The friend vs. enemy distinction & its application

There's clearly a certain truth to Schmitt's friend vs. enemy distinction and the importance he assigns to it. This distinction is all over social science (and literature, etc.) in the form of the "other". Basically, what Schmitt seems to be describing is an advanced manifestation of the "other" conceptualization with a political application (Look at all those big words!). Schmitt limits the friend vs. enemy distinction entirely to "the political", saying that other manifestations of the other dynamic should be labeled differently in non-political situations.

So my criticism of this point-of-view is severalfold. First, Schmitt seems to have invented his own semantic system with regards to this distinction which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me (maybe it has something to do with the translation, but I'm doubtful). As far as I'm concerned -- and Schmitt was unsuccessful in convincing me of the contrary -- one can conceive of anybody with similar interests as a "friend" and opposing ones as a "foe/enemy". These can be economic interests (somebody who wants to balance the budget a certain way could easily conceive of someone with a different take as an "enemy"), social ones, etc. I think Schmitt's point was that only in political circumstances does the enmity get advanced enough to describe the relationship between the two actors as a "friend vs. foe" one. But, I'm unconvinced of that. Again, it's a question of semantics, but I always have a hard time when an author makes up his own semantic system and expects me just to go along with it.

Additionally, I disagree with Schmitt's limitation of "the political" as extending only to situations in which the threat of war underlies all negotiations. Certainly this is true in the case of interaction between countries internationally, but Schmitt's definition requires us to disregard practically all intranational negotiations (except circumstances in which Civil War seems to be a potentiality). And these are the types of interactions that we generally conceive of as "politics" or "political" more than anything else. Even if you still hold that the representatives that we're referring to here represent states and populations with the means and, conceivably, the desire to go to war with one another if sufficiently agitated, I feel that you still have to take what we generally conceive of as "inter- and intra-organizational politics" into account. Having been a member of non-profit organizations and having watched how "politics" (or what I've always conceived of as politics) take root in daily interactions, I have a hard time discounting this side of the political altogether. But Schmitt requires that I do, because nowhere does the threat of physical violence and retaliation come into play.

So, my point is, Schmitt's definition is unnecessarily specific and limiting to an understanding of what really is "political"

The Objective Enemy

Our discussion in class of Schmitt's ideas of the enemy left me wondering about what an enemy might be. Of course according to Schmitt global warming is not what he would consider an enemy, and neither is terrorism. So what is it that we fight these days? We do not fight for ideals and visions for the future, unless that includes economic gains and military might. We does not include individual goals or desires, it is that of the state. What makes me wonder is that apparently the people are supposed to be a part of that state. How is it that our collective points of view get distilled into something like the war on terrorism? Does human behavior constantly strive to find an enemy? Are we out of enemies? I do not think we are done being against each other's ideals, but governments in a global society have to take more difficult routs to get the population to do what it wants.

Many still do follow the government blindly, otherwise our global community would fall to pieces and require a new beginning. I think that most people did not really care enough about the political enemy unless it might injure them directly. In order to get people on the side of the government in terms of obtaining power and funding, there has to be an enemy. Terrorists are better than global warming, so it is best to target them. At least they exist! Who has created the problem of global warming and AIDS other than many years of drivers and sex addicts? The enemy has to be invoked because otherwise the only people left to blame for any problems we encounter are ourselves.

I think a better way to discuss the political is to say that governments and political parties gives up someone to complain about. If we are out of complaints and have come to terms with the previous aggressor, then a political party needs to supply a new motivating factor to drive on society. Before the more modern ages, it was enough to fight to stay alive against the elements of nature. Since we think we have dealt with nature (excepting of course our recent Katrina case) we must move onto the things that might "really kill us". Because global warming isn't killing us yet, there will be no move to stop it. Since AIDS isn't killing all of us yet, or at least political leaders or rich people as a whole, there will be no move to stop it. This list may include cancer, traffic congestion, steroids in baseball (yes this is important), children who want education who can not afford it, children who need to eat, children who waste their education on alcohol, rape, murder...etc. I think the position of the leaders consists of "its not killing me or my family, so why should I care?". As soon as some scandal is uncovered, when enough people are killed, then we step up to the plate.

