughter 1995).
by force to re-establish democratic regimes. History may not be over yet, but the United Nations and other
international organizations are doing their best to end it (Owen 2000: 343). As the democratization of the
international system is therefore no longer an ideal far removed from the realities of international politics, it
becomes unacceptable not to realize this final epiphany of the liberal subject. Based on these two mutually
the liberal project can displace the political and articulate

instead a discourse of moral obligation for the liberation of the oppressed
individuals in non-democratic states. Suspending the international (legal) system
between mutually reinforcing notions of individualism and universalism,
the political and its concern with the limits of community and violence are
displaced. In its stead we find a boundless, and therefore empty, political
subjectivity, and a notion of war that assumes its metaphysical justness
and thereby knows no inherent limits. In other words, inter-vention becomes the
normal and central legal institution in this system (Schmitt 1988: 17).10 A third
reinforcing assumptions,
assumption of liberalism connects this arrogation of voice to speak for other people with the DPT. While democracy
within liberal societies is sup-posed to provide the conditions of possibility for political plurality, its articula-tion in
the theoretical context of the international society resists its own pluralization. As argued above, DPT is based on
the problematic assumption that in the international realm, democracy defines identity rather than plurality. In the
liberal mind, democracy becomes homologous; the heterologous con-ditions of the anarchical system are too much
for it to bear.
Terror
Liberalism inevitably produces terrorism by blurring the
friend/enemy distinction
De Bennoist 07 (Alain de Benoist is the editor of the two French academic
journals Krisis and Nouvelle Ecole, and the author of more than fifty books about
political philosophy, sociology and the history of ideas. Writing in The international
political thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order pg
78-81)
terrorism that is completely deterritorialized has yet another consequence. It
engenders confusion between military and police duties, which are now
thought to be interchangeable. During the Second World War, in order to fight against the
The appearance of a
Resistance, the German occupation troops already had to perform duties that were typically in the domain of the
police, such as investi- gation, arrests, interrogation of suspects, etc. At the same time, the collaborating police
simultaneously underwent a militarization process. After 1945, during the anti-colonial wars, regular troops also
The global war on

terrorism also falls under the domain of police work. Here we must not
forget that a policeman does not regard his adversaries as a traditional
soldier would regard his. By definition, the police are not content with
combating crime; they are, rather, attempting to eliminate it. The police also
do not conclude peace treaties with criminals. In this way, there is
nothing political in police activities, at least when they involve combating criminals and wrongdoers. However, there is a clear moral dimension: crime is not only socially, but
also morally, contemptible. The police character of the war against terrorism reveals this point of
utilized police methods, as they had to identify enemies who did not wear uniforms.
view. It puts forward implicitly, as Rik Coolsaet writes, this message that one has wanted to spread since the 19th
century: terrorism is not a legitimate political activity. It belongs to the criminal sphere (2004: 113). But what is it
exactly? Is terrorism a new political form of war, or is it a new form of criminality? (See Daase 2002; Falk 1986;
Terrorism is, after all, a war of peacetime, and this entails

the increasing inability to distinguish between the notions of war and
peace. This is in itself significant, because in this epoch of the fight against global
terrorism, the confusion between police and army duties has grown to
such proportions that it destroys the distinction between domestic and
international affairs.7 From the point of view of those who combat terrorism, things are clear. In public
Klitsche de la Grange 2001.)
discourse terrorists are irrevocably described as criminals. This is not a new phenomenon. During the French
Revolution, the Vendean insurgents were officially denounced as brigands. After the assassination in September
1901 of the American President William McKinley by an anarchist, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, called
anarchists criminals against the human race. But the equation terrorist=criminal, justified and supported by the
violent, blind and unpredictable character of terrorist actions, has also been used in the past to disqualify members
of the Resistance or freedom fighters in anti-colonial struggles. This equation made it possible for them to be
considered common law delinquents, which justified, for example, their being refused the status of political prisoner
the terrorist is regularly

described using terms such as criminal, assassin, bandit, reducing him to
the rank of violent undesirables, disturbers of order and social peace, or
as barbarian, savage, blood-thirsty madman, inclining towards
mental insanity or an uncivilized, brutal state of nature (2004: 41).
Terrorists, in other words, are denounced as criminals or madmen. That kind of
denunciation transforms the terrorist into a man who cannot have
anything in common with the people whom he attacks. Therefore, the
terrorist becomes an Other, a real hostis humani generis: [t]he image of the Other is constructed as
when arrested. Along the lines of semantic analysis, remarks Pierre Mannoni,
an image of somebody who will never be like us (Ragazzi 2004). This is constantly affirmed both by politicians
whichever cause terrorism is claiming to defend is really

incomprehensible. In the United States, it is maybe still more incomprehensible, as the
Americans, convinced of having created the best society possible or even
the only one truly acceptable have a tendency to find it unimaginable
that someone could reject the model of society which they champion . The
idea that the United States is a land of the free the ultimate model of
organization of society, and a nation chosen by Providence is so widespread that it
obviously facilitates the representation of terrorists as sick, perverted or
mad people: in September 2001, how could normal people not believe in the
goodness of the Americans? The mere fact that the terrorists detest the United States and
and by the media:
everything it represents made them appear as outcasts and, as the United States identifies itself as the Good,
Terrorism is therefore stigmatized as

