Jean Thiriart:
EUROPE AS FAR AS VLADIVOSTOCK

           
Robert Steuckers

Interview with Robert Steuckers about politics, conservative revolution, 
spirituality, eurasianism  and "synergies"

Schmitt's critics, from scandalized fellow Catholics to self-proclaimed liberal-democrats, have maintained that his distinction between liberalism and democracy was purely contrived. Indeed it was intended to achieve a baneful political effect: discredit the battered remnants of Weimar German parliamentary government and prepare the ground for a fascist dictatorship bottomed on a mythic popular will and without constitutional restraints. This argument is stated most exhaustively by Jurgen Fialowski in Die Wendung zum Fuhrerstaat in 1958, but it also continues to spill over into invectives against Schmitt encountered in The New Republic and elsewhere.

To this particular brief against Schmitt, as a perpetually calculating proto-fascist, his recent defenders, including myself, have responded by citing his documentable opposition to the Nazis in 1931 and 1932. One can also point to his proposals from the twenties on, to make the Weimar Constitution workable by institutionalising sweeping presidential powers in the face of threats to the German state and Weimar regime. Note that Schmitt supported a broad use of executive power under the socialist president Friedrich Ebert as well as Ebert's conservative successor, Paul von Hindenburg.

What unites Schmitt's critics and defenders however, is the belief concerning his steady preference for democracy over liberalism. Most interpreters are inclined to accept what Giovanni Sartori has remarked in this connection, that liberalism can be defined as whatever Schmitt was not; and certainly there is enough deprecation of liberals and liberalism in Schmitt's corpus to prove his antagonistic relationship to both.

Even so, his views of liberalism and democracy were more problematic than is often imagined; and though Schmitt treated his two points of reference as polar opposites, he did not conceptualize them always in exactly the same way, even less did he attach the same value judgement to both from the early twenties onwards. In Political Theology in 1922, Schmitt ridicules what Juan Donoso-Cortis had called "la clasa discutidora", the liberal bourgeoisie, who sought to turn all principled positions into the bases for mere compromise.

Taking a leaf from the Spanish Catholic counter-revolutionary of the 1830s and 1840s (Donoso), Schmitt goes after middle-class parliamentarians for excessive reliance on legal arrangements. He ascribes this political faith to the prevalent Deism of the European bourgeoisie, going back to the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Bourgeois liberals had transferred to the political realm the deistic belief in a self-regulating universe overseen by a divine watchmaker, whence their lack of understanding for the necessarily conflictual nature of political life and the need for sovereigns to settle the otherwise widening disputes between classes and interests.

It is certainly possible to glimpse in Political Theology the beginning of a critique against liberalism, which Schmitt was already developing in the early twenties. Significantly, the same work does not set over against the image of bovine and politically simple-minded liberals an attractive democratic alternative, quite the contrary. Democrats are shown to be idolaters of the popular will who yearn for revolutionary violence. Schmitt describes democrats as typically pantheistic; he takes, without attribution, Alexis de Tocqueville's warning from Book Two, Chapter Seven of Democracy in America that pantheism is the philosophic system most likely to seduce the human spirit in democratic centuries.

Schmitt's exaltation of an organic conception of democracy against liberalism indifferent to historical specificities and the need for unified authority was not a permanent aspect of his thinking. It marked only one period of time in his working career of more than seventy years, from the late twenties until Hitler's accession to power in January 1933. Schmitt viewed the Nazi regime as a sovereign dictatorship that had irreversibly replaced the preceding German government. He did not represent it as a mere continuation of a reformed Weimar constitutional order born of a legal revolution, nor did he consider Hitler's regime to be the flowering of German democracy. Schmitt, we may presume, was serious when he spoke of Germany in the mid-thirties as exemplifying the total state in the era of integral politics. Even at his ingratiating worst under the Third Reich, Schmitt presented the totalist politics of the modern era as a historical fate, what the Greeks had called ta peproma, an allotted destiny that is inflicted rather than freely chosen. In an Italian paper delivered in 1936, The Era of Total Politics, Schmitt notes that

"the current concept of politics has revealed its characteristic totality in the fact that war has become total, that it is a given quantity, from which there must proceed any analysis of internal as well as external politics. Through total war the essential necessity of the fullest inner unity of every belligerent power had displayed itself, together with total hostility toward the outside."

I for one do not read these passages as an ecstatic affirmation of the New Europe. Schmitt's own writings warn against total, ideologically-driven wars; and his thirty-year defence of the vanishing European order of sovereign states was related to his stated concern about avoiding the war of all against all. Schmitt defended the European state system that arose in the early modern period as a bulwark against unrestricted violence within and between countries. He did not praise that system for helping to mobilize populations for total war.

Equally implausible is the claim that Schmitt identified the German total state under the Nazis with authentic democracy. In fact, it may be argued that Hitler's sovereign dictatorship appeared to him as the outcome of Germany's failure to embrace Schmitt's own democratic remedy. Hitler took advantage of liberal anarchy and the absence of a German plebiscitary democracy to establish his total state. Schmitt's construction of a democratic alternative to what he considered Germany's collapsing liberal regime was devised specifically between 1928 and 1932 as a quid tertium. It was intended to foster a conservative executive as opposed to a parliamentary liberal regime, that would keep alive the German state and permit it to deal with revolutionary extremists. It is of course undeniable that Schmitt shouldered this legal and conceptual task with his own theoretical baggage. As most of his sympathetic critics concede, he was a conservative of a decidedly authoritarian bent, though not a socialist and not much of a nationalist. Schmitt clearly valued the state and his tracts of the early thirties was far more concerned with using the German president to preserve what remained of political authority than to uphold the Weimar Constitution. His prescription for rebuilding the Weimar regime around an expansion of Presidential powers derivative from Article 48 of the Constitution would have done more than simply provide the President with a strengthened basis for rule. It would have had the effect of reconstructing the German government by transferring the locus of authority away from parliamentary coalitions towards a popularly elected head of state.

It must also be admitted that Schmitt makes an overly desperate attempt to divorce democracy completely from the principle of equality, e.g. insisting that "in democracy there is only the equality of the truly equal and the will of those who belong to them", that "self-proclaimed democracies practice domination over colonies while teaching the equality of citizens at home", and finally, that "democratic equality really means homogeneity" and is inapplicable as an ideal for "all of humanity". Such definitions highlight aspects of democracy that most modern theorists ignore, but then, modern democracy has become synonymous with what Schmitt calls "mass democracy", as opposed to classical republicanism.

The association of democracy with cohesion and unity was a feature of pre-modern republicanism; but it is far from clear that the term democracy in the twentieth century applies predominantly to communities. Though not false, Schmitt's definition of democracy is at least somewhat forced and made to serve as an authoritarian traditionalist pole to liberal constitutionalism. Even more important, it was a response to a real political predicament, the breakdown of Weimar parliamentary government. Schmitt may have exaggerated the dangerous and naive character of normativism of whom there are by now there are few genuine practitioners left, yet in the twenties and early thirties, Hans Kelsen and other influential legal theorists represented a wide spread view that constitutional government, barring unexpected catastrophe, was reducible to properly constructed legal rules. Presumably the Weimar Constitution contained such norms and through legally prescribed rotation of party coalitions under a watchful but not over-bearing executive, German parliamentarianism could weather any storm, just about any, one should add. Constitutional architects like Hugo Preuss conferred emergency powers on the President, in the eventuality of the parliamentary system breaking down, though such a breakdown, it was hoped, would never be more than temporary. The President, moreover, could decide when emergency powers were needed, but he was also expected to return as soon as possible to Cabinet government which commanded a parliamentary majority.

After 1931, when the Nazis and the Communists in the Reichstag could block other parties efforts to form an effective government, Hindenburg ruled by emergency decree. His impressive re-election in 1932, against Hitler, signified for Schmitt a mandate for the powerful executive rule. Schmitt urged Hindenburg to govern as a "constitutional dictator", preserving the state under extended use of Article 48, until he threat to the German state had passed. The fallout effects of the German Depression, the spread of street violence, and the meteoric rise of Nazi and Communist electoral strength in 1931 and 1932 all argued for the need for steady national leadership, able to rise to the challenge of exceptional events.

In the face of persistent defenders of party government and of parliamentary supremacy, Schmitt in Legality and Legitimacy in 1931 mocked the idea that governments were to give every-one, including declared subversives, an equal chance to rule. The Weimar republicans, Schmitt noted, were willing to commit political and even physical suicide, provided that Hitler's followers obtained 51% of the vote, thereupon they would step aside and allow the Nazis to take over the German state. One of Schmitt's most outspoken critics, Ludwig Monsignor Kaas of the Catholic Centre Party, did exactly that, exhorting Hindenburg on January 26th, 1933 to name Hitler as German Chancellor. Though Kaas had grave misgivings about Hitler, he thought that Germany would cease to have a parliamentary system unless Hindenburg gave the Nazi leader, with his national electoral base, the chance to form his own party government.

Kaas believed that Schmitt wished to keep Hitler from the chancellorship at least partly out of contempt for parliamentary government. Although he may have been correct in this, it is also likely that Schmitt appreciated the cataclysmic consequences that would attend Hitler's elevation, and whatever other reasons Schmitt had for defending legitimate organic democracy against pale liberal legalism, one of his overriding concerns was obviously to save the German national state from both parliamentary chaos and violent extremists. This may not have been the only reason for his changing definition of democracy but it was a crucial one.

A powerful executive drawing authority from a national plebiscite could confront threats to the state and public order more effectively than squabbling party leaders, and a recognised military hero, such as even the doddery Field Marshall von Hindenburg, sustained by periodic acts of electoral homage, could speak more plausibly for the national will than parliamentary parties, and even, it was hoped, the would-be nationalist dictator Hitler. It was a traditional protector of civil order that Schmitt had in mind when he penned these controversial words in 1929: "The stronger the power of democratic sentiment becomes, the more certain seems the knowledge that democracy is something other than a system of registering secret ballots. For a democracy in the vital, not technical, sense, a parliament tied to liberal thinking, appears as a mere contrivance, while dictatorial methods can be not only sustained by popular acclamation but be seen as a direct expression of democratic substance." Though contemptuous of any attempt to reduce democracy to parliamentary techniques, Schmitt was here making an argument, further developed in the early thirties, for a strong executive established on plebiscitary support.

It is possible, let me repeat, to find other reasons for this identification of democracy with organic community, but it may be problematic to look for them apart from the political situation Schmitt was addressing. The Italian scholar, Michele Nicoletti, offers an original and voluminous interpretation of Schmitt's political thought in Trascendenza e Potere, emphasizing religious and existentialist themes. Exploring Schmitt's spiritual odyssey from before the Great War into the 1960s, Nicoletti dwells on Catholic theologies, the existentialism of Kierkegaard and the sin-obsessed meditations of the German Lutheran Heinrich Gogarten.

Nicoletti does not entirely ignore the Weimar political scene in carrying out his explication, but it would be fair to say that they furnish no more than a backdrop for his study. Throughout his 632 page book, we see each point in Schmitt's evolving legal and political thought keyed to an existentialist agony or theological breakthrough. Both Schmitt's remarks on organic democracy and his implicit justifications of power politics are traced to an immanentist theology, which Nicoletti sees by the late twenties overshadowing the transcendent moment in Schmitt's conceptualisation of the Deity: "la sostenza omogenea di un populo e di uno stato h dunque il frutto del processo di realizzazione dellunit` fondamentale" is: "innanzitutto un elemento esistenziale." Nonetheless, the "identity" of parts, which Schmitt associates with both organic democracy and an immanentist historical theology, Nicoletti assures us, cannot eliminate from his thought entirely "the transcendence which every political system conceals".

Significantly, Schmitt's analysis of democracy reveals his dependence on the Catholic notion of representation: Earthly institutions properly formed not only permit humans to stand in for each, but also show forth the transcendent will that they incorporate, whence the distinction in Italian between rappresentatione and spiritual rappresentanza.

