Kondylis’s Theory of Planetary Politics. A Short Introduction
by Sebastian Edinger
When philosophically educated non-German academics are asked who the most important and high-caliber philosopher of Germany in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is, they most likely come up with the name Jürgen Habermas, and, with the notable exception of Paul Gottfried, almost no one could even possibly come up with the name Panagiotis Kondylis (1943 – 1998), whose work, for the most part, is not translated into English yet. Gottfried himself says the following about Kondylis:
“Both Weber and Schumpeter were looking at the conditions in which social changes took place, and they note the overlaps as well as distinctions between the epochs in question. Panajotis Kondylis, a Germanophone Greek scholar whose work is not yet widely known, breaks new ground in this respect.” (Gottfried 1999: 32)
Unsurprisingly, Gottfried is right. Entire books could easily be written about the intellectual historian Kondylis and his theory of European modernity that, according to his assessments, ends with the Cold War. The fact that a completely new era has unfolded since then and that neither European modernity nor any natively modified American version of it is its driving force has become abundantly clear. Kondylis formulated in the early and mid-1990s, as part of his theory of planetary politics, a series of gloomy and ominously prophetic predictions that have since come true; moreover, his predictions are embedded into a theory that could not oppose Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history theorem more harshly. I will present the theoretical framework of Kondylis’s theory of planetary politics and his almost prophetic forecasts in the following paragraphs. (Of course, I am using the word “prophetic” here, and subsequently, loosely; neither was Kondylis a prophet, nor is my claim that he should be seen as one in the literal sense.) What should be kept in mind here is that Kondylis published Planetary Politics after the Cold War in 1992 and died just six years later, in 1998, which means he did not have much time to further refine his diagnosis, nor did fate allow him to witness how reality played out in relation to what he diagnosed and predicted.
What Kondylis predicted
I give you some of his prophetic forecasts in advance and then work my way from there to the theory that serves as their theoretical foundation.
(1) Already in his 1992 book Planetary Politics after the Cold War (Planetarische Politik nach dem Kalten Krieg), but also in his 1995 essay Europe facing the Outset of the 21st Century. World-historical and geopolitical considerations (Europa an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert. Eine weltgeschichtliche und geopolitische Betrachtung; reprinted in his posthumous work The Political in the 20th century; German: Das Politische im 20. Jahrhundert), Kondylis pointed out that the West, although drunk by the Cold War victory, is basically demographically doomed if it does not change course. Given his clear understanding of how intellectually “unelite” political elites were already back then, he explicitly anticipated the possibility that the West’s ideological favorite child, human rights universalism, could get (unintelligibly) turned into a death trap by those “elites”, with this then resulting in what is now unfolding, namely millions of “refugees” entering European countries with “anomy” as its necessary consequence. He literally said it: “Whoever openly and in earnest wanted to assert that the influx of 30 or 40 million people into today’s France or Germany would not cause anomic phenomena or manifestations is – I have to put it this way – an idiot”1 (Kondylis 2001: 133).
(2) Kondylis, in the midst of the 1990s, unambiguously stated that extending NATO territory and borders to the Russian state borders would prove to be a recipe for disaster. While Ukraine has not become a formal member of NATO, we now clearly know that Russia takes issue with having NATO-aligned forces too close to Moscow (see Putin’s stern warning at the Munich Security Summit in 2007). Kondylis gave a stern warning regarding the marriage of hubris and naivety at play in this endeavor, and he also mocked the intelligence and political instinctlessness of those who do not understand that a crossing of lines might be answered by more than just a diplomatic complaint.
(3) In his 1995 essay, he said unequivocally that the West faces two options: it will overcome the Cold War and form a new relationship with Russia that lets all settings of the Cold War agenda go, or Russia will see herself forced to form an alliance with China, despite the Russian-Chinese relationship historically having been precarious and despite both countries being rather natural enemies than natural friends. I’ll get into the reasons for this claim below.
