Partisan's theory

Carl Schmitt with his school class in 1904

Partisan's theory. An interim comment on the concept of the political is the title of a 1963 publication by the German constitutional lawyer and political philosopher Carl Schmitt .

Developmental background

After losing his professorship in 1945 due to his work for the National Socialists , Schmitt's second creative phase began, the focus of which was on his second major work " Der Nomos der Erde ", published in 1950 , in which he drew the sum of his war experience in terms of international law. In 1963 Schmitt published his treatise on the theory of the partisan, based on two lectures given in Spain in 1962, in the Duncker & Humblot publishing house in Berlin . In the foreword of this work, Schmitt expressly points out its sketchy character, even its "undemanding form of an intermediate note". Schmitt uses the free space resulting from the exoticism of his ostensible topic to turn to his main interest against the background of the Cold War at that time , the differentiation of the terms "friend" and "enemy" - the two categories from which he differentiates the actual The concept of the political sees grown up.

The four characteristic features of the partisan

Schmitt's interest in the figure of the partisan is purely theoretical. He sees him as the last really political being of the present, which refuses to be subsumed under the traditional political structures and thereby establishes itself as a new, independent political type. Schmitt tries to demonstrate this independence on the basis of four characteristic features, which he does not obtain from an empirical processing of historical material, but uses them as pure premises in order to create the foundation of his theory.

• irregularity

Under irregularity , Schmitt subsumes the external form of partisan warfare , in which the individual partisan does not benefit from the legitimation of the common soldier, since he violates all conventions of international martial law.

• Increased mobility

Under the concept of increased mobility , Schmitt sums up the tactical freedom of movement that defines the partisan's objective military-technical value .

• intensity

The characteristic of intensity expresses the increased political commitment, which distinguishes the partisans from other fighters - an inner attitude that is expressed in an unconditional readiness for action as well as an extraordinary “fighting morale”.

• Telluric character

The partisan's ties to earth and homeland are to be expressed in the characteristic of the telluric character , which Schmitt considers necessary to justify the partisan's fundamentally defensive stance, i.e. H. the limitation of his hostility, which distinguishes him from the exportable terrorist .

The appropriation of the partisan

In order to explain the development from the “defensive, autochthonous defender of the homeland” to the “world-aggressive, revolutionary activist”, Schmitt describes the development of the theory from the “conventional” to the “real” to the “absolute enemy” as a revolutionary use of originally Prussian ideas a line of thought from Carl von Clausewitz to Friedrich Engels and Lenin to Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong .

While Clausewitz had expanded the concept of war, but remained intellectually within the framework of statehood, according to Schmitt, Lenin succeeded in partially removing war from its fettering through interstate protection by developing the conventional concept of war into a revolutionary concept. For Lenin, the war no longer presents itself as a conflict between different states within the framework of classical international law, but as the "revolutionary party war of the international class struggle". At this point Schmitt implies quite clearly that Lenin included the interstate war in his political instruments, since he saw in it a suitable ground for developing revolutions.

Lenin was therefore the first, after Schmitt, to understand the partisan as an important figure in the international civil war and to try to use it for his own purposes. According to Schmitt, Lenin achieved “the alliance of philosophy with the partisan” by expanding the characteristic of “irregularity” from its original content as a modus vivendi of warfare to a fundamental questioning of the existing social order.

Stalin's concept of the " Great Patriotic War " then made it possible

“... to combine the essentially defensive, telluric power of patriotic self-defense ... with the aggressiveness of the international communist world revolution. The combination of these two heterogeneous sizes dominates today's partisan struggle all over the world. "

Mao finally succeeded in fully integrating the partisan by transplanting his experiences from two decades of partisan struggle on home soil into a peasant milieu and developing it there in a new way. Hence his revolution is more telluric than Lenin's.

The development of the enemy image and its significance in the Cold War

The change in the enemy image

As part of his remarks on the gradual appropriation of the partisan by “aggressive, world-revolutionary forces”, Schmitt goes into the associated change in the partisan image of the enemy . The image of the enemy as the actual basis of Schmitt's theories also provides the basis for recognizing a radically evolving understanding of war. According to Schmitt, in the course of the cabinet wars of the 18th century, warfare had become so regular that “the enemy, as a mere conventional enemy, became the opponent of a war game”. Schmitt regards the artificial separation of international law between the declaration and the execution of enmity as a rare achievement of European mankind, since it made it possible to "renounce the criminalization of the enemy, i.e. the relativization of enmity, the denial of absolute enmity".

In the historical figure of the partisan in the Spanish Civil War , the category of real enmity reappeared after Schmitt . As one of the decisive cornerstones in Schmitt's theory of the partisan, it serves to distinguish between the autochthonous-tellurically founded partisan with a fundamentally defensive basic position and the revolutionary-aggressive activist of the world civil war , who no longer has the defense of national soil in view as the primary goal, but the Destruction of the class enemy in the context of the international civil war.

Drawing on Lenin's distinction between Woina (war) and Igra (game), Schmitt concludes that for Lenin only revolutionary war is true war, because it arises from absolute enmity. Everything else is a conventional game. Thus "the war became an absolute war and the partisan became the bearer of absolute enmity against an absolute enemy".

In Mao too, Schmitt sees a representative of real enmity. Using Mao's example, he describes why the real hostility persisted in the Cold War:

"This is therefore not about half war and half peace, but a confirmation of real enmity by other than overt violent means, adapted to the situation."