Nicoletti insists that Schmitt never abandoned this Medieval concept of representation and tries to find its traces in his writings on liberalism and democracy. This theological investigation, interspersed with biographical details and some historical generalisations, is both engrossing and exhaustively researched. I would even recommend it, as does my friend Paul Piconne, to counter-balance the more secular interpretations of Schmitt brought forth by George Schwab, Helmut Quaritsch and myself. Nicoletti does justice to a side of Schmitt's thinking that those who stress his analytic rigour sometimes ignore; but it may also be advantageous to recall Schmitt's own maxim: Eine geschichtliche Wahrheit ist nur einmal wahr (a historical truth is only true once). This does not mean that all truth is relative.

Schmitt believed that truths have a context, to which they must be referred in order to be fully understood. His own legal and political tracts came out of specific historical circumstances, and though they may refer to highly personal existential encounters, they must be examined, first of all, as studied responses to those circumstances. This does not exclude categorically the use of Nicoletti's hermeneutic, which yields some insight into his subject's motivation. What I am suggesting is the need to give priority to perspectives on Schmitt's thinking, including his views on democracy, which are more historically based. In offering these counsels I am following Schmitt's prescribed methodology, which was to study legal thought in terms of locating it historically (das Rechtsdenken geschichtlich zu verorten).

The question may then be asked whether Schmitt's definitions of democracy and liberal democracy continue to be relevant. For his well-known critics, like Stephen Holmes, they most definitely are. Their Schmitt, despite his death, goes on furnishing the enemies of global democracy and human rights with the explosives to devastate our political culture. Schmitt remains for such critics the inventor of a grim alternative; and it is one that may become even grimmer, we are told, if authoritarian corporatists or anti-immigration nationalists, particularly Jean Marie Le Pen in France, rise to political power. Looking at the Western world now awash in human rights rhetoric and bureaucratic schemes for empowering victimised minorities, I for one find it hard to worry about these warnings, at least in the short term; and since I agree with Keynes about the long term, I have accordingly turned my attention to other problems. Then, too, it is hard to see why nationalists would have to read Schmitt in order to identify democracy with an organic, national community. They could find exactly the same ideas in Plato, Rousseau, Xenophon, Montesquieu, Renan and in dozens of other non-German authors.

Do Schmitt's political definitions clarify our own historical situation? I think they do, once allowance is made for their immediate and by now time-bound polemical uses. Particularly revealing for me is Schmitt's dismissive treatment of "liberal democracy" as "just another form of liberalism intended not for self-identified communities but for the entire human race". This comment from Parliamentarianism and Mass Democracy (1929) underscores a troublesome feature of open, universal nations, a changing and particularly destabilising self-definition. Mere legal norms cannot determine permanently such nations social and moral relationships; bureaucratic controls proliferate within them, especially therapeutic ones aimed at shaping behaviour and instilling privileged values; and indeed such controls may even be warranted, as an alternative to worsening conflicts among conflicting cultures. Small wonder that these situations also bring to power intellectuals pushing their own highest universal values, a problem Schmitt treated in 1959 in a perceptive essay On the Tyranny of Values.

A natural fit may then exist between the current practice of democratic pluralism and John Dewey's notion of democracy as something elevated to a "living faith" and having universal applicability. Value-indoctrination through political education and public policy has become increasingly important in pluralistic democracies combined with administrative states. Schmitt's remarks on liberalism and democracy illuminate this modern paradox of pluralistic societies imposing particular values by shame or by force. In the absence of settled community, such societies are left with an unpleasant choice: the persuasiveness of the political, which Schmitt understood as steadily erupting conflict, or the imposition of values created by intellectuals but reputed to be universal. There may be no way to avoid one or the other and it may even be possible to suffer both fates simultaneously. Recognising this to be the case should not be viewed as a hate crime, nor does it necessarily impel us to work for exclusionary public policies, which the present American bureaucracy would not enforce in any case; yet here too Schmitt's analysis of liberalism and democracy may be useful, particularly its emphasis on the correlation between societies that proclaim themselves to be elastic and those that cannot control their own violence and moral confusion.

Another correlation which it may be useful to ponder and which is implicit in Schmitt's work is between societies which boast of open borders and cultural tolerance and those whose intellectuals successfully impose their own "universal values". All value-advocates are willing to make speeches in favour of democratic pluralism, whether they believe in them or not. In any case, the stance of openness can be used by intellectuals against their rivals pushing other values.

Liberal legality has become the apparent dogma in pluralistic societies, but the quest for legitimacy goes on there as well as intellectual's work to impose uniform values through public institutions. Like Spinoza's nature, political societies, Schmitt reminds us, do not exist in vacuums. They will seek to legitimize themselves morally, whatever they call their institutions. They will turn to journalists and bureaucrats to occupy the social and spiritual positions from which kings and priests were once driven. Schmitt did not call this process "secularisation", a term he reserved for the shifting of power away from the Medieval Church to state sovereigns. He saw the modern project of wedding liberal legality to privileged values differently, as an unsuccessful attempt to re-establish political legitimacy. This was one more reason for his persistent misgivings about the fate of liberal democracy.

Note by the author

A legal theorist of international stature, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) enjoyed his greatest fame in the inter-war period. It was then that his constitutional commentaries, expositions on the nature of sovereignty and original contribution to an understanding of political life, The Concept of the Political (1927), made Schmitt one of the most provocative and courted intellectuals of Weimar Germany.

Originally identified with the Catholic Rhenish culture into which he had been born and the University of Bonn, where he taught in the early twenties. Schmitt then became associated with political celebrities in Berlin. Among those seeking his legal counsel were German President Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Heinrich Bruening and General Kurt von Schleicher. Schmitt's firm belief in executive sovereignty put him at odds with the Weimar Constitution, which divided power between the President and the Reichstag; after the onset of the Depression and the political unrest to which it gave rise, he urged Hindenburg to rule by executive decree. Schmitt also supported the suppression of the National Socialists and other parties committed to the overthrow of the German state. The accession of Hitler to power in January 1933 left Schmitt at the mercy of a man and movement he had outspokenly opposed. Seeking to protect himself, once he had decided not to emigrate, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in May and became identified for a time with Hitler's reconstruction of the German state. Note that though Schmitt initially defended Hitler's legal revolution, his own documented criticism of Nazi ideology aroused the regimes suspicions. From 1935 on he was kept under S.S. surveillance and his Serb wife accused of spying for the enemies of the Third Reich.

After the war Schmitt suffered successive humiliations: being gaoled (but then released for lack of proof) as an abettor of Nazi imperialism; exclusion from German academic life; and the denunciations by "liberal democratic" critics as a totalitarian anti-liberal. Unable to recover his professorship at the University of Berlin, he retired to his home at Plettenberg in the Sauerland. There he wrote and received guests, as he himself observed, "in exile", until his death. His post-war magnum opus, Nomos der Erde in Voelkerrecht des jus publicum europaeum (1950) re-established Schmitt's reputation as a scholar of international law and of the evolving European state system. It also contained his ideas about the prospects for international order beyond the disintegration of the nation states, and it stressed the modernity of the state itself as a political entity characterized by united sovereignty and by national particularity.

For those seeking information about Schmitt's work and studies about him in English, see the bibliographical essay at the end of my monograph, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory (Greenwoood Press 1992) and the footnotes to the new introductory chapter of George Schwab's Challenge of the Exception, second edition (Greenwood Press, 1989).

Carl Schmitt, the Inquisition, and Totalitarianism Arthur Versluis

The work of Carl Schmitt, on its face, presents us with enigmas; it is esoteric, arcane, words that recur both in scholarship about Schmitt and in his own writings. Jan-Wenner Müller observes that Schmitt "employed what has been called a kind of philosophical `double talk,' shifting the meaning of concepts central to his theory and scattering allusions and false leads throughout his work."[1] And Müller goes on to remark about Heinrich Meier's work on Schmitt that ultimately Meier too "lapsed into the kind of double talk, allusiveness, and high-minded esoteric tone so typical of Strauss and, to a lesser extent, Schmitt."[2] Indeed, Schmitt himself writes, in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes that "like all great thinkers of his times, Hobbes had a taste for esoteric cover-ups. He said about himself that now and then he made `overtures,' but that he revealed his thoughts only in part and that he acted as people do who open a window only for a moment and closely it quickly for fear of a storm."[3] This passage could certainly be applied to Schmitt himself, whose work both makes direct reference to Western esoteric traditions, and itself has esoteric dimensions. These esoteric allusions and dimensions of Schmitt's thought are, in fact, vitally important to understanding his work, but the question remains: what place do they have in it?

Carl Schmitt and Early Modern Western Esotericism

Much has been made of the exoteric-esoteric distinction in the thought of Leo Strauss. Some authors suggested that a Straussian esotericism guided the neonconservative cabal within the Bush II administration, after all a secretive group that disdained public opinion and that was convinced of its own invincible rectitude even in the face of facts.[4] It is true that Strauss himself distinguished between an esoteric and an exoteric political philosophy. In perhaps his most open statement, Strauss writes, coyly, of how "Farabi's Plato eventually replaces the philosopher- king who rules openly in the virtuous city, by the secret kingship of the philosopher who, being a `perfect man,' precisely because he is an `investigator,' lives privately as a member of an imperfect society which he tries to humanize within the limits of the possible."[5] Strauss's "secret kingship of the philosopher" is, by its nature, esoteric; as in Schmitt's, there is in Strauss's work a sense of the implicit superiority of the esoteric political philosopher.

But in fact those who are searching for esotericism have much more to find in the work of Schmitt, not least because Schmitt's references to classical Western esotericism are quite explicit. Schmitt refers directly to Kabbalism and to Rosicrucianism, to Freemasonry, and, most importantly for our purposes, to Gnosticism. It is quite important, if one is to better understand Schmitt, to investigate the meanings of these explicitly esoteric references in his work. While there are allusions to such classical Western esoteric currents as Jewish Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry scattered throughout Schmitt's writings, those references are concentrated in Schmitt's 1938 The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. There are a number of reasons why Western esoteric currents should form a locus in this particular work, among them the fact that many of these traditions (notably, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and Christian theosophy) emerged precisely in the early modern period of Hobbes himself and so correctly, as Schmitt recognized, represent historical context as well as contribute to Schmitt's larger argument.

But what is Schmitt's larger argument regarding these esoteric currents? There is little to indicate, at first glance, that Schmitt is derogating these esoteric currents-even the references to the Kabbalistic interpretation of leviathan, which come on the wake of Schmitt's notorious 1936 conference on Judaism and jurisprudence, are not immediately recognizable as anti-semitic. Schmitt's own overview of his argument is instructive. He summarizes the first chapter as covering the "Christian-theological and Jewish-cabbalistic interpretations" of the symbol of leviathan, and "the possibilities of a restoration of the symbol by Hobbes."[6] A restoration indicates a prior fall: this is our first clue. Schmitt's treatise on Hobbesian state theory is also an occasion for Schmitt's diagnosis of modernity as socio-political decline, and in this decline, (in Schmitt's view), esoteric currents played a part. Hence he references the seminal twentieth-century French esoterist René Guénon's La Crise du monde moderne (1927), and specifically Guénon's observation that the collapse of medieval civilization into early modernity by the seventeenth century could not have happened without hidden forces operating in the background.[7]

Both Schmitt and Guénon came from a Catholic background and perspective-and Guénon's broader thesis was that the advent of early modernity represented one stage in a much larger tableau of decline in which modernity (representing the kali yuga or final age) would conclude in the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the world. In this Guénonian tableau of decline, the emergence of individualistic Protestantism represented an important step downward from the earlier corporate unity of Catholicism, and a similar perspective inheres in Schmitt's work, no doubt why he alludes to Guénon in the first place. Hence, in the important Chapter V of Leviathan, Schmitt refers to the "separation of inner from outer and public from private" that emerged during the early modern period, and in particular to "secret societies and secret orders, Rosicrucians, freemasons, illuminates, mystics and pietists, all kinds of sectarians, the many `silent ones in the land,' and above all, the restless spirit of the Jew who knew how to exploit the situation best until the relation of public and private, deportment and disposition was turned upside down."[8]

At this point, we can see Schmitt's perspective is implicitly critical of the subjectification and inward or contemplative turn characteristic of those who travel "the secret road" "that leads inward." He opposes the split between private spiritual life and public life, which Schmitt associates with Judaism as well as with Protestantism and the profusion of esoteric groups during this period- and by implication, affirms a unified, corporate inner and outer life that is characteristic of Catholicism. Schmitt remarks that "as differently constituted as were the Masonic lodges, conventicles, synagogues, and literary circles, as far as their political attitudes were concerned, they all displayed by the eighteenth century their enmity toward the leviathan elevated to a symbol of state."[9] He sees Protestantism and the variety of esoteric groups or currents during the early modern period as symptomatic-like Guénon, he sees the emergence of modernity as a narrative of cultural disintegration.

