Thus, he is neither pirate nor corsair sea is distinct from land (an abiding fascination of Schmitt’s later work). Fourth, he is “telluric,” meaning basically defensive and tied to the earth, not an ideological revolutionist whose fighting is wholly abstracted from location. Third, he is mobile his fighting demonstrates “flexibility, speed, and the ability to switch from attack to retreat.” With modern technology, including motorization, this characteristic becomes especially important. That is, an irregular fighter is not a disorganized fighter. Second, he is politically engaged, not a “thief or criminal,” although what that means can range greatly, depending on the politics of the moment, up to and including partisans who are better organized, due to party organization, than regular troops. This is the starting point of departure from regular forces. First, he is an irregular fighter, not in uniform and not necessarily openly carrying a weapon. In order to fully grasp and discuss the partisan, we must fully define the partisan. And that is what we have seen, to the present day (1962), from Napoleon’s harassment by partisans in Russia to French war with partisans in Indochina, exacerbated by other changes in society, particularly technological changes. The partisan is thereby “bracketed,” an embodied manifestation of enmity between two incompatible visions of the world, and such enmity necessarily tends to spiral upwards in intensity. They were either a somewhat irregular type of soldier, but entitled to the protections of soldiers nonetheless, or simply bandits and outlaws, literally outside the law. It was in part due to them that the Congress of Vienna created the modern rules of war, which rejected granting any legitimacy to partisans as a class. What matters is that they existed, the first to dare to resist a nation in arms.
More specifics of the Spanish partisans don’t really matter, and are anyway hard to determine at this remove. The partisans were a spontaneous, decentralized movement with many small-scale groups and leaders. In Spain, the legitimate authority did not create the partisans in many ways the Spanish elite cooperated with Napoleon. Thus, the partisan in the core sense that matters for this book could not exist before 1800.
Prior to that, there was intermittent regularity of war, and intermittent attempts to create rules of war, but those only became regularized and universal in the nineteenth century (in Europe Schmitt expresses no interest in the rest of the world, though obviously such rules have never existed anywhere but the West).
While “partisan” in general terms is any fighter who represents a party, Schmitt says that if a partisan is defined as someone who engages in irregular warfare, for him to be truly manifest there must be regular warfare, and that only arose during the wars of the French Revolution. This was the guerrilla warfare during the Peninsular War after Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, from 1808 to 1813. Schmitt begins by examining what he regards as the first modern partisan conflict-that is, a conflict in which partisans confronted a modern army fielded by a modern state.
The relatively narrow scope of this book does not diminish its interest, however, and it has much to say about the modern situation of irregular warfare. That book is about enemies, enmity, and how it is that only through a politics of realism that enmity can be adequately limited, in order to avoid catastrophic conflict. Instead, it is an application and explication of one of Carl Schmitt’s core lines of thought, the friend/enemy distinction, fully developed in his classic earlier masterwork, The Concept of the Political (which I have not yet read). Instead, we’re talking about what Theory of the Partisan says to us in this time and in this place.Īs befits its origin as a set of lectures, Theory of the Partisan is not a major work. Since that time, the ice has broken and the West has lurched back onto the track-the wrong track, as it happens, but that’s not what we’re talking about today. The West was frozen in the glare of spreading Communism, paralyzed by the catastrophic end of the old European system and wholly uncertain of the path forward. The time was 1962 the place was postwar Europe. This is a book born of a particular time and place.
0 kommentar(er)
