We’re All Schmittian Now

The late 20^th century was the ushering in of a new era of politics beyond politics. The post-political and post-historical consensus that great ideological conflicts were at an end and governments could settle into the administration of people and things. The shift to governmentality as described by Foucault, “an art of managing things and persons, concerned with tactics, not laws”[1] in which sovereignty, as the distinction of a state to mark an exception, is sublimated. A technocratic, global architecture of international law and institutionalisation sits atop this post-political landscape. As the state is decentred as the locus of power, international institutions step in to set the limits and decide the rules of the game.

Such institutionalisation is aped in national contexts, with a growing bureaucratic complexity in all major developed nations that intertwines with its international counterparts. Health authorities become enmeshed with the WHO. Legal authorities with their transnational equivalents (the ECJ, ICHR or ICC for example). Corporations and delegations with their respective bodies of representation (G7, WTO, UNCTAD, etc.). Everything now is networked in a complex heterarchy of relations that falls outside the sovereign (i.e. exclusive) control of a particular power.

Sovereigns are now “the newly invigorated subjects of managerial power”[2]. Bureaucratic apparatuses have under their purview a wide range of powers to detain individuals, suspend normal life as during the COVID pandemic and create regulatory strictures that international companies have to abide by to invest or employ (equality or civil rights legislation, affirmative action protocols, EDI or sustainability targets). However, they lack the power of finality. There is no single arbiter, as these decisions are strained through a series of committees, commissions and tribunals that accede to an abstracted understanding of the law. Butler describes it in the case of military detentions of terrorist suspects during the War on Terror. The use of torture and indefinite detention in Guantanamo by US forces was a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions, yet the Bush administration changed the defining characteristics of how those accords affected US policies, suggesting the administration met the spirit of the conventions.

Governmentality and sovereignty were mixed, with the sovereign treating legal regulations of conduct as tactics through which they could overcome the resultant obligations. The Geneva Conventions could not be broken because terrorist combatants are non-state actors which falls outside the scope of the convention. They can be tortured because the interrogation techniques don’t fall under previously established definitions of torture, and besides their status as stateless people means they aren’t beholden to the conventions. Sovereign power does not except from the obligations, instead tactically negotiating the legal frameworks.

Post-political conflict management defined by the private reason of military commanders and bureaucratic regulations of tribunals and extra-legal combat and detention policies. The post-political condition, that of a life politics of choice encouraged through individual action and reasoning while encased in a matrix of defined possibilities that aren’t necessarily legally binding but provide a means through which good and bad conduct can be vaguely defined, is the apotheosis of the mechanised state as in Hobbes’ Leviathan. The covenant that Hobbes stated was the first move out of the state of nature is “something more than and something different from a covenant concluded by individuals. The assemblage of men gathered together by the fright of fiends cannot, from the presuppositions of their gathering, overcome hostility”[3]. What emerges is a machine of government born of innate reason. Such a covenant can only be concluded on the basis that reasoning individuals chose to submit to a sovereign power. But this power cannot be another individual, but instead a mechanism of control and coercion that extends beyond one man.

The innate paradox of liberal governance is in this construction. “At this point enters the differentiation between inner faith and outer confession into the political system of the Leviathan. Hobbes declares the question of wonder and miracle to be a matter of in contrast to “private” reason; but on the basis of universal freedom of thought—quia cogitatio omnis libera est—he leaves to the private reason whether to believe or not to believe and to preserve his own judicium in his heart, intra pectus suum. But as soon as it comes to public confession of faith, private judgment ceases and the sovereign decides about the hue and the false. The distinction between private and public, faith and confession, fides and confessio, is introduced in a way from which everything else was logically derived in the century that ensued until the rise of the liberal state. The modern “neutral” state, derived from agnosticism and not from the religiosity of Protestant sectarians, originated at this point. If looked at from the perspective of constitutional history, a dual beginning was made here: first, the juristically (not theologically) constructed beginning of modern, individualistic right of freedom of thought and conscience and thereby the characteristic individual freedoms embodied in the structure of the liberal constitutional system; and, second the evolution of the state from one inherently void of substantive truth into a justifiable external power, the stato neutrale e agnostico of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In one segment of his work”[4].

Contradictions between private reason and public confession create the basis for a post-political state, beyond ideological conflict and toward a mechanisation of order. Butler has it backwards in her reasoning in suggesting that managerialism and governmentality supersede sovereignty. Rather, sovereignty winds it way through new mechanisms of government. Beyond the exception, we now have the declaration of emergency as the means of sovereign power. It was states and international institutions that implemented lockdown protocols in 2020. It has been international coalitions under the umbrella of American hegemony that have been at the forefront of military conflicts for the past 30 years. It is a combination of bureaucratic regulations developed by intelligence agencies with transport architecture and internet accessibility (through the ubiquity of the HTTP protocol and later through social media algorithms – the sovereignty of the stack[5] and the power of administrative black boxes[6]) that has brought draconian security policies and mass surveillance techniques. It is the evolution of sovereignty, the evolution of the exception and its subsequent fragmentation, from a basic cartography of bordered states to an oceanography of bureaucratic and institutional complexity[7].