irrational and criminal at the same time, stripped of all logic, and
fundamentally portrayed as having no proper political objectives. This
the terrorists can only be incarnations of Evil.
description of the terrorist, as either mad, criminal or both, resonates of course with public opinion, which often
views terrorist acts as both unjustifiable and incomprehensible at the same time (why do they do it?, but what do
they want?). These reactions can be easily understood, but the question is whether the usage of such terms can
help the analysis of the true nature of terrorism, and the identification of its causes. The description of the terrorist
as a simple criminal is supported by a logic that bans any rapprochement between murder and legitimacy. This logic
becomes entangled, however, by the fact that in all wars, murder is legitimate even when it involves civilians,
victims of terror bombings or collateral damage. Terrorist rhetoric will therefore attempt to portray their actions as
legitimate. In fact, as we have seen, all terrorists consider, first, that they are indeed fighting a war, and, second,
that their actions are legitimate because their violent acts are only the consequence or result of another legal
violence; that is, that their violence is justified by the injustice of a situation and is therefore a completely
acceptable reaction to a situation which is unacceptable. In answer to this rhetoric, generally denounced as
specious, terrorism is, on the contrary, described immediately by those who combat it as purely criminal, and they
admit only grudgingly that terrorists might have political aims. It is emphasized that the terrorists methods
disqualify him as a political combatant and are proof that he is only a criminal. But the negation of the political
character of terrorism is not to be explained only by emotional reactions of opinion. For the public authorities
fighting terrorism, this negation often translates into an eminently political attitude, for which these emotional
reactions are just an instrument. It is a deliberate desire to obliterate the political message inherent in a terrorist
act, writes Percy Kemp, a denial of truth understood as a sine qua noncondition of the constitution of a new ethos.
Thus, in Israel, the refusal of the authorities to recognize the political specificity of terrorism (and therefore their
refusal of all negotiation) has its foundations in the official denial of the reality of the despoliation of the
Palestinians. In the United States, such a refusal is founded in the official denial of the incestuous relationships that
successive administrations have maintained with the Islamist groups, and of the subsequent rupture with these
people do not
deny that terrorists are making war on the United States, and that the US
must itself make war on the terrorists. However, the recourse to this term of
war is ambiguous. Traditional wars are concluded by peace treaty, which
is not a plausible option in this case. The model of war which operates
here is rather the model of the total war, of the moral (just) war, of the
police war, where it is not enough to just defeat the enemy: one has to
eliminate him. Carl Schmitt writes that theologians tend to define the enemy as something which must be
annihilated (Schmitt 1950: 89). Advocates of the just war use this reasoning, as do
those who fight the war against terrorism. This permits them to justify the
fact that they want not only to combat terrorism, but, rather, to eliminate
it. Henceforth, we see that this war is by nature very different from
traditional wars, that it is a war of police character, and an absolute war .
cumbersome allies at the end of the cold war. (2004: 2122) At the same time, the majority of
WMDs
Absolute War justifies the use of WMDs to eradicate an
inhuman other to preserve global order
Kam Shapiro, 2008 (Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and Government,
Illinois State University Carl Schmitt and the intensification of politics pg. 89)
None of this is to suggest some kind of technological determinism on Schmitt's part. As he notes elsewhere,
the technological obviation of de facto spatial boundaries is not enough to explain changing legal forms. After
all, the traditional three-mile boundary persisted long after having been rendered symbolic by enhanced
artillery. Along similar lines he Hegel's and Marx's arguments regarding the "artificially prolonged virginity" of
economic freedom that persisted after the American frontier no longer provided an outlet for political conflict
among different religious and economic groupings.134 Technology, fo r
Schmitt,
is always part of an
suggests
humanity needs concepts of Just war to legitimate the intensified
violence of weapons of mass destruction. 135 As he explains, "the present
weapons of total mass destruction or men's premeditated evil do not
constitute the ultimate danger. Rather, the danger lies in the
inescapability of a moral obligation. Those men who use these
weapons against other men feel compelled to destroy these other men,
i.e., their victims, even morally ."136 If we commit too much violence against them, we
interactive process: Both in the Nomos of the Earth and Theory of the Partisan, he
cannot bear the re- proach of our victims. Thus, Bodin's salutary demoralization of war is reversed by the
Absolute enmity has become

the consequence rather than the cause of spectacular Violence. Or, rather,
neither technology (weapons of mass destruction) nor human nature
(premeditated evil) can be isolated as sources of absolute enmity , or
machine gun. Yet this very possibility reveals another reversal.
even as independent qualities. In The Theory of the Partisan Schmitt ' writes, "It goes without saying that, in
concrete reality, there are no isolated and independent aspects, but that only their respective relations and
their functional dependence produce a general picture... . Ultimately, they all end up falling within the force-
The technological enhancement of

human technological efficiency shat- ters entire normative systems ."137
Similarly, the partisan is "uprooted from his environment" by his
technological "motorization."'18 Again, none of this is to suggest that Schmitt had succumbed
field of a technological-industrial development. ...
to determinism, though his resistance sometimes has a wistful quality, as when he warns against the
progressive technocratic ideology that imagines the partisan "will disappear simply of his own accord, within
smooth technological-functional processes, just as a dog disappears from the freeway."139 In a sense,
technology takes the place occupied by nature in Land and Sea, determining "not only [Man's] horizon ... but
also his poise, his movements, his figure and his height" yet without leaving him "a creature wholly
Schmitt's task, once again, was to contain material

forces of destruction. "Enmity and war are inevitable. What counts is
their containment, that is, preventing that the means of destruction
resulting from the scientific process are unleashed in inhuman
ways."141 The basis of this containment, however, is uncertain. As we have seen, the picture of a struggle
conditioned by his medium."140
between material forces and philosophical or political categories falsifies their practical inter- penetration.
New technologies change not only the means but also the aim, scope,
and justifications of conflict. Moreover, they change the significance of
political theory.
AT
AT Enemies Bad
Liberalism structures ontological violence around the notion of
a naturally human desire for peace enmity inevitably returns
and is violently repressed
In contrast, the barbarian is simply the savage who resists this civilising correction and thus forfeits his own nature,
The barbarian is thus anyone who does not feel at home

in the universal liberal homeland and continues to assert his Otherness
despite his inclusion in global civilisation. It is thus resistance and daringness to
resist that turns the savage, a mute and passive Other, into the most
extreme form of the enemy, the enemy of both nature and civilisation, insofar as in
the liberal ontology the two function in a mutually supplementary manner. The enemy of liberalism is
thus, by necessity, a foe, which entails that a Schmittian relation of just enmity is entirely
foreclosed in the liberal political ontology . While in the latter relation a minimal identity
of all interacting subjects as sovereign states provided a common framework of
legitimate equality between particularistic communities, liberalism is
constituted by a strict dividing line between societies that are in
accordance with natural liberty and those that are not. The latter may either
becoming a monstrous foe.
function in the modality of the savage, the passively acquiescent objects of pedagogical correctional practices, or,
in the case of their resistance to such interventions, are automatically cast as inhuman and unnatural foes, with
whom no relationship of legitimate equality may be conceivable. If the transformation of the savage into a liberal
the ultrapolitical engagement with the

foe may well be viewed as the continuation of the liberal peace by other
means. Thus, the distinguishing feature of the liberal politics of enmity is
that its utopian desire to eliminate enmity as such from the human
condition inevitably leads to the return of the foreclosed in the most
obscene form for liberalism, there indeed are no enemies, just friends and foes.
President Bushs infamous diatribe you are either with us or against us should not be
read as an extreme deviation from the liberal standard of tolerance , but
rather as an expression, at an inappropriate site of the transatlantic community of friends, of the
binary liberal logic. When both nature and humanity are a priori on the
side of liberalism, there is no need for a Schmittian reflection on how to manage coexistence with radical alterity for the purposes of limiting a permanently
possible confrontation. One is either with us or against us, and, in the latter case, one forfeits
not merely a place within our community of friends, but also ones
belonging to nature and humanity.
subject functions as a condition for liberal peace,
AT Alt Fails Bracketing

