Writings on War

It may seem odd for the Muslim World Book Review to deal with Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), one of the best known and most controversial legal and philosophical minds of his time and beyond, given that he was a Catholic and an opportunistic backbone of the Nazi regime to its very end.

However, Schmitt had emerged quite differently during World War I as the author of Political Romanticism (1919) and Political Theology (1922), even befriending the Dadaist Hugo Ball. Later, Schmitt was considered in Germany as being at par with literary and philosophical giants like Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger. In fact, his style is so brilliant that many formulations of his entered the German language as proverbial sayings.

After World War II Schmitt, far from repenting, even tried to become chief advocate at the Nuremberg Trials, maintaining that no precedent existed for treating a war of aggression ipso facto as criminal. On that basis he accused the Tribunal of violating the principle of nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (no crime, no penalty without [previous] legislation). Due to this, Schmitt really had to withdraw not only from his professorship in Berlin but from his public role. Nevertheless, his influence remained topical, as can be seen from Bush’s justification of torture and the ‘war on terror’.

Schmitt had indeed warned against the modern trend of distinguishing between just and unjust war, making it impossible even to distinguish between war and non-war. He foresaw that this trend would lead to the justification of total war and to the equally detrimental legitimization of warfare by calling it ‘pacification action’, ‘low intensity conflict’, ‘counter-insurgent operation’ or just ‘intervention’. Caesar dominus et supra grammaticam (The Emperor is also the Master of Grammar) [justifying language], he quips.