Schmitt K

1NC Shell
The affs utopian project of the abolishing politics is
doomed to fail enmity and conflict are inevitable but the
affs attempt to end them forever paradoxically
exarcebates them
Johnson 11 (Greg Johnson, Ph.D., is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. and
North American New Right. Reflections on Carl Schmitts The Concept of the PoliticaI 2/24/11
http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/reflections-on-carl-schmitts-the-concept-of-the-political/)///CW

Schmitts short book The Concept of the Political(1932) is one of the most important works of 20th
century political philosophy. The aim of The Concept of the Political is the defense of politics
from utopian aspirations to abolish politics . Anti-political utopianism includes all
Carl

forms of liberalism as well as international socialism, global capitalism, anarchism, and pacifism: in short,
all social philosophies that aim at a universal order in which conflict is abolished. In ordinary speech, of
course, liberalism, international socialism, etc. are political movements, not anti-political ones. So it is clear

the political is founded on

the distinction between friend and enemy. Utopianism is antipolitical insofar as it attempts to abolish that distinction, to root out
all enmity and conflict in the world. Schmitts defense of the
that Schmitt is using political in a particular way. For Schmitt,

political is not a defense of enmity and conflict as good things . Schmitt

fully recognizes their destructiveness and the necessity of managing and mitigating them. But Schmitt
believes that enmity is best controlled by adopting a realistic
understanding of its nature. So Schmitt does not defend conflict, but
realism about conflict. Indeed, Schmitt believes that the best way to contain
conflict is first to abandon all unrealistic notions that one can do
away with it entirely. Furthermore, Schmitt believes that utopian attempts to
completely abolish conflict actually increase its scope and intensity .
There is no war more universal in scope and fanatical in prosecution than wars to end all war and establish
perpetual peace. Us and Them What does the distinction between friend and enemy mean? First, for
Schmitt,

the distinction between friend and enemy is collective . He is

talking about us versus them not one individual versus another. Schmitt introduces the Latin
distinction between hostis (a collective or public enemy, the root of hostile) and inimicus (an individual

The political is founded on the

distinction between friend (those on ones side) and hostis (those on the other side).
and private adversary, the root of inimical).

Private adversaries are not public enemies. Second, the distinction between friend and enemy is

One
does not need to actually fight ones enemy, but the potential must
always be there. The sole purpose of politics is not group conflict; the sole content of politics is not
polemical. The friend/enemy distinction is always connected with the abiding potential for violence.

group conflict; but the abiding possibility of group conflict is what creates the political dimension of human

the distinction between friend and enemy is

existentially serious. Violent conflict is more serious than other forms of conflict, because when
things get violent people die. Fourth, the distinction between friend and enemy is
not reducible to any other distinction. For instance, it is not reducible to
social existence. Third,

the distinction between good and evil . The good guys are just as much enemies to
the bad guys as the bad guys are enemies to the good guys. Enmity is relative, but
moralitywe hopeis not. Fifth, although the friend/enemy distinction is not
reducible to other distinctions and differencesreligious, economic,
philosophical, etc.all differences can become political if they generate the friend/enemy
opposition. In sum, the ultimate root of the political is the capacity of human groups to take their

differences so seriously that they will kill or die for them. It is important to note that

Schmitts

concept of the political does not apply to ordinary domestic politics .

The rivalries of politicians and parties, provided they stay within legal parameters, do
not constitute enmity in Schmitts sense. Schmitts notion of politics applies primarily to
foreign relations the relations between sovereign states and peoples rather than domestic relations
within a society. The only time when domestic relations become political in Schmitts sense is during a
revolution or a civil war. Sovereignty If the political arises from the abiding possibility of collective life or

the political rules over all other areas of social life because
of its existential seriousness, the fact that it has recourse to the ultimate sanction. For
death conflict,

Schmitt, political sovereignty is the power to determine the enemy and declare war. The sovereign is the
person who makes that decision. If a sovereign declares an enemy, and individuals or groups within his
society reject that declaration, the society is in a state of undeclared civil war or revolution. To refuse the
sovereigns choice of enemy is one step away from the sovereign act of choosing ones own enemies. Thus
Schmitts analysis supports the saying that, War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is.
Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.

