The liberal blags have been taking potshots Robert Kaplan for this recent remark:
But America is much too alone in taking on this work. Europe, having been liberated from nuclear terror at the conclusion of the Cold War, proved unable to muster the gumption to deal with Yugoslavia on its own, or, as the case of Afghanistan shows, to demonstrate much enthusiasm for any great collective effort. Which leads to the question: What does the European Union truly stand for besides a cradle-to-grave social welfare system? For without something to struggle for, there can be no civil society—only decadence.
Thus, with their patriotism dissipated, European governments can no longer ask for sacrifices from their populations when it comes to questions of peace and war. Ironically, we may have gained victory in the Cold War, but lost Europe in the process.
Now, I think Kaplan is wrong here. He’s wrong on the substance and he’s wrong on the subtext (“stupid, lazy, good-for-nothing Europeans with their baguettes and stinky cheese and universal health care”). That said, I don’t think it’s as risible a remark as everyone else.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been reading a lot of Schmitt lately, but I really do think there’s something to the idea of conflict as a necessary driving force in meaningful life. He would certainly have found a more elegant and incisive way of saying it, but I’d have to imagine that if he were still around he’d make much the same point as Kaplan. The neutralization of politics that has gone into the development of a liberal European polity has some troubling byproducts.
It’s not about losing ‘civil society’ though – in fact it’s precisely the opposite. A life lived without the sense of politics as conflict is a life lived entirely IN civil society, in the depolicitized world of vocation and idle play. The problem of modern liberalism is the ease with which we simply take for granted the laundering of our basic struggles through the lens of boring insitutions and (relatively) meaningless choices.
Of course, as I said, I don’t AGREE with Kaplan’s argument. For one thing, I think there’s a strong case that European democracy (in particular) has a lot more of the flavor of conflict in it than this sort of critique assumes. My academic work right now is on precisely this question of whether liberalism is really a project of minimizing the scope of the political, and I come down pretty strongly on the side of it as a far more vital enterprise than is traditionally credited. Along those lines, I think it’s a rather gross overstatement to imply that the only way to inculcate a meaningful sense of struggle and conflict in a polity is to imagine existential threats where none exist.
If anything, the war-mongerers, the unrepenetant Cold Warriors in search of another Great Enemy, they are the ones far more susceptible to a Schmittian critique. They presuppose precisely the liberal milieu that they criticize – indeed the premise that our enemies seek to not just threaten us but also to threaten freedom as such is precisely the mechanism by which they transform war from a necessity into a crusade. It’s the false sense that you have identified the ‘just war’ which truly imperils the world.
So I agree with folks like Yglesias when they point out that the neo-cons are a problem. But I disagree with the implication that there is nothing to the argument in favor of politics as necessarily conflictual. We don’t have to believe everything Schmitt says, but I think it’s a mistake to not at least take him seriously. If we don’t, we run the risk of advocating for a milquetoast and anodyne sense of politics that helps put folks like Wolfowitz and Cheney and Bush into positions of power and arms them with a sense of legitimacy.
Struggle matters, but it should be genuine struggle over politics. There’s plenty of space for that within a liberal political structure but it’s not something we can just take for granted.