Carl Schmitt and Donoso Corts

Gary Ulmen
Carl Schmitts Catholic provenance is well-known.1 In his youth, he admired the Churchs stability and juridical perfection. He also admired the Churchs flexibility in uniting the most diverse political systems without losing its own principles. However, in the 1923 work in which he described the Churchs complexio oppositorum,2 he was already becoming disillusioned. By 1929, he was convinced that, instead of providing a firm foundation for political theories, theology generated more controversies than any other discipline. His disillusionment with the Church became final after WWII, because it regularly meddled in affairs beyond its purview. Schmitt often referred to the religious wars incited by theologians in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was fond of echoing Alberico Gentilis remark: Silete theologie in munere alieno! (theologians should mind their own business). Yet, Schmitt was strongly influenced by three 19th century counterrevolutionary Catholic thinkers Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and the long-forgotten Juan Donoso Corts.3 Schmitt agreed with Maistre and Bonald that man is evil by nature and that the only way to deal with this predicament was to rely on tradition and society. He owed a special debt to Maistre for his equation of sovereignty and decisionism. But by far the most profound influence on Schmitt seems to have been Donoso Corts. In the introduction to the small volume that Schmitt published on Donoso in 1950, he pointed out that the name had come up during three cataclysmic events: the 1848 European civil war; WWI and
1. See George Schwab, The Challenge of the Exception: an Introduction to the Political Ideas of Carl Schmitt between 1921 and 1936 (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1970). 2. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicsm and Political Form, translated and annotated by G. L. Ulmen (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 7f. 3. Juan Donoso Corts, Marquis de Valdegamas (1809-1853), a Spanish author and diplomat, was a Catholic philosopher.

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its aftermath; and the present global civil war.4 He also noted that once these earlier crises passed, Donoso was soon forgotten. Todays global civil war may warrant remembering him once again. Donoso was concerned with defending the established European order, after the 1834 civil war in Spain, the upheavals unleashed by the 1789 French Revolution and, later, the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe. His primary political aim was to form a conservative front of European powers against the revolutionary forces. Because it believed that man is good by nature, atheistic anarchic socialism also contradicted Donosos view that man is evil and even dangerous. Donoso also opposed the liberal bourgeoisie, which he defined as a discussing class. In an age when monarchy was rapidly disappearing, Donoso saw only one alternative to socialist anarchism and bourgeois liberalism: dictatorship. Of course, after WWI, when Schmitt wrote three of his essays on Donoso, he was not advocating dictatorhip for the Weimar Republic, but rather a plebiscitarian type of democracy with the president of the Weimar state at the top, aided by the army and the officialdom. By the time Schmitt discovered Donoso, he had already published an article on dictatorship,5 and his preferred solution for the problems of the Weimar Republic was to some extent a variation on Donosos theme of dictatorship. The novelty in Donosos thought was that he no longer advanced legitimist arguments, i.e., a restoration philosophy, and the question of legitimacy in the dynastic sense never entered Schmitts mind. He did, however, accept democratic legitimacy with respect to the Weimar constitution. There are also some similarities between Donosos condemnation of the freedom of discussion in the Prussian assemblies and other parts of Germany after the 1848 upheavals and Schmitts criticisms of the Weimar parliament. But Donoso was not opposed to the institution of parliament as such. He thought that it should be subordinated to the monarch so that both could find the solutions necessary for societys welfare. The same could be said of Schmitts opinion of the Weimar parliament. Finally, there is a striking similarity between Donoso and
4. Carl Schmitt, Donoso Corts in gesamteuropischer Interpretation: Vier Aufstze (Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950), p. 7. This book consists of four essays, three of which are translated in this issue. Not included is the first one, On the Counterrevolutionary Philosophy of the State (Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Corts), (1922), which appeared in Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Essays on the Concept of Sovereignty tr. by George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 53-66. 5. Carl Schmitt, Diktatur und Belagerungszustand, in Zeitschrift fr die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft, Vol. XXXVIII (1917), pp. 138-162.