(4) In 1992, Kondylis clearly stated that the immediate post-Cold War situation would be nothing more than an ephemeral and quickly bypassing “unipolar moment” and that China would rise to the status of a global power. He also mentioned India due to its population size, but was focused mainly on China, for good reasons, as we can see today.
(5) In his 1995 essay, Kondylis stated that the US might domestically erode in the near future. This erosion is now in its full swing of disintegration and decomposition into anarchic disorder. (Probably no one has given a more accurate and disturbing picture of the state of the US recently than Victor Davis Hanson. See his book, The Dying Citizen. How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, 2021; in shorter format, his recent essay A Culture in Collapse, or his remarkably concise videos “We Have Never Seen Anything Like This” and The De-Civilization of America.) Back when Kondylis predicted what Hanson today diagnoses, many people probably would have considered his prediction an outburst of madness or sheer nonsense. More details on this are below.
Short Outline of His Theory of Planetary Politics
In Planetary Politics after the Cold War (1992), Kondylis states that his aim is to give a “future-oriented description of the status quo." (Kondylis 1992: 2) This description, of course, is embedded in a history of the modern European age that enabled and paved the way for the planetary age Kondylis is describing in his later political works. A substantially valid description, therefore, cannot be given without a short outline of the historical framework on which Kondylis’s diagnosis of the 20th century is based. In very broad strokes, four steps are important here: (1) The inception of planetary politics in 1600; (2) its development during the modern age to the rise of mass societies around 1900; (3) the transformation of Western mass societies to hedonistic mass democracies after 1945; (4) the End of the Cold War, which Kondylis already describes as the End of the European modern age and the possible beginning of the end of Western supremacy and, maybe, even Western identity, or, at worst, the West’s existence as such. The age of mass democracy did not end with the Cold War, but Kondylis analyzed the West’s Cold War victory as a pyrrhic one since the historic and societal formation that was in place when the Cold War ended was also catastrophically unprepared for dealing with its own success and the ideological salto mortale coming with it.
According to Kondylis, the age of planetary politics began with the inception of European colonialism around 1600. Colonialism is not a purely political phenomenon but an economic one, the inception of which is also the inception of globalization, since colonialism essentially means “the formation of the colonial system and the world market” (Kondylis 1992: 2). Had the term “world market” been floating around back then, it would and could certainly not have been interpreted in an egalitarian sense; instead, the world market was the market created, dominated, and ruled by Western world powers that considered the planet itself a legitimate area for the exercise of economic and political power. The development of technological means was as important for the advancement of Western predominance as was the development of modern bureaucracies. Their main goal was not the intensification of trade but the consolidation “of their respective spheres of influence and to demarcate them from others” (ibid.: 7). Through different stages, this process lasted well into the 20th century: “Deep into the 20th century, planetary politics was shaped by planetary powers, whereas, to one extent or another, other powers were rendered objects of politics dictated by the former powers as sovereign agents”2 (ibid.: 9).
During this time, the defining moments of historic development were the replacement of feudalism by bourgeois societies in Western Europe and the Industrial Revolution around 1800. The most important ideological transformation that took place during that time was the replacement of genuine conservatism, the natural upholder of which was nobility, by bourgeois forces that opposed nobility as liberal forces until they were challenged by socialist forces against which they themselves turned into a conservative bastion while still being opposed to the original conservative forces they fought against. This complexion culminated in its great showdown in 1848, when, according to Kondylis, for the last time in European history, conservatism, liberalism, and socialism all collided with each other on the social and ideological battlefield, with conservatism getting swept away by the latter two, who emerged victorious and went on to define the main conflicts of the 19th century. (Kondylis calls this the “triptychon” of the 19th century, which shrank to a diptychon with the vanishing of nobility as a historical force. With the vanishing of nobility, genuine conservatism ends in the strict historical sense, according to Kondylis. The elaboration of this, especially for anglophone readers, is probably a counter-intuitive thesis is what his profound study Conservatism is about.) Since Kondylis dates the formation of modern mass society back to 1900, the ideological battlefield of mass society was marked by the conflict between liberalism and socialism, with conservatism being delegated to an anti-socialist resp. anti-communist defense strategy of bourgeois liberalism.
