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March 27, 2006
I see that Carl Schmitt's seminal work with an international focus, Der Nomos der Erde has recently been made available in English--it has been translated by G.L. Ulmen as The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeaum. (Telos Press, 2003). One strand of argument is that the French Revolution on, wars were being increasingly fought over moral doctrines ----most recently over claims to be representing "human rights." Such a tendency has replicated the mistakes of the Age of Religious Wars in that it has turned armed force from a means to achieve limited territorial goals, when diplomatic resources fail, to a crusade for universal goodness against a demonized enemy.
Is this not what has happened with Tony Blair's use of liberal universalism and liberal interventionism against international terrorism? He sees it a struggle about values and about modernity--about goodness versus badness. Blair comes across as if he were on a crusade against the people who hate us. His war is a struggle about justice and tolerance as well as security and prosperity and it is a reworking of Republican Washington's view of the world as sharply divided between "us" and the "enemies of freedom" .
One can read their conception of the war on terrorism through the lens of Schmitt's The Nomos of the Earth. Theirs is is a morally-inspired and unlimited "total war," in which the adversary is not treated as a "just enemy"; their war highlights the obsoleteness of traditional rules of warfare and recourse to novel technologies--especially air powe ---so as to conduct discriminatory wars against adversaries viewed as outlaws and enemies of humanity; Camp Delta in the Guantanamo naval base with its still over 500 prisoners from the Afghanistan war is a normless exception that reveals the nature of the new international political order of which the United States is the guardian --- the source of the normative order, itself unbound by it.
This quote sums up the ethos of liberal interventionism with military force in international affairs:
"The day will come, we are convinced of it, when we are going to be able to say to a dictator: 'Mr. Dictator we are going to stop you preventively from oppressing, torturing and exterminating your ethnic minorities.'"
Australia and the UN in East Timor is a classic example. Clinton and NATO intervening in the Balkans to protect Kosovo is another. Liberal democracies should intervene to stop atrocities, or help people to establish liberal democracies; and no absolute principle of national sovereignty, or fear of US imperialism, should stand in their way.
The harder more militant edge of liberal interventionism is the conception of liberalism as the battle for universal freedom, and as a revolutionary project for universal liberation by bringing about political revolutions in remote corners of the world. This provides the justification for the liberal hawks intervention in Iraq by the UK, US and Australian governments---they did so in order to liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny and bring them freedom and democracy. This example of a Liberal Interventionist rationale for intervention is what is advocated by Tony Blair, the British Prime MInister. As a liberal hawk he sees himself as a defender of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention and he is an advocate for the role of idealism and values in foreign policy.
Liberal interventionism is different from Conservative interventionism, as the latter is essentially dressed up imperialism---actions are done in order to serve the empire's self-interest. Foreign policy should concern itself exclusively with the national [imperial] interest and exclude consideration of human rights and liberal values.
Schmitt also argued in The Nomos of the Earth that there is tendency toward a universal state that seemed closely linked to Anglo-American hegemony (a "New World Order"?). Americans, Schmitt argued, aspire to a world state because they make universal claims for their way of life. They view "liberal democracy" as something they are morally bound to export. They are pushed by ideology, as well as by the nature of their power, toward a universal friend/enemy distinction.
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LIBERALS ARE SCUM!