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October 22, 2004
If we adopt Carl Schmitt’s distinction of the political—the friend/enemy distinction--- then all politics can be seen as struggle. Can we not see fear as a part of this struggle. A fear of being destroyed by one's enemies?
The implication that Schmitt draws in the Concept of the Political is that:
"War is neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the very content of politics. But as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and thereby creates a specifically political behavior.” (p.34)
The recognition of politics as “conflict and war” does not need to mean literally a war—nor does it mean war in the Hobbesian sense of “a war of all against all". Rather, it is the struggle of one collective grouping against another for autonomy.
By viewing politics in this fashion, we can achieve better understanding of struggles around class, the environment colonization, ethnic nationalism and between polticla parties (eg., LNP v ALP in Australia and Republicans v Democrats in the US). between nation-states. Schmitt’s concept of the political opens up politics to solidarity and takes us beyond the functions of states. Thus political struggle within parliamentary politics, or in civil society around the environment, is where individuals and collectives choose to unite in a political struggle against other political groupings.
Another example is the aboriginal question in Australia. The treatment of Aborigines in the creation of European civilisation in Australia is a question of injustice that presently haunts all our serious political debates. The cold war conservatives were so concentrated on the evils of Nazism and Communism, (what they called totalitarianism) that they failed to gain an understanding of the question of Aboriginal injustice.
In contrasting the barbarity of political conditions in totalitarian Europe with the dull decency, liberty and rule of law in the political life in the Australia of the second half of the twentieth century, they averted their gaze from evils closer to home and to abandon hope for the creation here of a better world.
A lot of that conflict between white and black in Australia (and elsewhere) is structured around fear of cruelty.
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