A decisive turning point leading to the present is the development after 1945, i.e., the successive replacement of mass society by hedonistic mass democracy, a formation everyone in the West today knows all too well. Its main features, according to Kondylis, are a massively enhanced living standard, the mutual reinforcement of unprecedented consumption, the historically extremely non-trivial overcoming of scarcity, and the ideology of human-rights universalism that served as an ideological weapon against the Soviet Union but, after the Cold War, due to its quasi-religious indispensability, turned into a weapon employed by ideological zealots within the West against the West itself (I think we should distinguish between “within the West” and “Western”; the West has lost many of its inborn people to intellectual third-worldism). Let me make this clearer in three steps.
(a) From mass society to hedonistic mass democracy
Mass society, as it initially unfolded in the last third of the 19th century in particular, was strongly shaped by bourgeois mentality and axiology. During that era, inner-European political struggles were the determining forces of world politics, while scientific and technological development as well as art, literature, and philosophy were also largely European domains. In his book The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms, Kondylis distinguishes between a “synthetic-harmonic intellectual stance” (synthetisch-harmonische Denkfigur) and an “analytic-combinatorial intellectual stance” (analytisch-kombinatorische Denkfigur), the former being characteristic of the bourgeois era, the latter forming the ground of corrosive criticism that terminated in deconstructionism advancing from a method to a dogma and means of destruction (see Kondylis 1990: 10–18, in particular). The difference between these intellectual stances that Kondylis elaborates on meticulously foreshadows today’s culture war frontlines between stances, the teleological vector of which is building something up, and stances, the teleological vector of which is tearing down what exists. The postmodern turn against the bourgeoisie as the intellectual driver of modernity already entails what is now unfolding:
“But also the preachers of postmodern values, who suspect reason to be intrinsically aligned with totalitarian universalism, do not want to recognize that their presumably playful-humane skepticism is unable to provide a solid foundation for the reorganization of human coexistence as such, but instead represents an ideologically sublimated projection of attitudes and mentalities typical for a mass democracy driven by mass consumption and permissiveness – from apolitical hedonism to resigned indifference and intellectual jester’s license”3 (Kondylis 1990: 5).
This applies specifically to human rights, a term Kondylis puts in quotation marks when he says that human rights “do not any more mean a final intellectual and ethical achievement after centuries of oppression and darkness, but basically just mass democracy’s mode of functioning and survival, and for that reason they are connected with it for better or worse” (ibid.: 209).
(b) Hedonistic mass democracy from 1945 to 1989
But what is at the center of hedonistic mass democracy? The above-mentioned cultural symptoms are neither the result of an autonomous cultural development that works as an autopoietic system nor are they just an epiphenomenon of some quasi-metaphysical “real cause,” for example, of the economy. Despite the economy not causing postmodernism per se, it is still the main driver of hedonistic mass democracy and one of the main determining forces of its cultural manifestation. Kondylis’s first central term is “economization of the political” (Ökonomisierung des Politischen). For the economy to become able to economize the political, instead of accompanying or mildly influencing it, several things had to be achieved and were only achieved by Western hedonistic mass democracies: a “historically unprecedented overcoming of scarcity of goods in societies that are consuming and producing goods on a large scale” (Kondylis 2001: 46); the abolition of the “idea of self-overcoming” (ibid.) or “self-discipline” (ibid.), in short, of highly demanding humane cultivation, and the shift to the boundlessly hedonistic “idea of self-actualization” (ibid.). The overcoming of scarcity of goods, once it is firmly established across several generations and takes root in a population’s mentality, creates the expectation of never having to face scarcity again, that is, of scarcity being a relict of the past, just like the unavailability of electricity. As long as the economization of the political is not fundamentally challenged and working smoothly, the dark shadow realm of merging economization with human rights universalism-based multiculturalism remains outside the imagination of the masses, including hedonistic mass democracy’s status elites, who are largely mass material themselves.
