Jeremy Varon (53 page)

To preface a study on left- and right-wing terrorism in Germany, Bernhard Rabert quotes Edmund Burke’s dictum that “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Within this Burkean frame, Rabert implies that combating terrorism was essentially a matter of democratic vigilance, preventing the evil of evil men. Yet militant democracy and its underlying ethos have limits as explanatory frame-284

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works for the state’s war on terrorism, both in their tendency to excuse and their inability to fully explain. Rabert, for example, pays scant attention to the harm that “good men” may presumably do in the purported service of democracy, and he nowhere mentions the possibility that democracy’s defense, taken up by men both “good” and “bad,”

might serve as a pretext for state action driven by antidemocratic impulses. To critics of the state’s response to the RAF’s violence, militant democracy blinded its exponents to just these dangers.

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War is only the utmost realization of enmity in politics

Carl Schmitt

The political philosopher Wolfgang Kraushaar was one such critic. In his 1977 essay on the Schleyer crisis, “44 Tage ohne Opposition” (“44 Days without Opposition”), he charged that, “With the death of Schleyer . . .

the authoritarian maxim that a state can only be a state when it has the opportunity to defend itself against an enemy was alive again.”96 To Kraushaar, the Federal Republic’s battle against terrorism had less to do with preserving democracy than with asserting state power, making the protofascist legal scholar Carl Schmitt, not Thomas Mann or any other democrat, the authentic theorist of the state’s conduct.

According to Schmitt, different spheres of human activity are governed by distinct criteria, expressed in dualisms. Morality, for example, concerns itself with the distinction between good and evil, aesthetics with that between the ugly and the beautiful. Politics, in Schmitt’s view, deals essentially in the distinction between friend and foe. Political entities are constituted by this elementary antagonism, which escapes moral, ideological, and all other normative considerations. The political foe is “simply the Other, the Alien, and it is enough . . . that he is in a particularly intensive sense existentially something Other and Alien, so that in the case of conflict he means the negation of one’s own existence and therefore must be guarded from and fought off.”97

Under normal circumstances, the nature of politics as antagonism is subdued or concealed. The truth of politics becomes apparent in moments of “emergency” when, in William Scheuerman’s paraphrase of Schmitt,

“the existence or life of an entity is severely threatened.”98 Since politics defies normativity, and all crises are sui generis, no norm is applicable in times of crisis; a crisis is by definition a “norm-less exception.” Crisis de-

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mands, above all, a decision that cannot be based on any a priori norm and that requires no external justification. What is important is simply that a decision be made. All authentically political experiences are therefore rooted in conflict and have a decisionist core. In addition, sovereignty rests “in the person who decides on the exception,” rendering Schmitt’s philosophy a fundamentally authoritarian one.99 Schmitt’s contempt for liberal constitutionalism and democratic parliamentarianism results from his conviction that true political action cannot be derived from principles, the operation of reason, or debate.100

In Kraushaar’s view, the state’s actions in the Schleyer crisis exemplified Schmittian logic.101 The state seized upon the RAF as an absolute adversary, consistent with Schmitt’s definition of the enemy as entirely “Alien”

or “Other.” The “actual” threat the RAF posed was less important than the view of it as an existential threat to the Federal Republic’s identity, starkly evident in Scheel’s speech and in the contact ban, which marked the RAF as a contaminant so strong that it demanded absolute quarantine. In Kraushaar’s judgment, the state’s essential goal during the crisis was to reestablish itself as capable of acting
(Handlungsfähig).
Chancellor Schmidt counted this, along with saving Schleyer’s life and apprehending his captors, among the state’s highest priorities.102 In cruder terms, Schmidt sought to prove, in his words, “that a democratic state is not a shit state
[Scheißstaat]
that has to put up with everything.”103

Yet saving Schleyer’s life proved incompatible with the imperative of strong state action: Schmidt’s refusal to negotiate and his use of the GSG