Maintance of a friend/enemy distinction is key to truly
bracketing war and preventing total wars of annihilation
Odysseos 7 (Louiza, Senior Lecturer of IR at the University of Sussex, Violence
after the State? A Preliminary examination of the Concept of Global Civil War,
Prepared for the 6th Pan-European IR Conference)
The first achievement concerns the aforementioned bracketing and regulation
of war, which can be traced, I have argued elsewhere, both to the emergence
of the state as an agent of rationalisation and detheologisation of public
life but also to the drawing and maintenance of lines or distinctions (the socalled amity lines) between European soil and the free space of extraEuropean lands available for appropriation.13 The amity lines set aside two
distinct areas considered open spaces (Schmitt 2003: 94-95): on the one hand, the
landmass of the New World, whose belonging to the native populations was not
recognised, and on the other, the newly mapped and navigable seas. In both types
of open space, force could be used freely and ruthlessly as these were areas
designated for agonal tests of strength amongst European powers (Schmitt 2003:
99). Refreshingly, Schmitt does not deny that this spatial distinction
presupposed the consignment of unrestrained violence to the rest of the
world (Rasch 2005: 258), but it was this which negated the need for
expansive war on European soil, and allowed limited war, guerre en forme,
to emerge as the norm. In this peculiar way, therefore, the interstate order
which existed until 1914 (cf. Nancy 2003b: 51) had sought to prevent wars
of annihilation, i.e. to the extent that war was inevitable, to bracket it (Schmitt
2003: 246). This was wholly different from later classical and contemporary
liberal attempts to abolish or banish war, that is, to end war as such (Joas 2003;
Reid 2006). The jus publicum Europaeum recognised that any abolition of war
without true bracketing resulted only in new, perhaps even worse types of
war, such as reversions to civil war and other types of wars of annihilation (Schmitt
2003: 246). It accepted war as an inevitable occurrence of international political
order and, in doing so, laid a foundation for a bracketing of war which rendered it
as a regulated contest of forces gauged by witnesses in a bracketed space. Such
wars are the opposite of disorder (Schmitt 2003: 187). The acceptance of this
type of regulated but limited warfare also enabled the recognition of the
opponent as an enemy on equal grounds. This development of the notion
of justus hostis (just enemy), associated with the denigration of justa causa (just
cause) reasoning in the commencement and waging of war, is the second
achievement of this order.14 The concept of an equal and just enemy
evolved alongside the emergence and consolidation of the modern state as
the predominant political entity, as well as the weakening of the moral
authority of the Church out of the demise of the respublica Christiana. Under
these conditions, warfare became divorced from substantive causes of
justice. Since war was the means by which land could change ownership status, it
became a type of political relation amongst states (Schmitt 2003: 100). Any
enemy which had the form of a state was a just enemy and war could be waged
against it. This avoided wars of conviction, creed and religion (that is, based
on justa causa) which had historically led to unlimited war seeking the
enemys annihilation. As he would say almost two decades later, with the
bracketing of war, European humanity had achieved something extraordinary:
renunciation of the criminalization of the opponent, i.e. the relativization of enmity,
the negation of absolute enmity (Schmitt 2007: 90). For Schmitt, renouncing the
discrimination and defamation of their enemies was a significant and rare, in fact, a
most human development (Schmitt 2004: 64).
AT Perm
The permutation is impossible we must choose between
universalization of values or recognition of enmity.
Alberto Moreiras, 04 (Director of European Studies at Duke, A God without
Sovereignty. Political Jouissance. The Passive Decision, CR: The New Centennial
Review 4.3, p. 79-80, Project MUSE)
The friend/enemy division is peculiar at the highest level, at the level of the order of the political. This peculiarity
ultimately destroys the understanding of the political as based on and circumscribed by the friend/enemy division.
The idea of
an order of the political presupposes that the enemies of the order
as suchthat is, the enemy configuration that can overthrow a given order, or even the very idea of an order of
the politicalare generated from the inside: enemies of the order are not properly external
enemies. This is so because the order of the political, as a principle of division, as division itself,
always already regulates, and thus subsumes, its externality: externality is produced
by the order as such, and it is a function of the order. Or rather: a principle of division can have no
externality. Beyond the order, there can be enemies, if attacked, but they are not necessarily enemies of the order:
they are simply ignorant of it. At the highest level of the political, at the highest level of the friend/ enemy division,
there where the very existence of a given order of the political is at stake, the order itself secretes its own enmity.
The friend/enemy
division is therefore a division that is subordinate to the primary ordering division ,
produced from itself. The friend/enemy division is therefore not supreme: a nomic antithesis
generates it, and thus stands above it. The order of the political rules over politics. The
political ontology implied in the notion of an order of the political deconstructs
the political ontology ciphered in the friend/enemy division, and vice versa. They
are mutually incompatible. Either the friend/enemy division is supreme , for a
determination of the political, or the order of the political is supreme. Both of them cannot
simultaneously be supreme. The gap between them is strictly untheorizable. If
Enmity does not precede the order: it is in every case produced by the order.
the friend/enemy division obtains independently of all the other antitheses as politically primary, then there is no
order of the political. If there is an order of the political, the order produces its own political divisions.
AT Conservatism
Schmitts political analysis is falsely portrayed as the origin of
neo-conservative thought that destroys its potential for
structuring criticism of imperialist policies
Chantal Mouffe, 2005 (Professor of Political Theory at the University of
Westminster. Schmitts Vision of a Multipolar World Order South Atlantic Quarterly
March 1, 2005 Volume: 104 Issue: 2 Page: 245-251)
Several
authors have suggested that the strategy of the neoconservatives who are
behind George Bushs war against terrorism is influenced by Carl
Schmitts view of politics as friend/enemy discrimination . Some of them have been
Before entering into the main discussion, it is, however, necessary first to discard a mistaken view.
trying to trace this influence through Leo Strauss and his importance in the intellectual formation of several
Their aim is to make Bushs politics appear