Like Hobbes himself, Schmitt is pessimistic about the human condition. Still, in Schmitt's view, Hobbes was not proposing that human beings flee from the state of nature into a monstrous state leviathan, but rather was arguing for total state power only insofar as it guaranteed protection and security. Hence, Schmitt writes, one's obedience to the state is payment for protection, and when protection ceases, so too does the obligation to obey.[10] The leviathan serves to diagnose the artificial, gigantic mechanism of the modern state, and to symbolize that state as an intermediate stage that can restrain or postpone the larger decline that modernity represents. In Leviathan, Schmitt isn't extolling the leviathan state or totalism, but rather coyly stops short-even though it is clear that he seeks a political alternative to the split between inner and outer life represented by the inward turn of esoteric groups and individuals, and by the subjectification represented by Romanticism during the early modern period. Schmitt belongs to the world of jurisprudence, to the realm of weighing and deciding, and one can see this in his treatment of esoteric groups, in which he acknowledges their differences-but he clearly has `placed' them in his larger narrative as indicative of the fragmentation represented by modernity.

It becomes clearer, then, how Schmitt could have seen in National Socialism a secular alternative to modernity. Fascism represented for him, at least potentially, the re-unification of inner and outer life, a kind of modern re-unification of the mythic and spiritual with the outer public life. It at first seemed to conform to the Hobbesian notion that in exchange for obedience, one receives protection from the state; it represented a new form of corporatism as an alternative to the socio-political disintegration represented by parliamentary democracy in the Weimar era; and it even offered an apparent unity of esoteric and exoteric through its use of symbolism and mythology in the service of the state. But to the extent that he allied with the Nazis, Schmitt was consciously siding with the Inquisitors, and with totalistic state power. In retrospect and by comparison, perhaps the "secret road" inward as represented by eighteenth-century esotericism was not quite so bad as all that. Yet to understand more completely Schmitt in relation to the esoteric, we must turn to a subject he treats somewhat more explicitly: Gnosticism.

Carl Schmitt and Gnosticism

Schmitt writes that oppositions between friend and enemy are "of a spiritual sort, as is all man's existence."[11] In Politische Theologie II, he writes that Tertullian is the prototype of the theological possibilities of specific judicial thinking, and refers to him as the "jurist Tertullian."[12] Heinrich Meier discusses Schmitt's indebtedness to Tertullian and in fact remarks that "Tertullian's guiding principle We are obliged to something not because it is good but because God commands it accompanies Schmitt through all the turns and vicissitudes of his long life."[13] What is it about Tertullian that Schmitt found so fascinating that he returned to his work again and again? Divine authority as presented by Tertullian divides men: obedience to divine authority divides the orthodox from the heretics, the "friends of God" from the "enemies of God," and the political theologian from the secular philosopher. Here we are reminded of perhaps Tertullian's most famous outcry: "What then does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What does the Academy have to do with the Church? What do the heretics have to do with Christians?"[14] Tertullian was, of course, a fierce enemy of Gnosticism, and his works, especially De praescriptione haereticorum, belong to the genre of heresiophobic literature.

Now with Tertullian's antignosticism in mind, we should turn to the afterword of Schmitt's Politische Theologie II, in which "gnostische Dualismus" figures prominently. There, Schmitt remarks that Gnostic dualism places a God of Love, strange to this world, in opposition to the lord and creator of this evil world, the two conflicting in a kind of "cold war."[15] This he compares to the Latin motto noted by Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit, "nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse"-only a god can oppose a god.[16] With these references, Schmitt is alluding to the Gnostic dualism attributed to the Gnostic Marcion, who reputedly posited two Gods, one a true hidden God, the other an ignorant creator God.

What is important here, for our purposes, is the underlying theme of heresy and orthodoxy. As is well-known, for Schmitt, especially from Der Begriff des Politischen onward, the political world is defined in terms of the well-known Schmittean distinction between friend and foe. But not so often remarked is that this friend-foe distinction can be traced directly back to the anti-heresiology of Tertullian. Tertullian devoted a considerable number of pages to the refutation of Marcion in five books, and in particular attacked what he perceived as Marcionitic docetism. In "Against the Valentinians," Tertullian attacked "certain heretics who denied the reality of Christ's flesh," first among these heretics being, again, Marcion. [17] For Tertullian, historicity is paramount: the docetic view that Christ did not come in the flesh but belongs to another world-this is unbearable to him. Tertullian devotes hundreds of pages to detailing and attacking the works of those he designates heretical, and (perhaps ironically, given Tertullian's venomous diatribes) compares them to scorpions full of venom.

So virulent is Tertullian in his hatred of those he perceives as heretics that he goes so far as to imagine that "There will need to be carried on in heaven persecution [of Christians] even, which is the occasion of confession or denial."[18] Here we begin to see the dynamic that impels Tertullian's hatred of those he designates as heretical. On the one hand, Tertullian belongs in the context of Roman persecution of Christians as a whole-but on the other hand, he in turn carries on an intellectual persecution of heretics whom he sees as scorpions, that is, as vermin.[19] Thus we see Tertullian's perception of himself as defender of the historicist orthodox, the strength of whose identity comes on the one hand, from affirmation of faith in the historical Christ against the Romans, on the other hand, from rejection of the Gnostics who seek to transcend history and who affirm, for example, a docetic Christ. Tertullian's very identity exists by definition through negation-he requires the persecution of "heretics." Tertullian is the veritable incarnation of a friend/enemy dynamic, and he exists and defines himself entirely through such a dynamic. We can even go further, and suggest that the background of persecution by the Romans in turn inevitably impels the persecuted historicist Christians to themselves become persecutors of those whom they deem heretics-a dynamic that continues throughout the subsequent history of Christianity (from the medieval condemnation of Eckhart right through the various forms of early modern and modern anti-mysticism within Protestant and Catholic Christianity alike). [20] Tertullian, for all his fulminations against what he imagines as Gnostic dualism, is in fact himself the ultimate dualist [or duelist]. He cannot exist without historical enemies, without persecutors and without those whom he can persecute in his turn.

Thus we begin to see the reasons for Schmitt's endorsement of Tertullian as the paradigmatic jurist theologian and political theologian. For Tertullian, Christ's historicity is paramount- exactly as is the case with Schmitt himself. In Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt proposes the historical importance within Christianity of the concept of the katechon, or "restrainer" that makes possible Christian empires whose center was Rome, and that "meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon."[21] The concept of the katechon is derived from an obscure Pauline verse: II Thessalonians 2.6-7, "And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way." This passage is in the larger context of a Pauline warning against the "activity of Satan" among those who are "sent" a "strong delusion" by God himself [!] "so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth (II.2.11)." The katechon represents, for Schmitt, an "historical concept" of "potent historical power" that preserves the "tremendous historical monolith" of a Christian empire because it "holds back" nothing less than the eschatological end of history.[22] The Pauline context in Thessalonians can be read to support institutional Christianity as a prosecutorial power. In any case, the katechon makes intellectually possible (in Schmitt's view) the emergence of the Christian empire oriented toward Rome and itself now a juridical, prosecutorial or persecutorial imperial power within history.

Now I am not arguing that Schmitt's work-and in particular his emphasis on the role of antagonism and hostility as defining politics, nor his emphasis on historicity-derives only from Tertullian. Rather, I hold that Schmitt refers to Tertullian because he finds in him a kindred spirit, and what is more, that there really is a continuity between Schmitt's thought and the anti-heretical writings of Tertullian. Both figures require enemies. Schmitt goes so far as to write, in The Concept of the Political, that without the friend-enemy distinction "political life would vanish altogether."[23] And in the afterword to Political Theology II, Schmitt-in the very passages in which he refers to Gnosticism and in particular to dualism-ridicules modern "detheologization" [Die Enttheologisierung] and "depoliticization" [Die Entpolitisierung] characteristic of a liberal modernity based upon production, consumption, and technology. What Schmitt despises about depoliticizing or detheologizing is the elimination of conflict and the loss thereby of the agonistic dimension of life without which, just as Tertullian wrote, the juridical trial and judging of humanity cannot take place. Tertullian so insists upon the primacy of persecution/prosecution that he projects it even into heaven itself. Schmitt restrains himself to the worldly stage, but he too insists upon conflict as the basis of the political and of history; and both are at heart dualists.

Why, after all, was Schmitt so insistent upon what he called "political theology"? In the very term, there is a uneasy conjunction of the worldly sphere of politics with what usually would be construed as the otherworldly sphere of theology. But Tertullian represents the forced convergence of these two spheres-in some central respects, Tertullian symbolizes the point at which Christianity shifted from the persecuted by Rome to the persecutor from Rome, the shift from Christ's saying that His Kingdom is not of this world, to the assertion of Christendom as a political- theological entity and of the possibility of Christian empire-that is, of the compression together and perhaps even the merger of politics and theology. This forced convergence of politics and theology could not take place without the absolute insistence upon an historical Christ and on the paramount importance of the horizontal, that is, of history itself (as opposed to and indeed, founded on the explicit rejection of the transcendence of history or of the vertical dimensions represented by gnosis).

The work of Schmitt belongs to the horizontal realm of dualistic antagonism that requires the antinomies of friends and enemies and perpetual combat. Schmitt is a political and later geopolitical theorist whose political theology represents, not an opening into the transcendence of antagonism, but rather an insistence upon antagonism and combat as the foundation of politics that reflects Tertullian's emphasis on antagonism toward heretics as the foundation of theology. When Schmitt writes, in The Concept of the Political, that "a theologian ceases to be a theologian when he . . . no longer distinguishes between the chosen and the nonchosen," we begin to see how deeply engrained is his fundamental dualism.[24] This dualism is bound up with Schmitt's insistence upon "the fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man" and his adamant rejection of those who deny original sin, i.e., "numerous sects, heretics, romantics, and anarchists."[25] Thus "the high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy."[26] The enemy, here, just as in Tertullian's work, is those deemed to be heretical.

Here we should recognize a certain irony. Tertullian, we will recall, railed against the Gnostics because they supposedly were dualists and because some of them reputedly held that humanity was deluded and that the world was evil.[27] Yet much of mainstream Christianity, like Tertullian himself, itself came to espouse a fierce dualism and an insistence on the evil nature of humanity and of the world. Even when it is clear, as in the case of Valentinus, that his thought includes the transcendence of dualism, Tertullian cannot bring himself to recognize this transcendence because his mind works on the level of the juridical only-he is compelled to attack; indeed, his entire worldview is constructed around those whom he rejects, ridicules, refuses to recognize as in any way legitimate- around those whom he sees as his enemies. And this fierce dualism, this need for that which is construed as heretical, as the enemy, is exactly what Schmitt's work also reflects.

As perhaps Tertullian once did, Schmitt too came up against the command of Christ to "love your enemies" (Matt. 5.44; Luke 6.27). His interpretation of it is befitting a wily attorney-he takes it only on a personal level. "No mention is made of the political enemy," Schmitt writes. "Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than to defend Europe," he continues, and the commandment of Christ in his view "certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one's own people."[28] Thus, Christ can be interpreted as accepting political antagonism and even war-while forgiving one's personal enemies along the way. Schmitt conveniently overlooks the fact that nowhere in the New Testament can Christ be construed as endorsing, say, political war against Rome-His Kingdom is not of this world. Is it really so easy to dismiss the power of the injunction to love one's enemies?