In defining the exception, we define the other that power is exercised against. “For as long as a people exists in the political sphere, this people must, even if only in the most extreme case—and whether this point has been reached has to be decided by it—determine by itself the distinction of friend and enemy. Therein resides the essence of its political existence. When it no longer possesses the capacity or the will to make this distinction, it ceases to exist politically”[8]. However, much as managerialism was proffered as the successor to sovereignty as the organisational principle of governance, post-politics proffered a politics beyond the friend-enemy distinction.

The attempted escape from this distinction into pure administration has produced a mutation of this distinction into these institutions. While they are meant to be bastions of objectivity, selflessness and honesty (i.e. following the Nolan Principles that govern the conduct of civil servants and elected officials in the UK[9]), they are themselves politically motivated in their aims and regulations. “A system that blatantly invents pretexts to invade and occupy foreign countries, which conducts mass surveillance and censors its own citizens, which locks down millions of healthy people and attempts to force them to take experimental vaccines, which is currently importing a foreign population into the heart of the country, and which does not hesitate to invert the very concept of justice in order to weaponize the justice system against democratic opposition”[10]. The use of made-up legal pretexts to prosecute Trump, removing all forms of legal objectivity[11]. The unaccountable conduct of intelligence agencies[12]. The introduction of curriculums which centre postcolonial and privilege theories. All of these are defining an enemy, an other, through which their efforts are directed toward combatting.

In many ways it’s intuitive. These institutions accrue power and develop a desire to grow further, much as any business would. Equally, they are innately political. Their functions in the distribution of goods, the penalisation of particular activities or the regulation and taxation of specific actions or entities creates a definable border between themselves and those they regulate. Governmentality then is the fragmentation of the distinction, and with it the fracturing of the exception. Now every agency or committee has the power of exception and the capacity to define what that exception excepts. There is no objectivity beyond the aims of institutions and their ideological character. The coronavirus pandemic was a particularly egregious example, in that livelihoods were destroyed through a variety of committee meetings (i.e. COBRA or SAGE), WHO proclamations and decrees with no central governing force. Everything was a deliberated decision, but with consensus drilled in from the beginning (with any physician or epidemiologist sitting outside of this consensus being relentlessly hounded and smeared). An abstract, ever-changing enemy emerged. It started with rulebreakers and anti-maskers, then anti-vaxxers and finally those who simply questioned the efficacy of lockdowns or the validity of ridiculous claims like over 50% of people getting long-COVID after an infection.

This is the nature of post-political sovereignty, the ultimate oxymoron. “A people which exists in the sphere of the political cannot in case of need renounce the right to determine by itself the friend-and-enemy distinction. It can solemnly declare that it condemns war as a means of solving international disputes and can renounce it as a means of national policy, as was done in the so-called Kellogg Pact of 1928. In so doing it has neither repudiated war as an instrument of international politics (and a war as an instrument of international politics can be worse than a war as an instrument of a national policy only) nor condemned nor outlawed war altogether”[13].

The enemies are now diffuse, and the ideological conflicts are fuzzy, but they are there. Occasionally they emerge in more concrete terms, as in the Israel-Palestine conflict where an existential war over the ownership of the Levant is being spoken of in medieval terms, as a conflict akin to the Crusades in its necessity and outcome[14]. However, they are more like the Russia-Ukraine war – difficult to define, no endgame in sight[15] and mediated via international coalitions, with little desire for an outcome from either side[16]. “At this moment, the oligarchy wields an awesome complex of official and unofficial powers to exclude whomever it chooses from society’s mainstream”[17]. This is sovereignty in the 21^st century, the unwritten rule being that enemies of the regime are multiple and none at the same time. Global institutions dare not admit who their enemies are, particularly when they happen to be ordinary people desirous of a degree of autonomy from overbearing government or the arbitrary whims of administrators and managers.

So in some ways we’re in a limbo between managerialism and sovereign power. But beneath the surface something is obvious – every institution has an enemy who their power is directed against. We may think we’re beyond politics, but we are all Schmittian now.

[1] Judith Butler, Precarious Life

[2] Judith Butler, Precarious Life

[3] Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes

[4] Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes

[5] Benjamin Bratton, The Stack

[6] Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society

[7] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2021/02/15/institutional-oceanography/

[8] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

[9] https://dailysceptic.org/2024/06/03/britains-moralising-ruling-class-would-rather-neuter-democracy-than-deal-with-its-complexities/

[10] https://im1776.com/2024/06/01/trump-verdict/

[11] https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/19/clarity-in-trumps-wake/

[12] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2023/06/17/autonomous-agencies-and-the-spectre-of-disinformation/