sinister because of its supposed intellectual origins in somebody deemed to be a
Nazi thinker. They claim that it is because it envisages politics in a Schmittian way that the approach of
neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz.
the neoconservatives creates a dangerous polarization between the civilized world and the enemies of
freedom and that it needs to be challenged. In other words, Bushs war against terrorism is presented as the direct
implementation of a Schmittian understanding of the political. To avoid the clash of civilizations to which this type
of politics is leading, we are told, the solution is to come back to the liberal approach and to work toward the
establishment of a cosmopolitan world order. It is, of course, not my intention to defend Bushs politics against his
Schmitt can help us to make a much more

incisive critique of Bushs politics. More important, perhaps, against all those who believe that
detractors. On the contrary, I will argue that
Bushs politics represents a parenthesis in the traditional American perspective, a parenthesis that could easily be
Schmitt allows us to grasp the

continuity existing between the traditional perspective and the politics
carried out by the current government. As far as Bushs politics is concerned, it is clear that
there is a profound misunderstanding at play in the conflation between
Schmitts approach and the one promoted by Bushs administration. To be sure, Schmitt
repeatedly underlined that the differentia specifica of the political was the friend/enemy discrimination. But he
always stressed that such a discrimination should be drawn in a properly
political way, not on the basis of economics or ethics. He specified that the
enemy should be never the personal enemywhat in Latin is referred to as inimicus
but the public enemy, hostis in Latin.1 He would certainly not have condoned
Bushs use of moral categories of good and evil to designate his enemies and his
messianic kind of discourse about the American duty to bring freedom and democracy to the world. This was
precisely the kind of discourse for which he criticized liberalism . Indeed, Schmitt
overcome with a different government in Washington, I contend that
was a sharp critic of liberal universalism, with its pretense of offering the true and only legitimate political system.
For him the world was a pluriverse, not a universe , and he was adamant that any
attempt to impose one single model worldwide would have dire consequences. In The Concept of the Political, he
denounced the way in which liberals were using the concept of
humanity as an ideological weapon of imperialist expansion and he showed how
humanitarian ethics served as a vehicle of economic imperialism: When a state fights its political
enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity,
but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept
against its military opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity
in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress and civilization to claim these as ones own and to deny
the same to the enemy.2 This, in his view, explained why wars waged in the name of humanity were particularly
all means were justified once the enemy had been presented as
an outlaw of humanity. Schmitt would no doubt have denounced the current drawing of the frontier
inhuman, since
between friend and enemy as one between the civilized world and its enemies as an avatar of the liberal rhetoric. In
Schmitts approach provides us with many

insights to undermine its basic tenets. Debunking its moralistic discourse,
it brings to light the rhetorical moves used by the current U.S. government to
confiscate and monopolize the idea of civilization . By declaring, as Bush did in one of his
fact, far from justifying Bushs strategy,
speeches, that those who are not with us are against us, the current American strategy renders illegitimate all
Schmitts
perspective reveals how this kind of discourse, far from being new, has long been
at the core of American politics. He thereby helps us locate Bushs strategy
in the wider context of the various steps taken by the United States to
enforce its global hegemony. In Vlkerrechtliche Formen des modernen Imperialismus, a text
forms of opposition to the attempt to impose a Pax Americana on the whole planet.
published in 1932 that is extremely relevant today, Schmitt examined the new form of imperialism represented by
the United States.3 The arguments specificity consisted in playing with the antithesis of economy versus politics,
claimingin an eminently political waythat economy and commerce were apolitical. Schmitt argued that
thanks to the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1823, the United States had managed first to exclude the great
powers from the American continent, so as to subject all the nations of that continent to its exclusive hegemony,
and later to justify its sole right on intervention in those countries in the name of international police actions to
secure democracy.
Aff Answers
Perm
Permutation do the aff and all non mutually exclusive
components of the alternative a synthesis of realist and
liberal understandings of sovereignty is critical to producing
effective IR analysis specifically regarding US intervention
Jeremy Moses, 2013 Senior Lecturer in political science at the university of
Canterbury, Sovereignty as irresponsibility? A Realist critique of the Responsibility
to Protect Review of International Studies39.1 (Jan 2013): 113-135.
there are two parallel discourses of
sovereignty that align with different theoretical approaches to I nternational
Relations and hence to questions of intervention and non-intervention. In this
The underlying contention of this article is that
article, these differing understandings of sovereignty will be characterised in terms of de jure sovereignty as
The key distinction here is between those who

believe that sovereignty is an 'empty signifier' that is redefined through
processes of social interaction and discourse and those who view sovereignty
as a timeless feature of social and political organisation and define it primarily in
terms of coercive power. In the liberal internationalist or cosmopolitan work on the subject,
opposed to de facto sovereignty.
sovereignty appears as a contingent, rule-based concept that can be judged as being good or evil and may be
granted and withdrawn in line with certain criteria. This has drawn heavily on constructivist analyses of sovereignty,
which 'treat the principle of sovereignty as a variable, arguing that its precise meaning and behavioural implications
vary from one historical context to another' 2and on assessments of the political impact of globalisation that are
often over-inflated.3On the contrary, Realists view sovereignty as de facto power. From this point of view,
sovereignty is understood as a quality exhibited by certain institutions at certain times. In relation to the RtoP,
debate has revolved almost exclusively around the de jure understanding of sovereignty, and indeed
sovereignty as a normative principle is explicitly rendered as the key