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Schmitts evaluation of political parties, i.e., that they were less interested in joining legitimate authority for action than in maintaining doctrinal positions that would enable them to undermine it and gain state power. Schmitt argued that in the Weimar Republic, the political parties were destroying the politcal unity needed to maintain the republic. After WWI, Schmitts main concern was to defend the established order, which had been buffeted by war and revolution. The collapse of the monarchy ended dynastic-monarchic legitimacy and introduced democratic legitimacy. For Schmitt, this raised the critical issue of sovereignty: Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception. It is the exception that makes the subject of sovereignty relevant,6 i.e., sovereignty becomes paramount in a crisis, when it must be decided how to restore order. An ordinary legal order can never account for an exception to the rule, since such an exception can never be anticipated. In a crisis, all a constitution can do is designate who should deal with it. The sovereign decides if an exception really exists, and then how to handle it. According to Schmitt, the very existence of the state is proof that it is superior to the legal order. The state should not be equated with legality, i.e., the legal order, as many positivist jurists had claimed, because the state rests on a more fundamental legitimacy. When there is an exceptional state of affairs, the state suspends the law on the basis of its right of self-preservation. Once order is restored, ordinary rules become decisive once again. The interpretive key here is political theology understood as the metaphysical core of all politics. This is because all significant concepts of the modern state are secularized theological concepts.7 The most interesting elaboration of this view is found in Maistre,8 Bonald, and
6. Schmitt, Political Theology, op. cit., pp. 5-6 (translation altered). 7. Ibid., p. 36 (translation altered). 8. Believing that the origin of political institutions is not human, but divine, that sovereignty comes from God and is absolute (but not despotic), Maistre also laid the foundation for modern Ultramontanism. Bonald, also an Ultramontane, elaborated the conditions necessary for the success of the counterrevolution. Montanism and Gnosticism were central during the most critical period of the Early Church, and what became the Roman Catholic Church was created only after the overthrow of both movements. The name Montanism derives from the monk Montanus, who (probably in 156 AD) claimed he had access to the spirit of Christianity, and sought to have the Early Church separate itself from the secular world in order to become more ascetic. But the Early Church chose to enter the Roman state and to Christianize it with the Gospel. Consequently, the Montanes withdrew from the Church and became a sect. Later, the original ideas became politicized with the founding of the Ultramontane Party in Rome.

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above all, Donoso. In both Spain and Germany, the Catholic Church was at the forefront of the counterrevolution. Maistre called the 1789 French Revolution diabolical, and provided a theoretical justification for restoration, even before it begun. As for Donoso, his political theology is more historical and sociological than that of Maistre or Bonald. He was concerned with a contemporary reality, i.e., the mythologization of the masses impulses and dreams, which were manipulated by particular groups.9 After the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which reestablished order following the Napoleonic wars, Europe enjoyed an era of peace and relative stability until the 1848 revolutions. The next four years saw violent oscillations in France, Italy, and Central Europe. The forces that unleashed them were liberalism, democracy, and nationalism. For a while, the revolutionaries seemed to be gaining the upper hand, but the tide turned and reaction prevailed everywhere. The counterrevolutionaries promoted tradition and custom, in the belief that history progresses slowly. Donoso saw beyond the reaction. He concluded that the epoch of royalism was at an end. Therefore, traditional legitimacy no longer existed. For him, there was thus only one solution: dictatorship. It is the same solution that Hobbes reached by the same kind of decisionist thinking.10 As after WWI, Schmitts volume on Donoso that appeared after WWII was not meant as a defense of dictatorship, but rather of the need for decision.11 He notes that between the 1789 and 1848 revolutions, decisionism became central to Maistre, Bonald, and Donoso. This was crucial, because the moral decision was the core of the political idea at
9. As Schmitt writes: In the first stage of this mythologization, there were still remnants of a secularized theology at work. The impulse was provided by a historical theology of the trinity, the doctrine of Joachim of Fiore, according to which the kingdom of the Father had been replaced by the kingdom of the Son, and now a third kingdom, that of the Holy Spirit, was on the horizon. However, that next stage has long since passed, and no longer requires either theological or secular concepts. To a great extent, the masses obviously have become completely concerned with a pure this-worldliness. . . . He [Donoso] . . . is weak when he lapses into moral philosophy or theology. He is thrilling and remarkable when he breaks through to a historical view and describes historical epochs, civilizations, nations, and empires. . . . Everything that he says in his great moments is thus an appeal to history. See Schmitt, Einleitung, in Schmitt, Donoso Corts, op. cit., p. 12-14. 10. Schmitt, Political Theology, in Schmitt, Political Theology, op. cit., p. 52 (translation altered). 11. There are now several works on Donoso in English. See John T. Graham, Donoso Corts: Utopian Romanticist and Political Realist (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1974); and Selected Works of Juan Donoso Corts, tr., ed., and introduced by Jeffrey P. Johnson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000).