(c) After the end of the Cold War
But Kondylis already anticipated that the West’s accomplishments would be undermined by its demographic weakness, as well as the transformation of human rights universalism into a principle of self-destruction due to the carelessness of the spoiled hedonists toward the dangers of mass migration to the West. Kondylis could not foresee that economization would coincide with financialization under the banner of a cluelessly celebrated “service economy” (although he clearly knew that the majority of people are susceptible to right away taking the newest trend for the end goal of evolution), the backside of which is the de-industrialization the West is suffering from. What he was thinking about was human rights universalism getting turned into an open invitation for migrants, and millions of the latter flooding Europe. To quote him on this again: “Whoever openly and in earnest wanted to assert that the influx of 30 or 40 million people into today’s France or Germany would not cause anomic phenomena or manifestations is – I have to put it this way – an idiot.” (Kondylis 2001: 133) Kondylis knew that mass migration into Europe, combined with having a demographic imbalance in native populations, would cut too deep into established normality with the possible consequence of the re-occurrence of things of the past: life-threatening scarcity and, as a consequence of it, a biologization of the political, meaning a re-shaping of the political along the lines of ethnic and tribal identities. One can call the end-product of this an ethnic war; Kondylis calls it “the partial return to the animal kingdom” (Kondylis 1992: 103; die teilweise Rückkehr zum Tierreich). One can now ask if this wasn’t just the anarchical-violence complement of unadulterated hedonism, both of which completely obliterate a society that is inhabitable by humans in the emphatic sense of the word.
Kondylis’s predictions and the present
That’s the diagnostic skeleton of Kondylis’s view of the inner decline of Western societies, but there is also a geopolitical line of argumentation at play. What follows from it prognostically has already been mentioned with the first prophecy, which is now better understandable. I will recapitulate the five prophecies:
(1) The immigration prophecy
Despite Western societies’ internal weakening due to the complete unleashing of hedonistic mass democracy after the Soviet Union vanished as an enemy but also as a counter-force that urged the Western world to not completely stray into hedonistic disarray and infantile anthropological naivety, the US seemed invincible in the aftermath of the Cold War, which is now known as “the unipolar moment.” This invincibility has been naively abused by turning human rights universalism from an ideology into a globalist and ferociously anti-nationalist agenda for the entire West, which, apart from the US, consisted exclusively of ethno-states that were required to deny their history, identity, accomplishments, and, finally, even their dignity. The re-education implemented in Germany was turned into a white (and simultaneously an anti-white) re-education program, and a demographic Americanization that had no historical roots whatsoever was being installed. This demographic Americanization is the inevitable consequence of human rights universalism turned into a political program. What is now unfolding in Western Europe is what Kondylis was able to anticipate, and it can unfold freely since idiots are in great supply.
(2) The NATO-Russia-China prophecies (bundling up thesis 2, 3, and 4)
In 1995, Kondylis wrote: “European, especially German, myopia, for example, at the support of the U.S. plan for NATO expansion to the Russian border, is perfectly suited to instill legitimate mistrust on the part of Russia and to push the Eurasian giant into aggressive isolation or into the arms of China”4 (Kondylis 2001: 127).