The political is inevitable because we have negated them

human nature is a terminal solvency takeout to the aff
the affirmatives politics leads to endless warfare rather
than constrained conflict
Johnson 11 (Greg Johnson, Ph.D., is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. and
North American New Right. Reflections on Carl Schmitts The Concept of the PoliticaI 2/24/11
http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/reflections-on-carl-schmitts-the-concept-of-the-political/)///CW

the political is rooted in human nature, then

Even if the entire planet could be turned into a
boneless chicken ranch, all it would take is two serious men to start
politicsand historyall over again. But the utopians will never even get
that far. Politics cannot be abolished by universal declarations of peace, love, and tolerance, for such
attempts to transcend politics actually just reinstitute it on another plane. After all, utopian peaceand love-mongers have enemies too, namely haters like us. Thus the
abolition of politics is really only the abolition of honesty about
politics. But dishonesty is the least of the utopians vices. For in the name of peace and love, they
persecute us with a fanaticism and wanton destructiveness that make
Why the Political Cannot be Abolished If
it cannot be abolished.

good, old-fashioned war seem wholesome by comparison. Two peoples occupying adjacent valleys might,
for strategic reasons, covet the high ground between them. This may lead to conflict. But such

conflicts have finite, definable aims. Thus they tend to be limited in

scope and duration. And since it is a mere conflict of interestin which both
sides, really, are rightrather than a moral or religious crusade between
good and evil, light and darkness, ultimately both sides can strike a deal
with each other to cease hostilities. But when war is wedded to a
universalist utopianismglobal communism or democracy, the end of terror or, more
risibly, evilit becomes universal in scope and endless in duration . It is
universal, because it proposes to represent all of humanity. It is endless, of course, because it is a war with

when war is declared in the name of

humanity, its prosecution becomes maximally inhuman, since anything is
human nature itself. Furthermore,

fair against the enemies of humanity, who deserve nothing short of unconditional surrender or annihilation,
since one cannot strike a bargain with evil incarnate.

The road to Dresden, Hiroshima,

and Nagasaki was paved with love : universalistic, utopian, humanistic, liberal love.

The current war on terror is a paradox it is the

sovereigns state of exception but in the name of
humanity vote negative to embrace the enemy as
something to be fought for the sake of the political
Grinke 14 (Greice Grinke is a graduate student at Universidade Federal do Pampa, Campus
Santana do Livramento for International Relations. How does Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism help to
explain the current 'war on terror'
http://www.academia.edu/7397601/Carl_Schmidt_and_the_war_on_terror)///CW

The war on terror proclaimed by the Bush government right after the 9/11 attack, is nonetheless
a clear call upon the state of exception as a way to strengthen
national power and to enhance cohesion within citizens about the identities and the values this
society needs to defend. In the same night that the terrorist incident happened, Bush in his speech
declared that America and [its] friends and allies [will] join with all those who want peace and security

This statement
provides an evident example of grouping people towards a common
enemy, and reestablishing the raison dtre of the political unity. In proclaiming
in the world and [will] stand together to win the war against terrorism . 10

war, the US government re-concentrated power and initiated an existential negotiation of the enemy

The sovereign power is reasserted over the rule of the law in a

state of emergency; a state in which all means are justified in defending the world from a new
axis of evil. Hence the US legitimized its actions from 9/11 onwards in the
state of exception, originated in a need to suspend basic rights to ensure security to its citizens
11 .

and allies. Nevertheless, the US was using this power of politics above the law as an exception to
reinforce the hegemonic power of the country towards a constructed enemy, to expand liberal democratic
values and its notion of freedom. Placing politics above the law is in any mean a problem, because inter
12 . This war against the terror is controversial as the
allied forces proclaim themselves as defenders of humanity, human
rights, justice and freedom; however it is a mascara to impose 9 5 cultural values on

arma silent regis

communities that do not think the same way as western societies do. The US seeks to triumph in the
international scenario more than just economically, but politically, using unfair ways to coerce institutions
or individuals who do not want to cooperate, for example, economic sanctions and torture in Guantanamo
Bay. The US utilizes its hard power, the exceptional state of law, to reinforce its soft power toward world
politics. This is not the first time in history that a nation justifies its imperialist actions in defense for a
major and higher cause. The religious wars during the XVI and XVII century were also justified in the
assumption that the church and catholic states protected humanity from a bigger evil: a new doctrine that
is not sacred embodied by the protestant church. However, these confrontations only occurred because in
the medieval period, the state was weak as a consequence of society being spread in small communities
ruled by feudal authorities. States found themselves in a conflicting framework of authority, and to unite
society the creation of a common cause was necessary; one which all individuals, in this case primarily
Catholics, would fell connected to same values and the same identity, fighting together against a common
threat. 13 As we can see, the situation of the US today is not much different from the circumstances 400

The
US claims the intrinsic right to guide a world order in order to claim
for the validity of its way of life; as a burden designated from God, to export
liberal democratic values and free the humanity from the
constructed devil enemy. The US wanted to legitimize its policies through the war on
terror 14 , and as Carl Schmitt agrees it is natural for the concept of the
political to justify actions towards the 13 6 distinction between friend-enemy
relations. Nevertheless, this war waged by the America government is
contradictory in its justification of actions as a defense for humanity,
liberty and freedom, in the definition of the goals about waging this war, and also in its
lack of a clear definition of the enemy.
years ago; more than that, they also share the same moral conviction of God to protect humankind.

