The Modern State and Its Enemies

Samuel Salzborn

Description

A consideration of the historical intellectual developments that provided the fundaments of the modern state

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.

1. Introduction: State Theory and Democracy; 2. Immortalising 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. On the Political Theory of Antisemitism; 10. Antisemitism in Eastern Europe: Theoretical Reflections in Comparative Perspective; 11. Right-Wing Extremism and Right-Wing Populism: Conceptual Foundations; 12. Renaissance of the New Right in Germany? A Discussion of New Right Elements in German Right-Wing Extremism Today; Index.

Sujets

• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Ideology
• Democracy

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 14 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785272226
• Langue: English

Extrait

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
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
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.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-220-2 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-220-9 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
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, b