The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

2 L. Odysseos and F. Petito
twilight years of the Weimar Republic have had a significant and growing
impact on contemporary legal and political theory in the English-speaking
world, 2 Schmitt’s ‘international political thought’, with which continental political
thought has frequently engaged, has been largely overlooked in the fields of
both International Relations and political theory; this despite the recognition of
Schmitt as a thinker regarded, even by some of his fiercest contemporary critics,
as ‘among the ranks of twentieth-century Europe’s most influential political and
legal theorists . . . who has [also] exerted a subterranean influence on postwar
American political thought’ (Scheuerman 1999: 1).
This neglect is, perhaps, partly explained by the fact the Nomos was only made
available in English in 2003. Moreover, the reluctance of International Relations
to engage with Schmitt’s thought is often justified as the result of his own involvement
with the National Socialist regime in the 1930s (Balakrishnan 2000; Schmitt
1950) – reluctance which, interestingly enough, has been resisted longer in International
Relations than in other related disciplines such as political theory, legal
theory and international law, and that arguably reveals the extent to which International
Relations is still an ‘American social science’ (Hoffmann 1977). But also,
and perhaps more interestingly, the ‘multidisciplinarity’ of Schmitt’s international
thought – which lies at the intersection of international relations, international law
and international history, while also drawing on philosophy and political and legal
theory – has arguably exacerbated this unfortunate neglect.
This volume was conceived as precisely an antidote to this neglect, seeking
with its analyses to fill the gap in both international relations and political theory
literatures, by examining the heterodox international writings of Schmitt and
exploring, more importantly, how they relate to the epochal changes in international
society that arise from the collapse of the ‘Westphalian’ international
order. Such an intellectual enterprise has, therefore, two majors tasks: first, it
introduces the international thought of Schmitt to International Relations, a field
which has not yet recognised that his writings offer, as we noted above, a
significant and powerful analysis of the geopolitical characteristics and ‘achievements’
of the Westphalian system of states, which stands contrary to the founding
‘mythology’ of the discipline itself (Teschke 2003; Krasner 1999; Schmidt
1998). For reasons which we outline below, the contributions to this volume
argue that Schmitt’s writings on the genesis of Westphalia should be regarded as
at least as important for International Relations as the writings of other classical
realist scholars such as E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Raymond Aron, Martin
Wight, Hedley Bull or Kenneth Waltz, but also those of liberals such as Leonard
Woolf and Harold Laski, whose influence on IR has also only recently been documented
(Carr 2001; Wilson 2002; Honig 1995/1996; Soellner 1987). In other
words, this volume, in expanding and giving further impetus to the debate on the
significance of Schmitt’s thought for international politics, instigates a movement
towards a reconsideration of his whole oeuvre, not as marginal to International
Relations, but as central to its key concerns. Here, therefore, lies our
first aim: to acknowledge Schmitt’s international thought, and in particular The
Nomos of the Earth, as a ‘missing classic’ of IR.