Link Hegemony/Alliances
The affs discourse of hegemony/alliances fails to create
an effective international order founded on the
friend/enemy distinction
Lind 15 (Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America
Foundation and author of The American Way of Strategy. He was a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School
and has taught at Johns Hopkins and Virginia Tech. He has been an editor or staff writer at The New Yorker,
Harper's Magazine, The New Republic and The National Interest Carl Schmitts War on Liberalism 4/23/15
http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/carl-schmitt%E2%80%99s-war-liberalism-12704)///CW

the conviction that the end of the Cold War inaugurated an era of
peace to accompany the inevitable spread of democratic capitalism
has been shattered. In Georgia and Ukraine, thousands have died as
Washingtons attempt to fence in Russia with NATO allies and affiliates has
OVER THE past few years,
great-power

been answered by Moscows determination to rebuild a Eurasian sphere of influence. In East Asia,

Chinas growing assertiveness has alarmed its neighbors and

collided with Americas determination to remain the dominant power
in the region. Regime-change efforts sponsored by the United States and its allies in Iraq, Libya and Syria
have created power vacuums and bloody regional proxy wars, to the benefit of Al Qaeda and the Islamic

In geoeconomics, too, the Pax Americana and the neoliberal version of

capitalism are increasingly contested. China, with the help of India, Russia,
Brazil and other countries, has sought to organize alternatives to global
economic and development institutions like the World Bank and the IMF,
State.

which are still dominated by the Western powers. In different ways, Xi Jinpings China, Vladimir Putins
Russia and Narendra Modis India represent an alternative economic model, in which free markets and

This moment of crisis for global

liberalism coincides with the translation into English of a fresh appraisal of Carl
Schmitt, a leading twentieth-century German thinker who, in the course of a long life, was a
consistent critic of political and legal liberalism and American
hegemony. In Carl Schmitt: A Biography, published in German in 2009 and published in English late
state capitalism are blended under strong executive rule.

last year, Reinhard Mehring, a professor of political science at Heidelberg University of Education, has
provided the most thorough study yet of the anfractuosities of the political theorist known to his detractors
as Hitlers Crown Jurist. SCHMITT, WHO was born into a Catholic family in Westphalia in 1888, rose to
prominence as a conservative legal academic in the 1920s. His discipline of Staatslehre is much more than
narrowly technical law or jurisprudence, including as it does elements of political philosophy and
political science. Schmitts intellectual allies were, by and large, the conservative nationalists of the
Weimar Republic, not the more radical Nazis. In his diaries after the Second World War, Schmitt not
inaccurately described Hitler as an entirely empty and unknown individual who rose out of the pure
lumpenproletariat, from the asylum of a homeless non-education. However, following Hitlers seizure of
power, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. Thanks to the sponsorship of Hermann Goering, Schmitt
was appointed state councilor for Prussia, president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists, editor-in-chief
of the German Jurists Journal and a professor at the University of Berlin, where he replaced Herman Heller,
a Jewish social-democratic legal theorist who had been forced into exile. At the height of his brief
prominence, Schmitt was even received by Mussolini. Schmitt would recall: I had a longer conversation in
private with Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia on the evening of the Wednesday after Easter. We talked
about the relationship between party and state. Mussolini said, with pride and clearly directed against
national socialist Germany: The state is eternal, the party is transient; I am a Hegelian! I remarked:
Lenin was also a Hegelian, so that I have to allow myself the question: where does Hegels world historical
spirit reside today? In Rome, in Moscow, or maybe still in Berlin after all? Schmitt did not consider the
possibility that the world-historical spirit might have taken up residence in Washington, DC. As Hitler
consolidated his tyranny, Schmitt became more abject. He defended Hitlers Night of the Long Knives on
June 30, 1934, and described the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws against Gentile-Jewish intermarriage as
the constitution of freedom, even though, according to Mehring, in his youth he had briefly hoped to
marry a Jewish woman, Helene Bernstein. Some of Schmitts newly adopted racial rhetoric was so
excessivehe proposed that the word Jew be placed next to the names of Jewish authors in footnotes in
legal textsthat some hostile expatriates and devout Nazis alike believed they discerned in his writing not
the zeal of the convert, but the cynicism of the opportunist. In 1936, the journal of the SS, Das Schwarze
Korps, published several articles questioning his true commitment to Nazi ideology. Schmitts friendship
with Goering and Hans Frank, who was later hanged for his war crimes as governor-general of German-

