gopal balakrishnan

THE GEOPOLITICS

O F S E P A R AT I O N

Response to Teschke’s ‘Decisions and Indecisions’

A
ssessments of the many first-rank European thinkers who
sympathized or collaborated with fascism—Heidegger,
De Mann, Céline, Jünger, Gentile, Croce, Della Volpe,
Pound—are inevitably problematic. In the case of Carl
Schmitt, the difficulties are compounded by the apparent disconti-
nuity of his political positions and his anomalous relationship to the
intellectual traditions of the right. Coming to us from a disturbing
place and time—and, for English readers, in the scrambled fragments
of an ad hoc translation process—Schmitt’s writings do not fit within
any grid of contemporary academic specialization.1 A sober evaluation
requires both a careful diachronic contextualization and a critically
informed interrogation of his work.

‘Decisions and Indecisions’, Benno Teschke’s intervention on the

thinker in nlr 67, seeks to cut through these complexities. A historical
sociologist of early-modern European state formation and transitions to
capitalism, Teschke established his reputation with The Myth of 1648.2
The positive contribution of his latest essay lies in its discussion and cri-
tique of Schmitt’s thinking on these subjects, as set out in The Nomos of
the Earth. Teschke develops a striking reading of this formidable work,
couched within a broader reflection on the contemporary reception of
Schmitt’s oeuvre, and the intellectual and political continuities of his
trajectory as a writer. Teschke’s essay presents a portrait of a fascist ide-
ologue, whose legacy currently provides the theoretical underpinning

new left review 68 mar apr 2011 57

 58 nlr 68

for us neo-conservatism. Its burden is that Schmitt has returned to

cast a baleful shadow on American foreign policy, the field of interna-
tional relations and the mainstream of intellectual life more generally;
but that his writings have, nonetheless, little if anything to say about
the current historical moment or past ones. He builds his case in the
course of reviewing Reinhard Mehring’s important new biography, Carl
Schmitt, Aufstieg und Fall.3

Building on a previously articulated framework of periodization and

contextual interpretation, Mehring’s carefully documented account
measurably advances our understanding of Schmitt’s life and career.
An assessment of the biography might have spotlighted this new his-
torical material, and considered what changes it compels us to make in
our understanding of this controversial figure. By and large, Teschke
declines to convey much of the fascinating story Mehring tells, instead
essentially complaining that it is not the sort of study that he would like
to see. In his view, Mehring simply fails to pass an appropriately damn-
ing moral judgement on the manifestly culpable subject of his study.
Above all, the biography’s painstaking examination of the 44-year-old’s
motives for joining the nsdap in May 1933 is peremptorily dismissed.
Instead, Teschke proposes a ‘theoretical edifice’ consisting of character
traits and political dispositions that in his view ‘predestined Schmitt
like few others’ to ‘opt for Hitler’.4 Clearly many of Schmitt’s contem-
poraries did not think his decision was a foregone conclusion, as they
were shocked and angered by it. In order to determine what in his past
predisposed him to join, a more careful consideration of motives of
the kind that Mehring presents cannot be simply brushed aside. And if
Schmitt’s decision is going to be explained by some deeper intellectual
and political affinity, making sense of his complicated intellectual rela-
tionships with other currents on the right, both before and after 1933, is
absolutely indispensable.

1
I develop this discussion further in The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl
Schmitt, London and New York 2000.
2
Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern
International Relations, London and New York 2003; see also ‘Imperial Doxa from
the Berlin Republic’, nlr 40, July–Aug 2006.
3
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions: Political and Intellectual Receptions of Carl
Schmitt’, nlr 67, Jan–Feb 2011, p. 62. Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: Aufstieg
und Fall, eine Biographie, Munich 2009.
4
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 78.
 balakrishnan: Schmitt 59

A new liberal order

Teschke seeks to demonstrate that Schmitt’s ‘international political

thought and historical narrative’ are ‘empirically untenable and theoreti-
cally flawed’—as he specifies: ‘replete with performative contradictions,
subterranean reversals of theoretical positions, omissions and sup-
pressions, mythologizations and flights into épreuves étymologiques’.5
In response, let me first of all provide a very bare sketch of Schmitt’s
thinking on the position of the German state in the international order
after the end of the First World War, and let the reader decide whether
Teschke has fairly conveyed the gist of his thinking.

