/ world today news/ Whether PMC “Wagner” is a full-fledged private military company and how to treat it is a question that many have been looking for an answer to since the beginning of the SVO. The processes that led to the emergence of Wagner and the PMC itself, however, were partially predicted in the works of the German jurist, philosopher, sociologist and political theorist Karl Schmitt.
The philosopher outlined his arguments in a short work called “Guerrilla Theory” in 1963. His arguments suggested that “musicians” should not be spoken of as a private military company. On the other hand, we can say that the appearance of “Wagner” is the beginning of the disappearance of private military companies as a phenomenon.
In his work, Schmitt addresses the theme of the transformation of warfare that came with the end of World War II. He links this transformation to the perversion of the original, purely political meaning of war in the period from the 17th to the beginning of the 20th century, which he calls the “golden age of European statehood”. This transformation leads to the irregularity of war: the parties cannot fully understand who is friend and who is enemy, the classic idea of loyalty and betrayal disappears, there is no longer certainty who is considered a participant in hostilities (and who is treated as a prisoner of war), and who is a criminal and must be convicted of terrorism, murder or destruction of property.
Irregularity also leads to the appearance of new types of participants in the war. In particular, the figures of the partisans. The partisan does not wear insignia, hides weapons under civilian clothes, does not hold territory – he is simply not a full-fledged participant in hostilities. Guerrilla warfare is dangerous because it causes boundless cruelty – the irregular nature of the guerrilla does not allow to make peace with him. The partisan himself is not looking for peace either, his victory is in the complete destruction of the enemy who occupied his territory. In such a war, there are no restrictions and principles. Therefore, the response to guerrilla action was also not regulated by jus in bello, the rules of war—armies used extreme brutality only when guerrilla activity was suspected.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the communists sent partisans from all over the world to fight not only for the country, but also against the class enemy. This significantly changes the nature of political confrontation on a global scale. The practice was conceptualized in his writings by Vladimir Lenin, and political leaders of the post-Stalin period actively supported partisans from Latin America, Africa, and Asia who later became political leaders of their countries. This led to the fall of the influence of the colonial powers, primarily Great Britain, and the success of left-wing ideas far beyond the borders of the USSR.
In an attempt to repeat this success, the nerds at Harvard, the Pentagon and the CIA proposed two technologies to fight the Soviet Union and then Russia.
The first technology was the “color revolutions”, which quite perversely, but even stylistically duplicated the first color – the “Red” revolution of 1917. And here all the colors of the rainbow flag were thrown at us: from radical green and blue to orange and outright brown .
The second technology was the private military companies that did their work without clear reference to the United States. Some analogue of a paid guerilla and not even connected in any way to the country in which he works. Color revolutionaries destroyed countries from within and private military companies cut off supplies, reduced the influence of the USSR/Russia and its few allies in the periphery (e.g. Africa) and consolidated success by instructing the armed forces of the new pro-American elites, won the coups.
Carl Schmitt identified four main traits of the partisan:
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Irregularity, the ability both to become a participant in hostilities and to hide among the civilian population
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Mobility, refusal of territory control, action in small groups
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Increased political engagement (after all, “party member” and “partisan” are words with the same root)
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The guerrilla’s special connection to the land that the soldiers of the armies of secular powers will not have.
If we compare “Wagner” with other PMCs – with “Academies” (formerly “Blackwater”) or “Aegis Defense” – we will see how they differ in their basic principles. And if we talk about who inherits the figure of the partisan according to Schmitt, it will be PMC “Wagner”. Of the four characteristics of the partisan, they are not characterized perhaps only by irregularity.
First, these are mobile groups. Stormtroopers “musicians” quickly occupy the territory that the army and military-civilian administrations have already been called upon to hold. The general gist of PMCs is that they are assault troops, not patrol or heavy infantry that are meant to hold territory.
Second, these are politically oriented fighters. Soldiers of Western PMCs are not supposed to be patriots. The entire Western labor tradition denies any vocation. There is no educational system, only the provision of educational services. This also applies to the US PMCs: their military operations are only “violence services”. Therefore, people often come there who do not ask humanitarian questions at all. Sometimes just butchers or computer game lovers, there are records of being handed over by the army for bad behavior. We can talk about a vocation, and about the military – not as individual entrepreneurs, but as people who realize their own vocation.
In the third place, no doubt, we are talking about the special nature of the connection with the earth and all its various derivatives. According to some indirect signs (interviews, humor on the front line, the culture of military callsigns, stripes on body armor), we can say that for the most part, one large ruble is not enough for Wagner’s contract fighter. There has to be some understanding of what is going on. On the part of the organization, it is not enough to provide a profitable fixed-term contract, it is also necessary to explain what kind of land should be recaptured from the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, what cities, what kind of people, why all this is happening, what is the background of what happens here and how it will be remembered in the future. Nothing to do with the safari tours in African countries organized by the French Foreign Legion, not to mention PMC “Academies”.
Of course, there is no classical partisan movement in Ukraine either from the Russian or the Ukrainian side. The 21st century has brought warfare to a significant degree of irregularity, and technical means of recognition and identification have made such guerrilla warfare simply ineffective. But perhaps within the SVO we see the contours of what war will be like in the future.
First, the time of mercenaries is passing. Many would like to see a future where wars are fought by corporate armies, but the truth is that people don’t kill and die for laundry or a paid mortgage. In any case, in these hotspots where there is a real risk of loss of life. Wars for resources are replaced by conflicts of civilizations, and here the Western mercenaries, who came to earn extra money, show extreme capriciousness, demand comfort and are almost ineffective.
Moreover, the irregularity of warfare in general will obviously increase. This means that national armed forces will not be the only participant in armed conflicts. Other participants will in some way possess the traits described by Carl Schmitt. And for these military-civilian units to be successful, it is necessary to recruit those who look the least like typical Western PMC fighters (The “Pirate” Archetype: individual entrepreneur in wartime) and increasingly resemble the archetype of the “partisan” according to Schmitt.
Finally, we see that the phenomenology of the mercenary spirit has come full circle. The figure of the guerilla gave rise to the figure of the mercenary, and in the synthesis gave the third type, for whom money is of course important, but obviously not enough in itself to go to the combat zone. Historical and political coordinates of one’s own actions must be given. That is, what patriotic education did for a partisan.
Today, perhaps education is not the most important thing. It is much more important to create a system of geohistorical positioning: to write narratives that would explain how the trajectory of the individual destiny of such a fighter lies in these times through the lands he defends. And the brochures that are distributed in the SVO zone, telling about the history of the founding of the Russian cities of Novorossiya, are a step in the right direction. In the information noise, love of country is an inevitable consequence of another action, its understanding.
Perhaps a special institute will grow up somewhere. With compulsory historical, cultural, geographical, political and psycholinguistic faculties.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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