Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy

Dates, dates, dates. 1917, 1945, 1989. The wars of the world seem to have been reduced to a squabble about dates. 1 For Jürgen Habermas, the year 1945 is pivotal. As he puts it, the Allied victory "permanently discredited an array of myths which, ever since the end of the nineteenth century, had been mobilized against the heritage of 1789." The unconditional surrender of Germany in 1945, then, stands for the unconditional surrender of "all forms of political legitimation that did not—at least verbally, at least in words—subscribe to the universalist spirit of political enlightenment" (Habermas 2001, 46). The year 1989 is merely an afterthought. If, in 1945, after the collapse of their fascist and militarist regimes, Germany, Italy, and Japan were integrated into the new universalist order, then 1989 simply represents the year in which former communist regimes, which in any event paid the all-important lip service to the ideals of 1789, were effectively and not just verbally integrated into that order. Ernst Nolte (1997) likes all three dates because they form the beginning and end dates of a series of consecutive civil wars, a European civil war between bolshevism and fascism from 1917 to1945, and a global civil war between liberal capitalism and communism from 1945 to 1989. Thus for Nolte, 1945 is pivotal only in the sense that it represents a crucial transition, an intensification not a culmination that only finds its ultimate resolution at the end of the "short twentieth century." Nolte, in other words, conflates Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union by calling the defeated enemy of the twentieth century "totalitarianism," while Habermas persists in seeing communism as an admittedly imperfect Enlightenment ally in the fight against the uniquely evil, fascist counter-Enlightenment. [End Page 120]