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a time when politics was under attack.12 For Schmitt, a political idea is not an abstraction, but a plan of action. Today, as in Donosos time, decisionism emphasizes the distinction between legality and legitimacy.13 Donoso already drew this distinction in his 1849 speech on dictatorship.14 For him, dictatorship is a political idea, but at that time it did not mean what it does today. It was synonymous with sovereignty; it was the opposite of liberal discussion, which never comes to a decision. Along with Maistre, he regarded every government as absolute, i.e., a dictatorship. As Schmitt put it, until 1848, legitimacy meant the historical, monarchicdynastic form of legitimacy. Most people did not recognize that a different form of legitimacy had come into play from the Left, one that proved to be stronger than conservative legitimacy. . . . It was the legitimacy of the democratic revolution. That is what Donoso understood.15 For Donoso, the final struggle between Catholic Christianity and atheistic socialism had begun. In the face of radical evil, dictatorship was the only answer.16 Today, however, the confrontation is between anarchy and nihilism. Nihilism has come to mean an extreme form of skepticism the rejection of all values, both moral or religious. Whereas political theology
12. Schmitt left no doubt as to his meaning: Today, nothing is more modern than the struggle against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists, and anarcho-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in the demand that the biased domination of politics over the objectivity of economic life must be ended. There should be only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks, but no longer any political problems. The dominant type of economic-technical thinking today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. See Schmitt, Political Theology, op. cit., p. 65 (translation altered). 13. As Schmitt noted, in modern times the idea became widespread that not men, but law should rule, which resulted in the formula in the name of the law. But the law has no name, and cannot interpret itself. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Legalitt und Legitimitt, 2nd. ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1968), p. 8. 14. As Schmitt writes: For Donoso Corts, the time of unquestioning adherence to legality had passed. . . . dictatorship was no longer legal; it was legitimate. The practical question was only whether dictatorship would be from above or from below (today, one would say: from the Right or the Left). Thus, arose the question of the legitimacy of dictatorship: cuando la legalidad basta para salvar a la sociedad, la legalidad cuando no basta la dictadura [even though legality protects society, legality does not prevent dictatorship]; and what he already considered to be the other concept of legitimacy in his 1849 speech: la dictadura es un gobierno legitimo como qualquio otro gobierno [dictatorship is a legitimate government like any other government]. See Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, ed. by Eberhard Freiherr von Medem (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), p. 49. 15. Schmitt, Einleitung, in Donoso Corts, op. cit., p. 18. 16. Thus, authority and anarchy could constitute a clear antithesis . . . and confront each other in an absolutely decisive way. See Schmitt, Political Theology, op. cit., p. 66 (translation altered).