The mentioned isolation did not occur; although it is a routinely (re-)occurring trope of Western media, a Russian-Chinese alliance has emerged out of the West’s political solipsism. Distrust was, as Kondylis predicted, truly a motivating factor in Russia’s choice of measures and decision-making; that this distrust is legitimate is a position now adopted by many internal critics of the West’s involvement in Ukraine. As predicted by Kondylis, China has also become a global superpower and, besides Russia, the only country capable of developing hypersonic weapons so far (China also has a lot more in store for the West). What Kondylis could not anticipate in the 1990s was the level of military strength, and even, as Andrei Martyanov’s book The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs convincingly shows, the significant military advantages5 Russia would acquire; when he wrote his books, the Soviet Union just had dissolved, and Russia had not rebuilt itself yet but suffered years of deep crisis, famines included. What about the US? Its military is the best in the world, right? Their hypersonic weapons program is not a failure, right? See the report Restoring America’s Competitive Nuclear Energy Advantage, p. 6, the headline of which is “The Current Landscape”. So, they see the problems, and when the political will is there, the results will follow, right? We are talking about a country that, for demographic reasons, has so little resources of competence that Taiwan almost felt pranked by them when they tried to open a TSMC factory in the US, suddenly being forced to realize the talent to properly staff the factory with is not there (anymore), just like they are not (anymore) in demographically Americanized Germany where TSMC, of course, ran into the same problem (the Arizona debacle is even referenced in the linked article). Furthermore, if even they find some talent, they probably cannot hire it, meaning they are not allowed to due to rampant DEI idiocy, which provides a strong incentive for them to pull out of the US market (credit to David P. Goldman for the link). To highlight a passage from the previously linked Yahoo article by quoting it: “TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. It’s sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, too, as is Intel. Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, preferring risking Russian aggression and Hamas rockets to braving America’s DEI regime.” There is no backdoor to the first world in third-worldization, nor is there a third way; civilizations go all the way and get ended by it, or they end third-worldization for good, not automatically saving themselves but the principal possibility of rebuilding themselves sometime down the line.
Kondylis also points out that a strong Russia would be of vital interest to a Europe that desires to be strong itself:
“People with some rudimentary knowledge about Russian history know that no stable entente cordiale with Russia can be achieved as long as Russia is not acknowledged a limine as the hegemonial power in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the entire Siberian region. Europe would have nothing to lose if Russia fulfilled this role successfully. Quite to the contrary, no danger would accompany Russia’s hegemony over a united Europe, home to 350 million people, that acts politically with one voice. Such a Europe would have nothing to fear from Russia; Russia could benefit on an unimaginable scale from a such a Europe”6 (Kondylis 2001: 127).
This passage has to be understood in the context of the so-called German Question, discussed under the thoroughly altered post-Cold War circumstances in 1993 in the comprehensive anthology entitled Westbindung. Chancen und Risiken für Deutschland (Western Orientation. Chances and Risks for Germany; edited by Karlheinz Weißmann Rainer Zitelmann, and Michael Großheim), to which Kondylis contributed an essay. His warning concerning Russia suggests that Kondylis considers a non-exclusive, prudently balanced positive relationship with the US and Russia as an imperative for a thriving and safe Germany. We can now easily and clearly recognize what Kondylis already saw, although we might be encouraged to refrain from openly stating it, which is that the slavish obedience to the US’s Russia policy not only prohibited the development of autonomous European-Russian relations but also brought upon Europe a demographic Americanization that was never in (or borne out of) the interest of the European peoples and proved to be a tremendously destructive force covered up by orchestrated insults, social ostracism of speaking truth to power, cancellation, censorship, and utterly compulsive lying. This is especially deeply concerning since the fifth prophecy, rather a premonition if you want to be very precise, deals with the (then) coming (now unfolding) decline of the US. Since Europe did not have the will, survival instinct, and intelligence to preserve itself (doing so would have required uncompromisingly rejecting demographic Americanization), we are now witnessing a synchronized decay of the US and Europe.
