The Modern State and Its Enemies: Democracy, Nationalism and Antisemitism

By Samuel Salzborn

The Modern State and Its Enemies considers the historical intellectual developments that provided the fundaments of the modern state, informed the key theoretical questions arising in the democratic context, and shaped the relationship between (state) sovereignty and (individual) liberty. The modern state as a nation-state is thus based on the relationship between its territory, its people and its sovereign authority. As a result, nationalism and minorities policy are issues that are key to the state’s self-conception. But historically, these have also been repeatedly used as weapons against the state, manifesting in separatism, irredentism and antidemocratic agitation. Both antisemitism and right-wing extremism have always stood in opposition to the democratic state and continue to do so. Antisemitism in particular is antithetical to modernity as it fundamentally rejects equality and individual liberty. This book presents its arguments in theoretical, historical and sociological terms, with a particular focus on examples from the German context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272226

Book preview

The Modern State and Its Enemies

The Modern State and Its Enemies: Democracy, Nationalism and Antisemitism

Samuel Salzborn

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Samuel Salzborn 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The book is supported by funding from the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, Berlin.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-220-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-220-9 (Hbk)

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Contents

1. Introduction

State Theory and Democracy

2. Immortalizing the Mortal God: Hobbes, Schmitt and the Ambivalent Foundations of the Modern State

3. Guardian of Democracy? Theoretical Aspects of Police Roles and Functions in Democracy

4. The Will of the People? Carl Schmitt and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on a Key Question in Democratic Theory

5. No Sovereignty without Freedom: Machiavelli, Hobbes and the Global Order in the Twenty-First Century

Nationalism and Minorities

6. The Concept of Ethnic Minorities: International Law and the German-Austrian Response

7. Carl Schmitt’s Legacy in International Law: Volksgruppenrecht Theory and European Grossraum Ideas from the End of World War II into the Present Day

8. The German Myth of a Victim Nation: (Re)presenting Germans as Victims in the Debate on Their Flight and Expulsion from Eastern Europe

Antisemitism and Right-Wing Extremism

9. Antisemitism in Eastern Europe: Theoretical Reflections in Comparative Perspective

10. Right-Wing Extremism and Right-Wing Populism: Conceptual Foundations

11. Renaissance of the New Right in Germany? A Discussion of New Right Elements in German Right-Wing Extremism Today

Bibliography

List of First Publications

Index

1

Introduction

In focusing on the modern state and its enemies, this book considers the historical intellectual developments that provided the fundaments of the modern state, informed the key theoretical questions arising in the democratic context (e.g., representation, participation, policing and the use of force) and shaped the relationship between (state) sovereignty and (individual) liberty. The modern state as a nation-state is thus based on the relationship between its territory, its people and its sovereign authority. As a result, nationalism and minorities policy are issues that are key to the state’s self-conception. But historically, these have also been repeatedly used as weapons against the state, manifesting in separatism, irredentism and antidemocratic agitation. Both antisemitism and right-wing extremism have historically stood in opposition to the democratic state and continue to do so today. Antisemitism in particular is antithetical to modernity, as it fundamentally rejects equality and individual liberty.

Democracies still face threats to their existence today. With autocratic regimes, political power is clearly based on the executive prerogative, meaning the use of force by police and military, thereby guaranteeing domestic stability through the threat and—if necessary—use of force (assuming there is no military intervention from abroad) (Chapter 3). In contrast, the political power of democracies is ultimately based on their power of persuasion, a principle that is often challenged and subverted by opponents of democracy, especially in times of social and economic crisis. Here, a democracy ideally means a constitutional order that guarantees universally applicable, generally formulated, nonretroactive laws while also having the ability to enforce these with sovereign authority, and that furthermore cements the separation of politics and jurisprudence by prohibiting the enactment of excessively vague blanket clauses. What differentiates democracies in practice is the particular way in which the demos is given the power to rule over itself: the resulting organizational rules are not only formal principles but also the outcome of substantive debates concerning the structures and functions of democracy. The distinctive modus operandi of each democratic system is thus also an expression of a particular understanding of democracy, with its own systemic answers to the central theoretical questions of democracy. Here, what can be seen as the central question of democratic governance is how the ruling should be related to the ruled, with the answers falling into two ideal types, based on difference or sameness: whereas conflict-oriented democracies advocate a representative system and thereby embrace social heterogeneity, consensus-oriented democracies argue for systems founded on identicalness and thus strive for complete or near-complete homogeneity between the ruling and the ruled (Chapters 4 and 6).