conceptual feature of the responsibility to protect . As we shall see below, however, this
normative understanding of sovereignty is deeply limited in terms of providing a useful tool for understanding the
resolution of crisis situations in international relations and is largely deaf to the implications of the de facto view.
The argument is not, however, that one or the other definition of sovereignty
is irrelevant or outdated. Rather, it is suggested that both de jure and de facto
definitions must be taken into account by anyone seeking to understand
sovereignty and its implications for international or global political
organisation and particularly for understanding the problem of humanitarian
intervention. The problem identified in this article is the sparse attention that is paid to questions of power
by those advocating the RtoP norm. In response to this lack, the aim here is to focus heavily on
the potential implications of the de facto view . It must be emphasised from the outset,
however, that this should not be construed as an attempt to dismiss outright the
significance of normative change for the behaviour of states, which has been well
documented in a vast quantity of IR literature, particularly over the past two decades. I
will return to the relation between de facto and de jure sovereignty below, particularly in my discussion of Schmitt's
contribution to debates over the meaning of sovereignty. The other key themes that require some preliminary
definition are responsibility and irresponsibility. Here again we find two somewhat contradictory notions of
responsibility at the heart of the debate over the RtoP. The first, proposed by supporters of the RtoP, invokes
responsibility as an obligation owed by all states to other states and all individuals to other individuals for the
protection of each other's rights. As we will see below, this expansive understanding of responsibility is derived
from liberal principles of justice, in turn the offspring of natural right and natural law theories. On the other hand,
from the Realist perspective, we have the Weberian ethic of responsibility as responsibility for one's own actions,
which, in the context of international politics, equates to taking personal responsibility for decisions and judgments
that impact upon the wellbeing of the state. 4This is, therefore, a more inward-looking understanding of
responsibility that does not insist upon taking responsibility for those beyond one's own sovereign space. This form
of responsibility is encapsulated in Hobbes's formulation of sovereignty as a 'mutual relation of protection and
obedience' 5and in Morgenthau's moral defence of the 'national interest'.6What can be agreed upon, then, is that
regardless of whether we take the liberal or Realist position on the

question of responsibility, maintenance of sovereignty is always premised
upon meeting certain responsibilities to others, but the domain of responsibility differs
enormously. From the RtoP perspective, principles of human rights mean that all are responsible for all, while from
the Realist perspective, the responsibilities of the sovereign amount to the prudent management of the internal and
external relations of the population within. In this sense, Luke Glanville is correct to argue that sovereignty and
7What is at issue, however, is not

whether sovereigns should responsibly manage their own domains, but
whether these responsibilities are enforceable by outside powers, and it is on
responsibility have always been intertwined to some extent.
this point that we find the greatest degree of tension between the liberal and Realist positions and the source of the
a de facto definition of
sovereignty does in some measure suggest an inescapable potential for
irresponsible action; that is, action that cannot be susceptible to interference or accountability by
another power. Further, this potential for irresponsibility, or unaccountability, is
derived from empirical questions of power rather than norms of nonintervention. It is in this limited sense, as I aim to demonstrate, that the concept of 'sovereignty as
irresponsibility' can be utilised to critique the RtoP. In order to more fully
understand the deficiencies of the concept of 'sovereignty as
responsibility' it is first necessary to outline the claims made by RtoP
advocates before moving on to an analysis of sovereignty from a Realist
perspective. This is then followed by a critique of two key elements of the RtoP related to the de facto
problem of intervention. What I am arguing here, therefore, is that
definition of sovereignty: the establishment of a 'right authority' for authorising and carrying out interventions when
required and the assessment of 'prospects of success' or 'balance of consequences' in determining the practical
feasibility of a given intervention. Finally, I will discuss the overall implications of the Realist critique of RtoP and
there are some serious lessons to be learned if the limits of the

RtoP norm in international politics are to be understood.
suggest that
The Alt ignores the reality of sovereignty - Recognizing the

inevitability of enmity can inform decisions on intervention and
statehood
Jeremy Moses, 2013 Senior Lecturer in political science at the university of
Canterbury, Sovereignty as irresponsibility? A Realist critique of the Responsibility
to Protect Review of International Studies39.1 (Jan 2013): 113-135.
the main lesson that can be drawn from this analysis is the
insistence that those interested in using force for the purposes of human
protection cannot simply talk around the problem of power or disguise it in ethical
terms by invoking just war theory or theories of legitimacy. It may well be far more productive
to directly confront the issues of concern to poorer and weaker states: that
any 'legalisation' of humanitarian intervention will be a license to the
great powers to engage in armed interference whenever it suits their own
interests. 85In this sense, RtoP represents the development of an international legal norm that discards a prior
Perhaps
norm (non-intervention in the internal affairs of other - weaker - states), but does not impinge on de facto power. In
so doing it removes the 'sovereign immunity' only of weaker states and not of the powerful .
De facto
sovereign power remains unaffected and, indeed, a moral license is given to

those who are capable of doing so to interfere further in the affairs of
smaller, weaker states. Sadly, the fact that Edward Luck, at the 2009 UN General Assembly Debate on
the Responsibility to Protect, chose to open the proceedings by expressing the desire to 'dispel some of the myths
that have clung to RtoP like so many unwanted barnacles from an earlier time and place' and included among these
'myths' 'the twisted notion that sovereignty and responsibility are somehow incompatible', 86does not give much
cause for hope that these concerns are going to be taken seriously in high-level debate. We have already seen how
the ethical zeitgeist of global responsibility can be captured by powerful states, with the US neo-conservative claim
to 'benevolent hegemony'87and rejection of criteria that would limit the exercise of their interventionist power at
the 2005 UN World Summit.88Indeed, humanitarian justifications were consistently offered in the lead-up to the
2003 invasion of Iraq and, following the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, became the primary
justification for the continued US occupation. Likewise, the Russian government justified their incursion into Georgia
in 2008 as a human protection exercise, as did the Chinese government following the violence in Xinjiang in 2009.
Retrospective attempts to explain these events away as not conforming to

the rules of RtoP 89miss the point that the US, Britain, Russia, and China
are (amongst a small number of others) the decisive powers in contemporary
international politics. To the extent that modern international law
maintains a coercive force, it is provided by agreement of these powers
who are themselves not subject to the law. We might say, then, that the use of RtoP
principles to justify the actions of the great powers represents continuation of power politics by other norms. In
Morgenthau
recognised that intervention was not going to go away and in some cases
could prove a positive exercise, but also maintained that 'it is futile to search
for an abstract principle which would allow us to distinguish in a concrete
case between legitimate and illegitimate intervention' . 90Emphasising the primacy of
directly addressing concerns over superpower intervention during the Cold War,
the national interest in all decisions on whether to intervene or not to intervene, he concludes that 'We have come
to overrate enormously what a nation can do for another nation by intervening in its affairs - even with the latter's
consent. This overestimation of our power to intervene is a corollary of our ideological commitment, which by its
very nature has no limit.' 91While we may not necessarily accept all the conclusions and premises of Realist
recognition of the physical limits presented by de

facto sovereignty should be taken seriously by anyone who seeks to
promote military intervention as a cure to the many ills of the world . To be
sure, sovereign power may be used to good or evil ends , but the evils of
genocide or ethnic cleansing are not caused by sovereignty because it has
no concrete ethical or moral content. There is a stark contrast here, therefore, between those
International Relations theory,
who view sovereignty as normative and those who view it as de facto power. What I have attempted to show above,
in this context, is that a Realist critique of the liberal notion of 'sovereignty as responsibility' has many compelling
dimensions that should be taken seriously by those interested in working toward a more secure world.
Alt Fails Bracketing Wrong

