Metapolitics and Strategic Decision-Making
The Dialectic of Wills
Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent argues that strategy and metapolitics form a spiritual hierarchy, where worldviews and philosophies shape decisions of war and sovereignty.
The destiny of man depends on the philosophy he chooses and on the strategy by which he seeks to make it prevail.
— General André Beaufre, 1963
I hear it said that German philosophers invented the word metapolitics, to be to politics what the word metaphysics is to physics. It seems that this new expression is most aptly invented to express the metaphysics of politics, for such a thing exists, and this science deserves the full attention of observers.
— Count Joseph de Maistre, 17971
This dimension is too often overlooked in geopolitical assessments: determining which metapolitical orientations guide the actors in the clash of powers represents a fundamental strategic question. Strategy and metapolitics are in fact intimately linked.
Let us evoke here one of the major figures of the French strategic school, General Beaufre.2 In the 1960s — together with Lucien Poirier, Charles Ailleret, and Pierre-Marie Gallois — he was one of the four generals who conceptualized the French doctrine of nuclear deterrence.3 This doctrine constitutes one of the pillars of French power and sovereignty. Recall that Emmanuel Macron has for several years proposed extending the French nuclear umbrella to other European countries, with priority given to those of Eastern Europe. French strategic interests would then merge with those of the European Union to create a strategic giant. A geopolitical giant indeed — but animated by what will, and by what vision of the world?
General Beaufre defined strategy as a “dialectic of wills employing force to resolve conflicts.”4 Yet this confrontation of wills is, above all, essentially a clash of worldviews, for in the mind of the general:
(…) strategy is only a means. The definition of the goals it must seek to attain belongs to politics and depends essentially on the philosophy one wishes to see dominate. The destiny of man depends on the philosophy he chooses and on the strategy by which he seeks to make it prevail.5
André Beaufre placed worldview and political philosophy at the very heart of this paroxysmal struggle of wills that is war. Strategy is therefore at the service of the human spirit, which employs it to overcome another human spirit with which it is confronted. War is as much a material as a spiritual clash. It mobilizes man in his entire existential and anthropological reality.6 It mobilizes man in his totality.
Thus, a chain of execution unfolds — from philosophy and worldview to the ultimate and tragic political decision that is the act of entering war. It is always with a system of values that he seeks to make prevail that man wages war against man.
War is first a process that arises in the human spirit, is decided in his heart, and is carried out by his body. The mobilization of minds precedes, directs, and accompanies the mobilization of bodies. The nation resembles a collective organism that sets itself into motion when its spirit, embodied by its leaders, so decides. Significantly, the French term chef designates both the leader of an institution or a collective human group, and the head of the individual human body. Other typical expressions, such as corps national (“national body”) or esprit de corps (“spirit of the body/corps”), reveal a homology between the nation in arms and the human body.
Every decision is first a phenomenon that occurs in the mind. To pursue this line too far would take us beyond the scope of this text, yet this is precisely why the Church Fathers recommended constant spiritual vigilance (nepsis) in order to cast out parasitic thoughts and imaginations that prevent man from maintaining his spiritual clarity. What extraordinary benefits a human community could gain from decision-makers who practice such inner discipline! To keep the mind clear, so as to decide without being overwhelmed by external conditions — this is the aim of every true leader, from the head of the family (the basic cell of the nation) to the head of state. A nation is a family of families, whose political father is the head of state.
In war, the tactical objectives of the strategic decision chain are of a material order: seizure of energy resources, territorial gains, capture of enemy positions, and so on. Yet the ultimate aims of strategy and war are essentially spiritual. For the purpose of every strategy of war is to succeed in breaking the morale and spirit of the enemy, so as to compel him to take a decision favorable to us. For General Beaufre, the decision one seeks to provoke is, above all, “a psychological event that one wants to produce in the adversary” in order “to convince him that to engage or continue the struggle is useless.”7
For to reach the decision is in fact to create and exploit a situation that produces “a moral disintegration of the adversary sufficient to make him accept the conditions one wishes to impose on him. This is indeed the general idea of the dialectic of wills.”8
This is what Lenin himself described as “the moral disintegration of the enemy.”9
War is thus, in a fundamental sense, a spiritual phenomenon that progressively externalizes and materializes itself, from the mind to the decisive physical clash between antagonistic human groups; from the vision of the leaders to the melee of the troops.
This is how we understand the term metapolitics: as the worldview and political philosophy that guide strategic actors, but also as the ensemble of means and the apparatus that the protagonists of the clash of powers deploy and organize in order to achieve their practical and theoretical goals. Metapolitical war (cognitive, cultural, spiritual) precedes, accompanies, orients, and structures material war. Metapolitics thus designates the “great politics” pursued by the real decision-makers who lead nations (as opposed to the petty parliamentary politicking). A great politics, always animated by a worldview and a specific axiology which justify and orient its actions.
“Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet — Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception,” says Carl Schmitt in his Political Theology.10 If to be sovereign one must decide, then to decide one must think. Decision is therefore a spiritual process with material consequences.
Strategic decision is thus a tripartite reality, in the image of the soul of man who executes it: first comes the intuition of the decision, then the thought and analysis of the necessary decision, and finally comes its material execution and the clash of Spirit (nous, νοῦς) with Nature (physis, φύσις).
Spirit, soul, matter. Even at the very heart of war — and perhaps above all there — man remains a spiritual political creature. A metapolitical creature.
(Translated with permission from the original French article here.)
Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, suivi de l'Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions (Considerations on France, followed by Essay on the Generative Principle of Constitutions), 1797.
A school that reached its greatest practical and theoretical achievements during the era of General de Gaulle.
Lucien Poirier: “I believe in the rationalizing virtue of the atom,” Le Monde, 27 May 2006.
André Beaufre, Introduction à la stratégie, 1963.
Ibid.
Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (The Battle as Inner Experience), 1922.
André Beaufre, Introduction à la stratégie, 1963.
Ibid.
Cited by General André Beaufre in La guerre révolutionnaire: Les formes nouvelles de la guerre (Revolutionary War: The New Forms of War), Fayard, 1972.
Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 1922.
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