9 virtually sealed Schleyer’s fate. The chancellor’s course of action thus took on the quality of the Schmittian “decision” as a “tragic choice,” in which sacrifice is unavoidable. By choosing a military solution—the
militarische
over the
geistige Auseinandersetzung
—he seized the true meaning of politics as life-and-death conflict and of war, in Schmitt’s phrase, as the “utmost realization of enmity in politics.”104 According to Kraushaar, the “GSG 9 killer commando” emerged as the “true representative of a theory of armed struggle” and hence the ultimate purveyor of Schmittian politics.105

Kraushaar also found troubling the public acclaim that Chancellor Schmidt received. By taking a hard line during the crisis, Schmidt successfully answered the charge by the right that the SPD government, despite its strenuous antiterrorist efforts, had been weak and indecisive in dealing with the RAF. International suspicion of Germany in the postwar years and the constraints placed on its military made Schmidt’s triumph even more satisfying: “What the people had to do without for so 286

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long, they seemed to finally get: a couple of enemies and a little honor.”106

A prominent journalist proclaimed that with the freeing of the hostages in Mogadishu, the German people could at last celebrate a military action of which the rest of the world approved. The state was able to act as “a selfless savior in a time of need,” perfectly staged as the GSG 9

freed the terrified hostages. This scene, in Kraushaar’s view, reactivated latent German longings for a paternalistic or even authoritarian state.

By agreeing to a partial blackout of coverage, the press made public criticism of the government’s handling of the crisis virtually impossible. Finally, Kraushaar argues, the extraparliamentary and, arguably, extra-constitutional powers that Schmidt and his crisis staff assumed set a dangerous precedent, in which Schmittian “state reason”
(Staatsräson)
dominated “constitutional reason”
(Verfassungsräson).

Even within a parliamentary setting, the passion for security seemed to prevail over democratic deliberation. The introduction of antiterrorists laws, such as the “Lex RAF” in 1974, had given rise to more or less conscientious debates in the Bundestag about the wisdom of altering the Criminal Code to restrict civil rights for the sake of national security. But at the height of the Schleyer crisis, those legislators who sought merely to raise such issues with respect to newly proposed laws were treated with suspicion and even contempt by their colleagues. The brief discussion in the Bundestag preceding the passage of the contact ban law illustrates how cramped the conversation had become. Amid the clamor of support for the law, Manfred Coppick of the SPD—one of only five representatives to cast a “no” vote—stepped forward to declare, “I resent . . . that some . . . have made irresponsible attempts to paint anyone indiscriminately as a ‘sympathizer’ who addresses the problem of terrorism . . . not on the basis of popular passion but rational deliberation.”107 In the face of jeers by his fellow legislators (“Such insolence!”;

“What an outrage!”), Coppick continued:

Since your reactions show how hard it is for you to listen to arguments, let me state here unequivocally: As a Social Democrat, I oppose murder, terrorism and every form of violence in a parliamentary democracy. . . .

The RAF has created the necessary climate for the forces of reaction in our country to tear down what has been painfully built up over the years, namely, democratic institutions and constitutional rights. . . . But not wanting to see the terrorists drive our society, I am also against any curtailment of constitutional rights. . . . Doing away with basic constitutional principles does not save lives, but it does create conditions under which peaceful, democratic development in a constitutionally grounded state is imperiled and human rights are threatened. . . .

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The fight against terrorism is not won by emergency laws but by the resolute application of existing law coupled with . . . adherence to constitutional principles and an unflagging devotion to creating greater social justice. . . . That is why I appeal to all union members, university professors, writers, and journalists: Stand up for civil liberties, no matter how difficult it is! Don’t be intimidated by the climate of repression [and let it]

deter you from fighting for the principles of reason and human decency.

You are not alone in this fight. I also call on the judges: Guard your independence. . . . I appeal to all who stepped forward in the 1960s to fashion a better, more humane world [“With bombs and terror?!” interjected CDU

and CSU Representatives] . . . to stand together and not to forget what once united us.108

Beneath Coppick’s beleaguered pathos lay a damning contradiction. The fight against terrorism was often presented as a defense of democracy, defined in terms of rational deliberation and an ethic of mutual respect.