The enemy is simply someone who managed to take enough of us out that we need to react because we fear for our own lives. This we is the political leadership. As soon as they are scared enough, or enthused enough by an opportunity, they take action. Nature isn't enough any more to scare us, now it is oil availability and people who blow themselves up at parties. Can anyone think of a time in recent history that politics acted for something other than economic gain or military might? I cant, please... help me think.

I don't "buy" it..(of course, no pun about economic liberalism intended in the slightest)

In section 8, Schmitt discusses the threat that economic liberalism poses to the concept of the political. “For the purpose of protecting individual freedom and private property, liberalism provides a series of methods for hindering and controlling the state’s and government’s power. It makes of the state a compromise and of its institutions a ventilating system and, moreover, balances monarchy against democracy and vice versa” (70). Furthermore, he states that “no consistent individualism can entrust to someone other than to the individual himself the right to dispose of the physical life of the individual” (71).

I realize that Schmitt grew up in a period and in a country where harsh state control was the norm and that the repression was seen as necessary for the greater good, but I question his assumption that the perpetuation of “the political” is better when given the choice between that and a liberal world. At least in the liberal world, one has free choice and is not expected to offer his life to the “higher purpose” of the state. What is wrong with decrying repression and lack of freedom? According to Schmitt, this leads to a “system of demilitarized and depoliticized concepts” (71) which he implies is negative. My question is this: perhaps I’m not understanding the point he’s trying to make, and if so, please comment, but, aside from making the concept of the political (and therefore a whole treatise on its meaning) completely irrelevant, what is wrong with such a demilitarized, depoliticized world? Perhaps it’s that we would then not be able to differentiate friends and enemies? Why does someone have to fit into one or the other—why can’t someone be part friend and part enemy? That seems to fit more closely with what I’ve learned of human nature—people are rarely ever completely for you or completely against you and are more interested in how their feelings about you will affect them. Please comment if you have thoughts because I think perhaps I’m not understanding Schmitt (I’m on migraine medicine and a bit tripped out, admittedly).

Schmitt mentions that “instead of a clear distinction between the two different states, that of war and that of peace, there appears the dynamic of perpetual competition and perpetual discussion. The state turns into society…the self-understood will to repel the enemy in a given battle situation turns into a rationally constructed social ideal or program. … At the intellectual pole, government and power turns into propaganda and mass manipulation, and at the economic pole, control” (72). Given what has come out as of late about the Bush administration’s lies concerning Iraq on the one hand and the northern hegemony in organizations such as the WTO, IMF, etc., this certainly seems to be the case in our society today. Perhaps it comes down to whether ambiguity about who actually is the enemy is necessarily a bad thing. I would say that since WWII, a clear cut, easily identifiable enemy (“Communism”, our biggest enemy for a long time, was not even a physical being) has been increasingly absent from our world. Since it’s the world we’re living in, I guess I fail to see why the world which Schmitt advocates is an improvement.

The enemy other

I confess I'm not all the way through Schmitt yet, but so far I'm finding him pretty interesting. When he is first introducing his theory of an "ultimate distinction" between friend and emeny, he writes:

The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. (p27)

I think it's interesting that Schmitt doesn't say that the enemy should be portrayed as the "other" but rather, it is in his nature that he is the enemy. I'm sure he didn't write with science fiction in mind, but it relates strongly to books like Ender's Game or movies like Starship Troopers where the very nature of aliens make them the enemy.

However, even in Ender's game, the line between friend and enemy isn't so easy. Even though the aliens are about as different as you can get, Ender and the queen find a commonality, and become not enemies, but friends. Even though Schmitt states that enemies are not necessarily at war, but rather that conflicts are possible, in my opinion the very nature of the relationship between humans and the buggers changes with the Speaker for the Dead's story of the bugger queen.

Additionally, Schmitt's idea that all relationships of states with other entities can be simplified to "friend" or "enemy" is overly simplistic. Conflict with any nation is possible, no matter how unlikely it may seem; then, is every nation an enemy?

