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

Geopolitics and grosspolitics 49
There was nothing wrong with having ideals of a ‘common humanity’ or a
‘world community’, but Burnham warned that the attempt to turn such desires or
theories into reality was, as history had shown over and over again, a recipe for
chaos and violence. Burnham too was, in Schmitt’s terms, a political pluriversalist.
Burnham also shared Schmitt’s negative view of the human condition.
According to his anthropological pessimism, 5 men were ‘not rational in their
actions but predominantly irrational, not filled with love only but also selfishness,
not good but a strange mixture of evil and good’ (ibid.: 25).
Where Burnham clearly disagreed with Schmitt, however, was on the role of
the United States in the new international order. Whereas Schmitt was concerned
about the transformation of the Monroe Doctrine from a defensive doctrine
of isolation to an offensive instrument of global intervention, Burnham
argued that this was precisely what had to be done. The course was basically set
when the United States entered the Second World War – ‘the first formative war
of managerial society’ – joining its allies against the other super-states, Germany
and Japan (Burnham 1941: 218). Thus began the world struggle of managerial
super-states. The struggle was bound to be inconclusive, Burnham argued, as
none of the super-states was able (or necessarily even willing) definitely to
conquer the other central areas and rule the world. This, however, would not
prevent the struggle from taking place, and in this struggle offence was
America’s best defence:
From her continental base, the United States is called on to make a bid for
maximum world power as against the super-states to be based on the other
two central areas. For her to try to make this bid is hardly a matter of
choice, since survival in the coming system can only be accomplished by
the expansive attempt. For the United States to try to draw back into a
national shell bounded by the forty-eight states would be fairly rapid political
suicide.
(ibid.: 218–219)
Germany and Japan had been defeated, but the Soviet Union had taken their
place in the struggle for the world. According to Burnham, the western and
eastern civilisations were to engage in battle for world supremacy, and this
battle would be either won by one or the other, or lost by both.
Why did Burnham see the struggle for the world as inevitable? As already
mentioned, he clearly saw how the world was divided politically, and he was
also keen to divide mankind into different cultural and even racial categories.
But if the United States wanted to live and prosper as a nation it simply could
not risk having an enemy like communist Russia, one with even a conceivable
amount of potential and intent to threaten its existence. Though the world political
was not one but many, it had become, in an age of world-wide movements
and atomic weapons, simply too dangerous a place for a balance of power. This
is pluriversalism with a vengeance.
Since The Managerial Revolution, another decisive element had been