In the global history of democratization over the past three centuries, there have been many cases of democratized states becoming destabilized through the actions of opponents both domestic and foreign (e.g., in South America and Southeast Asia), reflecting a constant interplay both qualitatively and quantitatively between democratic expansion and autocratic rollback (Chapter 9). The conceptual model of defective democracy (cf. Merkel 2010) makes clear that the drift into autocracy happens gradually and that the dividing line between democracy and autocracy can sometimes be fluid, such as in the cases of exclusive democracy (in which parts of the populace are systematically excluded from the electoral process), enclave democracy (in which constituent groups such as militias, businesspeople and/or the military exercise some political power without the need for democratic legitimacy), illiberal democracy (in which constitutional frameworks are suspended either partially or completely) and delegative democracy (in which political checks and balances have been tipped in favor of a strong executive) (cf. ibid., 37–8) (Chapter 3). Within the domestic sphere, democracies are faced with extremist forces trying to undermine their democratic foundations in order to establish an authoritarian or totalitarian system, while in the international arena, they are confronted by autocratic regimes with antidemocratic intentions.

So there exists a complex interplay between democracy and autocracy in which the two models of governance compete not only domestically for sovereign control over a territory and its people but also internationally between rival states. If the democratization wave theory formulated by Samuel Huntington (1991) is extended back through history, it can also be seen that the first democratization wave seen in the European and American bourgeois revolutions began as a reaction to the prevailing undemocratic regimes—largely autocratic ones—that had enjoyed relative stability for centuries (cf. Fukuyama 2011). The key development that shook the stability of autocracies was the Enlightenment’s posing of the legitimacy question (Chapters 4 and 5): once asked, it becomes impossible to silence through any means of thought control or physical force—which ultimately explains the steady, albeit slow, proliferation of democratic regimes around the world, while also allowing for the vague expectation that democratic models of governance will eventually prevail in time, even in the face of autocratic alternative systems.

In this sense, the story of democracy has always been a story of fragility, which also has to do with the nature of democracy itself. This is because democratic governance models are based on an Enlightenment ideal in which the person is not only to be treated as an individual but should also become a mature political subject. The philosophical ideals of the Enlightenment are politically implicit in the democratic model. What this Enlightenment philosophy has promised the individual is nothing more—and nothing less—than a shift from a passive object of history to an active subject of politics. What primarily distinguished the premodern mode of governance was that it did not need to justify itself as such. Its objective power stemmed from not subjectively needing to legitimize itself, since its own claim of divinity had already made it sacrosanct. But now that individuals were free of their premodern constraints, they were also to become aware of their own subjectivity, to recognize themselves as born free (Rousseau 1762, 5) and capable of learning and to emancipate themselves from their self-incurred immaturity (Kant 1784, 53). As both bourgeois philosophy and liberal theory, Enlightenment thinking committed the individual to freedom without being able to guarantee it—or even wanting to do so.

In its liberal aspect, this promised freedom from coercion not only implied a freedom from security but also entailed two other double-edged consequences, in its dialectic of public sphere versus private sphere, and in its contradiction between rights and economics. The latter guaranteed equality as a legal ideal, but one that ensured economic inequality while also legitimizing it, thereby realizing freedom as a theoretical equality while actually segmenting and differentiating society in its claims of universality; meanwhile, the former constituted the very core of bourgeois governance in its separation of public sphere from private sphere, a separation that promised freedom while also suspending it. While the public sphere was the site where the contract between free and equal brothers (Pateman 2000, 32) resulted in the partitioning of a legal system independent of the political sphere, this also generated the private sphere as a gendered site of reproduction, thereby establishing a basic precondition for the industrial division of labor. Public-sphere freedom was only to be achieved through private-sphere unfreedom for society’s female majority. Therefore, the premise of freedom in the private sphere was always structurally dependent on the reproducing of production frameworks that were founded upon a false promise of freedom—false for being halved in two ways. So while the public sphere became the site of the political, the private sphere became the site of the public sphere’s gendered reproduction.

