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This panel brings together theoretical and theoretically informed papers engaging with the political and legal theory/philosophy of Carl Schmitt. The papers are expected to analyse the manifestation of Schmitt's political theory in contemporary politics around the world. They can examine how Schmittian logic, articulated through his concepts of sovereignty, exception, nomos and the political, informs contemporary politics.
More tellingly, how do authoritarian regimes and political movements dismantle (liberal) democracy while using the vocabulary of democracy? Political movements in Western Europe and the USA, as well as the strongmen rulers of Hungary, Poland, India and Turkey, have not renounced democracy. Instead, they have claimed to institute their own version of democracy by appealing to the people. Thus far the literature has agreed that democratic backsliding in these cases amounts to populism, given that the antagonism between the elites and the pure people undermines the institutions and established values of liberal democracy. This logic, however, does not renounce democracy, yet defines it in a particular way. The peculiar account of democracy advanced by authoritarian movements resonates with Carl Schmitt's political logic. Here democracy requires homogeneity and the identification of the masses with a charismatic leader. Such an understanding of democracy restricts political participation to acclamation. Schmittian logic construes popular sovereignty in a way that is fundamentally at odds with public autonomy, as it forecloses genuine popular participation. Schmitt's central concern was restoring order in the context of political turmoil and economic instability. He abhorred political liberalism, which he equated with pluralism and compromise, and despised parliamentarism on the grounds that it was not true democracy, which, for him, required a distinction between 'insiders' and 'outsiders' and meant identity, in the sense of sameness, between the ruler and the ruled. A political decision, in this framework, is not the outcome of popular participation and public deliberation but rather a quasi-mythical event in which the people decide to distinguish their friends from their enemies.