occupied Poland, saved him from the clutches of the SS. He withdrew into recondite scholarship, which
included musings on a Monroe Doctrine for Europe that would justify German expansionism and a history
of the alleged struggle among maritime and continental great powers. Detained for a time by the Allies
after the war, Schmitt explained: In 1936, I was publicly defamed by the SS. I knew a few things about the
legal, semi-legal and illegal means of power employed by the SS and the circles around Himmler, and I had
every reason to fear the interests of the new elite. In a legal brief for Friedrich Flick, a German
industrialist who had collaborated with the Nazis, Schmitt, having used arguments about the limits of
positive law to justify the Hitler regime, opportunistically deployed them to justify war-crimes trials (though
preferably not for his client): Here, all arguments of natural sense, of human feeling, of reason, and of
justice concur in a practically elemental way to justify a conviction that requires no positivistic norm in any
formal sense. The Allied occupation authorities were unmoved and imprisoned Flick until 1950, but after
detaining Schmitt twice, once for more than a year, they decided that he had been too marginal a member
of Hitlers system for prosecution to be worthwhile. Like the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had also
disgraced himself by enthusiastically welcoming the Nazi dictatorship when he became rector of Freiburg
University in 1933, Schmitt was banned from teaching in German universities from 1945 to his death in
1985. Schmitt nevertheless managed to gather a small coterie of disciples and exercise some influence on
German jurisprudence. He continued to write and also had distinguished visitors, including the philosopher
Alexandre Kojve. In his old age in his native Plettenberg, Schmitt named his home San Casciano after
the Tuscan village where Machiavelli spent his final years in exile. In his intellectual diary, the Glossarium,
Schmitt bitterly complained: How harmless were those who sensed the opportunity for intellectual change
at the awakening in Germany in 1933, in comparison to those who took intellectual revenge on Germany in
1945. In the decades before his death in 1985, Schmitt interpreted current events in terms of what he
described and dreaded as the legal world revolutiona world order, promoted by the United States and
symbolized by the European Union, in which legalistic concepts like human rights and the rule of law
became the only source of political legitimacy. What most liberals view as triumphant progress, Schmitt
viewed as the disastrous marginalization of continental European statism as an alternative to the maritime
liberalism of the Anglo-American world: World politics reaches its end and is turned into world policea
dubious kind of progress. IF SCHMITT were merely one of many German conservatives of the Weimar era
who disgraced themselves by collaborating with the Nazis, he would be of interest only to historians.
Instead, Schmitts reputation as a major thinker endures, sometimes in surprising quarters. American law
professors wrestle with Schmitts theories about constitutionalism and power, while the Western Left is
impressed by his denunciation of liberal globalism as a mask for Anglo-American and capitalist
imperialism. In the late twentieth century, the American journal Telos, a meeting place for heterodox
leftists and paleoconservatives, helped further the revival of interest in Schmitts thought, along with
studies by G. L. Ulmen, Joseph J. Bendersky, Gopal Balakrishnan and many others. Some claim, absurdly,
that Schmitt influenced the neoconservative movement by way of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, a
respectful critic and correspondent in the 1920s. This interest is justified, because