But this halving of the Enlightenment ideal was not simply an exclusion: it was ultimately based on the dialectic of the Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947) itself, on its underlying premises and assumptions that are both deeply self-contradictory and inescapably caught in this self-contradiction. Here, emancipation from the theological paradigm ultimately meant replacing it with a natural science one—a paradigm shift in which emancipation was also inscribed with its opposite. This dichotomy arises because on the one hand, while the new rationalism may have freed the individual from the bonds of Christian subordination, it could not offer a sense of meaningfulness like that of the theologians, one capable of fulfilling the threatening emptiness of human life and the deep yearning for transcendence, which are tied to humanity’s innate fear of what Hobbes (1651) called the greatest possible evil: death, of which only humans, alone among all living creatures, are ultimately aware of, and which shapes them in their every worldly action, both consciously and subconsciously. On the other hand, this dichotomy also arises because emancipation was based on a natural science understanding that replaced an irrational faith in God with an irrational faith in Nature, one that ushered in a process of emancipation, albeit only for the light-skinned male part of society—an emancipation that every progressive movement has tried to expand since then. However, this new faith in nature and science would not only take humanity’s former humility and transform it into a fantasy of omnipotence in which everything could be conquered and controlled but also lead to the classification, segmentation and hierarchization of all humanity and, in this sexist, racist, colonialist and antisemitic enterprise, to the invention of more and more categorical distinctions that would stamp out, both symbolically and concretely, the great trauma of the Enlightenment—namely, the awareness of one’s own mortality—through ostensibly natural and scientific hierarchical systems, ones resulting in oppression and subjugation as well as persecution and extermination.

Although frequently lionized as the next democratization wave, the Arab Spring (i.e., the uprisings in several Arab countries starting with Tunisia in December 2010) took less than a year to lose its shine, as it not only turned out to be a distant mirage and a case of Western wishful thinking but—through the victories of various Islamist groups—has itself become part of the third great antidemocratic counterwave, in an authoritarian backlash that is starting to transform the old authoritarian regimes into totalitarian Islamist ones. At the same time, the Western world, instead of empathizing more with the struggle for democracy and freedom since 9/11, has been empathizing less: anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism have become increasingly prominent, particularly in the European Union (cf. Markovits 2007; Rensmann and Schoeps 2011), with actions supporting freedom and democracy (admittedly including military ones) being met with rejection and animosity, even here in one of the cradles of democracy, feelings that are projected upon the two states that symbolically combine the ideals of freedom and the Enlightenment with the use of military force: the United States and Israel.

This particular ambivalence toward modernity, one that rejects and fights against the emancipatory core of the Enlightenment while also voicing one-sided support for the technological solution and the essentialist option, ideas that are likewise inscribed in the dialectics of the Enlightenment, is mostly clearly seen in the worldview of antisemitism, as the negative guiding principle of modernity (cf. in detail Salzborn 2010a, also for the following). In the analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno (1947), antisemitism and modernity are inseparable from one another, with modern antisemitism both dependent on and limited by the Enlightenment: scientific emancipation’s potential for barbarism (and its real-world implementation) also includes the potential for self-reflection and a critical transcending of immaturity (Chapter 9).

In both political and social terms, antisemitism in the early modern era was initially directed only against the Jewish populace itself, and especially against its legal and political emancipation. Then came a process of radicalization—rigorously dissected by Shulamit Volkov (1978) in her conception of the cultural code that antisemitism had become through this process—which happened as antisemitism became increasingly involved in broader political questions and new ground was broken in the critiquing of entire social and political systems, ultimately leading to proposals for a fundamentally new society that was still "to be designed, planned and constructed, thereby inspiring the fantasies of the völkisch movement" (Schulze Wessel 2006, 222). The delusional in the process of antisemitic projection was and is manifested as an inverting of the relationship between individual and society, between internal and external and between psyche and sociality. Drawing upon what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno wrote about mimesis and false projection in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947, 220–22), it can be said that the antisemitic worldview is not interested in a mimetic transformation process with successful object representation and simultaneous subject recognition but instead the reverse: a projective-delusional transformation of external reality with the goal of aligning the social environment to fit the individual’s delusional drive structure. While modern antisemitism, in contrast to premodern anti-Judaism, does achieve an abstraction, it then seeks out—in its delusion—a concrete target for its projections, thereby accusing Jews of not being concrete but abstract: for example, in equating them with goods or money. Here, as Sartre (1945) has noted, the antisemite is rejecting certain abstractions of bourgeois society, particularly modern forms of property like money and stocks, since these would be too close to rationality and thus akin to the abstract intelligence of the Jewish.

