The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

6 War, violence and the
displacement of the political
Linda S. Bishai and Andreas Behnke
Recent academic trends have associated the work of Carl Schmitt in general, and
his concept of the political in particular, with the excesses of George W. Bush’s
foreign policy. Lon Troyer, for example, argues that Schmitt’s friend–enemy
distinction is the inspiration for President Bush’s ‘bi-furcation’ of the international
system: ‘The friend–enemy distinction in the sphere of international
relations is ordered, in Bush’s words, according to the great divide in our time
. . . not between religions or cultures, but between civilisation and barbarism’
(Troyer 2003: 262). Another intellectual, German historian Hans August
Winkler, sees Schmitt’s critique of liberalism vindicated through the influence
of Leo Strauss on work in the neo-conservative Project for the New American
Century think-tank in Washington, DC (Winkler 2003: 1).
Both of these perceptions of Schmitt suffer from some severe misconceptions.
While Troyer at least understands the distinction between friend and
enemy, his observation of certain hallmarks of the Bush administration’s foreign
policy mistakes Schmitt’s acerbic criticism of liberalism and its universalist
rhetoric for an endorsement of these policies. As for Winkler’s assertion, it is
surely oversimplification to reduce Leo Strauss to a mere ‘conduit’ for Schmitt’s
ideas. More significantly, though, it is paradoxical and utterly ironic to refer to
the great ‘enemy of liberalism’ (Lilla 1997) as the conspiratorial source of the
current ‘imperial liberalism’ (Rhodes 2003: 131–154) that constitutes the basis
of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
The purpose of this chapter, then, is twofold: to salvage Schmitt’s critique of
liberalism, and to ‘unlock’ the concepts of the political and of politics, that have
been displaced in favour of a liberal moralist discourse that refuses to recognize
the conditions of its own impossibility. The use of Schmitt in this context is
perhaps best described as a pharmakon, both poison and remedy, ambivalent in
itself, and used to tease out the ambiguities and antinomies of liberalism. 1 The
next section discusses Schmitt’s contemplation on the justifiability of war, in
particular how Schmitt’s ideas about war deny any easy appropriation by the
liberal project. The purpose here is to develop a particular ‘realist’ conception of
war and violence that emphasizes the need to restrain and limit (einhegen) it.
The third and fourth parts present a pathology of liberal thinking in International
Relations (IR) theory and international law. Critics of the Democratic