|
April 21, 2005
In Four Articles 1931-1938 Carl Schmitt argues for the emergence of a total state. How relevant, or useful, is this idea to the current situation of the conservative national security state fighting the war on terrorism?
Schmitt traces the emergence of the total state in a variety of ways. He says:
"In every modern state, the distinction between state and economy emerges as the real issue of the current, direct questions of internal policy. They can no longer be answered by means of the old liberal principle of unqualified non-interference and unrestricted non-intervetion. ..In the present day state, the economic questions constitute the core of the difficulties of the internal policy, and all the more so, the more modern and industrial the state is. Internal and foreign policies are economic policies to a considerable extent, and...not just as customs and trade policy or as social policy."
This is familar to us. It is the Keynesian welfare state. But Schmittt goes further in delineating the contours of the emerging total state. The transformation in the nature of the state can also be seen in the resistance to, and clampdown on, the powerful legislative state:
"At the very moment whern the victory seemed to be fully its own, parliament, the legislative body, the vehicle and keystone of the legislative state, turned into a contradiction-ridden structure, disowning its own qualifications and premises of its victory [over the old monarchy]. Its previous position and superiority, its expansionalist drive at the expense of the government, its representation in the name of the people, all that presupposed the distinction between state and soceity did not survive the parliament's victory, at least not in that form."
Schmitt goes on to say that Parliament changes itself from:
"...a stage for unifying free debate among free representatives of the people, from a transformer of narrow party interests into a supra party will, into a stage for the pluralistic division of the organized societal powers."
The name for this tendency of overcoming the sovereignty of Parliament in Australia is executive dominance.
|
