libraryofsocialscience | In his diary from the years 1947-51, Glossarium, Schmitt
explains the difference between conventional and absolute enmity by the
different behaviour of the German army on the Western and Eastern front
during WW2. Against the West-European (state) enemies, Nazi-Germany
fought a basically non-discriminatory war, where the rules of combat
were by and large upheld and the enemy was considered an equal; and then
a discriminatory against the East-European and Russian absolute
enemies, where all rules of combat and morality were systematically
violated and the enemy was considered inhuman (Schmitt 1991: 117). As
always, Schmitt neglects to deal with the plight of the European Jewry,
where Nazi-Germany fought an all-out discriminatory war.
Schmitt failed to ever really engage with the concept of the ‘total
enemy’, though the ideological radicalization in the absolute enemy
directs our attention to the limitlessness of such an enmity. But in the
post-war years Schmitt devoted his attention on enmities to the
partisan or political struggle enmity forms while failing to really
explore what it means when ideological radicalization merges with a
state machinery. In his Clausewitz – Philosopher of War, Raymond Aron has a chapter on the partisan inspired by Schmitt.
But he criticizes him, not least for the concept of the absolute enemy, which Aron wants to differentiate further between a biologically absolute enmity:
‘Ludendorff-Hitler’, that is, an enmity based on a biological or racist
philosophy: “I would call this ‘absolute hostility’ as it alone
deserves the term ‘absolute’, since it ends logically in massacre and
genocide” (Aron 1983: 368); and ideologically absolute enmity:
‘Mao-Lenin-Stalin’ and In a letter to Schmitt on October 1, 1963 he also
mentioned ‘politically absolute enmity (Carthago for Cato)’ (Müller
2003: 100). Aron is, of course, aware that Mao and Stalin murdered more
people than Hitler, but that was no logical or necessary consequence of
the ideological enmity:
Hostility based on the class struggle has taken on no less extreme or monstrous forms than that based on the incompatibility of races. But if we wish to ‘save the concepts’ there is a difference between a philosophy whose logic is monstrous and one which can be given a monstrous interpretation. (Aron 1983: 369)
In his book Democracy and Totalitarianism, Aron
differentiates the “aim of the Nazi Party” which was “to remake the
racial map if Europe and to eliminate certain peoples”, whereas the “aim
of Soviet terror is to create a society which conforms completely to an
ideal, while in the Nazi case, the aim was pure and simple
extermination.” (Aron 1968: 203). With Aron we get not only a
differentiation of the totalitarian state enemy but also – like Schmitt
but applied to the totalitarian state – a differentiation in stages of
enmification or as he calls it “three kinds of terror” (Aron 1968: 187).
They seem to follow Hannah Arendt’s differentiation elaborated below
and we can conclude this section by noting that Aron, while inspired by
Schmitt, saw a clear and evident failure on Schmitt’s part to apply his
enemy theory on the totalitarian state. Once a real totalitarian state
came into being in Germany – a qualitatively total state as Schmitt
would call it – he suspended his reflections on the enemy, only to
return to it in the partisan setting.
In order to understand the peculiarities of the total enemy we have
therefore to depart from the premier theorist of the enemy and to take
from him only the reflection on the decisive difference between an
interstate, codified and hedged ‘conventional enmity’ and then various
forms of unhinged, uncontained enmities, of which Schmitt failed to
grasp the most important one. What he basically didn’t understand was
that the state too could be carrier of a completely limitless enmity. To
him it was always state-subversive forces, of which the British Empire
was one, that carried such a universalist enmity, never the territorial
state. Unlike Schmitt – but with decisive common points of departure
(Sluga 2008; Bates 2010) – Hannah Arendt made the total enemy a key
concept in her explorations of both war and post-war ideological and
geopolitical constellations.
