#partisan war

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Ein neuer Rütlischwur der Parteien, [A new oath of the parties],” Simplicissimus. Vol. 37, No. 29, October 16, 1932. p. 340. --- (E. Schilling) ”Wir wollen einig kämpfen gegen Papen - doch trotzdem freu uns hassen allezeit!" ["We want to fight as one against Papen - but we're always happy!"]

Representatives of the anti-Papen parties swear to bring the Chancellor down, though they would be happy to hate each other instead.

[kaiamar]

Civil War Inside Democratic Party

To understand what’s going on now, it might make sense to return to pre-war America, since the Democrats, like the rest of America, are coming to grips with the end of the New Deal era. The party came out of the 1930s having created a new, activist liberal state designed to prevent the return of the great depression by using the government to defend the rights of labour and level the economic playing field that had tilted so steeply toward the wealthy. This liberal state was wildly popular, so popular that Republican Dwight D Eisenhower felt obliged to adopt and expand its premises.

With the country firmly behind what was known as the “liberal consensus”, Democrats continued to expand FDR’s New Deal, recognising that economic fairness required ameliorating racial inequality. When Republicans ran the reactionary Barry Goldwater against President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964, the resulting landslide gave Democrats a super-majority in Congress. Working with moderate Republicans to cut racist southern Democrats out of their centrist coalition, they passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and launched LBJ’s War on Poverty.

But, in part because of the economic prosperity it created, this centre did not hold. In 1968, Republican candidate Richard M Nixon attacked it from the right by bringing white racists into his party, while Democrats destroyed it from the left by shattering over the Vietnam war.

Democrat Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976 after Nixon’s spectacular implosion over Watergate, but the party’s crumbling coalition was no match for the rise of Movement Conservatives. Their narrative was simple: the Democrats’ New Deal government redistributed tax dollars from hardworking white men to lazy minorities and women. This easy – and false – explanation for the economic stresses of the 1970s drained working-class Americans away from the Democrats and into the party of Ronald Reagan. And there they stayed, for the most part, even as neoliberalism gutted the American middle class.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/25/civil-war-raging-inside-democratic-party

There’s a good history summary in this article. Worth reading for that alone.

[societymustbedefended-blog]

New wars as partisan wars

At Duck of Minerva, Brandon Valeriano explains why attempts to coin new terms to explain unconventional conflict (like that in Ukraine) actually tell us nothing about why they happen, or what's unique about them. Whether 'special wars' or 'non-linear wars' (or even Kaldor's much-maligned 'new wars'), these terms describe a type of conflict which has existed throughout history. He's right that we need to 'kill the syllogism', but I think we can explain what's different about these conflicts by relying on an older theory of conflict, namely Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan. Schmitt can account for all the aspects of unconventional war meant to be captured by syllogisms for new wars: combatants switching sides, an unknown number of irregular combatants, a reliance on asymmetric practices like subversion, terrorism, and insurgency.

Schmitt can capture all this because his theory places the friend/enemy relationships (and social networks writ large) at the center of analysis. Partisan war is waged by irregular combatants using insurgent tactics who seek to defend their own homeland and define existing rulers as an enemy for their entire society. In partisan war, we should expect both sides to label each other with identities representing absolute enmity, that draw social boundaries which require the complete separation of threatening Others from vulnerable Selves.  Partisan war had a particular historical connotation for Schmitt as well. It represented the end of European society, which had historically been united under ius publicum Europaeum, public law which regulated European states and limited the practice of war as well among those states. Partisan war thus erodes legal relations between different members of society and results in a breakdown of order, eventually resulting in unlimited violence.  Ultimately, the result of partisan war is the emergence of new relationships of absolute enmity that violently draw new social boundaries, or new friend/enemy relationships, and this is what's happening in Ukraine currently. The declaration of the 'Dontesk People's Republic' easily fits into partisan theory as an attempt to define a new homeland in absolute enmity toward the 'fascist' post-Maidan regime in Kiev. By initially supporting the separatists and claiming East Ukraine as Novorossiya, Putin is seeking to redefine the constitutional (in the sense of foundational) meanings of Ukrainian society. Better informed observers attribute this policy as a way to influence the upcoming presidential elections and build support for federalism and regional autonomy amidst the upcoming presidential election.  Messing with the social and political boundaries of other countries isn't a new kind of war that needs a new syllogism, but follows a very old pattern identified by Schmitt (ironically, he notes that Lenin was the first to articulate partisan war in a revolutionary sense, with Mao perfecting it). Rather than inventing new symbols for recurrent phenomena, we should instead rely on existing theories that fit into our existing canon of international relations and law.