The political in Ender's game

The clarity and simplicity of Schmitt's antithesis of "friend" and "enemy" being the basis of politics was really striking. Although his logic took a lot of twists and turns and, on this point at least, I never felt like it completely and fully established its own truth, it is still obviously a very useful way to conceive of political struggles. The division between the self and the other is clearly present in practically every part of the political spectrum.

I also found it very interesting to consider the struggles in Ender's Game in light of this conceptualization. Ender does assume a very political role for much of the book, particularly during the latter half or so of his training at Battle School. He acts in order to inspire respect, to garner allegiance, to fulfill everyone's expectations of him as the "chosen child", the "destined savior" of the human race or whatever it is. It's easy to see in Ender's relationship with other characters the division between friend and enemy (though the role of enemy is often imposed upon him by others, whereas Ender would have been content to remain politically "neutral"). Nonetheless, when the role of enemy is cast on you, you must assume it and reverse its definition back upon its imposer, who then becomes enemy from your perspective -- because, as Schmitt mentions, not to accept this antithesis and play by its rules is to ignore the underlying root of political dispute -- the threat of war.

And Ender uses this threat of war; he understands its significance and its political usefulness (and necessity). (I'm talking about on an inter-personal level, of course, not about the war he [inadvertently] wages on the buggers). Ender's calculating nature when it comes to combat, his ability to make preemptive strikes in order to prevent further problems in the future, is a very political asset. So is the more pacifistic way he creates allegiances among the members of his army, manipulates and uses their abilities and resources, etc.

There are also obvious themes of the political which tie into Schmitt's ideas in the subplot of Demosthenes and Locke, buttt.... they're not quite as interesting so I won't get into them here.

Encounters with the other

(Sorry this is late, guys – my internet wasn't really working, so I actually wrote this last night....)

In Ender’s Game, there’s a huge gap of understanding between the humans and the buggers. Both species fail to understand the intentions of the other, not just because they don’t try, but because their intentions are (literally) alien to each other.

In class, a comparison was made between the human/bugger encounter and the European/Native American encounter. I think this was a particularly apt metaphor, for a number of reasons.

For one thing, there’s communication. When the first explorers (and conquistadors) set foot in the New World and met the indigenous people, not only were they unable to communicate with the natives, but sometimes did not even recognize their speech as language. The same problem occurs between the buggers and the humans – not only can they not communicate, but they can’t even recognize each other’s communication as existing.

Another similarity is that Native Americans and European explorers couldn’t understand each others’ motivations. Native Americans could not understand the idea of personal property and ownership of land; Europeans could not understand Native American tribal organization and group possession of land. Similarly, whereas the buggers could not understand that each human was an independent being, humans didn’t understand the biological connection shared by buggers.

Contact with aliens is something we’ve only been able to speculate about, but I do think it's likely that the contact would result in conflict, just as most human contact with an "other" has throughout history.

Schmitt: Friends and Foe

It is an interesting idea that Carl Schmitt presents in determining how political groups have both friends and enemies. The state, as a political entity, is separate from humanity. Schmitt argues that "humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet" (54). Instead he argues that wars waged for the sake of humanity are not really for humanity but instead for political powers. Though he doesn't really touch too much more on this throughout the rest of his book, I find it interesting that no human can be the enemy of another human. I had always assumed that human beings were primarily enemies of other human beings, and animals or even alien species that we have not yet discovered could not really be our enemies. They would instead be a threat, or a dangerous animal that we need to take precautions against. Instead here Schmitt argues that an enemy must be made inhuman in order to fight against them. This idea makes sense for large scale battles and wars, but in the case of the individual, I'm not sure that humanity cannot wage war upon itself.

Looking back at Ender's game in the battle school, the children fought against each other knowing full well that they were all a part of humanity. Even Peter Wiggen was a member of the human race even though his ideas and actions were twisted. Ender found it perfectly possible to fight against members of the children's army, granted it was not a real war. His relationship with the other members of the battle school was constant strife. The fights that took place between any of the human characters in the book was a struggle of human against human. When he kills the buggers, Ender thinks he is playing a game to beat out his teachers and Graff. Even in Dune Paul fights against the emperor as his enemy who is also a human. I would say that it is definitely possible for humanity to wage a war against itself, and that self can be an enemy. You do not need a foreign species to make up an enemy.