States of Emergency - Centre for Policy Alternatives

yield real analytical insights about extra‐legality and the exercise
of power. These insights are most evident in respect of the more
salient aspects of his thesis such as the (lack of) traction of liberal
democratic values in the political culture of ofLicial and popular
subscription, the falsity of the assumption of separation between
normalcy and emergency, and his argument about the
permanency of crisis as the natural condition of politics. In this
way, chillingly it must be admitted, the differences between the
Nazi regime and the Sri Lankan State become a matter of moral
and political degree, i.e., a more‐or‐less question of egregiousness.
Thus while it would be factually wrong and analytically misleading
to equate the human rights abuses of the Sri Lankan State to the
fundamentally genocidal character of Nazi Germany, for the
purposes of an unromantic, sceptical and searching analytical
understanding of the behaviour of the Sri Lankan State in times of
emergency, it can be treated as a permutation within the
Schmittian ontology of political power and statehood. In short,
therefore, Schmitt’s contribution to political and legal theory
should read in abstract and applied to the Sri Lankan conditions
and experience, without succumbing to the distraction of his
personal association with the Nazi regime.
Schmitt’s ideas pertaining to states of emergency are found in two
works, Political
 Theology 54 and The
 Concept
 of
 the
 Political, 55
which attack liberalism for discounting the importance of (his
conception of) the exception by pretending that ‘the entire legal
universe is governed by a complete, comprehensive and
exception‐less normative order.’ As Dyzenhaus has pointed out,
54
Carl Schmitt (1985) Political
Theology:
Four
Chapters
on
the
Concept
of
Sovereignty
(Trans. George Schwab) (Cambridge: MIT Press)
55
Carl Schmitt (1976) The
Concept
of
the
Political (Trans. George
Schwab) (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP)
56