For Schmitt, the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations were attempts
by legal means to freeze the post-war status quo, subjecting Germany to
a new regime of international fiscal and military controls. In this new
order the victorious Great Powers preserved their full prerogatives while
the defeated were subject to invasive, destabilizing qualifications of their
nominal sovereignty in the form of sanctions, embargos, international
supervision of their foreign debt repayments and punitive interven-
tions for non-compliance. If the modern concept of law presupposed
a uniform jurisdiction over subjects, then the dictates of the post-war
settlement were legal only in the nominal and attenuated sense that
this now threadbare term had come to assume, as states were subject
to this international regime to vastly varying degrees. This crisis of legal
form was the most general expression of an epochal breakdown of the
classical bourgeois separation of the state from the sphere of economic
relations, as well as of the state’s monopoly of legitimate force over its
own territory and subjects, unfolding in a Europe stuck between the old
regime and welfare capitalism. The historical boundaries and conditions
of a whole conceptual network of oppositions—war and peace, belliger-
ents and neutrals, soldiers and non-combatants—that presupposed this
separation of state and society, of ‘the political’ from ‘the economic’, were
beginning to dissolve. Disorder manifested itself in the increasingly con-
tentious, not to say arbitrary, application of these terms to old and new
varieties of conflict. The new measures of international pacification were
increasingly difficult to distinguish from a continuation of war, giving
rise to an in-between condition of interminable low-level international
disorder stalked by outbreaks of civil war and economic meltdown.

5
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 86.
 60 nlr 68

Over this zone of patchwork and faltering sovereignties the United States
came to exercise vast influence as a creditor power, operating indirectly
through institutions that it controlled but to which it did not subject itself,
like the League of Nations. Reparations payments to New York, and loans
flowing back from it to a tenuously stabilized Europe, formed the mon-
etary artery of an unsustainable status quo. It was often said at the time
that the age of sovereign states was passing and that, if declining or back-
ward peoples relinquished the old-fashioned prerogatives of sovereignty,
they would eventually emerge out of the tunnel into a new age of inter-
national law and prosperity. Whatever the likelihood of that would have
been, Schmitt’s Weimar-era writing on international and constitutional
conflicts sought to address the consequences of a German and European
drift into a highly volatile, increasingly American-centred world economy,
without any political safeguards to stave off impending storms.6

This summary account conveys a sense of some of the historical reali-

ties that came into relief in Schmitt’s work. It seems reasonable that
some of it would resonate in contemporary conditions—as different as
they are from his times, the age of international revolution, fascism and
total wars between the world’s most powerful states. It is plausible that
Schmitt’s picture is incomplete, that there might be much more to say,
or indeed that one should hold a more positive view of the situation
described here than of what preceded it or came after. These would be
legitimate considerations in drawing up a balance on Schmitt. Teschke,
however, can see little more in these writings than a quasi-theological
valorization of sovereign decisions and an illiberal fixation on drawing
lines between friends and enemies. The upshot is that he offers little
to strengthen our grasp of the history of the facts and norms of liberal
imperialism, then and now.

Conditions of emergency

Teschke’s criticism of key elements of Schmitt’s ‘intellectual edifice’

takes us little further. In his view, Schmitt’s ‘jargon of the exception’—

6
‘Das Rheinland als Objekt internationaler Politik’ (1925), ‘Der Status Quo und der
Friede’ (1925), ‘Das Doppelgesicht des Genfer Völkerbundes’ (1926), ‘Zu Friedrich
Meineckes Idee der Staatsräison’ (1926), ‘Demokratie und Finanz’ (1927), ‘Der
Völkerbund und Europa’ (1928), ‘Völkerrechtliche Probleme des Rheingebiets’
(1928), ‘Der Völkerbund und Europa’ (1928), ‘Völkerrechtliche Formen des mod-
ernen Imperialismus’ (1932). These articles on the Weimar Republic in European
and world politics can be found in Positionen und Begriffe, Berlin 1988.
 balakrishnan: Schmitt 61