To add a viewpoint from my own perspective: A grotesquely insane aspect of this decay, with regard to Europe, is that Europe does not live through its own history but through a history imposed upon it by the US, nominally as Europe, factually as a prideless, dignity-stripped piece of existential plagiarism; by the latter, I mean plagiarism not as a particular form of behavior but as an unquestioned, unreflectable modus vivendi. The demographic Americanization proved to be, at least in the case of Germany, only the precursor of a limitless, complete, total, brainless, and hysterical regurgitation of American camps-left talking points due to all-pervading and all-encompassing conformism, but also due to a lack of talent, without any reflection, modification, or often even translation (in Germany, you will hear “persons of color” be called “Personen of color,” as if no German word for “color” existed and as if the thing itself was unknown until recently). The extent to which Germany would become a brain-dead copy of the US Kondylis was not able to anticipate.
(3) The American decay prophecy
Also in 1995, Kondylis wrote:
“A strategy of this kind, which could be called a strategy of self-serving submission [of Europe, S.E.], can only work under three conditions: that the expected quid pro quo from the Americans (e.g., in international trade) do not significantly exceed their maximum commitment; that the Americans would be willing to put their own forces in the balance, even if exclusively European interests were at stake; and, finally, that the United States do not, and maybe not even in a too distant future, lose their strength as superpower in world politics due to internal pressure pushing them to functional dissolution”7 (Kondylis 2001: 130).
More important than the speculative character of Kondylis’s assertion is the sheer fact that he articulated it in the 1990s, at a time when many of those who now mourn the US’s decline considered things going well. If you speculate about the US’s decline exactly in the middle of the “unipolar moment,” when the US looked stronger than ever, you clearly have to have internal reasons for decay in mind that are already visible to you. Since Kondylis does not dwell further on this particular topic of American decay, one can only speculate on why he explicitly talked about America’s possible decline in the near future. Extrapolation might be a good guide here. Two factors were on display in the 1990s that formed a malevolent coalition: hedonistic mass democracy dragged society ever deeper into consumerism, and the arrival of the Internet just elevated the dangerous tendencies of consumerism; it became truly all-pervasive. This applies especially to the atomization Kondylis regularly talked about in his political works, especially in The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms. But there is also a second factor at play that has been mentioned above and probably is the defining factor par excellence for Kondylis: the ideological reign of human rights universalism, an ideology prone to weaponization due to its bizarrely (at best) naive anthropology and its aggressive self-subordination to unfettered good intentions, which know no checks and balances and which can therefore easily be programmed into becoming a self-cannibalizing force. One has to assume, although Kondylis nowhere discusses this explicitly, that he anticipated the demographic transformation of the US pretty well. Race is not a topic in Kondylis’s work, but the sheer fact that he explicitly called tolerating mass immigration into Europe idiotic shows that he understands society as a function of its innately unique and different people, which implies that massive demographic changes can be a society’s and a country’s undoing, the inception of cataclysmic developments. An open question to which I have no answer is whether or not Kondylis had read The Bell Curve (Murray/Herrnstein 1994); had he done so, his prediction, as it relates to the US specifically, could very well have been strongly influenced by Murray and Herrnstein.
Kondylis’s Endgame Scenario: From the economization of the political to the biologization of the political
I mentioned the theoretical key element of the economization of the political (Ökonomisierung des Politischen), which applies only to the more pleasant side of the story. This economization has a dialectical backside to it. When everything that came with the economization of the political (again: a massively enhanced living standard, the mutual reinforcement of unprecedented consumption, the historically extremely non-trivial overcoming of scarcity) is gone; when the well is dried up, without needs disappearing while, at the same time, multiculturalism ate away at what characterized the good times of comparatively high homogeneity, the hour of the biologization of the political (Biologisierung des Politischen) has come, according to Kondylis. Biologization of the political is the name of the end times in a world of ethnic chaos and fragmentation since alliances will naturally form along the criterion of ethnic identity (what Kondylis has in mind, should not be confused with biopolitics, which, quite contrary to Kondylis’s scenario, explicitly relies on the state as a kind of state politics). Another term Kondylis uses to describe this state is the “return to the animal kingdom” (Rückkehr zum Tierreich).
