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COLUMBIAUNDERGRADUATEJOURNALOFHISTORY
validity to violations of international law.
2
Schmitt, an elegant, lucidtheorist, possessed ideas that, in their crisp beauty, seduce, despite thedevastating outcomes they describe. International law has always been
Schmitt’s eloquent critique provides an excellent starting point for adiscussion on international law. There is a dichotomy between conventional, “civilized,” wargoverned by international law, and unconventional, civil, colonial,or what Schmitt calls “partisan” war that threatens the spatial order.Schmitt argues that unconventional war destroys the international law of war: “The modern partisan has moved away from the conventionalenmity of controlled and bracketed war and into the realm of another,
it ends in extermination.”
3
In fact, partisan war did not destroy thelaws of war but rather created them. This thought reversal becomesespecially important when considering the contemporary application of Schmitt’s language. His characterization of “another real enmity, which
the “War on Terror” and the excuses for violations of international law.However, by placing Schmitt’s statement in historical perspective, itbecomes clear that partisan warfare does not destroy international law but rather creates it. The international law of war becomes a legitimate,
Schmitt marks the beginning of the breakdown of the law of war with the emergence of partisan warfare in the Napoleonic Wars.He writes, “new spaces of/for war emerged in the process, and new concepts of warfare were developed along with a new doctrine of war and politics.”
4
by Clausewitz’ famous dictum that war is “politics by other means.”Clausewitz’ book
On War
was written to address the new form of modern, total war created by Napoleon. Schmitt believes that whileClausewitz “recognizes openly the new ‘potential’ that [partisan war]
2
William E. Scheuerman, “Carl Schmitt and the Road to Abu Ghraib,”
Constellations
13, no. 1 (2006). Prominent neo-conservatives who follow Schmittinclude Jay S. Bybee, Alberto Gonzalez, and John Yoo.
3
Carl Schmitt,
The Theory of the Partisan
(New York: Telos, 2007), 11.
4
Ibid., 3.
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