‘sovereign is he who decides in/on the state of emergency’—offers no

analytic purchase on actual historical emergencies:
The explanation of the emergency is outside their remit; its critique cannot
be formulated from within the Schmittian vocabulary. Why is that the case?
Since Schmitt’s method—be it decisionism, the friend–foe distinction, or
concrete-order-thinking—is bereft of any sociology of power, decisionism
lacks the analytics to identify what constellation or balance of socio-political
forces can activate, in what kind of situation, the politics of the exception
and fear.7

It seems strange that Teschke has missed Schmitt’s many attempts to

frame the problem of emergency powers in socio-political terms. As
early as 1921, Schmitt was clearly identifying the evolution of emergency
powers as the legal form of appearance of a fundamental structuring
problem, a difficult-to-reconcile antagonism at the heart of modern
politics. ‘In the years between 1832 and 1848,’ he wrote, ‘the most impor-
tant dates for the evolution of the state of siege as a legal institution,
the question arose as to whether the political organization of the pro-
letariat created an entirely new condition, and thus new constitutional
concepts.’8 This formulation was elaborated upon in numerous subse-
quent variations. Putting emergency financial measures by late Weimar
governments into context, Schmitt noted that
here one can proceed from a recognized and undisputed fact that public
finance, in comparison to the earlier pre-war dimensions as well as in rela-
tionship to the contemporary free and private economy, has assumed such
proportions that what lies before us is not merely a quantitative increase
but a ‘structural transformation’.9
A formulation from 1933, after the last of the Weimar governments
had fallen, succinctly captures the paradox of this transition to state
capitalism: ‘Out of this there develops the necessity of a great, long-term

7
Teschke, ‘Decisions and indecisions’, p. 80.
8
Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur, Leipzig 1921, p. vii. A later passage offers a striking
encapsulation of the socio-political problem of le pouvoir constituant of modern
states: ‘Sieyès posed the famous question What is the Third Estate?, and gave
the answer that it was the Nation; the Third Estate was nothing and shall become
everything. But as soon as the bourgeoisie itself appears as a class dominating the
state, distinguished by property and education, the negation wanders away. Now
the proletariat becomes the people, because it is the bearer of this negativity. It
is the part of the population which does not own, which does not have a share in
the produced surplus value and finds no place in the existing order.’ Carl Schmitt,
Verfassungslehre, Munich and Leipzig 1928, p. 243.
9
Carl Schmitt, Der Hüter der Verfassung, Berlin 1931, p. 81.
 62 nlr 68

plan, even if the purpose of this plan is the restoration of a planless,

functioning economic system’.10

But even putting aside the substantive, historically specific dimensions

of what Schmitt wrote on states of emergency, the sociologies of power
that Teschke claims would explain them cannot, in fact, adequately do
so. For the phenomenon itself results from the way in which ‘the con-
stellation or balance of socio-political forces’ is manifested in the form of
legal-political controversies over whether the threat that would warrant
a state of emergency even exists or not, and who has the constitutional
or alternatively historical right to make this determination. Legality and
legitimacy: all states, including the ones that Marxists used to think
needed to be built, exist in this relationship of facts, norms and excep-
tions. As a result, both dialectics and ordinary experience are united in
recognizing that the very existence of a crisis situation is entangled in
opposing assertions regarding its meaning and implications, although
they depart in considering the significance of this. As a Marxist, Teschke
might have learned something from Schmitt about the necessity of
taking into account the problems surrounding the categorial forms in
which certain socio-political phenomena are unavoidably entangled.
For Marx these problems were not confined to the economic realm, but
arose out of bourgeois society’s constitutive separation of ‘the economic’
and ‘the political’.