Schmitt is a

classic thinkerperhaps the key thinkerof modern antiliberalism . Antiliberalism

can be contrasted with preliberalism as a variety of nonliberalism. Confronted with Enlightenment
liberalism in its various versions, preliberalism finds itself at a disadvantage in the battle for modern public
opinion, because appeals to preliberal sources of social authoritydivine revelations, local customs and
traditionsare unlikely to persuade those who are not already believers. Unable to hold their own in
debate with liberals, adherents of preliberal worldviews tend to withdraw into sectarianism, which may be
defensive and quietist like that of the Amish, or manifested in millenarian violence, like the Salafist
jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. In contrast with preliberalism, modern antiliberalism like
Schmitts seeks to defeat liberal thought on its own chosen ground of public debate, using its own
preferred weapons, rational analysis and secular scholarship. It is modern because it takes for granted the
post-Enlightenment intellectual environment of secularism and science. And it is antiliberal because it
defines itself against modern liberalism, on point after point. It is a reaction to liberalism that would not
exist without liberalisma Counter-Enlightenment, not an ancien rgime. In the Weimar Republic, Schmitt
was associated with Catholic conservatives. Relations were strained when he divorced his first of two
wives, Pawla Dorotic, whom he met when she was a Spanish dancer in a vaudeville theater. The Vatican
was not impressed by his request for an annulment, on the grounds that the Munich-born Protestant
dancer had lied to him about having an aristocratic pedigree as the daughter of a Croatian baron.
Moreover, according to Mehring, Schmitt did not attend church during the Nazi years. But those who
argue for his lifelong affinity with strains of Catholic reactionary politics can make a good case.
Notwithstanding his embrace of Nazi racism, Schmitts sympathies lay with Latin authoritarianism rather
than Teutonic totalitarianism. His only child, his daughter Anima, born to his second wife, married a
Spanish law professor belonging to Francos Falangist party, and she translated some of Schmitts writings
into Spanish. In Political Theology, he praised the nineteenth-century Catholic counterrevolutionary thinker
Juan Donoso Corts. In later life, he understood modern world events in terms of apocalyptic imagery
borrowed from Christian thought, including the idea of a katechon, a figure who, by maintaining order,
delays the end of the world. The katechon might be thought of as Schmitts answer to Thomas Hobbess
metaphor of the Leviathan. BUT SCHMITT did not think that the answers to modern problems could be
found in Thomism or a restoration of papal authority. There was no going back to the Middle Ages. Schmitt
embraced modern populism and tried to turn it to antidemocratic, illiberal ends. In his Verfassungslehre
(Constitutional Theory) of 1928, for example, Schmitt praised the French revolutionary thinker Abb Sieys,
author of What is the Third Estate?, for distinguishing between the pouvoir constituant and the pouvoir

constitu, the maker of constitutional government and the constitutional government that is made. The
idea that constitutions exist at the willand for the benefitof the sovereign people or nation was central
to the French and American Revolutions and goes back to the social-contract theory of John Locke and his
successors. It was stated not only by Sieys but also by Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of
Independence: That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its
foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their Safety and Happiness. As William E. Scheuerman and Renato Cristi point out in their
contributions to a 1998 anthology edited by David Dyzenhaus, Law as Politics: Carl Schmitts Critique of

Schmitt puts an antiliberal spin on the theory of popular

sovereignty. Sieys, like the American Founders, takes it for granted that the exercise of popular
Liberalism,

sovereignty operates under constraints, even if it is not constrained by constitutions or statutes. Even
when acting in revolutionary fashion, by discarding one government and forming another, a sovereign
people cannot violate natural law (in the version found in early modern social-contract theory, that is, not
the natural law of premodern Scholasticism). Moreover, in a revolutionary interim between governments,
the people are expected to act through representative, consultative bodies, such as constitutional
conventions. The sovereign peoples natural, extralegal right of revolution is not an excuse for either
communal atrocities or the dictatorship of an individual. The "smoking gun" emerges behind one of the
biggest conspiracies in American history. By dispensing with these constraints, Schmitt turns the theory of
popular sovereignty into a rationale for Caesarist dictatorship. The cryptic first sentence of Political
Theology, Sovereign is he who decides the exception, shows that the sovereign people have been
conflated with the sovereign executive. Social-contract theorists would have written, Sovereign are they
who decide the exception. Schmitt does not mean that any malcontent colonel who manages to carry

the sovereign is a charismatic leader who

saves the people from danger by acting decisively , outside of the law if
out a putsch is the sovereign. Instead,

necessary. Because the paralysis of parliamentary politics can itself pose a danger to the nation, in the
view of Schmitt and other antiliberals, the eighteenth-century French and American method of a quasiparliamentary constitutional convention to represent the sovereign people must seem to be merely the
attempted correction of one weak debating society by another. The decisive leader creates the new order
by deeds, not chatter. The Schmittian leader is a plebiscitarian ruler who can have his actions ratified by
the acclamation of a grateful people, but he does not act on their instructions. In his Constitutional Theory,
Schmitt argued that the natural form for the direct expression of the popular will is the yea-saying or naysaying shout of the assembled crowd. Cristi notes that Schmitt comes to accept and recognizes the

THE
FRIEND/ENEMY distinction is another original concept in Schmitts
antiliberalism. All political theories that do not advocate for a global
government must have some way of determining who belongs in
particular polities and who does not. In deciding on the boundaries of new states formed from
pouvoir consituant of the people only because he has found a way to disarm it.