As stated by Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) and Arendt (1951), antisemitism is ultimately a particular way of thinking, and as stated by Sartre (1945) and Claussen (1987), it is furthermore a particular way of feeling: here, antisemitism is both an inability and unwillingness to think abstractly and feel concretely, with the two transposed so that the thoughts become concrete, but the feelings become abstract. As a result, the contradictions of modern bourgeois society not only remain misunderstood and unexamined in intellectual terms but are also withheld from processing in emotional terms, because the feelings are abstracted and so the ambivalent emotions of the modern individual subject are not suffered. In antisemitism, the individual is desubjectivized twice over, both in losing intellectual sovereignty over personal self-reflection and in giving up the possibility of emotional understanding and empathy. The antisemitic desire to think concretely is accompanied by an inability to feel concretely: here, the worldview is to be concrete but the feelings are to be abstract, a situation that imposes an inversion upon both the intellect and the emotions, one whose dichotomy cannot help but lead to internal conflicts. On the ideological level, antisemitism thus maintains a decisionist attitude to the world, a conscious and subconscious radical decision to buy into the dualist antisemitic fantasy both intellectually and emotionally. Just as democracy is the guiding principle of modernity, antisemitism is ultimately its antithesis, as the negative guiding principle of modernity.

The focus of this collection of essays is to explore various aspects of the dialectical tension between democracy as a positive guiding principle of modernity (Bluhm 2006) and antisemitism as a negative guiding principle of modernity (Salzborn 2010a). Here, it can be said that the modern nation-state is organized not only along the polarity of ethnos versus demos but also according to the dichotomy of sovereignty versus freedom, or political power versus legal protections (Chapters 5 and 7). What is important about the modern nation-state’s twofold dichotomy is that it not only provides the foundation for antisemitism and ethnonationalist thought but can also provide a safeguard against them, depending on how the four categories of ethnos versus demos, as well as sovereignty versus freedom, are concretely combined and interrelated. Nazism, which was focused only on ethnos and only on sovereignty, attempted to eliminate the modern state with its contradictions and, as Franz L. Neumann (1944) put it, to build an antisemitic unstate in which contradictions and heterogeneity are destroyed, and the narcissistic fantasy of ethnonationalist homogeneity is realized through antisemitic annihilation (Chapter 2).

But here it is also clear that, within the logic of antisemitism, the never-ending project of antisemitic extermination can have no end, because antisemitism is structurally compelled to always create imagos as a necessary ideological construct for the preservation of its psychological and economic obsession with purity. Any attempt to unilaterally negate modernity is structurally doomed to fail, which means that a delusional structure of continual repetition is embedded within the antisemitic worldview—it is only with the extermination of the last human in the world that the desire for omnipotence and purity can finally be achieved, which is why Jean-Paul Sartre (1945, 470) was absolutely on the mark when he wrote that antisemitism is the fear of being human.

In this volume, the various contributions explore different facets of the tension between democracy and antisemitism as seen in the modern state, striving to analyze them in terms of political theory and intellectual evolution. Here, the perceived processes of inclusion and exclusion, as described on the systemic level by David Easton (1965, 1975) and on the cultural one by Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (1963,1980), are key elements in forming a subjective opinion of a political system and thus in deciding whether to offer or withhold political support, which can be categorized according to object (political community, regime, political authorities) and type (specific support, diffuse support), categories that themselves form the basis for multiplex opinions on the relevant political systems, opinions that then inform questions of legitimation and delegitimation. This is clearly demonstrated by recent developments in right-wing extremism around the world, for it is here that the political ideals of democratic participation and representation are being fundamentally challenged, with the goal of destroying the democratic guiding principle of modernity (Chapters 8, 10 and 11). While the relevant political theoretical conceptions may have been originally formulated in order to mobilize political movements, the same theoretical propositions are themselves also the result of social and political instabilities, regardless of whether oriented toward legitimizing or delegitimizing the relevant political order. Of course, an idea is in itself not enough for the practical realization of a theoretical political system, and so once an idea has solidified into a political agenda, the next necessary step is to socially electrify it: the cultivation of an alliance between elite and grassroots is therefore indispensable if a proposed new political order is to be realized or an already existing one is to be defended against attempts to revolutionize it. Here, the struggle between stability and instability, and between legitimation and delegitimation, is waged in the complex interplay between conscious structures (especially political and legal ones), preconscious/semiconscious structures (especially social ones) and unconscious structures (especially psychological ones) as seen in the interactions between individuals, discrete groups and the general public, structures that influence in various ways the stability and lability of existing political orders as well as the attractiveness or unattractiveness of proposed alternatives (Chapters 2 and 3). As described by John DeLamater, Daniel Katz and Herbert C. Kelman (1969), the functional and normative motives underlying a commitment to a political order are also combined with symbolic elements. The further evolution then depends on which factors in this interplay ultimately gain the upper hand, whereby it must also be noted that beyond the internal forces of a society, there are always the external ones as well, for example, with the threat of military intervention from abroad and the associated potential for an outbreak of physical violence.

