Gregg Lambert: An Old Question Raised Again: “Is War Merely the Continuation of Politics?”

Organized by the Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences

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Gregg Lambert (Syracuse University):
An Old Question Raised Again: “Is War Merely the Continuation of Politics?”

This talk is part of a longer study, as part of “The Perpetual Peace Project ~ 2022,” concerning what could be called the deconstruction of the Westphalian peace as one of the most important factors in understanding the return of the question of “the Balance of Europe” in response to the war in Ukraine today. In his 1962 “Theory of the Partisan,” Carl Schmitt invoked this history in describing the legal code of international law that was established to make possible a limited or ‘bracketed war” on the European continent, thereby protecting the boundaries between the temporal states of war and peace, and providing the juridical and diplomatic terms to distinguish between a “just or legal war” between existingnation-states and an indefinite or unlimited civil or partisan warfare, especially in the context of the various imperial, neo-colonial, and nationalist revolutions in Asia and Latin-America. It is at this point that Schmitt turns to the analysis of thereform-minded Prussian military officer, Clausewitz, who, in On War (1808), firstaddressed the problems to this “classical” theory of warfare that was caused by the new existence of partisan strategies and tactics of warfare, and it is precisely from this context that we find a new interpretation of the proposition that “waris a mere continuation of politics by another means.”