But here, democracy’s quintessential deliberative body, the parliament, seemed barely able to tolerate honest debate.

Kraushaar presents a very different image of the state’s conduct than that of militant democracy, as well as a completely different interpretation than Scheel’s of exactly the same events. So divergent are their accounts that they seem evidence of what Baudrillard calls the “uncon-trollable eruption of reversibility” constitutive of terrorism, in which protagonist and antagonist, and just and unjust action, seem to shift places in dizzying oscillations.109 To Kraushaar, the state ultimately reacted to the RAF not as a clear and present danger to democracy, as Scheel had argued, but as a supra-ideological opponent serving the state’s need to defend its power as such. They also held opposing views of the place of German history in the terrorist conflict. To Scheel, the outpouring of support for Schmidt represented the unified embrace of democracy and, by implication, a decisive rebuke of the authoritarianism of the past. To Kraushaar, it amounted to a coercive conformity of opinion reminiscent of the past, made worse as the media failed its democratic role as informer and critic. Here again, Schmitt’s theories deepen his cynicism. According to Schmitt, uniformity or homogeneity are the essential elements of national identity and political strength; the unity exhibited during the crisis, seen through a Schmittian lens, appears less democratic-pluralist than it does
völkisch.
The very fact that Schmitt’s theories—widely regarded as providing a philosophical justification for Nazi jurisprudence—

can plausibly be applied to aspects of West German antiterrorism throws into question the sufficiency of militant democracy as a response to the past.

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Schmitt’s view of the “truth” of politics is neither necessarily true nor, certainly, desirable. One might well dispute that the normless logic of friend and foe can fully dominate struggles between adversaries such as the RAF and the Federal Republic, whose conflict was clearly ideological. Dialogue, debate, and compromise remain political virtues, irrespective of Schmitt’s cynicism. Nor does Schmitt’s paradigm necessarily illuminate the meaning of the German Autumn to the extent Kraushaar suggests. One
could
disdain the RAF as a threat to democracy and not simply as an “enemy” in the severe, Schmittian sense. Furthermore, not all Germans longed to feel national or martial pride. (West German rearmament had in fact given rise to widespread protests in the 1950s and 1960s.) And though critics of the state may have been quiet during the tense days of Schleyer’s kidnapping, they neither ceased to exist nor remained silent forever.

In this light, Schmitt’s analysis is best viewed as one theory of politics among many that is valuable for understanding certain aspects of political conflict at certain times, not politics as such. Kraushaar implicitly concedes the limitations of Schmitt’s theory by advocating “constitutional” over “state” reason. (A pure Schmittian view would hold that constitutionalism is always a futile attempt to give politics a normative foundation.) By extension, Kraushaar neither definitively explains the state’s response to terrorism nor makes the notion of “militant democracy” irrelevant for understanding that response. Rather, he discloses the precariousness of militant democracy as a political ethic, insofar as it may slide into or serve as an alibi for decisionist, authoritarian, or
völkisch
impulses.

A view of the state as itself a threat to German democracy need neither participate in Schmittian cynicism nor come from the radical left.

Noting that there was in the 1960s and 1970s neither a “mass antidemocratic party” nor “mass misery,” Iring Fetscher rejected out of hand claims that the RAF threatened the postwar democracy in the same way that fascists had endangered the Weimar Republic. Writing in 1977, he charged that “the single, truly real danger lies in the hysterical reaction and hidden agenda of some reactionary politicians who use terrorism as an excuse for suspending the social-democratic and liberal course of reform and building an authoritarian state.”110

A social-psychological perspective compounds the irony of the state’s response to the RAF. Jörg Bopp, who revealed a psychological subtext to the actions of young radicals, provides a complementary portrait of the New Left’s more vociferous opponents. According to Bopp they

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projected their guilt feelings [about the past] onto the student revolt and made it the scapegoat of their own failure. By opposing the “left-fascists”