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supplies the analogies for political concepts, nihilism provides no basis for either. Since it is opposed to any order, it obviously cannot sustain any social system or international law.17 As Schmitt put it, it is imperative to distinguish clearly between the anarchy of the Middle Ages and the nihilism of the 20th century. . . . the European medieval order certainly was very anarchistic, in terms of a smoothly functioning modern factory, but it was not nihilistic, despite all the wars and feuds, as long as it retained the fundamental unity of order and orientation.18 According to Schmitt, Donoso touched on every important thought that traced a continuity between the predicament of 1944 and that of 1848. In 1848, things were different from today, but they were also different from what obtained in 1944.19 Liberalism, democracy, and even national unity, at least for Germany, had to wait for the outcome of WWI. Thereafter, when Schmitt first compared 1848 and 1944, it was clear already that Europe would be dominated by the superpowers in the East (Russia) and in the West (America), as Donoso had predicted.20 Yet, Donoso was aware of democracy, which, along with liberalism and nationalism, had ignited the 1848 revolution. In addition to his global prognosis, he provided a diagnosis of irresistible democratization, technicization, and centralization, which, after 1848, despite the reaction that he favored, he considered inevitable. It may even be argued that he foresaw the coming of globalization: he mentioned the railroad and the telegraph as promoting this development, although today it is being brought about by technology.
17. Today, it is possible to claim that a completely different antithesis has become actual, namely, that of anarchy and nihilism. By comparison with the nihilism of a thoroughly centralized order with modern means of destruction, anarchy can appear to be not only the lesser evil, but also a remedy to desperate people. See Schmitt, Einleitung, in Donoso Corts, op. cit., pp. 9-10. Today the Catholic Church is as opposed to nihilism as it was to revolution: it stood on the side of the counterrevolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. . . . in that remote skirmish . . . [it] stood on the side of the Idea and West European civilization. See Schmitt, Roman Catholicism, op. cit., pp. 38-39. At any rate, The line from 1848 to 1948 is the development and intensification of nothing and nihilism. See Schmitt, Glossarium, op. cit., p. 203. 18. Schmitt, Glossarium, op. cit., , pp. 56-57. 19. See the fourth essay of Schmitts book, A Pan-European Interpretation of Donoso Corts, reprinted in this issue, was originally written in 1944. Schmitt had delivered this essay as a speech at the Academia de Jurisprudencia y Legislacion in Madrid on May 31, 1944. It was published in German in 1949 in Die neue Ordnung, and in Spanish that same year in Revista de la Facultad de Derecho (University of Buenes Aires, Argentina). 20. As Schmitt notes, however, Donoso prognosis is somewhat weaker than Tocquevilles in Democracy in America, because he includes a third power, England, and lacks the link to the development of democracy.

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Today, however, the most relevant aspect of Donoso work is related to the present global civil war. As already indicated, Schmitt mentions the European civil war of 1848 between liberalism, democracy, and nationalism, on one side, and reaction and monarchism, on the other, as one of the three cataclysmic events that brought Donoso name to the fore. Prior to the French Revolution, the states political power had ended the religious civil wars by establishing a stable international order that bracketed war.21 The French Revolution destroyed that order, but it was reestablished at the Congress of Vienna, and, despite 1848, remained in force until WWI. For Schmitt, war is the touchstone of international law. It is a relation of order to order, not order to disorder. This last, order to disorder, is civil war.22 In a civil war, there is nothing in common with the enemy.23 Until 1848, Donosos thinking developed in the context of the Spanish civil war, although it was overshadowed by the contradictory foreign policy of other European states. But Donoso saw that the internal Spanish civil war would necessarily become a European and ultimately a planetary civil war that would end in a global civil war.24 Schmitt first mentioned a global civil war in 1950, but as early as 1938 he had already introduced the concept.25 The turn to a discriminatory concept of war had thrown the whole order of international law off its axis, while creating no new order.26
21. See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, tr. and annotated by G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), p. 142. 22. Carl Schmitt, Vlkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung fr raumfremde Mchte: Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff im Vlkerrecht, in Carl Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916-1969, ed. by Gnter Maschke (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995), p. 301. 23. Schmitt, Glossarium, op. cit., p. 36. 24. Schmitt, Einleitung, in Donoso Corts, op. cit., pp. 18-19. 25. The problematic of the concept of war is mirrored in the unrest in the contemporary world situation. It demonstrates, which has always been true, that the history of international law is a history of the concept of war. International law is a law of war and peace, jus belli ac pacis, and will remain so as long as it is a law of independent nations organized as states, i.e., as long as war is state war and not an international civil war. Every dissolution of old orders and every start of new ties raises this problem. There cannot be two contradictory concepts of war, nor can there be two contradictory concepts of neutrality within one and the same international law. See Carl Schmitt, Die Wendung zum diskriminierenden Kriegsbegriff (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1938), p. 1 (italics added). Years later, Schmitt used this wording again, when he wrote that Mao Tse-tung systematically developed all modern methods of national and international civil war. See Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen: Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen, 2nd. ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1975), pp. 59-60. 26. Ibid., p. 47.