the partition of dynastic or colonial empires, the standard in international law has been the so-called Latin
American doctrine: the borders of newly independent successor states in general should follow the
boundaries, however arbitrary, of administrative or political units within the former, larger state. An
alternative approach, the so-called Central European approach, favors redrawing arbitrary political
boundaries to create more homogeneous ethnic or linguistic groups. Neither doctrine is inherently illiberal.
In his Representative Government, John Stuart Mill thus argued that liberal, representative government is
most likely to succeed in countries in which most of the citizens share at least a common language, a
thesis that the continuing disintegration of multiethnic states in our time would appear to confirm. In Mills
words, Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a
people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public
opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. Neither approach to
defining the citizens of sovereign states equates political independence of one community from another
with inherent and unremitting enmity. In keeping with his decisionist approach to law and politics, Schmitt
is not interested in adumbrating general rules like these. The people are more than a collection of human

for
Schmitt, the people must have a mystical solidarity defined by the
recognition of common public enemies, who may be external or internal or both.
The friend/enemy distinction in a particular context, like the exception or state of
emergency in a particular situation, by its nature cannot be identified or limited in
advance. Rather, it is the essence of great leadership to grasp, at any given
beings in a common territory or sharing various characteristics like language and ethnicity. Rather,

time, which approach to legality or its opposite and which set of public enemies is in the interest of the
nation. Schmitt is sometimes compared to Hobbes as an authoritarian thinker. But the temperaments and
mentalities of the two were quite different. The Hobbesian sovereign, while prepared for war and anarchy,
prefers peace and quiet. Schmitts authoritarianism is histrionic and apocalyptic. What is most extreme is

most authentic. The exception is the rule. The emergency is the norm. The nation is constantly on the
verge of collapse and threatened by enemies without and within. Parliament is the problem, not the
solution. The times demand leaders who can take bold and decisive action, not waste time in idle debate.
Quoting Schmitt on parliamentary democracy (The value of life stems not from reasoning; it emerges in a
state of war where men inspirited by myths do battle), Stephen Holmes observed in 1993, That is
Mussolini, not Hobbes.

Link Liberalism/Democracy/Freedom
Their discourse of democracy/liberalism/freedom justifies
endless warfare in the name of humanity
Trombly 12 (Daniel Trombly is a graduate of GWU and defense contractor. He writes with an
emphasis on conflict, strategy, geopolitics and political theory. Lets Talk Real Schmitt 7/5/12
https://slouchingcolumbia.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/lets-talk-real-schmitt/)///CW
As I pointed out in an earlier post I wrote about Romneys remark about Russia as a number one foe,

for Schmitt, a distinction between the real enemy defined merely

by the potential for conflict in the extreme case, and the absolute enemy, whose
there remained,

political existence was intolerable to the body politic. In other words, the sort of Manichean friend-foe
distinction is derivative of, but not inherent to, the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt, in fact, would
become quite concerned with drawing a distinction between the friend-enemy relationship which
acknowledged what he believed was an enduring political reality the delineation of communities on the
basis of fear of violent death and one which demanded the vanquishing of ones enemies as a matter of
necessity.

Schmitt believed the most significant source of these

problems was liberalism, which sought to destroy the foundations

of international

order. To Schmitt, in Concept of the Political, not simply traditional sovereignty

but also the basis of neutrality and other vital facets of international law and behavior. Beginning in the
1930s and culminating in his 1950 Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt described the Jus Publicum Europaeum, the

Critical to Schmitts
understanding was that this order, in recognizing the real friend-enemy distinction, also
recognized jus hostis the rightful enemy by which two sovereigns could clash
without either being a criminal. In liberalism, as exemplified by World War I and confirmed
by World War II, aggression the exercise of the prerogatives of jus hostis the international
order criminalized aggression, and further defined as a meaningful
normative body humanity, against whom stood only enemies of
humanity. In a theme Schmitt discusses in the latter chapters of the Concept of the Political and
elaborates for decades after, the universalizing tendencies of liberal states
defines enmities in a manner that makes compromise impossible, for
who can compromise with an enemy of humanity and universal
values? In this manner, Schmitt saw liberalism as marking all its enemies,
not as jus hostis, but as hostis humani generis, the enemies of all humanity , like pirates,
idealized system of the 18th-19th century world order.

outlaws, and barbarians. In other words, the sort of Manichean worldview which defines all other countries
either as willing and grateful supplicants to the liberal international order with an American orientation
was not the kind of perspective Schmitt advocated, but the one he most vociferously despised. He did not
want a world where all political confrontations tended towards competition, and certainly not one where
enmity had to characterize relationships beyond the political. While Schmitt recognized certain kinds of
foes as absolute enemies his Theory of the Partisan in some ways foretells the global, technologicallyadvanced revolutionary as such a threat he wanted to avoid a world order which sought to characterize
its enemies in such a way.

