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Who is, was, and will be, the Partisan?, April 5, 2010
This review is from: Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political (Paperback)
This book, the 'Theory of the Partisan', grew out of two lectures delivered March of 1962, fittingly, in Spain. I say 'fittingly' because it was in Spain, during the resistance to Napoleon, that we first encounter the full figure of the partisan fighter. Schmitt observes that 'regular' warfare (which is contrasted with the irregular warfare of the partisan throughout this text) only emerged with (that is, in opposition to) Napoleon and the armies of the French Revolution. It is as if, from the very beginning, modern 'enlightened' politico-military order called forth its demonic other. We are reminded that Napoleon had 250,000 troops who were held in check by 50,000 partisans. ...What? How? - This is Napoleon for God's sake! Well, yes, but in order to be a great General one needs at least two things: an army that will competently obey, and an enemy who will stand and fight. Even though the French Revolutionary troops provided the former, the Spanish partisans refused to provide Napoleon the latter...
From these beginnings Schmitt traces the History and Theory of the Partisan in a very terse manner. (Schmitt's book, really only an essay, is only 95 pages long.) After the defeat of Napoleon the victors, at the Congress of Vienna, "reestablished the concepts of European laws of war." However, as Schmitt points out, with "the introduction of compulsory military service, all wars become in principle wars of national liberation..." Thus Schmitt implies that to lose a war now means to lose the right to be a self-determining people. Since every war is now, at least potentially, a fight for national survival, there can be (in fact) no more limited wars... Naturally, along the way, we learn something of civil wars and colonial wars, both of which always had a partisan presence. Our author also reminds us that the Russian Empire, throughout the 19th century, fought various irregular wars against numerous mountain people it sought to subdue.
Russia is important to Schmitt's thesis because it is from Russia (i.e., from Lenin and Communism) that, according to our author, a most pernicious form of Partisan warfare (communist internationalism) would eventually arise. Schmitt reminds us that Napoleon also fought partisans in Russia, and that Napoleon also lost there. In frustration, Napoleon reportedly said, that "in fighting the partisan anywhere, one must fight like a partisan". But who is the Partisan? Anyone? No. Early on in this essay Schmitt concedes that one can say that 'to be a man is to be a fighter', and adds that "the consistent individualist does indeed fight on his own terms and, if he is courageous, at his own risk. He then becomes his own party-follower. (p. 19)" Though noting this possibility he dismisses this anarchy vaguely as merely a "sign of the time".
So then, who are the Partisans that we are to be interested in? Schmitt defines them thusly, they are:
1. Irregular Troops (no uniforms, weapons hidden, e.g.)
2. Mobil (flexibility, speed, the ability to quickly attack and retreat)
3. Intensely Political (unlike, say, pirates, - who are really only unpolitical 'businessmen'!)
4. Telluric (a local movement, rooted to a given 'land')
Or, at any rate, that is who Schmitt wishes they were. You see, the partisan "changes his essence once he identifies with the absolute aggressivity of a world-revolutionary or a technicistic [sic] ideology. (p. 20)" But of course the 'old-school' partisans described above will always be with us. "For at least as long as anti-colonial wars are possible on our planet, the partisan will represent a specifically terrestrial type of active fighter." So, you see, it is not only communist universalism that is changing the nature of the Partisan (for the worse), but progressive technocratic modernity itself. Modern weapons and communications allow telluric partisans to be easily used as pawns in the various chess matches of the Great Powers. But who really is using whom? ...Huh? Don't the Great Powers, especially the nuclear powers, seemingly by definition, always have the "upper hand"?
