Carl Schmitt, the Dolchstoßlegende and the Law of Armed Conflict

Scott Horton

A scholar reading Carl Schmitt's writings on international law topics today is overcome with a sense of a brilliant but fundamentally flawed mind that undergoes some radical mood shifts. There is the post-World War II Schmitt, carefully offering up cautious, traditional conservative understandings of international public law. There is the Schmitt of the 1930's with his astonishingly adventurous, and downright chilling interpretations in which the totality of international law is consumed, reprocessed and extruded so as to meet the short-term political objectives of the National Socialist Reich. Then there are the works of political theory, starting with Der Begriff des Politischen and developing in Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950), which offer a take on international law which, it seems to me, is often difficult to distinguish from the international relations theory approach of Hans Morgenthau. This latter segment in particular helps to explain why Schmitt often seems so uncannily similar to current day Neoconservative writers like John Yoo, Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner whose analysis is clearly indebted to Morgenthau. It often seems very difficult to reconcile these different manifestations of Schmitt other than by suggesting something very human: that careerist expedience plays a powerful role in the process. This is most evident of his writings in the core period of his advocacy of the interests of the National Socialist state, 1933-37.

A recent study by Prof. Dirk Blasius (University of Duisburg-Essen) makes an important contribution to the understanding of Schmitt's posture on international law issues in general, and his attitude towards the law of armed conflict in particular. In "Carl Schmitt und der 'Heereskonflikt' des Dritten Reiches 1934" (Carl Schmitt and the Third Reich's Army Conflict of 1934), Blasius pulls together a number of powerful texts from the period between the wars that put Schmitt's attitudes in a new light. The article is published in Germany's leading historical journal, Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 281, p. 659 (2005). The works that Blasius covers includes diary entries and archival manuscripts, the significant tract on the restructuring of the legal profession, Staat, Volk, Bewegung of 1933 (discussed in my last post), and the fairly obscure Staatsgefüge und Zusammenbruch des zweiten Reiches – Der Sieg des Bürgers über den Soldaten (State Structure and the Collapse of the Second Reich – the Victory of the Bourgeoisie over the Soldiers)(1934). These documents taken together reveal a crude and generally ahistorical take on Germany in the period between the war of 1866 and the founding of the Weimar Republic. At the same time they provide a key to understanding political views that drive Schmitt's legal posture, particularly on law of armed conflict issues.

The Frederican Military State
Schmitt is a Westphalian Catholic with notorious and even racist disdain for Prussia, a curious background for a Prussian State Councillor. In his diary he writes that Prussia constituted a "victory of the Slavs over Germans, because the Germans Germanized the area to the east of the River Elbe, and the Slavs who lived there were incorporated into the Germans, with the product being called Prussians." (Blasius 661) Nevertheless, he views the modern Sparta, Prussia, as the core of Germany, and its state structures as imbued with essential characteristics of the German Volk in a sense that combines Herder and Hegel. Frederick the Great "has become a symbol for the unity of state and army, of governance and the conduct of war. His life and his state contain examples for all situations in which the problem of state, army and economy can be portrayed" (from a lecture at the University of Berlin, Jan. 24, 1934). This state concept maximized potential from both economic and military perspectives. "The revolutionary significance of this total reform is not reduced, but rather strengthened by its hierarchical and authoritarian structure. At this time, in 1807, the indivisible unity of state, army and economy was strongly impressed upon the consciousness not only of the great fomenters, the Barons von Stein [sic: probably intended to refer to Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom Stein], Scharnhorst, Boyen – but also their opponents." For Schmitt, this is a silver age of efficient and enlightened authoritarianism, which laid the foundations for the creation of the modern German state.

The Encroachments of the Liberal Bourgeoisie
The silver age ends, however, with the arrival of a new middle class with liberal-democratic aspirations. "For Prussia, the leading German state, this period means an open or latent conflict between government and parliament, state and popular representation, and indeed a period of military and budgetary conflict."(Blasius 667) The second half of the nineteenth century presents a gradual process of accumulation of power by the bourgeoisie and extension of its political and economic rights. "The idea of a liberal democratic constitutional state gradually triumphed in domestic politics over the spirit of the German Volk, and then they triumphed militarily and in foreign policy through the disarming of the battling army."(Blasius 669)

The Dolchstoßlegende
The key to Schmitt's narrative lies in the Dolchstoßlegende – the suggestion that the German Army was "stabbed in the back," i.e., betrayed, by liberal democratic forces in the waning days of the Second Reich. The Dolchstoßlegende suggests that limitations imposed by the civilian authorities in the course of the Great War led inexorably to the failure of the Germany Army. This in turn led to the abdication of the Emperor Wilhelm, the termination of the Second Reich, and the creation of the Weimar Republic. The argument is preposterous – in fact Germany was in the last days of the Great War little short of a military dictatorship. Nevertheless, conservative nationalists in Germany used the Dolchstoßlegende as their principle political weapon in their struggle with the forces of liberal democracy. Given the demonstrated potency of this rhetorical device following a military defeat, it has made numerous repeat performances in other societies. As Kevin Baker argued in the June 2006 issue of Harper's, key figures in the present Bush administration are linked to efforts to argue that the failure of the United States in Vietnam during the Nixon and Ford Administrations is attributable to a "sell out" by forces in the United States which opposed the war; Baker cites several other uses of this line of argument in American politics in the end of World War II and during the Korean War. The Schmitt edition of the Dolchstoßlegende involves an interesting permutation. "During the Great War," Schmitt writes, "every deterioration of the military or foreign policy situation would work to the domestic benefit of the opponent, that is, the Parliament, with nearly mathematical precision; it would also furnish constitutional arguments for its claims to power." (Staatsgefüge, 39). However, Schmitt comes to a focus not on the end phase of the war, but rather on its outset: the decision to avoid a focus of the combat on the fortified Franco-German frontier by swinging quickly through neutral Belgium. "On August 4, 1914, the German Chancellor [Bethmann Hollweg] declared the German invasion of Belgium to be an 'injustice,' for which compensation would be necessary. A childish notion of law governing emergencies, combined with a servile fear of the appearance of this act in the eyes of foreigners, produced this shameful capitulation, and betrayed Germany's popular army to the constitutional ideals and legal concepts of its foreign and domestic enemies." (Staatsgefüge, 41-42)

This is an audacious characterization in light of what Bethmann Hollweg actually said in this address in 1914. The Chancellor in fact acceded to the proposal of the General Staff that the neutrality of Belgium be violated. Indeed, he did so reciting the Bismarckian mantra "Not kennt kein Gebot!" (Necessity knows of no limitation). His sole bow to the requirements of international law was a vague promise that some accommodation would be offered the Belgians after Germany had obtained its military goals.(Blasius 672)

The invasion of a neutral state by Germany at the outset of the Great War was a clear violation of international law principles, and German actions afterwards raised a slew of issues under the Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions. Schmitt's ostensible position is that Germany should have taken these steps with no remorse. His analysis seems completely driven by the concept of Kriegsraison, the view that military expediency alone can drive the action, and that no effective legal constraints existed. This reasoning seems very close to that of Carl Lüder, a well known German law of armed conflicts expert of this era, who argued for robust military action that was unfettered by concern for international law.

Schmitt's ahistorical analysis suggests a dismissive attitude towards basic law of armed conflict rules and a will to be driven by his best assessment of the short-term political interests of his state. As I noted previously, this is the attitude which ultimately drove internal analysis in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, not the more conservative and traditional analysis of the post-World War II Schmitt.
Posted 3:15 AM by Scott Horton [link]