Link Surveillance
Surveillance is a necessary tool of the sovereign
Versluis 6 (Arthur Versluis, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Professor in the
College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University, holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, and has published numerous books and articles How Carl Schmitt Spawned Fascist America
8/10/06 http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/08/10/how-carl-schmitt-spawned-fascist-america-nbsp/)///CW
The invasion of Iraq is, of course, not the only example, just the one with the most far-reaching and visible

FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance

whose purpose was to limit the abuse of federal uses of wiretaps
or other forms of surveillance after the abuses of the 1960s and 1970s had been revealed. The scope
of the wiretapping and other invasions of American citizens privacy is not yet fully
known, but no doubt eventually many abuses will be revealed. Only long after the election shenanigans
consequences. There are others. Consider the abrogation of
Act,

of November, 2004, did Americans even learn that the Bush Jr. administration once again had unilaterally
abrogated American law, asserting here too the power of the unitary executive. What very few people

this notional unitary executive power has an instructive

precedent, which is outlined in the works of the German legal theorist, Carl Schmitt. In the
1920s, Schmitt sharply criticized the parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic, in an analysis that
have realized is that

has a striking resonance with the contemporary American Congresss morass of ineptness, paralysis, and
manifest corruption. When National Socialism came to power in the 1930s, Schmitt defended the Third
Reich and its right to peremptory justice by reference to the juridical example of the Inquisition.

According to Schmitt, the ultimate power of government is not to be

found in legislation, but in the executive power to abrogate or suspend
legislation. What matters is not the rule, but the exception , and
sovereign is he who decides the exception. Schmitts aphorism describes how Hitler in fact took power,
with the unilateral abrogation of civil liberties in Germany. Hitler imposed a state of exception on those
whom he deemed alien to or a danger to the regime, and those in such a state of exception no longer have
the rights of citizens. This state of exception, willed by the German unitary executive power, was the
juridical basis for the Nazi death camps. The assertion of notional unitary executive power in part results
from officials prior disgust at the inherent weakness of a parliamentary system to forcefully address longterm problems facing society, like a weak fiat currency, economic crisis, or terrorism. A unitary executive
power appeals to the Right, to which Schmitt and purportedly the Bush Jr. administration belong, but,
one has to note, it also could have appeal for the Left. Such executive powers no doubt appeal to all who
are certain of their own rectitude, certain that they are guided by destiny or by God to act, to be decisive.
Thus one characteristic of fascism is said to be decisionism. At least were doing something, a
decisionist says even if what were doing is in fact despotic and destructive. George W. Bush is, he tells
us, the decider.

Link X Country is Evil Link

Their discourse of [X] as an intrinsic enemy is a link
Trombly 12 (Daniel Trombly is a graduate of GWU and defense contractor. He writes with an
emphasis on conflict, strategy, geopolitics and political theory. Lets Talk Real Schmitt 7/5/12
https://slouchingcolumbia.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/lets-talk-real-schmitt/)///CW
Schmitt saw great power politics, with spectrum of neutrality, detentes, humanzied limited wars and
elitist, decisionist ethos not simply as normal, but as morally superior to the alternative of the
universalistic hegemon that overstepped its right as a major power, upending what Schmitt saw as a

A foreign policy that saw Russia as an

ugly country and an irascible foe for exercising a sphere of
influence, for resisting the will of an American, Western-backed
liberal universalism, and advocating for the traditionalist, hardline
interpretation of state sovereignty, would not be Schmittian, but closer to
fundamentally pluralist international order.

the ideals Schmitt believed were fundamentally antithetical to his vision of politics. There are certainly

Schmitts friend-enemy
distinction is actually a lot more nuanced than most IR writing gives
him credit for and, while its a low bar to clear, its a lot more nuanced than campaign-trail
relevant ways to apply Schmitt to American foreign policy, but

rhetoric.

AT: Nazism
Schmitts Nazism and anti-semitism was actually Schmitt
twisting his own theories for personal gain the
alternative avoids this trap
Rachlin 7 (Robert D. Rachlin is a lawyer in Vermont and a professor at the Vermont Law School, A
New Chicago Edition of Carl Schmitt's Seminal Work October 2007 http://www.hnet.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13761)///CW

The fundamental status of this concept did not prevent Schmitt, in his
Nazi reincarnation, from using the idea of the enemy as a theoretical basis
for identifying the Jews with that baleful role (or hamper leaders of the Third
Reich in doing so, either). But it is important to avoid confusing Schmitt's
opportunistic use of the friend/enemy concept in service of the
NSDAP with his exposition of it in The Concept of the Political. This
notion of the need for national unity bolsters Schmitt's considerations on the topic of war. Although
government exhortations to war are almost always couched in terms
of humanity, peace, and justice (p. 54), the fact of war, for Schmitt, owes its sole
rational justification to the need to overcome a threat to national
existence. Schmitt is punctilious, to the point of redundancy, in rejecting the
notion of a just or unjust war, citing Grotius's dictum: "I do not include justice in the

definition [of war]," rendered by Schwab as "Justice is not included in the definition [of war]" (pp. 49-50).[2]
In an apparent, though not explicit, reference to Woodrow Wilson's resort to the slogan "war to end all
wars," Schmitt scorns the idea of "demand[ing] of men that they wage war, kill and be killed, so that there
will never again be war" (p. 48). The idea is derided further at the end of the book: "A war waged to
protect or expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last
war of humanity" (p. 79). (In the original, letzten Krieg der Menschheit is set in scare quotes. Omission of
the scare quotes in the translation denatures the irony.) War is thus completely abstracted from normative
justifications. Schmitt leaves unanswered an obvious follow-up question: is there a rational place for laws
of war?