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But what is a global civil war? There are two interrelated circumstances that create the conditions for global civil war. The first is when war ceases to be bracketed, and the second is the turn to a discriminatory concept of war, which transforms the real enemy into an absolute one [foe].27 Yet there is a third element that has come about since Schmitt wrote: when the state loses its form and becomes historically obsolete, war also loses its form. This happened when both the US and Russia abandoned the European system of international law and failed to create a new order. In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt identified the roots of this predicament in an unresolved problematic of American foreign policy: in the development of the United States since 1890 and of the Western Hemisphere that it dominates. After WWI, this predicament was also perceptible in Europe: The contradictions stem from the unsolved problematic of a spatial development that is compelled either to make the transition to a Groraum and to find its place in the world of other recognized Groreme, or to transform the concept of war contained in traditional international law into a global civil war.28 In this context, Lenin transformed the center of gravity from war to politics, i.e., the distinction between friend and enemy. That was meaningful, and, following Clausewitz, a consistent continuation of the idea of war as a continuation of politics. Only Lenin, as a professional revolutionary of global civil war, went still further and made an absolute enemy [i.e., foe] out of the real enemy.29 This means that war today is essentially different from that in
27. Cf. G. L. Ulmen, Return of the Foe, and George Schwab, Enemy or Foe: A Conflict of Modern Politics, in Telos 72 (Summer 1987), pp. 187-193 and 194-201, respectively. 28. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, op. cit., p. 296. There was also a Russian side to this problem: As soon as the discrimination of other governments is in the hands of the United States, it has the right to turn people against their own governments, and to transform state war into a civil war. Thus, discriminatory world war in the American style becomes total and global civil war. At first glance, this is the source of the unexpected joining of Western capitalism and Eastern Bolshevism. From both sides, war, because it has become global and total, is transformed from the interstate war of traditional European international law into global civil war. This also reveals the deeper meaning of what Lenin had to say about the problem of total war, when he stressed that, given the contemporary state of the world, there is only one type of just war, namely, civil war. See Carl Schmitt, Die letzte globale Linie, in Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos, op. cit., p. 446. 29. Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, op. cit., p. 94. According to Schmitt: Just war, i.e., the deprivation of the rights of the opponent, and the self-empowerment of the just side; that means: the transformation of state war (i.e., of war in international law) into a war that is simultaneously a colonial and a civil war; that is, logically and irresistibly: . . global civil war; and ceases to be interstate war. See Schmitt, Glossarium, op. cit., p. 249.

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the times of our grandfathers. The change is important and has something sinister about it. War today is no longer a hostile encounter of two organized and well-disciplined armies. It is not pursued just with military weapons. The opponents mutually seek to destroy each other with all the means available. Thereby, war is transformed into a civil war; also, the cold war becomes a cold civil war.30 The relation between 1848 and today can be understood only in terms of global civil war, the return of just war, and the situation of international law. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Churchs authority was decisive in the determination of what constituted a just war.31 But from the 16th to the 20th century the justa causa was put aside: The formal reference point for determining just war was no longer the Churchs authority in international law, but rather the equal sovereignty of states. Instead of justa causa, international law between states was based on a justus hostis [just enemy]. Any war between states, between equal sovereigns, was legitimate. Given this juridical formalization, a rationalization and humanization a bracketing of war was achieved for 200 years.32 The attempt to distinguish between just and unjust wars began after WWI, both in official American declarations and in Lenins pronouncements. Although today war is radically different, the distinction is still unclear. What is clear is that the question of just and unjust wars is concerned primarily with a new international order grounded in international law. Despite the efforts of the League of Nations and of the UN, which
30. Carl Schmitt, Amnestie oder die Kraft des Vergessens (1949), in Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos, op. cit., p. 218. 31. According to Schmitt: In scholarly discussions of international law today, especially concerning the question of just war, the international law of the Christian-European Middle Ages is invoked and utilized in a peculiar and contradictory manner. This is true not only of those scholars continuing to work with the system and methods of Thomist philosophy, to whom reference to scholastic definitions readily suggests itself. It also is true of numerous arguments and constructions in which, for example, League of Nations theorists in Geneva and American jurists and politicians have endeavored to utilize medieval theories, above all those concerning just war, for their own ends. See Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, op. cit., pp. 56-57. 32. Ibid., pp. 120-121. According to Schmitt: the turn to the modern age in the history of international law was accomplished by a dual division of two lines of thought that were inseparable in the Middle Ages. These were the definitive separation of moral-theological from juridical-political arguments, and the equally important separation of the question of justa causa, grounded in moral arguments and natural law, from the typically juridical-formal question of justus hostis, distinguished from the criminal, i.e., from becoming the object of punitive action. The decisive step from medieval to modern international law from the theological system of thought predicated on the Church to a juridical system of thought predicated on the state lies in this dual division.