There is more. For Schmitt's distinction between the personal and the political here makes possible what his concept of the katechon also does: Christian empire. Here we see the exact point at which the Christian message can be seen to shift from the world-transmuting one of forgiving one's enemies to the worldly one that leads inexorably toward the very imperial authority and power against which Christ himself stood as an alternative exemplar. "My Kingdom is not of this world," Christ said. But somehow a shift took place, and suddenly Christ was being made to say that his kingdom is of this world, that rather than forgiving one's enemies, one should implacably war against them. Thus we have the emergence of Christian empire. But the collapse of feudalism and of the medieval polis, and the emergence of modernity ultimately meant the de-politicization of the world-the absence of enemies, of heretics, of those against whom others can define themselves-none other than the cultural vacuum represented by technological-consumerist modern society.

Conclusions

And so we again reach the argument that I began to suggest in "Voegelin's Antignosticism and the Origins of Totalitarianism," but from a very different angle. There, I argued that rather than attempting (like Voegelin and his acolytes) to blame the victims-the Gnostics and `heretics'-for the advent of modernity and for totalitarianism, it might be more reasonable to take a closer look at the phenomenon of the Inquisition and of historicist Christianity (particularly millennialist Christianity) for the origins of modern secular chiliasm. After all, it wasn't the heretics or the Gnostics who burned people at the stake, or created institutional torture chambers, or who slaughtered the Albigensians. Rather, it was the institutional church that did this. Our analysis of Schmitt's work has brought us, unexpectedly, back to the same general terrain.

It is worth remarking, however unpleasant it might be to admit it, that as Mao or Pol Pot did when their policies meant the deaths of millions, so too the Church itself did when it burned at the stake the great mystic Marguerite Porete, or the brilliant author Giordano Bruno and many others for heresy-all of these institutional murderers believed at least in part that they killed people for their own good, or at least, for the better good, and in order to realize some better state upon earth in the near future. How is it that the medieval Church was so unwilling to allow the Albigensians their freedom and their own traditions? Why was it so impossible to regard them as Christian brethren and not as enemies to be slaughtered? By slaughtering those deemed heretics, one hastens the historical millennium of Christ's kingdom upon earth, or so the logic goes. Secular chiliasm in the technological modern world like that analyzed by Pellicani is only a more extensive and brutal form of the same phenomenon, whose origins are to be found in historicist Christianity, not among those victims of it that were deemed heretical.[29]

Schmitt's work belongs to the juridical tradition of Tertullian and he inherits Tertullian's need for enemies, for heretics by which one can define oneself. Thus it was not too difficult for Schmitt to organize the 1936 conference to weigh the "problem" of "the Jews"-he was predisposed toward the division of "us" and "them" by the triumphant Western historicist Christian tradition that peremptorily and with the persistence of two thousand years, rejected "heretics" who espoused gnosis and, all too frequently, rejected even the possibility of transcending dualism. Indeed, Schmitt's work allows us to see more clearly the historical current that was operative in National Socialism as well as in Mussolini's Fascist party-and that brought Schmitt to open his 1936 conference remarks with the words of Hitler: "In that I defend myself against the Jews, I struggle to do the work of the Lord."[30] The murder of heretics has a theological origin; the murder of secular opponents has a political origin-but often the two are not so far apart, and so one could even speak of political theology in which to be the enemy is to be de facto heretical.

Thus, after the "Night of the Long Knives" and after Goebbels and Himmler carried out the murder of various dissidents, Schmitt published an article defending the right of the Third Reich and its leader to administer peremptory justice-and, in an interview published in the party newspaper Der Angriff, defending none other than the Inquisition as a model of jurisprudence.[31] Schmitt argued there that when Pope Innocent III created the juridical basis for the Inquisition, the Church inaugurated perhaps the "most humane institution conceivable" because it required a confession. Of course, he goes on, the subsequent advent of confessions extracted by torture was unfortunate, but in terms of legal history, he thought the Inquisition a fine model of humane justice. He managed to overlook the fact that the "crimes," both in the case of the Inquisition and in the case of National Socialism in mid-1930s Germany, were primarily "crimes" of dissidence.

Here we begin to consider the larger question of ideocracy as haracteristic of modernity. Ideocracy has nothing to do with Gnosticism or gnosis-but it might well have something to do with those who require enemies in order to define themselves, and with those who are willing to torture and slaughter in the name of some forthcoming imagined religious or secular millennium. It is rigid ideocracy we see at work in the unreadable pronouncements of Communist China defending their occupation of Tibet and the insanity of the Cultural Revolution; it is rigid ideocracy at work in the pronouncements of Stalinist Russia, behind which millions upon millions lie dead. Secular millennialism requires a rigid historicism-faith in history is necessary, a belief that one can remake this world and human society into a new historical model, even if the price is murder and torture. Schmitt was a subtle thinker and very learned, no question of that. His work offers us insights into the nature of modernity, into geopolitics, and into politics as combat. But his work also, unexpectedly, throws light on the intellectual origins of modern ideocracies in early and medieval historicist, anti-heresiological Christianity.

[1] See Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003), p. 7

[2] Ibid., p. 205

[3] See Carl Schmitt, G. Schwab, trs., The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), p. 26.

[4] See Hugh Urban, "Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration: The Gentleman, the Prince, and the Simulacrum," in Esoterica VII (2005): 1-38.

[5] See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1952), p. 17; Leo Strauss, "Farabi's Plato," Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), pp. 357-393, p. 384.

[6] Schmitt, Leviathan, op. cit., p. 3.

[7] Ibid., p. 29.

[8] Ibid., p. 60.

[9] Ibid., p. 62.

[10] Ibid., pp. 96-97.

[11] See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), p. 59, citing The Concept of the Political (1933 ed.) III.9.

[12] See Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1970), p. 103, to wit: "Für eine Besinnung auf die theologischen Möglichkeiten spezifisch justischen Denkens ist Tertullian der Prototyp."

[13] Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), p. 92.

[14] See Meier, op. cit., p. 94, citing Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum, VII. 9-13: "Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? Quid academiae et ecclesiae? Quid haereticis et Christianis?"

[15] Schmitt, PTII, op. cit., p. 120: "Der gnostische Dualismus setzt einen Gott der Liebe, einen welt-fremden Gott, als den Erlöser-Gott gegen den gerechten Gott, den Herrn und Schöpfer dieser bösen Welt. . . [einer Art gefährlichen Kalten Krieges]".

[16] Ibid., p. 122.

[17] See A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, eds., Ante-Nicene Fathers, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), III.521.

[18] Ibid., III. 643.

[19] See Tertullian's treatise "Scorpiace," op. cit., III.633-648.

[20] Here we might remark that Western forms of Christianity are strikingly different in this respect from those in the Eastern Church, where mysticism remained (however uneasily at times) incorporated into orthodoxy itself and not imagined as inherently inimical to orthodoxy.

[21] See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, G.L. Ulmen, trs., (New York: Telos, 2003), pp. 59-60.

[22] Ibid., p. 60.

[23] Carl Schmitt, G. Schwab, trs., The Concept of the Political, (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1976), p. 51.

[24] Ibid., p. 64.

[25] Ibid., p. 65.

[26] Ibid., p. 67.

[27] I write "supposedly" dualist and "reputedly" held the world to be evil because these accusations, repeated by Tertullian and several other ante-Nicene Fathers, are hardly borne out as characteristics of all the works we see in the Nag Hammadi library, the collection of actual Gnostic writings discovered in 1945.

[28] Ibid., p. 29.

[29] See Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse: Ideological Roots of Terrorism, (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp. xi. I wholeheartedly agree with Pellicani's basic thesis that "The expansion on a planetary scale of a new form of chiliasm that substituted transcendence with absolute immanence and paradise with a classless and stateless society is the most extraordinary and shattering historical-cultural phenomenon of the secular age." But this "new form of chiliasm" has nothing whatever to do with Gnosticism as an actual historical phenomenon. One cannot find a single instance in late antiquity among the Gnostics themselves for such a phenomenon-but if one were to refer instead to "the destructive calling of modern pseudo­-gnostic revolution" that seeks to "purify the existing through a policy of mass terror and annihilation," Pellicani's thesis would no longer be quite as subject to the criticism of an anachronistic misuse of terms. Later in the book, Pellicani discusses the cases of the Pol Pot regime and of Communist China-both of which illustrate his larger thesis well. But neither of these have anything whatever to do with the phenomenon of Gnosticism in any historically meaningful sense. Even Voegelin himself expressed doubts about attempting to apply "Gnosticism" to the case of Communist Russia-let alone to Cambodia! Such cases could be construed to illustrate a uniquely modern pseudo-gnosticism-though one could with more accuracy dispense entirely with the dubious references to "Gnosticism" and simply refer to secular millennialism.

[30] See Carl Schmitt, "Das Judentum in der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft," in "Die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft im Kampf gegen den jüdischen Geist," in Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung, 41(15 Oct. 1936)20:1193-1199, cited in Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, (London: Verso, 2000), p. 206.

[31] See "Können wir uns vor Justizirrtum schützen?" Der Angriff, 1 Sept. 1936, cited in Andreas Koenen, Der Fall Carl Schmitt, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 1995), p. 703; see also Balakrishnan, op. cit., pp. 202-203.

Jean Thiriart

EUROPE AS FAR AS VLADIVOSTOCK

History and geopolitics 

(1992)

History knows about state-cities: Thebes, Sparta, Athens, later Venice, Florence, Milan, Genoa.

Today it knows about territorial states: France, Spain, England, Russia. 
Finally it discovers continental states, such as the United States of America, present China and yesterday's USSR (1). 
Today's Europe undergoes a stage of transformations. 
She has to proceed from the more or less stable stage of territorial states to the stage of the continental state. 
For the majority of the people, this transition is hindered by mental inertia, not to mention laziness of thinking. 

Though no larger than a piece of yarn, Sparta had a strong vitality, from an hiostorical point of view, being first of all vital in her military aspect. Her dimensions and her resources were enough to contain an army capable of gaining respect from all her neighbours.
Here we approach the basic problem of vitality of states. The historical state-city was superseded by the territorial state. The Roman Empire superseded Athens, Sparta, Thebes. And with no strong effort (2). 

Today the historical vitality of the state depends on its military vitality, which in turn depends on its economic vitality; which leads us to the following alternative.
First hypothesis: territorial states are compelled to become satellites of continental states. France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England represent but a fiction of independent states. Since a long time ago, since 1945, all these countries have become satellites of the United States of America. 
Second hypothesis: these territorial states are turned into a single continental state - Europe. 
 
 

The historical failure of one continental state: the USSR 

The regretful disintegration of the USSR is explained, in particular, by the insufficient theoretical understanding of the state by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and in some way Stalin. Already in in 1984 my disciple and collaborator, José Cuadrado Costa, based on works by Ortega y Gasset and myself, published a brilliant and prophetical essay under the title "Inadequacy and Obsolescence of Marxist-Leninist Theory of Nationality" (3). 
As far as the understanding of the essence of the state is concerned, Jacobins were obviously far ahead of Marxists. In this area Marx ever remained bound to the romantic era of Revolution of 1848. Already at the end of the XVIII century Sieyes wrote about the way to obtain an "homogeneous" nation-state. The nation-state is a fruit of political will. 
Another example of Marxist idiocy, ascending to XIX century romanticism, is the idea of the withering away of the state. It is difficult to think of a bigger nonsense. It is an old anarchists' dream (4). 
So Lenin did preserve the formal existence of the republics. I purposedly write the word as plural number. 
Due to the application of the principle of centralism within the communist party and to the peculiar personality of Stalin, this fiction or comedy lasted till 1990. The weakening of the Party resulted in the break-up of the USSR along fault lines ascending to the 1917-1922 epoch. 
Fiction became reality. 
In 1917 the Russian Jacobins created the Republic of Councils (I draw your attention to the singular). Lenin agreed with this fiction of the Union of Soviet Republics (I draw your attention to the plural) and tolerated it. From 1946 to 1949, at the climax of his power, Stalin too preserved this appearance of "Independent" States, extending from Poland to Bulgaria. One more theoretical imprudence. 
 
