By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
For an allegedly expert, centrist-green government, Krivokapic and his team are pretty much right-wing. God forbid they lean much farther right than they’re doing now.
At the same time, the government propaganda is fooling the public with stories about how everyone on the political stage, except, you can guess, for those political subjects that make up the government, are nationalist extremists.
Why is the government right-wing? Because it was formed and is functioning by following (accidentally or not, it’s unimportant) political views of Carl Schmitt.
Who was Carl Schmitt?
An important jurist and political theorist, whose work strongly influenced both the European right and the European left, after the left actualized his theory of partisans and the state of emergency in the 1960s and 1970s.
Beside that, Carl Schmitt was a Nazi. And not just any kind – they called him “Hitler’s lawyer”. Many of his works have been thoroughly studied. Some, on the other hand, are simply disgusting, only a warning monument to how much the human spirit can be degraded: “The Führer protects the law” and “German law in defense of the Jewish spirit”, for example.
For Schmitt, politics begins by making a difference between friends and enemies. It begins, more precisely, with the moment “in which the enemy is recognized as the enemy in the crystal (clear) night (bracket AN).” According to Schmitt, political enmity stems from the existential threat that the enemy poses to us. Therefore, the role of politics for Schmitt is survival itself, that is, as the Democratic Front, DF, once put it in its campaign: “Either he or we”.
That – either they or we – is the very core of Schmitt’s understanding of politics. One doesn’t have to be a genius to figure out that in the fight against what we perceive as an “existential threat”, in Schmitt’s political theology more or less everything is allowed. See: The Fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany.
At the same time, Schmitt defines the term “friend”. Just as the enemy, in his opinion, is not necessarily someone unethical, but simply someone who’s different from us and whom we perceive as a threat, a friend is not necessarily someone ethical, but simply someone who has the same goal, i.e. the same enemy as we have. Schmitt’s political community essentially functions as nature – and it, nature, knows no values, but only survival.
The enemy whose existence contributes to the sustainability of Krivokapic’s government is clearly the DPS. Misunderstandings, quarrels and disgusting remarks that are happening and will happen between members of the government are completely irrelevant, as long as Djukanovic and his party exist as an “existential threat”.
That was, in fact, the case until the voting on Srebrenica and Leposavic in the Montenegrin parliament. The crisis in which the government found itself after that was not only political. It’s, to be sarcastic – existential. By synchronizing political action with the “enemy”, the government annulled the very idea of the political on which it was formed. It turned its “enemy” into a “friend” and demonstrated that politics is not necessarily a matter of existential threat, but that it can be a matter of an agreement. It showed that a complete elimination of the enemy is not the only option, as the dialogue is quite possible. From that being said, numerous questions arise: why would someone with whom we share values be our enemy and why would someone with whom we don’t be our friend?
Following the voting on Srebrenica and Leposavic, the DF stays committed to Schmitt, and it’s logical why they’re now talking about “betrayal” and “commitment to the fight”. Their policy remains radical: for them, anything but the elimination of the enemy is unacceptable.
Krivokapic is obviously confused, but also sure that he wants to stay in power.
URA has the opportunity to seriously test its Machiavellianism and the strategy of brutal political “pragmatism”.
Democrats act as undoubtedly the most serious constituent of the government: Becic called for a dialogue between the government and the opposition in parliament, which further distanced him from the “enemy-friend” paradigm. It was, I assume, a difficult decision for him, but not so difficult having in mind the EU’s clear expectation that it should have been done in exactly that way.
Rasko Konjevic, the Leader of the SDP, reacted to Becic’s call for the start of dialogue concerning decisions that require a two-thirds, that is, three-fifths majority of MPs. Konjevic calls for “establishment of a value majority in the parliament”: the community of values. Which is, after voting on Srebrenica and Leposavic, definitely possible.
That would undoubtedly be a step in the right direction. And a real “game changer”.
