I had the privilege to participate at “Historical Fascism as a Global System: Alliances,Interactions, and Entanglements” Online Convention, Central European University PU, Vienna, 3-5 December 2021.
I had the following presentation:
Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Dictatorship as the Foundation of (Post-)Fascism
In this
paper it has been argued that Carl Schmitt’s concept of “constitutional
dictatorship” can be seen as the main ideological foundation of historical
Fascism and contemporary Post-Fascist tendencies. This paper is about how
Fascism has been theorized regardless of time and place.
The theory
of state of exception’s first and isolated appearance was Carl Schmitt’s book
of Dictatorship (2014) published in 1921. There was a rise of a debate on state
of exception between 1934 and 1948, because of the collapse of European
democracies and discourse on state of exception unfolded within the framework
of constitutional dictatorship. The debate was maintained by Article 48 of the
Weimar Constitution granted emergency powers the president of the Reich. In the
Schmittian sense, the state of exception and constitutional dictatorship are
inseparable. In 1926 Schmitt summarized his definition on dictatorship:
“Dictatorship is the exercise of state power freed from any legal restrictions,
for the purpose of resolving an abnormal situation – in particular, a situation
of war and rebellion. Schmitt distinguishes the two types of dictatorship in
conjunction with regulation on the state of emergency, on the one hand a
constitutionally mandated form (commissary dictatorship), and on the other hand
“a dictatorship in which the whole existing legal order is rendered obsolete
and a completely new order is intended (sovereign dictatorship). (cited by
Hoelzl & Ward, 2014, p. xxiv). If commissary dictatorship is about the
continuous extension of state of exceptions, sovereign dictatorship prevails
now as the constitutional system grabbed and institutionalized by a sovereign
dictator. Schmitt argues in his Political Theology that “sovereign is he who
decides on the exception” (2005: 5), in this sense ultimate sovereignty means a
constitutionalized dictatorship.
I am
arguing here that the contemporary Post-Fascist populist regimes and leaders
are convinced that there is a core need to reformulate and acquire political
sovereignty by them.
We witnessed
that the 20th century was about “legal civil war” and his seminal example is
the Nazi State (Agamben, 2005). After Hitler took power, he proclaimed in 28
February 1933 the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State by
which the parts of the Weimar Constitution concerning personal liberties were
suspended. Given the fact that the decree was never repealed, the Third Reich
could be seen a continuously extended state of exception that lasted for twelve
years. I am arguing in this paper that the political system that Schmitt
desired as sovereign dictatorship is not the Third Reich itself, but
contemporary Post-Fascist populist regimes which are about to constitutionalize
the state od exception as extraordinary measure.
The panel
also included: Eötvös Loránd, Hungary): Ziegler Dezső Tamás: The
Post-Fascism of Fidesz: A Cross-Historical and Cross-National Analysis