 

The political state as opposed to the ethnic state 

In the French dictionary "Le Petit Larousse" it is written that the conditions of uniformity for an ethnos are its language and its culture.
For the purposes of this analysis, I will give my own extended interpretation of this concept, having said that the unity of the ethnic state has its roots in the unity of race, religion, language, common imageries, common memories, common frustrations or fears. 
The concept of the political state (as an open, expanding system) is fully opposite to the concept of the ethnic state (as a closed, fixed system). The political state is the expression of the will of free men to have a common future. 
The political state, or more precisely the political nation-state - of which I am considered the modern theorist, after Ortega-y-Gasset (5) - allows the individuals to preserve their personal individuality (please forgive this barbarous, rough pleonasm) within the framework of society. 
Less than two months ago (6) I stated my opinion about the importance of the concepts of Imperium and Dominium. Since 1964 I never stopped developing this concept of Roman origins. 
To one political friend who called me "Vallon" (it was not enough for me!), I wrote, as usual, that I am neither Vallon, nor Flemish, neither German, nor Belgian, and not even European. I am me. The person of Jean Thiriart - this is Jean Thiriart, I wrote him. I do not like at all appearing together with other people in any file, in which it is said they "remember me". 
I want to constantly save my Socratic irony. A supporter of totalitarianism when the talk is about Imperium, I become an anarchist in the sphere of Dominium. 
Marx and Engels knew absolutely nothing about this fundamental dicotomy Imperium/Dominium; this is why they wrote "The German Ideology", addressed against Max Stirner. Stirner's vision of Imperium (free federative choice, the right to secession, and so on) will always remain utopical and inapplicable. On the contrary, his vision of internal freedom, of the sphere of Dominium, will always be interesting. I am Bolshevik, Jacobin, Prussian, Stalinan, whenever the speech goes about Imperium and its civil discipline, but my taste and intellectual interests concerning my private life, my life within the framework of Dominium, they go to Odysseus, the champion in imitating the Cynics, to Diogenes, who in reply to the question: "Can you see any good man in Greece?", - answered " Nowhere; but I see some good lads in Lacedemones...". 
It is known that Diogenes and the other Cynics admired the Spartan system because the Spartans were partisans of discipline and austerity and enemies of luxury and laziness.
So, like Diagoras, I am against religion. In the private sphere, of course!
Surely, I am famous as the messenger of united Europe from Dublin as far as Vladivostok (7). 
But this united Europe, which I describe and invoke, is connected to the sphere of Imperium. And in my opinion such Imperium has to be powerful, dynamic, merciless – in order to be effective.
As to personality, it is connected to the cathegory of Dominium.
My cultural personality forbids me to choose among cathegories. It is unique, as unique is my genetic code.

Biologically, each person is an embodiment of a unique code. He is one. In the field of culture - music, architecture, literature, painting etc. - I claim for myself the status of unshakable individualist. 
In the political state there can be no "minorities", as these deal only with individualities, while collectivity deals with the Imperium. 
These binds represent limitations, which I already mentioned above. 
 
 

Recent misfortunes : federalism, confederalism 

As soon as in the concept of construction of the state the twine concept of "Imperium-Dominium" is indroduced, such wicked solutions, as federalism or even worse than that, confederalism, lose any sense and usefulness.
I can not refrain from quoting here an American author, which I konow but for one single quote of his - but such a relevant quote: 
"Any group of persons, whatever their number and reciprocal similarity, and whichever the degree of their firmness in assessing their opinion – any group ends with breaking into smaller groups adhering to different variants of the same opinion; in these subgroups in turn there emerge under-subgroups, and further on, down to last limit of such division – the single individual". 
These words are attributed to Adam Ostwald, author of a book under the title "Human Society". 

The anarchists of the XIX century and many others, including Proudhon, persisted in the gross blunder of believing that conflicts and tensions within the LARGE groups could almost disappear, finding themselves a solution in the SMALL groups.
That is the social harmony of the XIX century - the harmony of the small group, opposed to the horror of the intolerable domination of the large goup. 
Even Lenin invented an historical nonsense within the framework of the absurd concept of the "ever-well-doing-and-harmonious-small-group” – which later forced him to write about the withering away of state, and also to wish and foretell it. 
 
 

Europe as far as Vladivostok : the minimum size 

The nation-state, wishing to be independent, is compelled to have adequate military means.
Possessing these means depends on demography, autarchy of raw materials, and the industrial power of the state. Between Iceland and Vladivostok we can unite  800 million people (at least for the sake of keeping the balance with the 1,200 millions Chinese) and yet find in the Siberian soil all that is needed to satisfy energetic and strategic requirements. 
I affirm that, from the economic point of view, Siberia is the province of the European empire most necessary to its viability. 

A great union of highly industrialized and technologically leading Western Europe with Siberian Europe, disposing of almost inexhaustible commodity reserves, will allow the creation of a most powerful republican Empire, with which nobody will but come to an agreement. 
 

Limitations imposed by the European empire

This state is a unity. It does not want to know and will not suffer horizontal division (regional autonomies), or vertical division (social classes) (8).
Its main principle forms a uniform citizenship: in any place of the European empire, the citizen has the right to elect, to be elected and to work. He can absolutely freely change his residence and fis job. His professional qualification is recognized through all the Empire: the doctor who received his diploma in Madrid, without any limitations can practice in St.Petersburg. 
Any regional corporativism is excluded.
Separation of any portion of territory is excluded by virtue of the main principle, postulate. 
We shall again make use of the Jacobins’ principle: "The Republic is unitary and INDIVISIBLE".  It is not advisable to repeat Lenin’s mistake about "the right to self-determination ". 
The "region" or the former national state enter in it forever. The unity of this state is irreversible consolidated by the constitutional law. 
0n the contrary, this Empire can expand, not by "seizures", but through annexation of those who want to join. 
The army is popular and integrated. A military caste can not enjoy any monopoly or privileges under the excuse of professionalism. This army will be completely subordinated to political authority. 
Within its first 25-50 years of existence, this integrated army will be given special attention so that that the recruits from different regions of Empire serve together. 
It is not necessary to suppose the existence of Croatian regiments or French divisions or German or Russian armies. 
There is one single currency. Possessing foreign exchange or using it as a means of payment is punishable. 
Is not it humiliating, shameful, that today it is possible to go to Russia only  having provided oneself with American dollars?
It is humiliating indeed both for the tourists from Western Europe, and for the Russians. 
It is a symbol of our common fall: the West Europeans colonized since 1945, the East Europeans balkanized and colonized since 1990. It would be more correct to pay the Moscow hotel in European ECUs, instead of foreign dollars. English should be the common language (9). I did not write ‘American’. In it consists my pragmatical, inevitable choice. The concept of a uniform legislation is one of fundamental principles of this Empire. Civil laws, criminal laws, labour laws and commercial laws are uniform. Interpretation and application of the law are identical everywhere.
 
 

Dominium and its limitations 

Each one knows the saying that one person’s freedom ends there, where freedom of another person begins.

In a previous article (6) I have indicated, among the general areas of Imperium, those in which unitary Republic "... never recedes... ". As to Dominium, it assumes unlimited freedom of choice, disposing of all personal liberties which do not harm the Imperium. 
These freedoms are granted within the framework of private life.
In old (worn out, ailing) political systems and regimes, feelings, emotions, fears from private life will inevitably try to enter – much too often, alas - into political life. 
Imperium should remain an area elaborated, structured and directed by the neo-cortex only. 

In order to understand one person’s behaviour, it is necessary to study the mechanisms of the brain (10). 
I shall repeat here my favourite joke about myself: "... I do not have soul. I have a brain. Actually, as any other individual, I have three brains, namely: 
- the originary cortex, the most ancient one (the old skin of brain), allowing to us to walk, climb, creep or give a basketball a spin; 
- the "intermediate" brain (meso-cortex), containing all my “programmed” emotional "software", necessary for survival. Sergey Chakhotin, Pavlov’s scholar, long time ago has described these passions and emotions.
The survival of the individual is promoted by the impulses to fight and nutrition; thed preservation of a species – by sexual and parental (associative) inclination. 

And finally the most modern of our three "maintenance programs" is the neo-cortex, this magnificent tool of the human being. An insuffiently used tool. 
The ancient skin of the brain is already 200 millions years old. The neo-cortex was formed only one million years ago. 
This doctrine (or thesis) about the three kinds of brain, "overimposed against each other", or about a three-fold brain, as written by the French translator Roland Guyon, was put forward by the American physiologist Paul D.MacLean (10). Itwas then made popular by Arthur Koestler (10). 
In Otto Klineberg’s "Social psychology" there is a lenghty duscussion about the question of the emotional behaviour of the person. 
Two centuries before the scientific works of Paul D. Mac Lean appeared, Sieyes anticipated this modern thesis about the superposition of three brains.
Bastide, in his 328 pages long dissertation, mentions Sieyes manuscript "About brain and instinct". 
Long before me, Sieyes was surprised and irritated because of pseudo-demonstrations in political language
If I too impose this digression on the reader, it is only to show that a very large part of bitter, aggressive political speeches stems from our superemotional average brain. 
A good study of political speech is possible only knowing the working mechanism of human brain. 
In this case it is easy to detect the reason of introversion, of hatred towards something. It becomes a simple clinical problem explained by brain physiology.

For many years I had to deal with "writers" describing politics as a reflection of “meso-cortical” behaviour (passion, emotion, impulse, frustration, fear, repulsion), whereas I with all my forces try to describe a “neo-cortical” Republic... sic! 

One of my critics said that I am a "rational cold monster".
I agree with him, and I prefer this condition to that of "irrational Bacchic monster", so much loved by post-nietzschean rascals.
I persistently recommend the educated reader, who is interested in politics, to familiarize with the works of Paul D. Mac Lean. 
The absurdity of pseudo-rational political speeches pretending to be persuasive (the attorney persuades, the scientist proves), is clearly evident from this statement by Marc Jeannerod: 
"... the indirect character of relations between the subject and the external world. The subject creates to itself its own representation of this world, and this representation guides his action. In this prespective, action is not the answer to any external SITUATION, as the consequence or product of that particulat REPRESENTATION".
Any primitive vaniloquy about "ethnos" is very simply explained through this concept of (fictitios) "representation" of a rejected reality (production of reality). Reject of reality, need for day-dream.
For the person who has received a rigid scientific education, politics and its language represent obvious absurdities. 
People throw in each other’s faces inventions and fictions of personal hostility, refusing to accept those situations... 

But we shall return to Mac Lean’s three kinds of brain.
When we consider the orbits of satellites, trajectory of space probes, durability of steel, optical corrections introduced in building a photolens, we use only our neo-cortex. 
Duiring a quarrel between drivers, ending up in a fight, we use the so-called reactive (archeo-cortical) and emotional (meso-cortical) brain mechanisms and we behave as mammals and reptiles. 
In the fight between drivers, aggressive impulses take the lead, gradually suppressing the regulating function of the neo-cortex. Sexual inclination, sometimes unbearable, will force us to desire the minor daughter of the neighbour. 
The same person always functions with the help of this double "program": the programs of impulses-passions-feelings-emotions, and the program of absolutely rational thinking. 

This digression was necessary as a transition to the question of the government of peoples.

Religion refers to area of Dominium. 
It is a private kind of activity, which should not have any possibility at all to exert influence on public life (with the consequent risk to see how “Islamists” challenged the authority in Yugoslavia). It is ridiculous to suppose that religion should interfere with a reasonable political life, in Imperium. Just because of neglecting this principle, mean and silly slaughters have taken place in Lebanon, Palestine, Armenia, Yugoslavia and Moldova.

Those who mix religion with politics are the present "apprentice sorcerers". He is criminal, who has created this condition of strained relations, but, from the historical point of view, also criminal is he, who turned his eyes away from the fact that religious passions can be used in a political context. 

