Punishing Friends
Carl Schmitt, a German writer and thinker who achieved some notoriety after he joined the Nazi party, wrote his most important works in the decade prior to Hitler’s rise to power. Schmitt criticized parliamentary democracies (in no small part a result from having witnessed the chaos of the Weimar Republic) and liberalism, but was an astute political thinker. His book The Concept of the Political retains its status as a classic in the field, and one of his fundamental contributions was to understand politics as hinging on the distinction between friends and enemies.
Schmitt had observed that power in a political system resided with the person who had the ability “to make an exception,” that is, to suspend law when emergency situations required it. While “exceptions” might prove rare, the friend/enemy distinction always shaped political life. Schmitt was quick to point out that the friend/enemy distinction did not apply to animosity between private individuals, but instead applied to an individual’s willingness to fight and die to preserve the integrity of “the group.” This also meant that one would be willing to kill others if a person perceived the other as being a hostile threat to the integrity or existence of the group. Politics thus always involved drawing a distinction between “us” and “them,” thereby creating collective identities.
Nation-states, Schmitt argued, required an internal coherence created through a homogeneous notion of citizenship aided by an external enemy who helped bind the disparate parts together. Schmitt feared that liberal democracies, with their emphasis on difference and diversity, lacked the resources to rally people to fight and die for the nation when faced with existential threats. The persistent presence of enmity in political life meant that nations, in order to survive, had to have the capacity to unify citizens around the needs of the nation, determined by the nature and level of the threats posed. Bordering nation-states typically pose the main threat.
Schmitt’s argument bears up well when thinking about international politics. Some nations can be clearly identified as “enemies” and others as “friends,” particularly in times of war. The whole modern international system operates off alliances between partners who find sufficient shared interests and values to work cooperatively with one another and to attend to one another’s security against “enemies.” “Rewarding friends and punishing enemies” is a low target for international order, but you only have to aim slightly above it to hit it.
Schmitt was hardly the first to realize the distinction’s importance. In book 1 of Plato’s Republic, Polemarchus makes the reasonable argument that justice involves “giving each person his due,” meaning in part that one owes friends generosity and enemies punishment. Socrates takes this position apart, demonstrating that “rewarding friends and punishing enemies” provides no stable foundation for justice. I need not go into his reasoning, but will note that Polemarchus’s argument is not absurd. “Rewarding friends and punishing enemies” may not give justice a sure base, but it does seem to be part of what justice requires. After all, we expect good to be rewarded and evil to be punished, and we think it redounds to our benefit to associate with “good” people and avoid “bad” ones.
No political philosopher to my knowledge has advocated for rewarding enemies and punishing friends as a basis for good political order. Any mode of order, domestic or international, requires a minimum level of trust to operate. One maintains trust with friends through mutual respect, reciprocity, and keeping ones word; one relates to enemies through diligent surveillance, skeptical engagement, and violence. Doing violence to one's friends makes as little sense as does deference to ones enemies. A certain amount of prudential deliberation is required to know the difference between the two, and sometimes the lines might get blurred, but experience and history have a way of cementing both friendship and animosity.
Nothing complicates any relationship more than money. Friendships that experience inequalities of wealth and power have difficulty maintaining themselves. The richer, stronger party make take the poorer, weaker one for granted, while the poorer, weaker one may experience a reflexive resentment and identity crisis as regards the other. Things can become especially complicated if economic interests do not align well with values. What’s true of individuals is even more true of nations, particularly if they share borders.
Differing values matter less than conflicting values, but they matter. It’s worth remembering that our fragile international order has been maintained fairly successfully among western democracies based on low-level shared values. Respect for the rule of law. Maintaining democratic procedures. Belief in human dignity and equality. Upholding basic civil liberties and rights. The sanctity of contracts. All of these have bound the western democracies together in the post-war world. Now we face a serious problem: to what degree do competing values and interests put so much strain on political relationships that those shared values will crack under the weight?
America has a habit of overestimating the strength of its enemies and the good will of its friends. Skilled leaders maintain friendships and keep them in good order. Political friendship is different than personal friendship because interest and not affection is the decisive factor in politics. We can maintain political relationships well so long as our interests and values align, but any skewing of either can place those relationships under strain. Such moments of strain, both domestic and international, place a premium on steady and prudent leadership.
Western democracies have been placed under tremendous pressure by the forces of globalization and its alternative value-structure. These forces have created deep fissures in the domestic politics of democratic nations while also driving wedges in their relations to one another. How to respond to globalization is one of the great political questions of the day. It’s not a totally new question — imperial power and cosmopolitanism being perennial features of human affairs — but the impulse has never been connected to technological and financial power the way it is now. Globalization creates winners and losers, and the losers will have their say one way or another.
I digress. Slightly. The magnitude of the challenges should not render us impotent or intemperate. Nor should we approach them arrogantly: no one knows for sure what specific policies can best address the depths of our problems. Uncertainty calls for caution. The challenges of globalization may occasionally call for bold, even brash, decisions, but those decisions should still respect the principles mentioned above, the minimum of which is to reward your friends and punish your enemies. Punishing friends, I’ll confess, makes no sense to me. Indiscriminately imposing punitive policies doesn’t seem to fit the demands of justice.
The United States and Canada have done something exceptional: they have maintained a very long border peacefully for well over a century. Recall that there are times in the past when the US got greedy as regards our northern neighbors, even, during the presidency of the rapacious William McKinley, trying to leverage tariffs into an effort to annex Canada. For the most part, however, and certainly for the last century, the relationship has been marked by cooperation and comity rather than competition and conflict.
My own experience bears this out. Three of my siblings were born in Canada. I have a close friend and a sister who live there. My wife is from Canada. I’ve crossed the border well over a hundred times without incident. I’ve long found the knee-jerk Canadian anti-Americanism both annoying and comical, but I understand the difficulties associated with living alongside a highly successful sibling or having a friend who’s richer and more powerful than you are. Canadians are friendly, open-minded, and hospitable, even if they do evince an off-putting air of smug self-satisfaction when discussing politics — especially American politics. As sibling nations we needle each other and even take slight advantage of each other, but we’ve for the most part avoided openly harming or hurting one another.
Which makes the latest actions of American leadership toward Canada puzzling to me. The niggling trade or values issues that might exist between the two nations don’t warrant the extreme political and economic responses of the past month. Canada, our neighbor, our friend, deserves better than what they’re getting. I don’t think rewarding friends and punishing enemies is what justice is, but I’m quite confident that rewarding enemies and punishing friends is as good an example of injustice as any I can think of. I hope someone in our leadership class realizes that and will act accordingly.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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