Lessons from Marx

On this point, Teschke in fact senses that what Schmitt wrote often seems
to touch on the conceptual centre of his own Marxist understanding of
modern statehood and geopolitics, which hinges on the historical process
of the separation of the political from the economic, of coercion from the
conditions of surplus appropriation. Teschke interprets this as ‘a theoreti-
cally uncontrolled volte face’: against the logic of his own views, Schmitt
was forced to ‘deploy a Hegelian-Marxist figure of thought: the separation
between the political and the economic, with its international analogue,
the separation between a territorialized inter-state system and a private,
transnational world-market’.11 This is a blunder. The multi-level crisis of
this constitutive difference is, in fact, the central problem cutting across
nearly all of Schmitt’s writing on the inter-war disorder. His best-known

10
Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954, Berlin 1958, p. 370.
11
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 85.
 balakrishnan: Schmitt 63

text The Concept of the Political begins by laying out the consequences
of the post-liberal breakdown of the separation between the state and
society. Schmitt’s political and legal writings track an ongoing conflictual
process of the maintenance and redrawing of this separation in different
phases of international capitalist development and state formation. Many
of his contemporaries—including Marxists who wrote on what they called
monopoly and state capitalism—addressed the same development. But
in one respect Schmitt was in advance of them, and precisely because his
whole work was an exploration of the impact of this post-liberal structural
transformation on the very categories that are employed in delineating
the partly autonomous regions of modern collective existence and their
respective forms of judgement. Teschke could have learned something
from Schmitt’s reflections on this ‘Hegelian-Marxist’ problem, for in his
own proposed sociological alternative, this separation once established
never becomes problematic in the subsequent history of capitalism. In
this respect Schmitt was the more ‘dialectical’ thinker.

Teschke vaguely and in passing acknowledges that Schmitt might have

theorized the crisis of the separations and neutralizations that are bour-
geois society’s conditions of existence but disingenuously dismisses the
significance of anything he did write because ‘Schmitt’s state’, as he puts
it, was unable to solve this crisis:

Schmitt’s state could not mediate and arbitrate the tensions of civil society
but needed to be insulated from it: to govern against civil society, to pro-
vide order. This was grounded in the conviction that industrial society, class
conflict and the spectre of a socialist revolution demanded a reformulated
theory of the state—and, ultimately, dictatorship.12

Actually, until the end of the Weimar Republic Schmitt held that inde-
pendent working-class organizations were a permanent feature of more
developed capitalist societies, and that the attempt to destroy them would
trigger a civil war.13 It is hard to know exactly what Teschke means by
‘Schmitt’s state’, but the term effectively effaces the distinction between
his relationship to the Weimar Republic on the one hand and Nazi rule
on the other. The effacement is realized in the design of the entire essay,
which gives scant consideration to Schmitt’s Weimar writings, i.e. the
texts for which he is best known and form the basis of almost all of
the contemporary reception of his work. We have seen that biographical

12
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 88.
13
‘Wesen und Werden des faschistischen Staates’ (1929), in Positionen und Begriffe.
 64 nlr 68

concerns do not weigh heavily for him, but is it really true that the
Weimar Schmitt was already a fascist in his conception of law and poli-
tics, as Teschke’s running together of the two periods would seem to
imply? Everyone knows how easy it is to find statements coming from
other times that offend contemporary sensibilities. By these standards
Karl Marx would be a bigot, but not some table-thumping right-wing
newscaster who knows how to stick to his script. In this case, the task of
understanding requires determining whether Schmitt held views which,
by the standards of Weimar times, would make it reasonable to think
of him as an ultra-authoritarian, extreme nationalist or anti-Semite. In
fact there is no evidence of this whatsoever. In lieu of evidence, Teschke
simply asserts that Schmitt subscribed to a theory of ‘racist-identitarian
democracy’ tout court. What Schmitt actually wrote in his main work on
constitutional law from 1928 conveys a rather different conception of
popular sovereignty:

Nation and Volk are often treated as synonymous concepts but the word
‘nation’ is terser, and less subject to misunderstanding. It designates, that
is, the ‘Volk’ as a unit of political action, while a Volk that does not exist as
a Nation is only some kind of ethnic or cultural group, not however a real
political bond between human beings.14

It is certainly true that, like many on the right at the time, he was an early
and avid admirer of Mussolini, but, unlike most of them, was wholly
hostile to his local imitators until just before they came to power in 1933.
From the beginning to the end of the Weimar era, Schmitt had an unu-
sually politically diverse circle of friends, students and admirers—Walter
Benjamin, Otto Kirchheimer, E. R. Curtius, Leo Strauss, Ernst Jünger, to
name only a few. Since he was not regarded by any of them as being an
ultra-authoritarian, extreme nationalist or anti-Semite before 1933 it is
safe to assume that he was not, even leaving aside the fact that the case
cannot be made on the basis of his work. The significance of pointing
this out is not to diminish the enormity of his later choices, but simply
to establish the difference between the recurring and continuous prob-
lems of his work and his conjunctural responses to them, so as to avoid
identifying the former with any one phase of the latter. When this con-
flation is made, neither the continuity nor the ruptures in the career of
this profoundly disturbing figure can be understood, while the historical
concreteness of his thought appearing in the pattern between the two is
effaced beyond recognition.

