Perilous Futures by Peter Uwe Hohendahl

Author:Peter Uwe Hohendahl [Hohendahl, Peter Uwe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General, Political Science, History & Theory, Philosophy, Political
ISBN: 9781501730672
Google: LEZQDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-10-15T22:26:30+00:00

The Military Discourse of the 1950s and 1960s

Carl Schmitt was by no means the first theorist to focus on partisan warfare. In this respect he could not and did not claim originality. In fact, he draws heavily on the existing critical literature. In Germany he draws on the writings of Gerhard Nebel, Rolf Schroers, Hans Joachim Sell, and Hellmuth Rentsch.4 Among the Spanish and French experts he cites are Luis Garcia Arias, Raymond Aron, and Roger Trinquier. He is equally familiar with the Anglo-American literature, for instance the works of Peter Paret and John Shy.5 As much as their perspective and evaluation of irregular wars may differ, these authors share the insight that these so-called small wars changed the geopolitical situation after 1945. Therefore the analysis and political assessment of these wars were of equal if not greater importance than the discussion of nuclear strategy. Mao’s victory in China in 1949 after an extended period of civil war, the defeat of the French Army in Indonesia in 1954, and the Cuban Revolution and the civil war in Algeria between 1954 and 1962, which ended with the independence of Algeria, were the most visible examples of the effectiveness of subversive warfare.

Why were the insights of these authors of interest to Schmitt? For one thing, they confirmed Schmitt’s fear that the age of contained interstate wars was a thing of the past, that the nuclear stalemate between the superpowers shifted political conflicts to parts of the globe where they would not trigger a completely destructive nuclear exchange. However, on closer inspection it turns out that Schmitt, especially following the lead of his French sources, advances a more radical interpretation of guerilla warfare. For him, it has become the major threat to the existing global political order, a threat that cannot be contained. Therefore his theory is concerned with the logic of this threat, which is ultimately political and, by extension, theological rather than military. This becomes apparent in the way Schmitt constructs the history of partisan warfare with his peculiar emphases and selection of wars.

When we look at the debates over the foreign policy of the Federal Republic of the early 1960s, it becomes very clear that Schmitt’s theory offered a counterprogram, a sharp deviation from the concerns of public opinion and the political parties. These debates focused on what might be called national survival strategies under the conditions of the East-West conflict and the military threat of nuclear annihilation of the civilian population. We have to recall that in the early 1960s, with the incoming Kennedy administration, tensions were rising after the international discussion on arms control had failed. From a West German perspective the erection of the Berlin Wall in August of 1961 demonstrated again the vulnerability of the West and especially of West Germany’s own borders; and the problem of the defense of Berlin raised the question of the potential use of nuclear weapons and the fear that the civilian population of West Germany, as the border state, might not survive the exchange.

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