By Michael Marder · Monday, March 25, 2013 This is the third in a series of five blog entries aimed at understanding the current political crisis in the European Union through a Schmittian lens. (For the previous posts, see part 1 and part 2.) The argument of the third installment is simple: Because the European Union lacks a political existential vibrancy, its institutions—the formal stratum of its constitution—are equally hollow. In other words, what we get in the EU is form without substance, provided that substance is understood in a markedly existential sense, as the underlying subject of political existence.
Europe’s Formal De-Constitution
The constitution conceived as “a special type of political and social order” is the second meaning of the term Schmitt isolates in Constitutional Theory.[1] It is important to understand that he operates with a deformalized concept of form as a direct expression of existential content; constitution is “a special form of rule not detachable from . . . political existence.”[2] If so, then everything we said about the existential vacuum of the EU applies to its substantial form: since this does not exist, empty procedural formalism laboriously creates a façade of order, a speculative arrangement not grounded in actual political life. As a result, an artificial division of competences is established between national and European laws, putting in place an abstract order with the indispensable formulation of the relations of supremacy and subordination. (Hence, the Articles 3.a.1 and 3.b.1 of the Treaty of Lisbon: “The limits of Union competences are governed by the principle of conferral. The use of Union competences is governed by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality.”)
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By Michael Marder · Friday, March 22, 2013 This is the second in a series of five blog entries aimed at understanding the current political crisis in the European Union through a Schmittian lens. (Read part 1 here.) In this post, Michael Marder suggests that a profound source of the problem is that the EU is not rooted in the collective existence of its citizens. In place of a political constituting subject, we find nothing but crass economic interests, covered over with a thin rhetorical veil. For a more extensive discussion of Schmitt, see Michael Marder’s Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt.
Europe’s Existential De-Constitution
The “absolute concept of the constitution” refers to the constitution as a whole,[1] united not by virtue of an external system of basic laws but thanks to the pre-constitutional source from which these laws emanate and derive their legitimacy. Schmitt notes that “constitution in the absolute sense can mean, to begin with, the concrete manner of existence that is given with every political unity,”[2] whereby the “state does not have a constitution” but “is constitution, in other words, an actually present condition, a status of unity and order.”[3] In light of the already mentioned political existential vacuum at the core of the European Union, combined with the fact that it is neither a state nor a confederation of states, we may surmise that it is not a constitution, even though it claims the right to determine the conditions of its unity and order. Since there is no “concrete manner of existence” to draw upon, the status of the EU is equivalent to the formal guidelines, to which potential member states must adhere if they are to gain the right of admission. The deficit of actual unity is remedied by the imposition of ideal unity, procedural at worst and metaphysical at best. Instead of strengthening the status of the EU, this imposition makes it ever more precarious: it sets the stage for a violent standoff between the emergent realities of political existence and the idealities of an alien form foisted upon them.
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By Michael Marder · Wednesday, March 20, 2013 This is the first in a series of five blog entries aimed at understanding the current political crisis in the European Union through a Schmittian lens. The thesis I advance here is that speculative bubbles can burst not only in the economic domain but also on the political arena. The failure of constituting the EU on a political foundation—that is to say, on the basis of the collective existence of EU citizens—is a precipitating factor for the bursting of what I call its “speculative constitutional bubble.”
A Speculative Constitutional Bubble
In a 2000 Cardozo Law Review article, “Carl Schmitt and the Constitution of Europe,” which developed out of the International Symposium titled “Carl Schmitt: Legacy and Prospects” and held in New York City a year prior to the paper’s publication, Jan Müller raised a question we can finally respond to today, over a decade after its original formulation. “[D]oes European integration prove,” he asks, “how useless the Schmittian intellectual tool kit has become, and, in particular, that ‘Schmittian sovereignty’ remains caught in existentialist, concretist ways of thinking, which have long lost touch with the intricate ‘legitimation through procedure’ or the legitimation through prosperity which some see at the heart of the EU?”[1] In the intervening period, we have witnessed, among other things, a spectacular failure of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, signed in the end of 2004 and rejected at the French and Dutch referendums half a year thereafter; the coming into effect, in 2009, of the Treaty of Lisbon, which focused on institutional procedures at the expense of actual constitution-making; and the ongoing Euro zone crisis, which, as I shall argue, stands for the culmination of a certain economic and political speculation on the meaning, role, and form of the European Union.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 18, 2013 Telos 162 (Spring 2013) is now available for purchase in our store.
 At its inception, Telos pursued a specific project as a journal: to serve as a bridge between the world of what was then often referred to as “European theory” and a U.S. intellectual world largely defined by quantitative methods in the social sciences. Over time, the terminology changed, and it is now more common to use the parlance of “analytic” and “continental” modes of philosophy, and if the latter term still clearly points toward Europe, there are representatives of both trends in the university lives on both sides of the Atlantic. In retrospect, however, the question for Telos was never one of a simple cultural transfer or the pursuit of some intellectual equilibrium in which scholars in both worlds would think the same way. On the contrary, instead of thinking about method in general, at stake for Telos was the difference between reflections on the meaning of the human condition, thoughtful explorations of the good life, and what appeared to be an exclusively numerical measuring of the status quo, a positivist description of what already exists, with no expectation of change.
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By Alessandro Vitale · Friday, January 25, 2013 The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
 “Russia and the West” is a topic that never seems to be exhausted, and as a question, one that can never be answered satisfactorily. People and intellectuals use a staggering number of criteria to determine Russia’s suitability (or lack thereof) to be counted “Western,” ranging from the geographic and the linguistic to the political and institutional. For centuries, Russians have wondered if they are part of “Europe.” It is evident that geographically and culturally they are “Eurasians.” In any case, about three-quarters of the Russian population live west of the Urals, in what has always been considered a part of Europe. Russia has been connected to Europe for centuries. All the important movements, relevant things that Russia has made in history, have been through its connection to Europe. Russia has really been and remains an important part of Europe. But Russia is not only Europe.
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By David Pan · Wednesday, January 2, 2013 The following paper was presented at Telos in Europe: The L’Aquila Conference, held on September 7-9, 2012, in L’Aquila, Italy.
Since the Treaty of Westphalia, sovereignty in the West has been imagined in terms of the nation-state and its ability to provide a universal basis for political relations both within state boundaries and in relations with other similarly organized entities. On the one hand, the nation-state originates as a means of overcoming the religious civil wars, and its establishment coincides with the attempt to relegate theological disputes to a private sphere that does not threaten the structure of the state. In this way, the state as opposed to the church becomes the primary form for defining the political. On the other hand, the development and stability of the nation-state system seems to have been inextricably linked to the dynamic of colonialism. As Carl Schmitt lays out in The Nomos of the Earth, the establishment of a jus publicum europaeum that created guidelines for limiting war between European states was accompanied and indeed predicated upon a complementary establishment of the amity lines that distinguished Europe from the rest of the world as the place of such limited war as against the “freedom” of the spaces beyond the line in which restrictions on warfare did not apply. For Schmitt, the relationship between these two dynamics, the coalescence of nation-state relations in Europe on the basis of a limitation of war and the establishment of unlimited war in those areas outside of Europe without nation-state structures, has not been coincidental but in fact constitutive for both the rise of the West and the structure of international relations in the modern world.
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