14
Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, p. 79.
 balakrishnan: Schmitt 65

Schmitt considered and proposed a variety of provisional solutions to the

erosion of the old European form of statehood—in his view, the defining
development of the contemporary historical situation—from conserva-
tive presidential democracy to National Socialism, from attempts to
restrain the decline of the old European order of sovereign powers, to
embracing breakthroughs to new forms of continent-straddling impe-
rium. Rather than denouncing him as a theorist of dictatorship pure
and simple, Teschke might have explored what could be learned from
Schmitt, just as Schmitt knew that there was something to learn from
how Marx had addressed this problem of the separation of the economic
from the political, from his early articles on Hegel all the way to his later
account of the primitive accumulation of capital in great land grabs and
colonial conquests.

Blood and dirt

In a work written in 1943–44, although published only after the war,

Schmitt situated the past quarter-century of upheavals in terms of an
epochal crisis in the underlying presuppositions of European norms of
statehood, property and war. A configuration of concrete juristic forms
had taken shape in Europe’s post-feudal passage to a system of centralized
warring states vying for continental hegemony and mercantile-colonial
acquisitions. Written when the tide had turned against Wehrmacht/ss
forces in the East, Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth was a conservative retro-
spect on the origins of an inter-state civilization that had arisen out of the
fiery chaos of war and primitive appropriations, and now seemed to be
returning to it. In Land und Meer, written in 1942, Schmitt had looked
back at this same historical span with some expectation that an old
European order of sovereign states could be superseded by a new order
of polities capable of continent-wide military and economic organiza-
tion. The Westphalian order of warring powers formed a community of
shared legal and political orders in opposition to non-Christian peoples,
later conceived in terms of a division between civilized and uncivilized.
These oppositions expressed a world-historical expropriation of non-
European peoples and territories.

Teschke suggests that Schmitt ignored the fate of the New World indi-
genes, conceiving the Americas ‘as a de-subjectified vacuum’.15 What he
actually wrote was more disturbing than this alleged omission. In Land

15
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 82.
 66 nlr 68

und Meer, alluding to the genocidal measures that German occupation

forces had unleashed on the Eastern front, Schmitt pointed out that none
of the colonial powers of the Age of Discovery had recognized the rights
of the original inhabitants of the lands they seized. The nomos arising out
of early modern state-formation and overseas conquests divided the world
into two zones, with two laws of war and appropriation. In this Westphalian
state-system the terrestrial surface of the earth was subject to norms of
European war and diplomacy by which territories anywhere in the world
could be legitimately acquired and their inhabitants reduced to native sub-
jects or eliminated. Schmitt claimed that the obscure presupposition of
this mode of territorial enclosure and delimitation was that the oceans
remained res omnium, owned by no one but subject to the de facto control
of the greatest maritime power of the age. The mold of this Eurocentric
concrete order was now being broken open by the inexorable rise of the
us, a development that threatened to reduce the old continent to the status
of a province within a planetary civil war. In response, as Schmitt saw it,
the German Reich was making its own ‘America’ in Europe, with methods
comparable to those of the New World founders. The formless total war
now raging across the world was the result of the crumbling limites, and
the reflux of the elemental, oceanic and colonial violence that European
political form had once held down and kept out—‘bracketed’.

Land und Meer makes clear, in a way that the later Nomos of the Earth does
not, that this original division between land and sea in European public
law is what explains a historical reversal unfolding from early modern
times. A European continent of autochthonous warring states came to
be subject to the power that had assumed effective control of the world
oceans, balancing these states from offshore and hollowing them out by
unleashing social forces within them that were inexorably drawn into the
orbit of the open world market. This is the historical thesis of Schmitt’s
essay The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes from 1937. The
opposition of land and sea is the primitive dimension of the opposition
of state and society, and Schmitt’s quasi-mythic account is an attempt to
grasp the historical logic of the original separation of state and society
and the long unfolding reversal of the hierarchy between them.

