Between Naïveté and Hypocrisy? Fascist Political Theorists on Pacifism

After becoming a member of the Nazi Party on May 1st, 1933, the lawyer and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) wrote a series of polemical articles in which he articulated the key themes of his own Nazi philosophy. One of the articles he wrote carried the cryptic sounding title “Peace or Pacifism?” (Frieden oder Pazifismus?). Although the disjunction “or” might indeed sound illogical or misplaced in the title, from a far-right perspective, no such contradiction exists. Schmitt claimed that the coming Europe, whose center was constituted by the new Nazi Reich, was facing a crucial moment in deciding its future: Either one would need to accept German dominance over continental Europe (this constituted what Schmitt called “peace”) or continue to support the profoundly unjust Versailles treaties and the German subjugation in the name of “pacifism,” which, in Schmitt’s reading, was nothing else than a code name for the Allied occupation of Germany. Schmitt’s fierce rejection of pacifism had its roots in his Weimar-era writings. In his Concept of the Political (1927/1932/1933), Schmitt had famously argued that the particularly “political” relationship is always one between friends and enemies; nothing is political as such, but everything might become political – a moment characterized by the abandonment of all forms of rational argumentation in favor of disruption, violence, and even war. Thus, pacifism was not only antithetical to Schmitt’s conceptualization of the political relationship as such but would also make the defense of any constitutional order fully impossible. By presupposing the goodness of human nature, pacifism was a dangerously naïve political attitude that would endanger the existence of any political community. However, Schmitt not only condemned pacifism as naïve. He also saw in the pacifist attitude a hypocritical rhetorical instrument that could be used to subjugate other nations and peoples in the name of humanity and freedom. This is precisely what the Allied Powers had (supposedly) done to Germany after World War I by condemning her as the sole culprit to this massive conflict. Since wars are engagements in which there are always at least two sides and perspectives, no one could justly speak in the name of humanity - “whoever says humanity wants to cheat,” as Schmitt would put it. Beyond naivete, pacifism could thus also be used rhetorically in order to justify one’s particularistic political goals in the name of the common good. Taking our cue from Carl Schmitt’s political theory, this paper examines how the fascist critique of pacifism is inextricably bound with a critique of liberalism. In fact, from a far-right perspective, pacifism, is nothing but a liberal codename for a subjugation that does not dare to speak out its name. It is argued that this dual critique of pacifism and liberalism as both naïve and hypocritical makes it possible to critically parse out some of the central lines of argumentation among the new intellectual strands of the later and contemporary far-right.