Schmitts history is entirely incorrect limited war is a
mystification of a more violent and bloody time
Benno Gerhard Teschke, 2011 (Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the
University of Sussex, Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitts international
political and legal theory International Theory (2011), 3:2, 179227
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/1671/1/Schmitt-IT%5B1%5D.pdf)
If these observations do not per se falsify Schmitts thesis of a war-inform, they are thrown into sharp relief when
read in conjunction with the rationality of war-declarations, aims, and endings and the actual conduct of war.
Given that military conflicts were essentially inter-dynastic conflicts between

magni homines, the predominant contemporary form of conflict was , next to naval
trade wars, the war of succession. This appellation indicates that the casus belli
were rarely, if ever, motivated by a rational calculus of costs and benefits a
self-limiting Clausewitzian move that calibrated the war-effort as a rational exercise to a clearly defined political
The proximate causes of these wars of succession resided in the

irrational biological accidents of dynastic vacancies and inheritance
disputes among the European fraternity of princes (Kunisch 1987). War-declarations,
interest.
aims, and endings were decisively shaped by these inter-dynastic conflicts that were, at a deeper sociological level,
As sovereignty was a personal adjunct of dynastic houses,

every death of a reigning monarch led to succession crises that turned
immediately into multilateral affairs, as most royal houses were connected through elaborate
marital strategies in which states married states to aggrandize their territory-as-property. Correlatively, the
logic of trade wars, notably the sequence of AngloDutch naval wars, was grounded in the
mercantilist imperatives for the militarized control of exclusive trading
routes. 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. As control
property disputes.
over land and people constituted the main source of income for rulers in pre-capitalist Europe, even though it was
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. It was this, given
Schmitts lack of any causal account of war, which drove the intense
military rivalries at the time. 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. These deepened the concessions that
rulers had to make to their nobilities, tax-farmers, and financiers . But as
in finite supply as a natural monopoly, geopolitical accumulation
absolute sovereignty was essentially a contested institution relying on an unstable compromise between
war-endings also blended quickly over into prolonged

civil wars, as evidenced by the French Fronde, a noble rebellion against the
cutting of their privileges after the Peace Treaty of Westphalia . The
conduct of war was not humanized, either in terms of ius in bello, or in terms of a clear
distinction between combatants and noncombatants. 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
dynasties and their nobilities
sequestration and ransom. Armies tended to ransack civilian areas in an effort to feed
themselves, causing plunder, rape, famines, and population displacement. Bellum
se ipse alet (war feeds off itself) captures this predicament. 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
Forced conscription of civilians was a common

practice. Any sociology of contemporary armies shows that in spite of all the (Weberian and Foucauldian)
prisoners, if they were not killed outright.18
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 kings armies; yet,
essentially beyond their disciplinary control (Kroener 2000, 205).19 War was not, as
Schmitt suggests, an intermittent, temporally limited, and formalized affair of a
politys 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 detre. War was the central axis of early modern
geopolitics and money its engine (pecunia nervus rerum) and the ultimate arbiter over defeat
and victory. Across Europe, public finances were dominated by war expenditures and associated debt-servicing.20
As wars grew ever costlier, taxation-rates increased,

social discontent mounted, public debts multiplied, and royal bankruptcies proliferated, until
revolution and reform reconfigured property and authority relations , tax
systems and public finance and sovereignty. Schmitts 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, ultimately rooted in a wider
strategic-rhetorical move to elevate the pre-revolutionary age to the
paragon of civilized warfare an interpretative foil licensing the fabrication of a degenerated and
inflated total war ascribed to AngloAmerican liberal universalism. Schmitts account of the ius publicum
europaeum from the Discoveries to Versailles is pervaded by contradictions, omissions,
and empirical misjudgements, grounded in an oscillation between
unlicensed abstraction and empty concretion. At the centre stands a vacillation between a
literal adherence to the minimal positivism of an abstractly accepted ius publicum an idealization of
absolutist statehood, an un-examined account of early modern geopolitics and a full embrace
of the juristic notion of non-discriminatory warfare and a sociologically
disembodied and inter-nationally evacuated notion of concretion,
formalized in spatial concrete-order-thinking. This false notion of concretion land
War was the states prima and ultima ratio.
appropriation, land division, sea partition carefully dissociated from processes of contested social property
relations, authority relations, and geopolitical encounters, re-emerges consequentially as another mega-abstraction:
spatial order. In the end, Schmitt maps the positivistic abstraction of the ius publicum on to the territorial
abstraction of the spatial constitution combining to form the nomos. This play of abstractions was to undergo
another round in Schmitts interpretation of Versailles and after.
Liberalism Good
Liberal wars of intervention are proven to be more limited in
scope than the alternative dont make the good the enemy of
the perfect
Chris Brown 07 ( Professor of International Relations at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt:
Terror, Liberal War, and the Crisis of Global Order 2007. 67)
Schmitts normative position is impossible to sympathize with, but the
clarity with which he develops his argument is admirable, as is his recognition of the
changes in world order that took place in the seventeenth and again in the twentieth centuries. It is not
necessary to share in Schmitts nostalgia for the jus publicum Europaeum
in order to admire the precision with which he delineates its
characteristics. He presents an account of the European states-system which is rather more compelling
than the version of international society associated with English School writers (Butterfield and Wight 1966; Bull
1977), or with the much less clearly defined a-historical world of modern neo-realist theorists (Waltz 1979; Baldwin
1993). The Nomos of the Earth is a book that should be on the reading list of any international relations theorist.
one might admire, but one should not endorse. The picture of the world
that Schmitt presents invites us to accept that the humanized wars of
the modern European states-system represent not simply in practice, but
also in theory, an advance over the just wars that preceded them, and the humanitarian
Still,
wars that have followed them. That these humanized wars were generally less terrible than their predecessors and
the attempt to control and