Schmitt can be divorced from Nazism their argument is a

logical fallacy
Emden 9 (Christian J. Emden is a professor at the Department of German Studies at Rice University.
He was a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and taught at the University of Cambridge, England.
Professor Emden is on the editorial board of Modern Intellectual History and the Zeitschrift fr
Kulturphilosophie, co-edits the book series Cultural History and Literary Imagination and serves as an
external reviewer for the European Science Foundation. Emden on Gross, 'Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The
"Jewish Question," the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory' July 09 https://networks.hnet.org/node/35008/reviews/45893/emden-gross-carl-schmitt-and-jews-jewish-question-holocaust-andgerman)///CW

Gross increasingly begins to fall victim to the

strange logic of Schmitt's argument and even adopts what can be
termed a kind of "Schmittianism in reverse," characterized by the
assumption that any critique of universalism is necessarily
Schmittian and continues the latter's antisemitism. Philosophers call this type of
Without realizing it, however,

argument a category mistake: in the same way that Schmitt, especially after 1933, openly describes a normative, formal,
and legalistic interpretation of constitutional law, represented by Kelsen and Hermann Heller, as "Jewish," Gross links the
critique of universalism to a Schmittian antisemitism.[31] He repeats, in other words, Schmitt's own category mistake,
simply in reverse. But Gross's category mistake is not the only problem of his methodology, for he also presents us with a
kind of informal fallacy: Gross explicitly argues that Schmitt's critique of the constitutional state as a "Jewish legal state"
really only emerges after 1933 but then proceeds to show that the logic of Schmitt's bizarre claim is already structurally

It is
"structurally" present, for instance, in Schmitt's distinction between
present in his earlier works, such as the first edition of Der Begriff der Politischen and Politische Theologie.

"friend" and "enemy," although there is no reason to assume that

such a distinction--as undoubtedly problematic as it is--has to be read exclusively in
terms of Schmitt's antisemitism. Does the binary structure of Schmitt's claim make it inherently
antisemitic? To be sure, antisemitism rests on such a binary opposition, but it
would surely be far-fetched to argue that all binary oppositions are
antisemitic, such as, for instance, the "Hegelian dialectic." Indeed, the universalism and formal procedural
qualities of the modern Rechtsstaat, and the notion of civil society that underlies this state, rest on a philosophical
tradition--German Idealism and especially Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel--that operates rather often with such
binary modes of thought. Although it has been claimed, somewhat unpersuasively, that Kant's philosophy is marked by
the traces of antisemitism that run through German Idealism,[32] it should also be noted that Kelsen's own Reine
Rechtslehre (1934), the counterpart to Schmitt's work, relies heavily on a Kantian model.[33] Does this imply that Kelsen's
own defense of the democratic state, because it rests on a clear binary distinction between a formal and a substantive
notion of law, ultimately follows the logic of Schmitt's argument?[34] This conclusion would be a necessary implication of
Gross's own argument. Gross's "Schmittianism in reverse" also leads him to an overly simplified opposition between a
liberal strand of German intellectuals, represented by Max Weber, Ernst Cassirer, and Aby Warburg, and an irrational one,
represented by Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, and Martin Heidegger. Such clear-cut distinctions might be a helpful heuristic
device, but hardly reflect the complexity of intellectual culture between 1918 and 1933. Weber's liberalism remained an
aristocratic one and his assessment of mass democracy was not entirely positive.[35] Likewise, it is certainly true that
Cassirer and Warburg regarded myth as "a threat to liberal values," but Cassirer's Philosophie der symbolischen Formen
(1923-29) as well as Warburg's unfinished Mnemosyne-Atlas (1924-29) also emphasized, much like Walter Benjamin, the
anthropological inevitability of myth-making.[36] Seen against this background, the central problem of Gross's argument

he falls into the trap of Schmitt's ideas

and is forced to give up critical and analytical distance . On the positive side,
is what I have called his "Schmittianism in reverse":

much can be learned from the material that Gross presents, and current scholarship on Schmitt will do well to take it
seriously.