Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Schmitt’s works were written at the start of the 1930s, when the Weimar Republic was deep in a constitutional crisis and on the threshold of fascism. As a lawyer, Schmitt proposed subjugating the law to specific political tasks, opposing the abstract legality of the state governed by the rule of law, with the ‘substantial legitimacy’ that comes from having the people united. In the book’s central chapter, ‘The Guarantee of the Constitution’, Schmitt called for the replacement of the multiparty system by just such a ‘substantial order’, where the state acts with a unified will. And for this, he argued, it was essential to have a presidential dictatorship to protect the constitution.

A member of the Nazi Party from 1933 and an active supporter of the Hitler regime, Carl Schmitt died in 1985, aged ninety-six. Even after his death he remains one of the most contradictory figures in modern political theory. On the one hand, his ideas lie at the heart of the right-wing theory of National Socialism. On the other, he exerted a huge influence over all political thought in the twentieth century, from Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas to Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, [23] Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist; Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism; Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, ‘bare life’ and homo sacer . The concept of biopolitics (see below) informs many of his writings; Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher. His subjects include continental philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, film criticism, Marxism, Hegelianism and theology. and even on the modern constitutional structure of the Federal Republic of Germany. Schmitt’s harsh criticism of the interwar liberal world order and of the idealism in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson found resonance at the start of the twenty-first century, when the wonderful liberal world that had risen out of the remains of the Berlin Wall began to fall apart.

American neo-cons and the European ‘new right’ enthusiastically quote Schmitt today; but nowhere has Schmitt’s renaissance been as turbulent and politically significant as in Putin’s Russia. Oleg Kildyushov, who has translated and researched Schmitt, calls him ‘the theoretician of the Russian 2000s’. Political scientists close to the Kremlin are particularly excited by his theory of ‘the state of emergency’. This argues that a politician becomes a sovereign only from that moment when he steps outside the law and declares a ‘state of emergency’, at the same time creating a new norm and receiving a genuine and tangible legitimacy. According to Schmitt, sovereignty means the ability to go outside the boundaries of legalism and abstract law and declare a state of emergency.

This is exactly how Putin’s Russia is behaving today, acting according to the logic of the ‘state of emergency’, tearing up the rule book and expanding the boundaries of its sovereignty. Some were frightened and others euphoric over the annexation of Crimea; but now that we can assess what happened in a sober way, it should be acknowledged that nothing significantly new took place. This was not a ‘Putin 2.0’, nor was it any sort of decisive new direction, capriciousness or madness, which Angela Merkel hinted at when she said that Putin had ‘lost touch with reality’. The President continued to act exactly in the logic of Schmitt’s sovereign, taking a political decision (the word ‘decision’ is key in Schmitt’s thinking) in violation of existing judicial norms. Furthermore, says Schmitt, the sovereign can rely on a host of ‘organic factors’: ‘the will of the people’, tradition, culture, the past, political expediency, emergency conditions – but not on the law, nor on universal human values. Just remember the unexpected ‘asymmetric answer’ by Putin to the terrorist action in Beslan in Ingushetia in 2004, when Chechen terrorists seized a school with one thousand children. In response, Putin cancelled the elections of governors all over Russia. One might well ask, what on earth did the governors have to do with this? But in the paradigm of Schmitt’s sovereign, the most important thing is the act of violating the existing judicial norms so as to declare a state of emergency.

Just about all of the authorities’ decisions over the past ten years fit into this logic, from altering the constitutional moratorium on two presidential terms right up to the ‘Bolotnaya Affair’ (the repression of people who took part in the protest meetings on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in 2012), and the prison sentence for Pussy Riot (two years in jail for singing a punk prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow): these were all ‘state of emergency’ actions, a violation of accepted conventions and norms for the sake of a symbolic assertion of sovereignty. For a while, this logic worked solely within the country, causing merely a few standard reprimands from the West about the authoritarian drift of the Russian state. The case with Ukraine, however, saw internal policy spill over onto the outside, shocking the world. But the Crimean gambit showed exactly the same sovereign logic of the ‘state of emergency’ by citing ‘the will of the people’, only this time it meant violating not the Russian Constitution but international law, undermining not the social consensus within the country but the international order. Looking back at Putin’s actions over the previous ten years one could see that the annexation of Crimea (or a similar piece of foreign policy adventurism) was inevitable.

At the same time, it is interesting to see how Carl Schmitt’s theory fits into typical Russian sociocultural practice. The objective logic of Schmitt’s sovereign, which causes Putin constantly to alter the game’s scenario (from where we get his trademark ‘unpredictability’) and to tear up the template in order to show his superiority over his opponents, apparently coincides with his subjective beginnings, with his ‘lads’’ ( patsany ) view of his status, which he brought from the backstreets of Leningrad in the 1960s, preserving the language and the romanticism of the St Petersburg criminal underworld (they would be known today as ‘city ghettos’). This concept is well understood by the vast majority of the male population of Russia, who are concerned less with what they can make of their lives and more with the ceaseless promotion of their own status. In Russia you have to be a ‘real lad’ ( patsan ): to know how to put down (humiliate even) your enemy; to stand on your own dignity; to show no sign of weakness; and to answer for your own words. According to this logic, it’s important to be able to break the law; indeed, it’s this arrogance and preparedness to break the law that marks out a real ‘lad’ from a ‘nerd’ (‘ordinary man’).

For Putin, who came from the sleazy world of the St Petersburg backstreets and who loves to show off that he knows the foul language of the criminal fraternity (remember his famous phrase, ‘we’ll wipe out the terrorists in the shit house’ [24] A phrase uttered by Putin during a press conference in September 1999, commenting on the Russian air force bombing of the Chechen capital Grozny. ) these status games are second nature. This typical Russian disdain for norms and rules so that you can assert your own status can be seen at every level of society: it might be displayed by cutting out your business partner; by overtaking a car that’s cut you up and thus punishing the other driver; or by stealing land from an annoying neighbour. In this way the logic of the backstreet bandit becomes the logic of Schmitt’s sovereign and the ‘code’ of the criminal underworld which formulates contemporary Russian politics.