Wokeness is already presenting this phenomenon of the biologization of the political to us in a bureaucratic form, not as a form of state politics but as a form of ethnical warfare by the employment of bureaucracies that act as a subversive state within the state, the constitution of which gets hollowed out without getting re-written, abrogated, or outright eliminated. At the same time, and this is wokeness's perverse strength, it is madly hyperculturalistic to claim sex is a spectrum, for example. Here, a lack of principles, their rejection, or the sheer intellectual incapability of thinking in terms of principles creates mobility. But to keep the focus on the aspect of biologization: Kondylis could very well turn out to be right with his prediction as soon as reality becomes unmanageable by bureaucratic measures. In those end times, the military will be recognizable as an integral part of the state bureaucracy, and it could “just” lose control at some point or even fragment and dissolve itself. In case we get to the full-fledged biologization of the political, it will be the state in which passports do not matter, only what people look like does. It is important to note that wokeness is not an antidote to or break with human rights universalism but a follow-up ideology that is applied locally in order to coordinate the social consequences of human rights universalism, which still serves as the foundation for open border policies. (Part of this coordination is to integrate the choosing of one’s gender into human rights universalism and to present this option as conditio sine qua non of the latter that either welcomes it or is just a scam.) A break would occur if wokeness openly defended open borders due to being a legitimate weapon of a legitimate war. As of now, double talk is kept alive by the woke camp, for the right is dumb enough to not ideologically break away from human rights universalism, which is not being openly rejected by the left for the sole reason that it can be easily weaponized against the right. The biologization of the political, as manifested in DEI, which technically is a synthesis of (anti-meritocratic, therefore necessarily increasingly dysfunctional) economy and (charlatanized) biology under the umbrella of (furiously anti-biological and hyperbiological) bureaucratic totalitarianism, is a strategic pillar of the woke camp’s war against the West. The right, as the defenders of the West (although not really active in doing so), accepts the asymmetry caused by sticking to universalism and resisting the biologization of the political; it accepts the left’s double talk and the simultaneous application of human rights universalism and the biologization of the political. In so far as it is still the prisoner of the West’s 1990s ideology, it is, therefore, unable to take on the left properly (simply pointing to facts here: with Nathan Cofnas and Amy Wax as the most notable exceptions). Kondylis, although speaking in a disengaged, descriptive tone, already diagnosed a do-or-die situation for the West:
“The West wants to portray its [Cold War, S.E.] victory as victory of capitalized big Freedom, but something more concrete is the defining moment: the West is obliged to carry out to its final victory on a planetary scale the intertwining of the social and the planetary, that markedly characterized the history of the 20th century, under its aegis and its leadership, and it must, thereby, implement its own conception of social life on a planetary scale.”8
Is the West forced to stick to this catastrophic recipe, which is borne out of hubris and victory drunkenness, or can it refrain from this project and save and rebuild itself?
References:
Gottfried, Paul Edward (1999): After Liberalism. Mass Democracy in the Managerial State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hanson, Victor Davis (2021): The Dying Citizen. How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America. New York: Basic Books.
Herrnstein, Richard J./Murray, Charles (1994): The Bell Curve. Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press.
Kondylis, Panajotis (1990): Der Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensform. Die liberale Moderne und die massendemokratische Postmoderne (The Decline of Bourgeois Thought- and Life-Forms. The Liberal Modern and the Mass-democratic Postmodern Age) . 3. Aufl. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Kondylis, Panajotis (1992): Planetarische Politik nach dem Kalten Krieg (Planetary Politics after the Cold War). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Kondylis, Panajotis (2001): Das Politische im 20. Jahrhundert. Von den Utopien zur Globalisierung. (The Political in the 20th Century). Heidelberg: Manutius.
Martyanov, Andrei (2019): The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs. Atlanta; GA: Clarity Press.
Weißmann, Karlheinz/Zitelmann, Rainer/Großheim, Michael (1993): Westbindung. Chancen und Risiken für Deutschland. Frankfurt/M.; Berlin: Propyläen.