...So it would seem. But the following remark of Schmitt does make one wonder:
"...belligerent actions after 1945 had assumed a partisan character, because those who had nuclear bombs shunned using them for humanitarian reasons, and those who did not have them could count on these reservations - an unexpected effect of both the atomic bomb and humanitarian concerns. (p. 24)"
The Geneva Conventions (which "widened the circle of persons equated with regular fighters [...] and in this way [the partisans] were granted the rights and privileges of regular combatants") and nuclear weapons had the unexpected side effect of placing the Partisan at the center of World History. What no great power dared to do on its own could now be done by surrogates fighting for them. If this book were written only yesterday, instead of originating in talks delivered in the early sixties and first published then too, Schmitt would undoubtedly here say something smart about the Soviet Union destroying itself in Afghanistan fighting 'partisans' armed by America, only so the latter could then be slowly consumed in a war with its own creatures. - But that is exactly what is so astonishing about this book! At the height of the cold war Schmitt foresaw, however darkly, the utter futility of being a 'superpower'. And he sees this at a time when the 'best and the brightest' in both camps (i.e., that is, capitalists and communists) were certain that they were in a bi-polar world and that it was either "them or us"; but Schmitt, virtually before anyone, realizes that it could be neither ...and no one.
The second chapter presents a brief history of the development of the theory of the partisan. We are told that the Germans historically were allergic to Partisan warfare. But we also learn of the importance of the Prussian Landsturm Edict of April 1813 ("this document is a Magna Carta of Partisan Warfare") which was changed three months later ("cleansed of all partisan dangers") even though Napoleon had not been defeated (p. 43). But that is not the end of it. Schmitt points out that while the partisan efforts of the Spanish and the Russians were, let us say, 'pre-enlightened' (if not anti-Enlightenment!), the Landsturm Edict is a result of the Enlightenment itself! Here the Partisan became, "philosophically accredited and socially presentable." (p. 47)
"Berlin in the years 1808-13 was infused with a spirit that was thoroughly consistent with the philosophy of the French Enlightenment, so consistent that it was the equal of it, if not allowed to feel superior to it. [...] The nationalism of this Berlin intellectual stratum was not just a matter of some simple or even illiterate people, but rather of the educated elite. In such an atmosphere, which united an aroused national feeling with philosophical education, the partisan was discovered philosophically, and his theory became historically possible. (p.44)"
What is important to note here is that what had previously been merely and purely telluric pre-theoretical partisan resistance movements first became theorized by the political Right in the German Enlightenment. Churchill somewhere remarked that the Germans, "transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia." One of the burdens of Schmitt's essay is to indicate that this 'plague' was in reality of an Internationalist Partisan character, and that it was, ultimately, a product of the German Enlightenment! But today we know even more than that; we know that, as plagues are wont to do, it survived the death of its host (i.e., the USSR) and became that free-floating phenomenon we call 'terrorism'.
But we have gotten ahead of ourselves. Clausewitz, a product of this Berlin Enlightenment, in "1810-11, had given lectures on guerilla warfare at the General War College in Berlin [...]." But Prussia chooses to not carry out an insurrectional war as many enlightened reformers had hoped. In the end, Clausewitz "remained a reform-minded professional officer of a regular army of his time, who could not let the seeds that we see here be developed to their ultimate consequences. (p. 46-47)"
Schmitt tells us that this development "required an active professional revolutionary." That would be Lenin. He was "the first to fully conceive of the partisan as significant figure of national and international civil war, and he sought to transform the partisan into an effective instrument... (p. 49)" of the USSR. Lenin, of course, realizes that all partisans are not equal. As Schmitt observes, for Lenin if "partisans are controlled by the Communist Central Committee, they are freedom fighters and glorious heroes; if they shun this control, they are anarchistic riffraff and enemies of humanity. (p. 50)" This, of course, is the (in)famous 'they may be bastards, but they are our bastards' rationale that was the common tactic of both sides throughout the cold war era. One could perhaps say that Schmitt's essay is a meditation on how 'the bastards' emerged as a power in their own right...
Lenin read Clausewitz quite seriously and annotated him in his notebooks. According to Schmitt, Lenin uncovers the primacy of the 'Friend-Enemy' distinction in this reading. Of this Schmitt says, that for "Lenin, only revolutionary war is genuine war, because it arises from absolute enmity. Everything else is conventional play (p. 52)" Unless war is based on 'absolute enmity' with the bourgeois it is merely play. This is why, for Lenin, any partisan resistance outside of the control of the communist party is such a contemptible thing. It is only a game! This "bracketed war and prescribed enmity [of International Law] were no longer any match for absolute...
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