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

Second, what is really at stake in seeking to redress the neglect of Schmitt’s
international thought, beyond the important problem of exegesis, is the need for
a deeper understanding of the present international condition of crisis and
epoch-making change in the normative structures of international society. The
contributors to this volume variably illustrate that Schmitt’s insights can provide
scholars from social, legal and political sciences with a new common multidisciplinary
research platform that helps to analyse the rise of global terrorism, the
current international political environment of the global ‘War on Terror’, the
crisis of international legality, the emergence of US ‘imperial’ hegemony, and
the prevalence of a global interventionist liberal cosmopolitanism (see Schmitt
2000 [1963], 1996).
Yet why place such an emphasis on the past, that is on a history of international
relations – a history written, moreover, more than half a century ago – if
what we are urged to understand is the present situation of world (dis)order,
institutional instability and political violence and what we are expected to construct
is a future peaceful and just global order? There is a great need to give a
context, to localise, to give a perspective to our fast-changing globalised world
politics and this requires, more than ever, acute historical sensitivity. We cannot
hope to read the present, even less to construct the future, without understanding
the past, and this notwithstanding what the dominant positivistic methodologies
of social sciences would like us to believe. In particular, we would contend that,
in this time of transformation, any serious reflection on the contemporary international
situation, aiming to go beyond the news commentary, needs to be historically
informed. In this respect, we are committed to a historical sociological
methodology and would gladly subscribe to the final sentence of Hedley Bull
and Adam Watson’s introduction written to The Expansion of International
Society: ‘[w]e certainly hold that our subject can be understood only in historical
perspective, and that without an awareness of the past that generated it, the universal
international society of the present can have no meaning’ (1984: 9).
With this methodological premise in mind, we offer below a critical introduction
to Schmitt’s alternative history of ‘Westphalia’ or, in his own words, of the
first nomos of the earth, the jus publicum Europaeum, situating in this way the
varying interpretations of Schmitt’s international thought contained in this
edited volume. 3 This global order, which Schmitt regarded as the greatest
achievement of European jurisprudence and civilisation, came gradually into
being in the sixteenth century from the ashes of the respublica Christiana, the
pre-global nomos of the Middle Ages. In the twentieth century, the disintegration
of the jus publicum Europaeum becomes clear and the question of a new
nomos of the earth arises.
Rethinking ‘Westphalia’ as the nomos of the earth
Introduction 3
Schmitt understands Westphalia as a uniquely European order. He historicises
Westphalia, in other words, by highlighting the unique conditions and circumstances
in Europe which enabled this concrete spatial order and its international