In the German original: „Wer aber offen und im Ernst behaupten wollte, die Einwanderung von 30 oder 40 Millionen Menschen ins heutige Frankreich oder Deutschland würde keine anomischen Erscheinungen hervorrufen, der ist - ich kann es nicht anders ausdrücken – ein Idiot.“
In the German original: “Planetarische Politik wurde bis tief in das 20. Jh. hinein von den planetarischen Mächten gestaltet, während die restlichen Mächte in diesem oder jenem Ausmaße die Objekte der Politik bildeten, die von den ersteren als souveränen Subjekten diktiert wurde.”
In the German original: “Aber auch die Verkünder postmoderner Werte, die die Vernunft totalitärer Universalismen verdächtigen, wollen nicht recht einsehen, daß ihre angeblich spielerisch-humane Skepsis keine Grundlage zur Regelung menschlichen Zusammenlebens überhaupt und als solchem bilden kann, sondern eine ideologisch sublimierte Projektion von Einstellungen und Mentalitäten darstellt, die für die massenhaft konsumierende und permissive Massendemokratie kennzeichnend sind – vom apolitischen Hedonismus bis zur resignierten Gleichgültigkeit und zur intellektuellen Narrenfreiheit.”
In the German original: “Europäische, zumal deutsche Kurzsichtigkeit, wie sie sich z.B. bei der Unterstützung des amerikanischen Planes zur NATO-Erweiterung bis an die Grenze Rußlands bemerkbar macht, ist dazu geeignet, absolut legitimes russisches Mißtrauen zu nähren und das eurasische Riesenland in die aggressive Isolierung oder in die Arme Chinas zu treiben.”
For the fact alone that Russia has serious hypersonic capabilities, unlike the US who has no equivalent to the Zircon or the Kinzahl in store. - But let us also not forget that Kinzahl’s performance in the Ukraine war got mixed reviews, and recently a quite negative one from China: https://www.newsweek.com/china-studies-underperforming-russian-missiles-ukraine-war-1862458
In the German original: “Wer sich in der russischen Geschichte auch nur halbwegs auskennt, muß wissen, daß keine stabile entente cordiale mit Rußland in Frage kommt, wenn ihm nicht a limine das Recht zuerkannt wird, als die große Ordnungsmacht in Kaukasien, in Zentralasien und im ganzen sibirischen Raum zu fungieren. Europa hätte nichts zu verlieren, wenn Rußland diese Funktion erfolgreich erfüllt, ganz im Gegenteil sogar. Die Gefahr einer russischen Hegemonie über ein vereinigtes, politisch geschlossen handelndes hochindustrialisiertes Europa von 350 Millionen Menschen bestünde nicht.”
In the German original: “Eine solche Strategie, die man die Strategie freiwilliger eigennütziger Unterordnung nennen dürfte, könnte offenbar nur unter drei langfristigen Bedingungen gut ausfallen: daß die von den Amerikanern erwarteten Gegenleistungen (etwa im internationalen Handel) nicht wesentlich das erträgliche Maß übersteigen, daß die Amerikaner auch dann bereit wären, die eigenen Kräfte voll in die Waagschale zu werfen, wenn ausschließlich europäische Belange auf dem Spiel stehen, und daß die Vereinigten Staaten nicht eines vielleicht nicht allzu fernen Tages unter dem Druck innerer Auflösungserscheinungen weltpolitisch erlahmen.”
“Der Westen möchte zwar seinen Sieg einfach als Sieg der großgeschriebenen Freiheit hinstellen, dabei geht es aber um etwas Konkretes: er muß die Verflechtung von Planetarischem und Sozialem, die die Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts auf die Tagesordnung gesetzt hat, unter seiner Ägide und in seinem Zeichen zu Ende führen, er muß also seinen eigenen Sozialentwurf in planetarischem Maßstab durchsetzen.”
Thank you!