The war in the center of the political: The actuality of Schmitt's view of war

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of Carl Schmitt's theoretical considerations of the concept of the political. Schmitt's theory of the political had grown on distinguishing between friend and enemy, which this author considered as specifically political distinction that all political activity could be brought down to, unrelated to other relatively independent areas of human thought and actions. The core of this theory is the political struggle and the possibility of war as the ultimate intensity of this struggle. Schmitt's considerations of war are still interesting and topical today, thirty years after his death, and his scientific papers - including those published before World War II - testify to his profound deliberation of the essence of war and mature, sometimes visionary, insights in its metamorphosis, from religious wars and legally limited wars of modern-age European states, through economy-motivated wars and wars of imperialist expansion, to the cold war and the state of non-war. Schmitt's emphasis of hypocrisy and ideology of liberalism, which is prone to justify the war as 'the war in the name of humanity' and to replace the term 'war' with various euphemisms, while actually dehumanizing it, can be used even today as one of most well-founded 'blows from the right' to neoliberal concepts of the world arrangement. Schmitt's theoretical considerations, lit by dim light of the knowledge of the political and existential evil, brought in once again on the wings of interventions, but this time to those whose secular dictatorships were overthrown in North Africa and the Middle East, and, by all odds, complicated and long-lasting armed conflicts and political instability promoted instead, have attained new significance.

Keywords

• the political
• state
• enemy
• struggle
• war
• intervention