In the laical Imperium of the United republics of Europe, religious freedom will be allowed (I would rather write “admitted”) within the framework of Dominium, and ruthlessly suppressed at the first attempt of interfering in the area belonging to Imperium. Unashamed and false racists coined the thesis of ethno-differentiation (sic) and of "ethno-cultural identities" (re-sic). As a result of it, true wars have arisen in Moldova, Yugoslavia, Caucasus – wars waged by common criminals, or, for the sake of precision¸ by gangsters.
Besides robberies, prostitution, gambling and narco-traffic, criminals and thugs for at least twenty years have been showing interest even for the question of “oppressed minorities”.
These religious and ethno-differential follies have been duly manipulated first by charlatans, and then gangsters - these so-called follies, leaning on deseperates with automatic gun in their hands, will throw us so low that we shall turn into the "thousands tribes of New Guinea", hunting heads. 
In summary, I shall say that Dominium means almost uncontrolled freedom of opinion (even the most idiot), but the Imperium of United laical republics never, even for instant, will admit the freedom to “do everything you want". Since 1945 history teaches us clear and bloody examples of what ought NOT to be done. Of what should not be allowed to happen tomorrow. 
 
 

When will Moscow calls the aid of “old hands”

It is simply crazy, what is going on in Russia in the last two years. 
The economy should have been liberalized step by step, from bottom (11) to top, staying on each stage for 2-3 years. 
Instead of this, in Moscow the worst adventurers of international finance were admitted. The bargain sale of the results of the work of three generations of Soviet people is open.
Wall Street sharks begin excessively to show interest in the economy of the former USSR. 
She should not weaken her political nuts, consenting to the separation of her peoples, even if Lenin, in his political illiteracy (an heritage of rising Marxism around 1848) conceded (very hypocritically and very carelessly) "the right to self-determination". 

The political and military partition of the USSR is and will always remain an unforgivable historical mistake. A fateful and irreversible event. 
Centrifugal force will destroy in five years what centripetal forces had created in four or five centuries.
At first it would have been advisable to fill shops with sausage and bread, favouring the creation of one million small-sized economic enterprises (from l up to 50 workers). Simultaneously it was necessary to strengthen political repression AGAINST all these "fighters" for separation, independence and autonomy.

Another example of the suicidal behaviour of the new Russian leaders is their "trips" to Washington instead of agreeing upon receiving economic help from Western Europe. 
From an historical and geopolitical point of view, the US are the special enemy of the USSR.
US historical strategy is to separate Europe and to partition the USSR. 
All along four centuries England conducted the same politics against the Spanish kings, against France and Germany. 
Today England left her place to the US. But only yesterday she tirelessly aimed at destroying the main continental force, capable to unite the european continent into a federation: the Spanish Absburgs, Bonaparte, Wilhelm II, Hitler. 
 
 

“Lonely" Russia is the future "Brazil in the snow" 

The partition of the USSR is irreversible. “Great Russia" is left with no more chances to be a great power. 
Then "lonely Russia" is country with no the future, same as Germany since 1945, and France since 1962. 
From an historical point of view Germany was devoided of any significance in 1945. Though she is today a great industrial power, she is completely passive, absolutely ininfluent in the international arena (12). 
Yes - 47 years have already passed, since Germany does not have any more foreign policy. In itself, this is not so bad for European unity.
Nationalistic hysteria caused a lot of evil to Europe: two suicidal wars - in 1914 and 1939. 
If some dreamer still hopes that Russia will become again "Great Russia", a first-class power, let him know from the start that Washington has already many weapons left. Washington cynically played the Baghdad card against Teheran, and then the Riyadh card, and that of her accomplices in Damascus and Cairo, against Baghdad. Washington has still many knives in stock with which, in case of necessity, to finish the partition of the USSR, and then to attend to the partition of Russia itself. 

If required, Washington without the slightest doubt will play against Moscow the Pekin card or the Islamist world card (from Pakistan to Morocco). 
Today France, England, Germany are but the historical fiction of independent states, the parodies of them. 
All these so-called "great" countries do not have foreign policies anymore. 
The Iraqi war has shown that Washington needs France and England only as suppliers of "senegalese fusillers".

Notes:

(1)
From 1981 to 1985 I published a number of works (some of them translated into Russian), advancing the theoretical possibility of uniting Europe from East to West through the repetition of an historical scenario so-called "Macedon"... Since 338 to the revolt in Galilee, at Cheronea, Philip Macedon actually accomplished the unification of Greece. 
In those works the argumentation went about the proper ideological-military method of uniting Europe in the direction from Vladivostok to Dublin. 
The Chinese continent was united 22 centuries ago by an outstanding politician – Tsin Shihuanti. 
Tsin dynasty (221-206). Unitary centralized state, beaurocraric leadership; subordination of the feudal lords. Construction of the Great Chinese wall.
Subsequent events compelled to forget about fearing the Soviet Army and about the skilfully alimented disgust for communism. In 1992  the “Macedon” solution already appeared inadequate in comparison with the 1982-1984 period. Today we should elaborate a concept of regaining back the whole Soviet territory through the construction of Great Europe, formulate it¸ and urgently wish for its realization. 
Child-like, antihistorical concept of the "Commonwealth of Independent States”, propoised by the ingenuous Gorbachev, had not the least chance of success. It was a dead born child. Its semantic absurdity is obvious: commonwealth of independents (sic)...; equally well it would be possible to speak about devote Catholics couples practising the free love. 
 

(2)
Rome was a POLITICAL STATE aiming to the expansion of its borders. 
Not such were, on the theoretical plan, cities Sparta, Athens, and Thebes, with their concept, doomed to paralysis, of the "immanent and eternal state-city". Approximately 2000 years after Prussia too would have become an expanding political state. However such expansion does not necessarily imply conquest. A theoretical and concrete example of this. If during the years 1950-55, in full cold war, the US had offered us the political integration of Western Europe into an honest and sincere "Atlantic" structure, we would have been witnesses of the birth of the Atlantic Republic, extending from San Francisco to Venice and from Los Angeles to Luebeck. 
I bring this theoretical example so that the reader can distinguish a usual enslaving imperialism from integrating imperialism. 
Such obvious ability to expand also should have the Uniform European Republic. All my geopolitical concepts postulate the necessity of preserving a of a vital nation-state. 
I shall use geopolitics with the purposes of creation of the concept and description of vitality of Republic. 
I am not a geopolitical theorist, whereas Haushofer and Spykman were among its ideologists. 
Both are badly disguised imperialists.
The difference between the theorist and the ideologist is huge. 
Haushofer only rationalized his animal pan-germanism. His concept of the "Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo" block is no more than rational masking his pan-germanist fictions. 
As to the United States, they refer to their “Manifest Destiny”. It is ideological, messianic geopolitics, born out of imaginations, in turn caused by regular reading of a paranoid literature and raids through the biblical text.
Weinberg lists the expressive chapter titles to this historical paranoia: "geographical predestination", "mission of regeneration", "inevitable destiny", "international police power". Psychologists and psychiatrists will find there food for reflection and entertainment. 
My geopolitical concept is completely different. I would say, that "the industrial and technological advance peculiar to United States must or can create such a situation, when one will reasonably and fairly administer the Continental State extending from Alaska to Patagonia. 
Instead of provocatively "walk around" their fleet in the Chinese and Mediterranean seas. 
Ideological geopolitical theories operate in the terms of subordination and/or explotation, whereas the theoretical geopolitics "in its pure state" deals with development and construction of vital states. 
 

(3)
Jose Cuadrado Costa "Insuffisance et depassement du concept marxiste-leniniste de nationalite", October 1984, in "Conscience Europeenne" n.9, Charleroi Belgique. (Concept of "nationality" in  Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Ortega-y-Gasset and Jean Thiriart). It exists in  Spanish, French and Russian language. 
 

(4)
It is necessary to critically read this work by Daniel Guerin ("L'Anarchisme", Poche Gallimard). There all nonsenses of XIXth century romanticism are written. It is difficult to find somebody more ingenous and more silly than Proudhon. He described an idyllic world, the world of "federations of federations". He did not expect Moldavian, Croatian and Armenian wars with the purpose of brutal destruction of the "Minority of Minorities". And with just one burst from an automatic gun! 
 

(5)
Jose Ortega-y-Gasset "La Revolte des Masses", Editions Stock 1961; Jose Ortega-y-Gasset "La vocation de la Jeune Europe", Revue de la S.S. Universitaire "LA JEUNE EUROPE" Berlin 1942, Cahier 8. 

(6)
Jean Thiriart "EUROPE: I'Etat-Nation Politique", revue "Nationalisme et Republique" n.8, juin 1992 25, Cours Foch 13640, La Roque d'Antheron (France). 

(7)
Since already more than a quarter of century I have been developing the concept of Europe as: (a) unitary state, (b) of European nations. General  De Gaulle wanted a strong (and united) France in an impotent (confederal) Europe. 
Europe did not like such. As well as Maurras, he was caught in an impasse. 
In 1965 the German writer Heinz Kubi attacked me about the ancient prophets of Great Germany, to which I supposedly belonged. 
Kubi writes: 
“L'Europe: une nation? (Europe: one nation?). The paradox of political landscape in Western Europe is that same people most intolerant to each other’s opponents (on the European question: gollists-confederalists and thiriarists-unionists – J.Th.) are supporters of the same concept of state. For De Gaulle it was unthinkable that the state could and should be something different from national state, as the nation is the only lawful basis for politics. The same concept is dominant among one faction of the European opposition, ("Jeune Europe " – J.Th.). This one last wants to quit the national framework, but can not offer any other kind of state, except for national. So, they want to substitute the present states with the European national state. They dream of the European nation, and it is not casual, that on this matter they agree with the prophets of "Great Germany" and other fascists from the past." (see page 312 of the French issue). 
See " PROVOKATION EUROPA ", Kiepenheuer und Witsch, Koln-Berlin, 1965. French translation: " Defi à l'Europe ", Seuil, 1967. 
The defeat of racist "Great Germany" I all too well have learnt, during war and after, in the years of reclusion. I have taken from it useful lesson about the fact that the racially united state (Hitler’s) could not extend without constant wars. Therefore in a dark cell I have worked out the concept of the expansionist political (not racial) united state. 
I have taken and developed the concepts of Sieyes and Ortega-y-Gasset, the concept of political nation to be "rounded off" into a higher destiny, a European destiny. 
 

(8)
On a meeting, the 7th of September 1789, the abbey Sieyes clearly and unambiguously stated said and has repeated: "Sovereign is only the Nation. The Nation has neither orders, nor classes, nor groups. Sovereignity can not be divided and transmitted". See Colette Clavreuil "L’influence de la theorie d'Emmannuel Sieyes sur les origines de la representation en droit public",  doctoral dissertations, Université de Paris, 1982. ; Jean-Denis Bredin "Sieyes, la clé de la Revolution française”, Editions de Fallois, Paris 1988; Paul Bastid "Sieyes et sa pensée" re-ed. Hachette 1970. 
Nobody could formulate the concept of the Unitary state better than Sieyes. As to me, I transfer this concept of United and indivisible republic to my reflections about the creation of an Imperial republic from Dublin to Vladivostok. As well as Sieyes, I am sick of all these federative theories, sources of threats of civil wars, sources of territorial partitions. 
 

(9)
For the science educated person, all our languages are too weak, indistinct, obsolescing means of expression. Scientific language is unequivocal, the literary language is always ambiguous. For this reason "writers" are expressed so not clearly in sociology or politics. See the capital work by Louis Rougier "La metaphysique et le langage", Denoel 1973. 
Actually all over the world English is already and inevitably is the common language of science and technology. The Parisian Institute Pasteur does not publish anything any more in French. All its works are issued only in English. 
 

(10)
Paul D. Mac Lean "Les trois cerveaux de l'homme", Robert Laffont 1990 (French translation); Arthur Koestler "Le cheval dans la locomotive ou le paradoxe humain", Caiman-Levy 1968; see Chapter XVI "Les trois cerveaux". Koestler addresses himself to the many educated readers. MacLean writes for the reader well familiar with brain neuropsychology. 
Sergey Chakotin "Le viol des foules par la propagande politique", Gallimard 1952. Chakotin is disciple and follower of Pavlov. His "Violence upon crowds" is a capital work indispensible to those, who want do go more in deep into the given question. 
Otto Klineberg "Psychologie Sociale", Presses Universitaires de France 1967. 
Josè M.R. Delgado "Le conditionnement du cerveau et la liberte de L'esprit" Charles Dessart, Bruxelles 1972 (French translation). 
Jean-Didier Vincent “Biologie des Passions”, Seuil 1986. 
Marc Jeannerod "Le cerveau-machine", Fayard 1986. Guy Lazorthes "Le cerveau et l'esprit - Complexité et malleabilité ", Flammarion 1982. 
 