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today is becoming more and more like the League, there is still no new world order, and there has not been one since the collapse of the nomos of the earth grounded in European international law. The cold war was a civil war a global civil war.33 It was a just war, because both sides assumed that they had right on their side. Each considered the other to be a foe, and assumed that any clash would be total. That civil war ended with amnesty for both sides, but without any agreement concerning the international order. For a short time, it seemed as if history had ended. Then came September 11, and this illusion died in the flames of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Today, it is obvious that the war on terrorism is a global civil war: it is total, and the enemy is considered a foe who must be annihilated by whatever means necessary. War is no longer exclusively a state prerogative, but is now in the hands of terrorists, bandits, and criminals.34 While sovereign governments are still bound by certain restraints, these groups are not. They do not distinguish between civilians and soldiers. Islamic terrorists are enemies of democracy and the Enlightenment, as was Donoso, and they are willing to use all available means to destroy what they consider heretical. Like Donoso, they are counterrevolutionaries steeped in religion. But there is a vast difference between Donoso conservative Catholicism and the terrorists Islamic fundamentalism. Donoso was for order. The terrorists are for disorder and destruction. If war is no longer under state control, at least part of the reason is that the state has been in decline since at the least the mid-20th century, and is becoming obsolete. This is another reason why there is no common agreement concerning the conduct of war, even among sovereign governments as became obvious in the polemics concerning the US treatment of incarcerated combatants and its plans to attack Iraq. According to the
33. See Gary Ulmen, Just Wars or Just Enemies, in Telos 109 (Fall 1996), pp. 99112. It is still assumed, however, that nothing has changed. Consider Michael Walzers attempt to reintroduce a moral argument into the definition of war [See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 2nd. ed. with a new preface (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 51]. He claims to appeal to the laws of international society [sic!] (as these appear in legal handbooks and military manuals). As for the rest, he equates law with the moral law, to those general principles that we commonly acknowledge (p. xxvii). What these principles are, is never spelled out. As David Hendrickson puts it, if war belongs to the realm of necessity, it makes no more sense to pass moral judgment on it than it would to pass moral judgment on catastrophes occurring in nature. [See David C. Hendrickson, Twenty Years of Michael Walzers Just and Unjust Wars, in Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. II (1997), pp. 19-20]. 34. Cf. Gary Ulmen, The Military Significance of September 11, in Telos 121 (Fall 2001), pp. 174-184.

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Geneva conventions, soldiers must wear uniforms, carry arms openly, display rank, and act at the behest of a sovereign authority bound by the laws of war. None of this is true of terrorists. Moreover, while the Geneva conventions require prisoners of war to give name, rank, and serial number; terrorists often use aliases and have no state-sanctioned rank and serial number. Also, at the conclusion of hostilities, legitimate soldiers are required to lay down their arms and return to civilian life. If a terrorist is released, he returns to the terrorist network. This means that terrorists are not legitimate enemies, but foes, and must be treated as such. Loose talk about war and international law today only shows that there is no common agreement concerning this quintessentially postmodern war or any postmodern international law. Modern war came into being with the sovereign European state, which had the monopoly of both power and violence. That sovereign state initiated the modern age, which now has ended. After WWI, there was an attempt to criminalize aggression, meaning the side that took the first shot. That doctrine was already an indication that the European system had collapsed, since in that system both offensive and defensive war were considered legitimate. Today, much of the debate about Iraq has to do with the new American doctrine of preemptive strikes, which, after September 11, seems to be the most prudent course of action. Sitting around waiting for another terrorist attack is not only foolish, but suicidal, since terrorists are prepared to destroy not only their foes, but themselves. This postmodern predicament requires rethinking the concept of war and of international order, which will be possible only when the war against terrorism has been won. In the meantime, behaving as though nothing has changed, and that the world is the same as it was before September 11, does not change todays stark reality. Is Donoso relevant today? Absolutely. Not only in relation to the implications of present global civil war, but also in the need for decision.