Despite the end of the Cold War conflict between competing systems around 1989/90, which Francis Fukuyama (1992) enthusiastically proclaimed as the end of history before issuing a dark and pessimistic retraction some twenty years later in his equally enthusiastic diagnosis of a new and essentially antidemocratic future of history (2012), the argument over what makes for a good or bad political system has now attained a virulence that has not been seen in a long time. Today, many utopian dreams, such as the desire for world peace, the yearning for a just world order and the wish for worldwide mechanisms of calm deliberation, seem just as far from any chance of realization as they did when first proposed, considering the gigantic rollback represented by the worldwide upsurge in authoritarian and totalitarian movements (Chapter 5).

And while certainly open to debate, it can be said that the concept of the state lies at the heart of modern political thought, and regardless of whether the analytical perspective is affirmative or critical, constructive or destructive, intellectual or emotional, it is impossible for any political science analysis to get around considerations of the state and its various dimensions. Even in postmodern or communitarian visions of a discursively or morally conceptualized world society (and/or information society) transcending the nation-state, it is the state, in its very negation, that still acts as an unmistakable normative template shaping the discourse.

Here, the question of how the state dimension manifests itself is ultimately one of degree, not essentialness: regardless of whether the state represents the positive normative basic framework for theory building or merely provides the unavoidable negative foundation for normative distancing, both approaches show a referential dependence on the state as a political structuring principle (cf. Müller 2009, 221–58). Worth noting in historical terms is that what we now see as traditional concepts of state theory were originally developed as systematic empirical analyses of historical states, which then became a theory of state only through their normative claims, although they actually would have been initially located within the field of political systems analysis (highly instructive here is Helms 2004, 13–14).

The fascination triggered by the state in both its real and ideal (and thus idealized) forms is rooted in the structure of modern socialization itself, and thus in the unavoidability of the state as a historical ramification of modern society. In fact, the development and disintegration of political systems can be essentially described as the erosion of legitimation systems that combine the belief in the concrete state with the hope in its ability to function as the embodiment of the abstract state (i.e., of the way it should be), or indeed with the hope that it can fend off—with reference to competing political models like the Reich, the ekklesia, the Tiānxia and the umma—the pan- ideologies, tribalism and/or anarchy. Therefore, the key to understanding the development and disintegration of political systems is the question of legitimation. And this is precisely what makes the state unavoidable: it provides the organizing framework for the formation of modern society, and so must (in the Hegelian sense) continually reproduce it, in order to avoid going entirely extinct.

State Theory and Democracy

2

Immortalizing the Mortal God: Hobbes, Schmitt and the Ambivalent Foundations of the Modern State

Without a doubt, the lasting currency of the Old Testament myth of Leviathan and Behemoth is due, in large part, to its appearance in the state theory of Thomas Hobbes. In Jewish eschatology, the two monsters are conceived of as radically antagonistic: Behemoth, a male, controls the land, while the female Leviathan rules over the sea. Both monsters, intending to establish a reign of terror, struggle for dominance. They are then slain by God or—according to differing versions of the myth—kill each other. All accounts agree, however, that the monsters’ deaths will bring about the Day of Justice. Their story was popularized through Hobbes’s treatises Leviathan or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651) and Behemoth or the Long Parliament (1682). In his 1651 magnum opus, Hobbes describes an oppressive political system with only remnants of individual rights; the less well-known Behemoth, dating from the time of the English Civil War, deals with a chaotic non-state marked by utter anarchy. The absolute rule of Leviathan, in which traces of the rule of law and vestiges of individual rights are preserved, is distinct from that of Behemoth, which is marked by lawlessness and disorder (cf. Perels 2000, 361).

In older depictions, Behemoth often resembles an elephant, a hippopotamus or