(11)
Jean Thiriart et Rene Dastier (1962-1965) " Principes d'Economie Communautaire ", 170 pages (various ed. by Luc Michel, 1986). A comprehensive work on socio-economic theories of Jean Thiriart. (Socialism on European scale: communitarianism). There is also a brief exposition of this doctrine in a small volume of 42 pages: Yannik Sauveur et Luc Michel "Esquisse du Communautarisme" (1987). And at last, the article by Jean Thiriart "Esquisse du communautarisme", published in the journal "La nation européenne ", n.l, February 1966. 
The present Russian regime is accomplishing the liberalization of the economy in the most pernicious direction. At first they invoked  the aid of international financial sharks, which was the last thing to be done. And Yeltsin did it, proving himself to be a layman, a person without any knowledge both in the fields of economics and history. 
It would have been much more correct: (a) immediately to liberalize all enterprises with a labour work force from l to 50 people; (b) in 2-3 years to liberalize enterprises with a labour work force from 50 to 500 people. It would have been necessary to go bottom-up, from immediate liberalization of very small enterprises to those of very major concern in 6-8 years. Free enterprise stimulates work. It is impossible to say the same about the speculative international finance, looking only to its own immediate benefit. Here we shall not describe the wide margin between industrial capitalism ("Ford", "Renault", "Citroen") and speculative bank capitalism (International Monetary Fund). Hundreds pages of economic researches by Dastier and Thiriart (1962-1965) are devoted to this subject. Considerably simplifying, one might say that communitarism means a completely free economy for the enterprises with a volume of employment up to 50 people, regulated economy for those with more than 500, controlled - those above 5000, and state-economy for those with more than 50,000. It is "variable geometry” system, half-way between industrial capitalism and classical socialism. 

(12)
Modern Germany is an economic giant, on one hand, and political dwarf, on the other hand. It is a country historically evirated since 1945. Present Germany is one of the exploitation zones of the cosmopolitan economy  based on Wall Street. 
List brilliantly demonstrated the difference between cosmopolitan and political economy. Proceeding from this difference, Thiriart built the theory of the economy of power as opposed to the American economy focused on profit. 
There is an excellent analysis of List’s ideas by the American author Edward Mead Earl (see Edward Mead Earl in “Makers of Modern Strategy”, Princeton University 1943). In 1980 the publishing house Berger-Levrault issued this work in French translation under the title "Les maitres de la strategie" (Chapitre 6: “Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List: les fondements economiques de la puissance militaire”). 
List spent many years in the US. He said that "riches are useless without unity and power of a nation ". About the analytical quality of his work Edward Mead Earl wrote that it could be worth being included in an anthology of geopolitical studies.

Interview with Robert Steuckers about Politics,
Conservative Revolution, Spirituality, Eurasianism and "Synergies"

Answers collected by Troy SOUTHGATE (ENGLAND)

RS: I was never actually involved in politics, as I was never member of a political party. Nevertheless I am a citizen interested in political questions but of course not in the usual plain  and trivial way, as I have no intention to candidate or to become a Council's deputy or a member of Parliament. For me "politics" means to maintain continuities or, if you prefer, traditions but traditions that are embedded in the actual history of a particular human community. I started to read historical and political books at the tender age of 14. This lead to a rejection of established ideologies or non-values. From 15 on, with the help of a secondary school teacher of history, a certain Mr. Kennof, I realized that people should grasp the main trends of history in keys and always make use of historical atlasses (I collect them since then), in order to understand in one glimpse the main forces animating the world scene at a precise moment of time. Maps are very important for politics at high level (diplomacy for instance). The principal idea I acquired at this young age was that all ideologies or thinkings or blue prints which wanted to get rid of the past, to sever the links people have with their historical continuities were fundamentally wrong. As a consequence, all political actions should aim at preserving and strengthening historical and political continuities, even when futurist (proactive) actions are often necessary to save a community from a sterile repetition of obsolete habits and customs. 

The discourses of most ideologies, including the various expressions of the so-called far right, were in my eyes artificial in the Western World just as communism was an abstraction in front of the whole Russian history in the East or an abstraction obliterating the genuine historical patterns of the East-European peoples submitted to Soviet rule after 1945. The rupture of continuities or the repetition of dead past "forms" leads to the political-ideological confusion we know nowadays, where conservatives aren't conservative and socialists aren't socialists anymore, and so on.

Fundamental political ideas are better served in my eyes by "Orders" than by political parties. Orders provide a continuous education of their affiliated and stress the notion of service. They feel reluctant in front of the mere politicians' petty ambitions. Such Orders are the Chivalry Orders of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance in Europe, the notion of fotowwa in the Persian Islamic world as well as later experiments, including in the 20th Century (The Legion of Archangel Michael in Rumania, the Verdinaso in Flanders, etc.).   

Q.: Please explain what you mean by the term "Conservative Revolution" and, if possible, provide us with an outline of some of its chief ideologues.

When the phrase "Conservative Revolution" is used in Europe, it is mostly in the sense given to it by Armin Mohler in his famous book Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932. Mohler listed a long list of authors who rejected the pseudo-values of 1789 (dismissed by Edmund Burke as mere "blue prints"), stressed the role of Germaness in the evolution of European thinking and received the influence of Nietzsche. Mohler avoided for instance purely religious "conservatives", be they Catholics or Protestants. For Mohler the main brandmark of "Conservative Revolution" is a non-linear vision on history. But he doesn't simply take over the cyclical vision of traditionalism. After Nietzsche, Mohler believes in a spheric conception of history. What does that mean? It means that history is neither simply a repetition of the same patterns at regular intervals nor a linear path leading to happiness, to the end of history, to a Paradise on Earth, to felicity, etc. but is a sphere that can run (or be pushed) in every direction according to the impulsion it receives from strong charismatic personalities. Such charismatic personalities bend the course of history towards some very particular ways, ways that were never previously foreseen by any kind of Providence. Mohler in this sense never believes in universalistic political receipts or doctrines but always in particular and personal trends. Like J?nger, he wants to struggle against everything that is "general" and to support everything that is "particular". Further, Mohler expressed his vision of the dynamic particularities by using the some awkward terminology of "nominalism". For him "nominalism" was indeed the word that expressed at best the will of strong personalities to cut for themselves and their followers an original and never used path through the jungle of existence. 

The main figures of the movement were Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck and Ernst Juenger (and his brother Friedrich-Georg). We can add to these triumviri Ludwig Klages and Ernst Niekisch. Carl Schmitt, as a Catholic lawyer and constitutionalist, represents another important aspect of the so-called "Conservative Revolution". 

Spengler remains the author of a brilliant fresco of the world civilisations that inspired the British philosopher Arnold Toynbee. Spengler spoke of Europe as a Faustian civilisation, at best expressed by the Gothic cathedrals, the interaction of light and colours in the glass-works, the stormy skies with white and grey clouds of most of the Dutch, English and German paintings. This civilisation is an aspiration of the human soul towards light and towards the self-commitment. Another important idea of Spengler is the idea of "pseudo-morphosis": a civilisation never disappears completely after a decay or a violent conquest. Its elements pass into the new civilisation that takes its succession and bend it towards original paths. 

Moeller van den Bruck was the first German translator of Dostoievski. He was deeply influenced by Dostoievski's diary, containing some severe judgements on the West. In the German context after 1918, Moeller van den Bruck advocated, on base of Dostoievski's arguments, a German-Russian alliance against the West. How could the respectable German gentleman, with an immense artist's culture, plea in favour of an alliance with the Bolsheviks? His arguments were the following: in the whole diplomatic tradition of the 19th century, Russia was considered as the shield of reaction against all the repercussions of the French Revolution and of the revolutionist mind and moods. Dostoievski, as a former Russian revolutionist who admitted later that his revolutionist options were wrong and mere blue prints, considered more or less that Russia's mission in the world was to wipe out of Europe the tracks of the ideas of 1789. For Moeller van den Bruck, the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia was only a changing of ideological clothes: Russia remained, despite of the Bolshevik discourse, the antidote to the Western liberal mind. So defeated Germany should ally to this fortress of anti-revolutionism to oppose the West, which in the eyes of Moeller van den Bruck is the incarnation of liberalism. Liberalism stated Moeller van den Bruck is always the final disease of a people. After some decades of liberalism, a people ineluctably will enter in a terminal phase of decay. 

The path followed by Ernst Juenger is known enough by everyone. He started as an ardent and gallant young soldier in the First World War, leaving the trenches with no gun, simply with a hand grenade under is arm, worn with elegance like the stick of a typical British officer. For Juenger the First World War was the end of the petty bourgeois world of the 19th Century and the "Belle Epoque", where everyone had to be "as it should be", i. e. behave according to sad patterns pre-cut by borrowing teachers or priests, exactly as we all today have to behave according to the self-proclaimed rules of "political correctness". Under the "steel tempests", the soldier could state his nothingness, his mere fragile biological being, but this statement couldn't in his eyes lead to an inept pessimism, to fear and desperation. Having experimented the most cruel destiny in the trenches and under the shelling of thousands of artillery guns, shaking the earth thoroughly, reducing everything to the "elemental", the infantrymen knew better of human cruel destiny on the surface of this planet. All artificiality of civilised urban life appeared to them as mere fake. After the war Ernst Juenger and his brother Friedrich-Georg turned to be the best national-revolutionist journalists and writers. Ernst evolved to a kind of cynical, soft, ironical and serene observer of human and life facts. During a carpet bombing on a Parisian suburb, where factories were producing war material for the German army during WWII, Juenger was terrified by the unnatural straight air path taken by the American flying fortresses. The linearity of the planes' path in the air above Paris was the negation of all the curves and sinuosities of organic life. The modern war implied the crushing of those winding and serpentine organicities. Ernst Juenger started his career as a writer by being an apologist of war. After having observed the irresistible lines thrust forward by the American B-17s, he became totally disgusted by the unchivalrousness of a pure technical way to run a war. After WWII, his brother Friedrich-Georg wrote a first theoretical work leading to the development of the new German critical and ecological thinking, Die Perfektion der Technik (The Perfection of Technics). The main idea of this book, in my eyes, is the critique of "connection". The modern world is a process trying to connect human communities and individuals to big structures. This process of connection ruins the principle of liberty. You are a poor chained prole if you are "connected" to a big structure, even if you earn 3000 $ or more in a month. You are a free man if you are totally disconnected from those big iron heels. In a certain way, Friedrich-Georg wrote the theory that Kerouac experimented untheoretically by choosing to fall out and to travel, becoming a singing tramp. 

Ludwig Klages was another philosopher of organic life against abstract thinking. For him the main dichotomy was between Life and Spirit (Leben und Geist). Life is crushed by abstract spirit. Klages was born in Northern Germany but migrated as a student to Munich, where he spent his free time in the pubs of Schwabing, the district in which artists and poets met (and still meet today). He became a friend of the poet Stefan Georg and a student of the most original figure of Schwabing, the philosopher Alfred Schuler, who believed to be the reincarnation of an ancient Roman settler in German Rhineland. Schuler had a genuine sense of theater. He disguised himself in a toga of a Roman Emperor, admired Nero and set up plays remembering the audience of the ancient Greek or Roman world. But beyond his lively fantasy, Schuler acquired a cardinal importance in philosophy by stressing for instance the idea of "Entlichtung", i.e. the gradual disappearance of Light since the time of the Ancient City-State of Greece and Roman Italy. There is no progress in history: On the contrary, Light is vanishing as well as the freedom of the free citizen to shape his own destiny. Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, on the left or conservative-liberal side, were inspired by this idea and adapted it for different audiences. The modern world is the world of complete darkness, with little hope to find "be-lighted" periods again, unless charismatic personalities, like Nero, dedicated to art and Dionysian lifestyle,  wedge in a new era of splendour, which would only last the blessed time of a spring. Klages developed the ideas of Schuler, who never wrote a complete book, after he died in 1923 due to an ill-prepared operation. Klages, just before the WW1, pronounced a famous speech on the Hoher Meissner Hill in Central Germany, in front of the assembled youth movements (Wandervogel). This speech bore the title of "Man and Earth" and can be seen as the first organic manifesto of ecology, with a clear and understandable but nevertheless solid philosophical background. 

