The theory of war is always about the distinction of enmity, which gives war its meaning and character. Every attempt to contain or limit war must be based on the awareness that, in relation to the concept of war, enmity is the primary concept, and that the distinction between different types of war is preceded by a distinction between different types of enmity. Otherwise, all efforts to maintain or limit war are only a game which cannot withstand the outbreaks of real enmity. After the Napoleonic wars, irregular war was pushed out of the general consciousness of European theologians, philosophers, and jurists. There were indeed friends of peace who saw in the abolition and proscription of the conventional war in the Hague Convention the end of war in general; and there were jurists who considered any doctrine of just war to be eo ipso just, because Saint Thomas Aquinas had already taught such things. No one suspected what the unleashing of irregular warfare would mean. No one considered what the victory of the civilian over the soldier would mean if one day the citizen put on the uniform while the partisan took it off to continue the fight without it.
It was this lack of concrete thinking that first completed the destructive work of the professional revolutionaries. This was a great misfortune, because with those limitations on war, European man had succeeded in something rare: the renunciation of criminalizing the wartime enemy—that is, the relativization of enmity, the negation of absolute enmity. It is really something rare, even incredibly humane, to get people to renounce discrimination and defamation of their enemies.
The partisan now seems to be calling this into question again. His criteria include the extreme intensity of his political commitment. When Guevara says “The partisan is the Jesuit of war,” he is thinking of the unconditional nature of political commitment. The life story of every famous partisan, beginning with the Empecinado, confirms that. In enmity the partisan without rights seeks his justice. In it he finds the meaning of the cause and the meaning of justice, when the shell of protection and obedience which he has hitherto inhabited breaks, or the web of norms of legality from which he could previously expect justice and legal protection is torn apart. Then the conventional game ends. But this cessation of legal protection need not yet be partisanship. Michael Kohlhaas, whom the sense of justice made into a robber and murderer, was not a partisan because he did not become political and fought exclusively for his own violated private law, not against a foreign conqueror and not for a revolutionary cause. In such cases, irregularity is apolitical and becomes purely criminal because it loses its positive connection with a regularity that exists somewhere. This is what distinguishes the partisan from the robber chief, whether noble or ignoble.
In discussing the geopolitical context (see above), we have emphasized that the interested third party performs an essential function when it provides the connection to the regular, which the irregularity of the partisan requires in order to remain in the realm of the political. The core of the political is not enmity per se, but the distinction between friend and enemy, and presupposes both friend and enemy. The powerful third party interested in the partisan may think and act entirely selfishly; with his interest he is still politically on the side of the partisan. This has functions as political friendship and is a kind of political recognition, even if it does not lead to public and formal recognition as a warring party or as a government. The Empecinado was recognized as a political entity by his people, the regular army, and the great power that was England. He was no Michael Kohlhaas nor Schinderhannes, whose interested third parties were gangs of criminal fences. Salan's political situation, on the other hand, went down in a desperate tragedy, because he became illegal in his own country, and outside, in the realm of geopolitics, not only did he not find an interested third party, but, on the contrary, he encountered the consolidated enemy front of anti-colonialism.
The partisan then has a real enemy, but not an absolute one. This follows from his political character. Another limit of enmity follows from the partisan's tellurian character. He defends a piece of land with which he has an autochthonous relationship. His basic position remains defensive despite the increased agility of his tactics. He behaves exactly as Saint Joan of Arc specified before the ecclesiastical court. She was not a partisan and fought regularly against the English. When she was asked by the ecclesiastical judge the question—a theological trick question—of whether she wanted to claim that God hated the English, she replied: “Whether God loves or hates the English, I do not know; I only know that they must be driven out of France.” This answer would have been given by any normal partisan to the defense of the national soil. With such a fundamentally defensive stance comes the fundamental limitation of enmity. The real enemy is not declared the absolute enemy, nor the ultimate enemy of humanity in general.53Lenin shifted the conceptual focus from war to politics, i.e. to the friend-enemy distinction. This was sensible and, according to Clausewitz, a logical extension of the idea of war as a continuation of politics by other means. Only Lenin, as a professional revolutionary of the world civil war, went even further and turned the real enemy into the absolute enemy. Clausewitz spoke of total war, but still presupposed the regularity of an existing statehood. He could not yet imagine the state as an instrument of a party, and a party that commanded the state at all. With the absolutism of the party, the partisan had also become absolute and was elevated to the bearer of absolute enmity. It is not difficult today to see through the conceptual trick which brought about this change in the concept of the enemy. On the other hand, it is much more difficult today to refute another way of making the enemy absolute, because it seems to be immanent in the present reality of the nuclear age.
Technical-industrial development has increased the weapons of man into pure means of annihilation. This creates a provocative imbalance between protection and obedience: one half of mankind becomes hostage to the rulers of the other half, who is armed with nuclear weapons. Such absolute means of annihilation require absolute enmity if they are not to be absolutely inhuman. After all, it is not the means of annihilation that destroy, but humans that destroy other humans with these means. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes grasped the core of the process as early as the 17th century (de homine IX, 3) and formulated it with great accuracy, although at that time (1659) the weapons were still comparatively harmless. Hobbes says: “Man is more dangerous to another man of whom he believes himself endangered than any animal, just as much as the weapons of man are more dangerous than the so-called natural weapons of animals, for example: teeth, paws, horns or poison.” And the German philosopher Hegel adds: “weapons are the very essence of the fighters themselves.”
In concrete terms this means the supra-conventional weapon supposes supra-conventional man. It does not presuppose him only as a postulate of a distant future; it rather presupposes him as an already existing reality. The ultimate danger, then, does not even lie in the presence of the means of destruction and a premeditated malice in man. It consists in the inescapability of moral compulsion. Men who use these means against other men see themselves as obliged to annihilate their victims and objects, even morally. They must declare the other side as a whole to be criminal and inhuman, to be totally worthless, otherwise they are criminal and inhuman themselves. The logic of value and unworthiness unfolds its entire destructive consequence and forces ever new, ever deeper discrimination, criminalization and devaluation, up to the destruction of all life that is unworthy of life.
In a world in which the partners push each other into the abyss of total devaluation in this way before they physically annihilate each other, new kinds of absolute enmity must arise. The enmity will become so terrible that one may not even speak of enemy or enmity, and both may even be formally ostracized and condemned before the work of annihilation can begin. Annihilation will then become quite abstract and quite absolute. It will no longer be directed at an enemy at all, but only serve the supposedly objective enforcement of the highest values, for which, as we know, no price is too high. It is the denial of real enmity that will clear the way for the work of annihilation of an absolute enemy.
In 1914 the peoples and governments of Europe staggered into the First World War without any real enmity. The real enmity arose only from the war itself, which began as a conventional war of states under European international law and ended with a world civil war of revolutionary class enmity. Who will prevent the unexpected emergence of new types of enmity, in an analogous but still infinitely increased way, the implementation of which will cause unexpected manifestations of a new partisanship?
The theorist can do no more than preserve concepts and call things as they are. The theory of the partisan leads into the concept of the political, into the question of the real enemy and a new nomos of the earth.
[←53] “Such wars (as actually pass for ultimate wars of mankind) are necessarily especially intensive and inhuman because they exceed the political in treating the enemy as a sub-moral and even sub-categorical monster, one who must not only be defended against but definitively annihilated, so that he can no longer even be a demonstrably bounded enemy. The possibility of such wars suggests that it could still happen, depending entirely on the distinction of friend and enemy and the political recognition involved in it” (Der Begriff des Politischen, 37).
From: The Theory of the Partisan
An Interjection to the Concept of the Political
Carl Schmitt
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