limit the role of violence in human affairs is necessarily futile and counterproductive is a normative position that deserves to be rejected. Ultimately,
Schmitts critique of the notion of the Just War rests upon a shaky
empirical base and an undesirable normative position but it still represents one of
successors is an empirical judgement that can be contested, but that
the most compelling critiques of the notion available. Schmitts critique of the Just War is not a critique that is based
on contingencies how Just Warriors behave but on fundamentals. He takes us to the heart of the problem and
demonstrates that both the medieval Christian and the modern, liberal, legal/moral account of Just War are
unacceptable but if we believe that it is desirable to reduce the role of violence in human affairs this should simply
stimulate us to rework the relevant categories to try to produce a more viable account of the circumstances under
which the resort to force might be justified.
Humanitarian intervention works in controlling violence

prefer empirics
Chris Brown 07 ( Professor of International Relations at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt:
Terror, Liberal War, and the Crisis of Global Order 2007. pg 56-57)
The term humanitarian intervention is a rather unfortunate recent coinage. It refers
to circumstances where one state or a coalition of states intervenes by force in the supposedly domestic affairs of
another state ostensibly in the interests of the population of the latter, for example to prevent or curtail genocide or
other gross violations of their human rights. It is unfortunate because, apart from the fact that the adjective
it directs
attention towards the motives of the intervener as the key defining quality
of this kind of action, with the implication that unless the intervening
humanitarian in itself raises all sorts of issues that will be addressed later in this chapter,
states are pure at heart the intervention in question will not count as
properly humanitarian. Since, ex hypothesi, states almost always act for a
variety of reasons, some altruistic, most not, this kind of purism generally
leads to the conclusion that no humanitarian interventions have taken
place, and that the claim of such motivation always hides some darker
intent. This way of looking at the issue is, I think, mistaken. From the point of
view of the victims of genocide or other forms of serious oppression, the motives of
their rescuers are not a matter of immediate importance to take one obvious
example, had the French or US governments acted effectively to end the genocide in
Rwanda in 1994, it seems unlikely that those whose lives had been saved
thereby would have worried too much about exactly why their rescuers
acted. In such extreme cases outcomes are what matter rather than intentions;
indeed, in this particular case it was precisely because any US action would have had to have been motivated by
altruism, since it had no substantial material interests in Rwanda, that no such action took place.2 Having made this
point, I will simply assert since the scope of this chapter does not allow me to discuss in detail the facts of each
there have been a number of interventions since 1990 where

states have used force in circumstances where action has actually ended ,
or curtailed, or prevented large-scale human rights abuses and where the motives
of the interveners were to bring about this state of affairs, or, at a
minimum, were not inconsistent with this outcome. Such was , I think, the
case in northern Iraq in 1991, in Bosnia in 1994/1995, in Kosovo and East
Timor in 1999 and, under rather different circumstances, in Sierra Leone in
2001. This chapter is devoted to trying to tease out how these actions should be understood. I have suggested
case that
some problems with the term humanitarian intervention, but some would wish to preserve this coinage suitably
shorn of its more implausibly altruistic implications. The term humanitarian war is also sometimes used, and the
claim made that this kind of military action is qualitatively different from previous uses of military force. This seems
plausible, but what does this qualitative difference amount to? And what principles are appropriate for judging the
morality of this kind of use of force?
AT Framework Analysis Bad

Schmittian analysis is historically misinformed and justified the
Nazi war of imperialism
This article has argued that attention to Schmitts political context and politics of concept-formation provides a
Schmitts theoretical premises,

which generated a determinate, but defective, reinterpretation of the
history of international law and order. The theoretical and historical critique of Schmitts
triple theoretical axiomatic revealed their one-dimensional (geo)political cast,
which precludes the incorporation of social relations into Schmitts definition
of his research premises. These dual deficiencies theoretical and historical
suggest a shift to the alternative paradigm of international historical
sociology. Inversely, the article has suggested that the Schmitt-inspired IR literature tends
to dissociate Schmitts thought history and theory from his specific political
project. This generates a depoliticized and de-contextualized acceptance
of his conceptual narrative of international law and order, which translates into an
privileged vantage-point for disclosing the purpose and limits of
underproblematized projection of Schmittian categories unto an altered contemporary geopolitical configuration. As
neo-Schmittian endorsement of Schmitts history and theory as

international theory stands on fragile ground. Carl Schmitt formulated his international
a result, the
thought in the context of the interwar crisis IRs Twenty Years Crisis. This crisis of capitalist modernity had deeply
affected the political and geopolitical landscape of all major powers, but found its most acute expression (next to
Russia) in the crisis of the Weimar Republic, facing disorder from below strikes, civil war, coup dE tats, revolution
Schmitts intellectual
riposte 216 BENNO GERHARD TESCHKE revolved around the political reassertion of
domestic and international order. The former was encapsulated in the definition of sovereignty as
and a loss of sovereign autonomy from outside, codified in the Versailles Treaty.
an unmediated and subjective decision on the state of exception (and, later, the full embrace of the Fuhrerprinciple and the total state), and in the concept of the political, which redefined democracy in identitarian
existentialist terms through the mediation of agonistic friend/enemy declarations by the state executive.
The
latter was captured in his defence of the sanctity of the legality of