Carl Schmitt started his career as a law teacher in 1912 but lived till the respectable age of 97. He wrote his last essay at 91. I cannot enumerate all the important points of Carl Schmitt's work in the frame of this modest interview. Let us summarise by saying that Schmitt developed two main ideas: the idea of decision in political life and the idea of "Great Space". The art of shaping politics or a good policy lays in decision, not in discussion. The leader has to decide in order to lead, protect and develop the political community he is in charge of. Decision is not dictatorship as many liberals would say nowadays in our era of "political correctness". On the contrary: a personalisation of power is more democratic, in the sense that a king, an emperor or a charismatic leader is always a mortal person. The system he eventually imposes is not eternal, as he is doomed to die like any human being. A nomocratic system, on the contrary, aims at remaining eternal, even if current events and innovations contradict the norms or principles. Second big topic in Schmitt's works: the idea of a European Grand Space (Grossraum). "Out-of-Space" powers should be prevented to intervene within the frame of this Great Space. Schmitt wanted to apply in Europe the same simple principle that animated the US President Monroe. America for the Americans. OK, said Schmitt, but let us apply "Europe to the Europeans". Schmitt can be compared to the North-American "continentalists", who criticised Roosevelt's interventions in Europe and Asia. Latin Americans also developed similar continentalist ideas as well as Japanese imperialists. Schmitt gave to this idea of "Greater Space" a strong juridical base. 

Niekisch is a fascinating figure in the sense that he started his career as a Communist leader of the "Councils' Republic of Bavaria" of 1918-19, that was crushed down by the Free Corps of von Epp, von Lettow-Vorbeck, etc. Obviously, Niekisch was disappointed by the absence of historical vision of the Bolshevik trio in revolutionist Munich (Lewin, Leviné, Axelrod). Niekisch developed a Eurasian vision, based on an alliance between the Soviet Union, Germany, India and China. The ideal figure who was supposed to be the human motor of this alliance was the peasant, the adverse of the Western bourgeois. A certain parallel with Mao-Tse-Toung is obvious here. In the journals that Niekisch edited, we discover all the German tentatives to support anti-British or anti-French movements in the colonial empires or in Europe (Ireland against England, Flanders against a Frenchified Belgium, Indian nationalists against Britain, etc.). 

I hope I have explained in a nutshell the main trends of the so-called conservative revolution in Germany between 1918 and 1933. May those who know this pluri-stratified movement of ideas forgive my schematic introduction.

Q. Do you have a "spiritual angle"?

By answering this question, I risk to be too succinct. In the group of friends, who exchanged political and cultural ideas in the end of the Seventies, we concentred of course on Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World. Some of us rejected totally the spiritual bias, because it lead to sterile speculation: they preferred to read Popper, Lorenz, etc. I accepted many of their critics and I still dislike at the uttermost Evolian speculations, alleging a spiritual world of Tradition beyond all reality. The real world being disregarded as mere triviality; But this is of course a cult of Tradition mainly supported by young people "feeling ill in their own skin", as we say. The dream to live like beings of fairy tales is a form of a refusal of reality. In chapter 7 of Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola, on the contrary, stresses the importance of the "numena", the forces acting within things, natural phaenomenons or powers. The initial Roman mythology laid the accent more on the numena than on the personalised divinities. This bias is mine. Beyond the people and the gods of the usual religions (be they Pagan or Christian), there are forces acting and man should be in concordance with them in order to be successful in his earthly actions. My religious/spiritual orientation is more mystical than dogmatic, in the sense that the mystical tradition of Flanders and Rhineland (Ruusbroec, Meister Eckhart) as well as the mystical tradition of Ibn Arabî in the Muslim area or of Sohrawardî in the Persian realm admire and worship the total splendour of Life and World. In these traditions, there is no clear-cut dichotomy between the godly, the sacred, the holy on one side and the worldly, the profane of the simple on the other side. Mystical tradition means omni-compenetration and synergy of all the forces yeasting in the world..  

Q. Please explain to our readers why you place such importance on concepts like geopolitics and Eurasianism.

Geopolitics is a mixture of history and geography. In other words of time and space. Geopolitics is a set of disciplines (not a single discipline) leading to a good governance of time and space. Geopolitics is a mixture of history and geography. No serious power can survive without continuity, be it institutional or historical continuity. No serious power can survive without a domination and a yielding of the land and space. All traditional empires first organised the land by building roads (Rome) or mastering the big rivers (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China), then lead to the emergence of a long history, to the sense of a continuity, to the birth of the first practical sciences (astronomy, meteorology, geography, mathematics) under the protection of well structured armies, with a code of honour, especially codified in Persia, the womb of Chivalry. The Roman Empire, first empire on the European soil, was focussed on the Mediterranean Sea. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation couldn't find a proper core, as well coordinated as the Mediterranean. The waterways of Central Europe lead to the North Sea, the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea, but without any link between them. This was the true tragedy of the German and European history. The country was torn between centrifugal forces. The Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen tried to restore the Mediterranean realm, with Sicily as the central geographical piece. His attempt was a tragic failure. It is only now that the emergence of a renewed imperial form (even under a modern ideology) is possible in Europe: after the opening of the canal between the Rhine-Main system and the Danube river system. The is a single waterway now between the North Sea, including the Thames system in Britain, and the Black Sea, allowing the economical and cultural forces of Central Europe to reach all the shores of the Black Sea and the Caucasian countries. Those who have a good historical memory, not blinded by the usual ideological blue-prints of modernism, will remember the role of the Black Sea shores in the spiritual history of Europe: in Crimea, many old traditions, be they Pagan or Byzantine, were preserved in caves by monks. The influences of Persia, especially the values of the oldest (Zoroastrian) Chivalry in world history, could influence the development of similar spiritual forces in Central and Western Europe. Without those influences, Europe is spiritually mutilated. 

Therefore, the Mediterranean area, the Rhine (also coupled to the Rhone) and the Danube, the Russian rivers, the Black Sea and the Caucasus should constitute a single civilisation area, defended by a unified military force, based on a spirituality inherited from Ancient Persia. This means in my eyes Eurasia. My position is slightly different than that of Dughin but both positions are not incompatible. 

When the Ottomans gained complete control over the Balkan Peninsula in the 15th Century, the land routes were cut for all Europeans. Moreover, with the help of the North African sea rovers assembled by the Turkish born Barbarossa based in Algiers, the Mediterranean was closed to European peaceful commercial expansion towards India and China. The Muslim world worked as a bolt to contain Europe and the Moscovy, core of the future Russian Empire. All together, Europeans and Russians, joined their efforts to destroy the Ottoman bolt. The Portuguese, Spaniards, English and Dutch tried the sea routes and circumvented the African and Asian land mass, ruining first the Moroccan kingdom, which drew gold from subtropical Western African mines and claims in order to build an army to conquer again the Iberian Peninsula. By landing in Western Africa, the Portuguese got the gold more easily for themselves and the Moroccan kingdom was reduced to a mere residual superpower. The Portuguese passed around the African continent and entered the Indian Ocean, circumventing definitively the Ottoman bolt, and giving for the first time a real Eurasian dimension to European history.

At the same time, the Russian repelled the Tartars, took the City of Kazan and destroyed the Tartar shackle of the Muslim bolt. This was the starting point of the continental Russian Eurasian geopolitical perspective. 

The aim of American global strategy, developed by a man like Zbigniew Bzrzezinski, is to recreate artificially the Muslim bolt by supporting Turkish militarism and Panturanism. In this perspective, they support tacitly and still secretly the Moroccan claims on the Canary Isles and use Pakistan to prevent any land link between India and Russia. Therefore the double necessity for Europe and Russia today to remember the counter-strategy elaborated by ALL European people in the 15th and 16th Century. European history has always be thought of through petty nationalist visions. It is time to reconsider European history by stressing the common alliances and convergencies. The Portuguese seaborne and the Russian landborne actions are such convergencies and are naturally Eurasian. The Battle of Lepante, where the Venetian, Genoan and Spanish fleets joined their effort to master the East Mediterranean area under the leading of Don Juan of Austria, is also a historical model to meditate and to remember. But the most important Eurasian alliance was without any doubt the Holy Alliance lead by Eugene of Savoy at the end of the 17th Century, which compelled the Ottoman to retrocede 400.000 km2 of land in the Balkan and South Russia. This victory allowed the Russian Czars of the 18th Century, especially Catherine II, to win once more decisive battles. 

My Eurasianism  ‹and of course my all geopolitical thinking‹ is a clear answer to Bzrzezinski's strategy and is deeply rooted in European history. It is absolutely not to compare with the silly postures of some pseudo-national-revolutionnist crackpots or with the poor aesthetic blueprints of new rightist would be philosophers. Besides, one last remark concerning geopolitics and Eurasianism: my main sources of inspiration are English. I mean the historical atlas of Colin McEvedy, the books of Peter Hopkirk about the secret services in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, along the Silk Road and in Tibet, the reflections of Sir Arnold Toynbee in the twelve volumes of A Study of History.  

Q. What is your view of the State? Is it really essential to have systems or infrastructure as a means of socio-political organisation, or do you think a decentralised form of tribalism and ethnic identity would be a better solution?

RS: Your question needs a whole book to be properly and completely answered. First, I would say that it is impossible to have A view of THE State, as there are many forms of States throughout the world. I make of course the distinction between a State, which is still a genuine and efficient instrument to promote the will of a people and also to protect its citizens against all evils be they machinated by external or internal foes or natural (calamities, floods, starvation, etc.). The State should also be carved for one population living on a specific land. I am critical of course against all artificial States, like those that were imposed as so-called universal patterns. Such States are pure machines to crush or to exploit a population for an oligarchy or foreign masters. An organisation of the peoples, according to ethnic criteria, could be an ideal solution, but unfortunately as the events in the Balkan show us the ebbs and flows of populations in European, African or Asian history have very often spread ethnical groups beyond natural boarders or settled them within territories which were formerly controlled by others. Homogenous States cannot be built in such situation. This is the source of many tragedies, especially in Middle and East Europe. Therefore the only perspective today is to think in terms of Civilisations as Samuel Huntington taught us in his famous article and book, The Clash of Civilisations, first written in 1993.     

Q. In 1986, you said "the Third Way exists in Europe at the level of theory. What it needs is militants" [Europe: A New Perspective in The Scorpion, Issue #9, p.6] Is this is still the case, or have things developed since then?

RS: Indeed, the situation is still the same. Or even worse because, growing older, I state that the level of classical education is vanishing. Our way of thinking is in a certain way Spenglerian, as it encompasses the all history of the human kind. Guy Debord, leader of the French Situationnists from the end of the Fifties till the Eighties, could observe and deplore that the "spectacle society" or the "show society" has as main purpose to destroy all thinkings and thoughts in terms of history to replace them by artificial and constructed blueprints or simple lies. The eradication of historical perspectives in the heads of pupils, students and citizens, through the diluting work of the mass-media, is the big manipulation, leading us to an Orwellian world without any memory. In such a situation, we all risk to become isolated O'Brians. No fresh troops of volunteers are ready to take over the struggle. 

Q. Finally, tell us about your involvement with Synergies and your long-term plans for the future.

RS: "Synergies" was created in order to bring people together, especially those who publish magazines, in order to spread more quickly the messages our authors had to deliver. But the knowledge of languages is also undergoing a set-back. Being plurilingual, as you certainly know, I have always been puzzled by the repetition of the same arguments at each national level. Marc Luedders from Synergon-Germany agrees with me. It's a pity for instance that the tremendous amount of work performed in Italy is not known in France or in Germany. And vice-versa. In order to remain short here: my main wish is to see such an exchange of texts realised in a swift way within the next twenty