Tales of transition

Teschke seeks to demonstrate that his own, Marxist account of the histor-
ical emergence of early modern forms of sovereignty, war and property
 balakrishnan: Schmitt 67

is superior to the one he attributes to Schmitt. As he tells it England’s

passage to capitalism is a break away from the power and property rela-
tions of continental feudalism; its subsequent economic and mercantile
expansion eventually undermines the world of European Absolutism
which for centuries had successfully evolved alongside it; these victo-
ries paved the way for subsequent converging 19th-century transitions
to capitalism and the state forms that correspond to it.

Britain’s post-1713 balancing of the continental inter-state system—

empirically noted by Schmitt, but theoretically reduced to the
extra-sociological category of ‘maritime existence’—eclipses a social
account of Britain’s transition from feudalism to capitalism and post-1688
transformation from dynastic to constitutional-parliamentarian sover-
eignty, essential for understanding the timing and socio-political sources of
British balancing in the 18th century.16

The truth is more interesting than this hesitant contrast would indi-
cate. For told in a different register and with concepts that explain as
opposed to just narrate, Teschke’s historical sociology replicates the
exact form of Schmitt’s fascist epic. Pointing this out is not meant to
discredit his excellent work in this field, studies that seek to extend
Robert Brenner’s unsurpassed theorization of the transition to capital-
ism into the geopolitical realm. It only further underscores the futility
of his attempted demolition. For The Leviathan, Land und Meer and The
Nomos of the Earth tell the story of how the old regime mutated into the
19th-century world of nation-states and British-centred world-market
colonialism, and then reached its limits with the rise of new powers and
new dimensions of power.

As the airplane came, a third new dimension, appearing alongside land

and sea, was conquered. Now man is lifted above the surface of the land as
well as the sea and receives in his hand a wholly new means of transport as
well as a weapon. The range and measures are further transformed, and the
possibility of human domination over nature and other men ascends into
unforeseeable domains.17

Air power and radio waves were productive forces that spelled the end of
the British Empire, laissez-faire capitalism and a European map of small
and medium-sized nation-states. Teschke believes that ‘the predomi-
nantly non-territorial nature of the us restructuration of the inter-war

16
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 84.
17
Schmitt, Land und Meer, Leipzig 1942, p. 74.
 68 nlr 68

European order provided a direct refutation of Schmitt’s axiomatic thesis

of international orders based on land-grabs’18 because he does not real-
ize that for Schmitt, the main problem of concrete-order-thinking was
that land was no longer the clear-cut ground of political and economic
organization, even as legal and political thinking remained mired in the
older elemental presuppositions.

Schmitt envisaged the reorganization of political space along the lines

of a vast geographical zone embracing a large number of satellite states
that would constitute the Grossraum of a guardian power. In his view the
us Monroe Doctrine was the precursor of these new geopolitical shapes.
Like the American Republic with its hemispheric claims, such guardians
would not be states in the older sense of a bureaucratically organized,
territorial monopoly of force but dynamic exponents of a political and
historical idea to determine friend and enemy. Although he would
oppose the militant universalism of the us–ussr age that emerged with
the destruction of the German Reich, Schmitt seems to have foreseen
something like the Cold War bloc system coming into being. The second-
class satellite states that Schmitt had once viewed as the embodiment of
political reason were now reduced to nominal entities, with jurisdictions
honeycombed by military bases, radio towers and patrolled airspaces.
Teschke’s complaint that Schmitt was never able to clarify the exact mode
of integration of these smaller states into the new ‘“greater imperial
order”—federal, imperial, vassalic’ rings hollow, as this harrowing out-
line of emerging political shapes would hardly seem to require it.19