The technical aspect of partisanism

Schmitt regards technology as the most decisive aspect of his consideration of modern partisanism . Based on the fact that the modern partisan participates directly in the advances in science and technology and operates in a constantly changing environment, Schmitt comes to several conclusions:

• Even if he tries to hold on to the fundamentally telluric character of the partisan, he admits that the increase in partisan mobility could lead to a complete “de-localization” of the individual irregular fighter, so that he loses his telluric character and “only that which is transportable and an interchangeable tool of a powerful headquarters driving world politics “, a technician of the invisible struggle in the situation of the Cold War.

• Against the background of the availability of nuclear weapons of mass destruction , Schmitt asks about the future of the partisan and develops various scenarios:
  • He rejects the first, purely technical-optimistic, technically well-organized world without the "old, feudal-agrarian forms and ideas of struggle and war and enmity", in which the partisan would simply have outlived itself due to far-reaching structural changes. The reason for this rejection is on the one hand Schmitt's negative anthropology and on the other hand the assumption that the partisan will succeed in adapting to his changed technical-industrial environment and developing it further into a new form of the irregular fighter. Schmitt identified this new form with the term industrial partisan . As part of his pessimism for progress, he shows the possibility that such an industrial partisan could seize the most modern conventional and non-conventional means of destruction. The atomic equilibrium of the world powers enables the irregular fighters who use means of mass destruction and who would continue to operate irregularly within a limited framework controlled in scope and intensity by the world powers.
  • In his radically pessimistic tabula rasa scenario , Schmitt developed the need to train the post-atomic fighter now, who would be able to immediately occupy the bomb craters in the bomb-ravaged zone after a nuclear war, as a logical consequence of his previous idea to occupy destroyed territory . Alluding to his nomos theory, Schmitt states that "[...] a new type of partisan could add a new chapter to world history with a new type of spatial allocation". He uses the space race of the two superpowers, which was becoming topical at the time, to expand his nomos considerations into interplanetary space and to show the theoretical possibility of future cosmopartisans .

The total devaluation of the enemy against the background of supra-conventional weapons

After he had declared Lenin's trick to create an absolute partisan enemy image as still easily transparent, Schmitt goes at the end of his treatise to sketching what from his point of view absolutely compelling reason for this process. Schmitt sees the real reason for the change towards the absolute enemy and the resulting absolute enmity in nuclear weapons , the absolute weapons of destruction of the atomic age. Schmitt emphasizes, however, that it is not the means of destruction that destroy other people, but people who use these means. However, since it is the weapons used that shape the character of the fighter, “the supra-conventional weapon supposes the supra-conventional man”.

The real danger to mankind, however, does not lie in the presence of nuclear weapons or an inherent malice, but in an inescapable moral compulsion:

“The people who use these means against other people see themselves compelled to destroy these other people, ie their victims and objects, also morally. You have to declare the other side as a whole criminal and inhuman, totally worthless. Otherwise they are criminals and monsters themselves. "

According to Schmitt, value and worthlessness develop their own logic, and this forces "ever new, ever deeper discrimination, criminalization and devaluation up to the destruction of all life unworthy" - the destruction of the bearers of worthlessness.

Schmitt's considerations on the inevitability of a future nuclear exchange of blows lead to the conclusion that in the course of this fall into the abyss of total devaluation of the enemy, new types of absolute enmity would arise:

“The enmity will become so terrible that one may no longer even be allowed to speak of enemy or enmity and both will be outlawed and condemned in all forms before the work of annihilation can begin. The annihilation then becomes completely abstract and completely absolute. It is no longer directed against an enemy at all, but only serves an allegedly objective enforcement of the highest values, for which, as is well known, no price is too high. Only the denial of the real enmity clears the way for the annihilation work of an absolute enmity. "

reception

The political scientist Wolfgang Kraushaar from the Hamburg Institute for Social Research said that Hans-Jürgen Krahl must have received Carl Schmitt's theory of the partisan , as emerged from the criteria and demarcations for the definition of the guerrilla that he and Rudi Dutschke at a famous SDS delegates' conference in 1967 developed (so-called organizational unit). Such an orientation of left theorists on the partisan theory published by Schmitt in 1963 is in fact not unlikely. For example, the Maoist Joachim Schickel published a “Conversation about the Partisans” with Carl Schmitt in his 1970 book Guerilleros, Partisanen - Theory and Practice , describing him as the “ only available author ” who “ spoke competently on the subject ” (Schickel , Conversations with Carl Schmitt, 1993, p. 9).

The right-wing -Forscherin Natasha Strobl recommends reading the partisans among other texts as an introduction to the conceptual model New Right ideology.

literature

• Partisan's theory. Intermediate note on the concept of the political , Duncker & Humblot, 5th edition, ISBN 3-428-08439-X .
• Herfried Münkler : The partisan. Theory, Strategy, Shape , VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1990, ISBN 3-531-12192-8 .
• Joachim Schickel: Guerrilleros, Partisanen, Theory and Practice , Hanser, 2nd ed. 1970.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On the exotic nature of the theme chosen by Schmitt, cf. Marcus Llanque , A bearer of the political after the end of statehood: The partisan in Carl Schmitt's political theory, p. 61. In: Herfried Münkler (ed.), Der Partisan, 1990.
2. ↑ telluric - concerning the earth, coming from it; see. Wiktionary: telluric .
3. ↑ Natascha Strobl: Tweet from March 3, 2020 (thread). In: Twitter. Natascha Strobl, March 3, 2020, accessed on March 3, 2020 .