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

254 M. Dean
(2000: 102) has used the term ‘sovereign police’, with a clear Schmittian resonance,
to discuss the first Gulf War and the treatment of internees within concentration
camps. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire (2000: 17)
discusses the new, imperial form of sovereign right as a combination of the
‘juridical power to rule over the state of exception’ and ‘the capacity to deploy
police force’. Both would maintain that in the new global dispensation, military
interventions today take the form of police action in the sense that Schmitt
meant it in the above passage. Although we cannot unpack these uses of the
term ‘police’ here, the notion of ‘an international police power’ has a longer
history in international relations dating back at least to Theodore Roosevelt’s
description of the role of the United States in the Western Hemisphere in his
extension of the Monroe Doctrine as ‘the exercise of an international police
power’ (quoted by Ferguson 2004: 52–53).
Yet this is an example where Schmitt seems to lack the conceptual history
necessary to understand the nuance of the term ‘police’ and its mutations.
The beginnings of such a genealogy of ‘police’ can be found in Foucault’s work
(e.g. 2001) or in German conceptual history (e.g. Knemeyer 1980; Oestreich
1982) and in discussions of the German cameralists’ Polizeiwissenshaft or
science of police (e.g. Small 1909). However, it is not necessary to go that far
to find a very different meaning of police. In his own Leviathan, Schmitt uses
the term in a manner consistent with the early modern discourses analysed in
these literatures. When citing a brief defence published by Hobbes against
Bramhall, Schmitt (1996b: 21–22) uses ‘police’ to refer to the ‘peace-enforcing
function of the state’. For Schmitt: ‘The absolutism of the state is, accordingly,
the oppressor of irrepressible chaos inherent in man, or as Carlyle said in his
drastic manner, anarchy plus police’. Police here is the civil, stately condition
in which all citizens are secure and in which reigns peace, security and order
(ibid.: 31).
In one text, then, police is the condition sought by the Leviathan in its fight
against the anarchic and rebellious forces of the state of nature or of religious
and civil war (Behemoth). Here, the creation of Leviathan is a condition of
police. In the other, the Leviathan (as dragon) is being lanced by the new airpowers
which introduce anarchy into the rules and spatial theatres of war. But
there is no fundamental inconsistency: Schmitt’s view is that police is a legitimate
action of the sovereign to secure domestic order which needs to be carefully
distinguished from war, which is something that occurs between sovereigns. The
attempt to view international military intervention as police action is thus linked
to a fundamental remoralization of war and the emergence of a new discriminatory
kind of total war.
The strength of this view, which is repeated by Schmitt’s Left followers, is
that it notes the elision of the once domestic police function with that of war and
military action. Its weakness is that the solution it nostalgically imposes is to
reinstate the classical spheres of domestic police and external, properly conducted
war (Dean, forthcoming). In our own time, we might wish to distinguish
between not only military intervention and police action but also between differ-