Aside from his understandable hostility to the historical Schmitt, and

his less reasonable indifference to non-sociological forms of thought,
there is another factor at work in Teschke’s inability to note this dis-
quieting parallel between his own and Schmitt’s understanding of the
problem posed by the original historical separation of the political and
the economic, as well as the historical narrative of the transition to mod-
ern capitalism to which it gives rise. For Teschke the classical age of the
jus publicum europaeum—the multi-state European legal community of
war and diplomacy—that Schmitt portrays in The Nomos of the Earth
idealizes the insatiable war machines of Absolutism as the protagonists
of a civilized and limited form of military competition. Teschke thinks
that he is refuting Schmitt when he claims that Absolutism brought

18
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 85.
19
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 89.
 balakrishnan: Schmitt 69

no reduction in the human toll of warfare, writing that, at the end of

the Seven Years’ War, ‘casualty figures in the Prussian Army stood at
180,000 soldiers, which was the equivalent of two-thirds of its total size,
and one-ninth of the Prussian population.’20

What he fails to grasp is that the reason why Schmitt extolled the pro-
tocols of land war of that period was not because they reduced the
casualty rates of battle, but because they were based on the neutrali-
zation of the religious and civil wars of the past century. In Schmitt’s
account, the terminal crisis of the European state form in the 20th
century induced a reflux of religious and civil wars—in the form of war-
ring ideological movements—and an end of the age of neutralizations.
Schmitt’s purpose in The Nomos of the Earth was to provide a history
of the international conditions of the conventions of limited war—
limited in the sense of another separation: the separation of sovereign
power from the promotion of partisan religious causes—and to por-
tray this rationalization-neutralization of public order as the condition
for the transition to 19th-century civilization. Since Teschke holds that
Absolutism recognized no firm distinction between state and society, he
has assumed that Schmitt, in the face of massive contravening evidence,
was indifferent to it as well, and that his primary purpose in writing The
Nomos of the Earth was to portray continental European monarchies in
a more favourable light than England’s glorious parliamentary-capitalist
state. Schmitt’s actual point was that the jus publicum europaeum, the
concrete order that had withstood and adapted to an age of war and
revolution, in the transition from the old regime to the new age of clas-
sical liberalism, was now in danger of dissolving amidst another equally
momentous transition.

Drawing the balance

In giving The Nomos of the Earth its due, we might ask how it stands up
to the classic liberal and Marxist theories of imperialism: Hobson in the
first category; Luxemburg, Kautsky, Lenin and Bukharin in the second.
None of these authors—it should be noted—attempted to deal with the
origins of European overseas imperialism in the 16th century, with the
Spanish and Portuguese carve-up of South and Central America, as
Schmitt signally did. Nor did these traditions produce any memorable

20
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 83.
 70 nlr 68

theorizations of the inter-war power system, transformed by the dik-

tats of Versailles and the League of Nations. Against this background,
Schmitt’s penetrating insights on the inter-state order stand out all the
more sharply. Arguably, their relative abstraction—compared to the
rootedly historical accounts of Lenin or Hobson—freed Schmitt’s ana-
lytics for wider application in radically altered times.

Others have used Schmitt as a platform to express their unqualified

support for law, tolerance, modernity etc, or, alternatively, to formu-
late some qualifications regarding these same commitments. Much of
Teschke’s essay is written in a similar editorial spirit. His opening para-
graph bemoans a double ‘rehabilitation’ of Schmitt by neo-conservatives
and post-Foucauldians—Hardt and Negri, Agamben—which has
‘outflanked the Kantian liberal-cosmopolitan mainstream in a pincer
movement’.21 In order to impress on the reader that he is making a
bold challenge to orthodoxy, Teschke has to portray the Anglo-Saxon
reception of Schmitt as nearly unanimously apologetic. In fact, the
judgement that he wishes to press home is wholly at one with respect-
able liberal opinion, as the titles of two well-regarded studies—Mark
Lilla’s Reckless Mind, Jan-Werner Mueller’s Dangerous Mind—suggest.
A sample of recent essays reveals a veritable outpouring of exactly the
same sentiments that Teschke expounds in his review: nyrb (Lilla), New
Republic (Stephen Holmes) or Boston Review (William Scheuerman). If
he had taken the actual reception into account it might have dispelled
his outsized fears of an unopposed Schmittianism, rendering some of
his polemical efforts superfluous.