Imperial Germanys war against the Allies as the highest expression of the
states ius belli ac pacis of the ius publicum europaeum and, later, the idea of land-appropriations as
the historical norm. This legitimized Nazi-Germanys war of conquests and the
idea of coexisting imperial greater regions as the new nomos of the earth .
Schmitt remorselessly dissected the crisis of the legal form, the relation between constitutionalism, democracy and
emergency powers, and the pathologies of liberal international law in order to fend off the potential of a
revolutionary German pouvoir constituant and to deconstruct the practice and ideology of the legalpolitical
expansion of the liberal-capitalist zone of peace the incipient legalization and de-politicization of interstate
rather than developing categories of analysis for the crisis, he

provided normative legal-political categories against the crisis . Schmitt
relations. But
developed a legalpoliticalspatial counter-vocabulary concepts for a New Order to stem the tide of the
The ideological
purpose, theoretical limitations, and historical deficiencies of Schmitts
legalpoliticalspatial register do not per se invalidate all Schmittian insights. But they do cast
advancing liberal-capitalist spaceless universalism and the threat of socialist revolution.
doubt on the standing of his international thought as a plausible and

coherent international theory, and raise a large question mark behind attempts to elevate him to a
hitherto under-appreciated classic of IR, and The Nomos to the status of a founding text of the discipline (Odysseos
and Petito 2007, 8). How can neo-Schmittians escape these liabilities? Furthermore, its
undigested problems manifest themselves in a number of questions and challenges to contemporary attempts to
mobilize Schmitt as a critic of the liberal project of modernity.
AT Liberalism Bad
Schmitts general analysis cannot account for the
particularities of modern liberalism
For at the centre of the heterodox partly post-structuralist, partly realist neo-Schmittian analysis stands the
conclusion of The Nomos: the thesis of a structural and continuous relation between liberalism and violence (Mouffe
2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007). It suggests that, in sharp contrast to the liberal-cosmopolitan programme of
perpetual peace, the geographical expansion of liberal modernity was accompanied by the intensification and deformalization of war in the international construction of liberalconstitutional states of law and the production of
Liberal world-ordering proceeds via the

conduit of wars for humanity, leading to Schmitts spaceless
universalism. In this perspective, a straight line is drawn from WWI to the
War on Terror to verify Schmitts long-term prognostic of the 20th century as the age
of neutralizations and de-politicizations (Schmitt 1993). But this attempt to read the history
of 20th century international relations in terms of a succession of
confrontations between the carriernations 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. For in the
liberal subjectivities as rights-bearing individuals.
cases of Wilhelmine, Weimar and fascist Germany, the assumption that their conflicts with the AngloAmerican
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, posing the question of whether the causes of WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of interimperial rivalry (Blackbourn and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated and incomplete liberalcapitalist
development, due to the survival of re-feudalized elites in the German state classes and the marriage between
rye and iron (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards the construction of
an autarchic German regionalism Mitteleuropa or Groraum was not deeply influenced by the international
ramifications of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a purely political existentialist assertion of German
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. Similar objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the Western discourse of liberal
humanity against non-liberal foes apply to the more recent period. For how can this optic explain
that the liberal West coexisted (and keeps coexisting) with a large number of
pliant authoritarian client-regimes (Mubaraks Egypt, Suhartos Indonesia,
Pahlavis Iran, Fahds Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafis pre-intervention Libya,
to name but a few), which were and are actively managed and supported
by the West as antiliberal Schmittian states of emergency , with concerns for liberal
national identity.
subjectivities and Human Rights secondary to the strategic interests of political and geopolitical stability and
Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now,

Libya, the idea that Western intervention has to 218 BENNO GERHARD TESCHKE 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 proeconomic access?
Western fashion, deeply co-determined by long histories of Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial
legacies. If these states (or social forces within them) turn against their imperial masters, the conventional policy
And as the Schmittian analytical vocabulary does not

include a conception of human agency and social forces only friend/ enemy
groupings and collective political entities governed by executive decision it also lacks the
categories of analysis to comprehend the social dynamics that drive the
struggles around sovereign power and the eventual overcoming, for
example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emergency without US-led
wars for humanity. Similarly, it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering and the
expression is blowback.
production of liberal subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention seems improbable in some cases
Liberal
world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building, coordinating,
and drawing liberal and anti-liberal states into the Western orbit, and overtly or covertly
intervening and refashioning them once they step out of line. These are conflicts within a world,
which seem to push the term liberalism beyond its original meaning . The
(e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more likely in others (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya).
generic Schmittian idea of a liberal spaceless universalism sits uncomfortably with the realities of maintaining an
America-supervised informal empire, which has to manage a persisting interstate system in diverse and case-
it is this persistence of a worldwide system of states, which

encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American
supremacy possible in the first place.
specific ways. But
----

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power is neither purely foreign, nor domestic, but stems

the sovereign power to breach the law has the

he correctly identified an international community in which annexation is

Schmitt saw nothing but smoke and mirrors in the age of

the controlled country, nay, creating , if it appears expedient, a new

controlled states territory is absorbed into the spatial sphere of the

The controlled states territory

Johnson tells the story of an American Empire of military bases that

satellites that he defines as ostensibly independent nations whose foreign

The alternative is to reject liberal universalism and maintain

would be terrifying is a world in which there no

longer existed an exterior but only a homeland , no longer a space for

it would always be vulnerable

ultimately everyone may be excluded from the world unity

it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as

It is thus the liberal peace project itself that

State Based Policy Fails

We thus need to interpret Grossraum

now become unacceptably conservative, even anachronistic .59 In response,

The abstract universalistic orientation of such imperialistic approaches also disregards

Policy Making Bad

Reflecting on the nature of knowledge within the converging point of

spectacles of peace, from the victors peace

The mainstream assumption is in full keeping with the liberal

The institutions, practices, and techniques of war may have to be

Peace, a mere instance of politics, becomes in turn a variety of war . Isnt

the State a means of waging it.65 As a technology

such a transference would ensure the economic

exhibiting the hypocrisy and

Within the USA,

the sheer fact of the occupation of enemy territory

This law seeks to grasp the curious phenomenon of the

Schmitt associates the law

He takes up the distinction between

legislation and jurisdiction separated out later. . . . This primeval condition ,

represents not a constitutional

the principle of intervention a question of international law

state of siege or exception.

Privileging The Other

The recognition of sovereign equality, and the

In the absence of an authority to decide the

If the realists have it right, we can expect the world to

The subtext here is that

the US stance here and its would-be justification in international

the American rationale for this denial of a

what is at issue here is elementary question of

the widely perceived undecidability of the category of terrorism to the extent

contemporary terrorist violence may be grasped as a retort of the

terrorism is the practical

what requires reflection is a question of how enmity is to be

answers to these questions

The escape from the murderous

Schmitt detects the unique

the new concept of global space is

The norms and conventions developed for the conduct of interstate

It is in this context that the transformation of warfare

What had begun as a war between equal

For Schmitt, it remains important to

the abolition of war as a means of

logically implied condemnation of unjust wars.

Although Schmitt does not agree with the

the problematic nature of

the condemnation of war reflects, broadly