In order to rule out the possibility that there might be legitimate intellec-
tual reasons for the contemporary interest in Schmitt, Teschke identifies
him with the national security doctrines of the Bush administration.
Leaden tales of neo-conservative adventures at home and abroad make it
seem as if America’s recent assertions of power were inspired by notions
alien to the political traditions of this republic, although the remorseless
continuities of the last couple of years have led to a noticeable decline
in the market for these civics lessons. Turning his own method of argu-
ment against him, one could say that Teschke’s views are characteristic
of an educated liberal milieu that was inflamed by the cavalier legali-
ties of American ‘unilateralism’ when the speaking roles went to people

21
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, p. 61.
 balakrishnan: Schmitt 71

called ‘neo-conservatives’, but simply lost interest in such issues as soon

as the normal quotient of legitimizing pabulum was restored to the lan-
guage of televised statecraft. The reader of his essay may have wondered
why its author bizarrely proceeds as if this former president were still in
office, as opposed to the actual incumbent.

More interesting is his suggestion that neo-conservatives promoted

both the Manichean world-view and decisionism that he sees Schmitt as
having advocated, and the wars for humanity and imposition of liberal
democracy that he clearly attacked.22 But any familiarity with Schmitt’s
accounts of the international scene between the wars makes it clear that it
was precisely this combination that he saw taking shape in the American
relationship to the far more unstable Versailles order. Teschke refuses to
consider what Schmitt’s theorization of this inter-war crisis got right, let
alone to what extent our own times could be said to resemble his.

Maintaining equanimity often proves difficult when examining the work

of important thinkers compromised by association with fascism; but it
should not pose such problems for the kind of tough-minded Marxism
that Teschke aspires to represent, for the classics of this tradition, how-
ever polemical, offer a clear model for a critical study of major bourgeois
thinkers like Schmitt. In order to have the right to judge, one must first
set up the relationship between theoretical assumptions, ideological lim-
itations and political alignments through a careful weighing of evidence
and argument in context. Teschke would probably agree that overly
politicized or moralistic judgements of Hegel or Weber might block com-
prehension of their work. But since he already knows that Schmitt was a
fascist, he thinks that he will not miss much by rapidly proceeding to the
harshest dismissals. Why does he assume that, in this case, the method
of reducing an ‘intellectual edifice’ to an imputed ideology satisfies the
requirements of criticism? The implicit logic seems to be as follows:
Schmitt could not possibly have sought an objective understanding of
structural transformations in law and politics; he must have been moti-
vated by a tendentious hostility to law, tolerance, modernity, etc. One can
therefore dispense with the protocols of immanent criticism, and move
on to the problem of classifying the work, ideologically. If it cannot be
denied that while reading through some of Schmitt’s texts, occasion-
ally moments of insight and even brilliance stand out, these must be

22
Teschke, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, pp. 92–3.
 72 nlr 68

regarded as lucky strikes, or the result of incongruous borrowings from

more legitimate thinkers.

Arriving at a balanced judgement of Schmitt, that avoids either apolo-

gia or demonization, is no easy task. His critique of liberal democracy
under the Weimar Constitution contained some of the most striking
insights ever written on this political form; but it was fed by a counter-
revolutionary authoritarianism which, after March 1933, led him to
Nazism—a trajectory demanding outright condemnation. His critique
of the Versailles settlement, equally acute, has actually become more rel-
evant, as the imperialist order of the Great War’s victors mutated into
the ‘international community’ of the capitalist bloc under American
hegemony—its ideologies and practices uncannily close to so many
of Schmitt’s almost clairvoyant descriptions. America’s post-Cold War
flight forward now seems to be faltering, in tandem with the financiali-
zation it tirelessly promoted as a long holding pattern against the onset
of capitalist stagnation. Further rounds of public intervention to stave
off the unfolding meltdown of markets, at ever greater social cost, as
the exclusive form through which wealth can be created, are releasing
a new phase of an ongoing structural transformation of the classical
relationship between state and society. Properly understood, the writings
of Carl Schmitt form an indispensable supplement to comprehension of
the current situation in terms of a longer-run breakdown of the separa-
tion of ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’, and of the forms of the coming
attempts to shore up the ‘neutralizations and depoliticizations’ that con-
stitute capitalism’s historical conditions of possibility.