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

4 L. Odysseos and F. Petito
law, the jus publicum Europaeum, to develop. The realist paradigm of International
Relations understands international politics as immutable and repetitive,
portraying the Westphalian system of states as the latest historical manifestation
of existing power political relations – the tendency towards repetition lauded as
an analytical and predictive strength (see, for example, Waltz 1979). For
Schmitt, on the contrary, the genesis and demise of the Westphalian order could
only be discussed within a broader historical narrative of an emergent, secularised,
European modernity and of the related consolidation of the modern
state, the development of which transformed the institutional and legal basis of
political coexistence of peoples and princes in Europe.
Indeed, for Schmitt, modernity as an epoch relates directly to the rise of the
state as the ‘historical agency of detheologization and rationalization’ of ‘public
life’ (Schmitt 2003: 159, 140; see also 1985; Ulmen 1996: 130). Secularisation
and, more specifically, the divestiture of the spiritual authority of the Church
over politics and war allowed the emergence of this new and unique spatial
order (Schmitt 1999: 204). The modern state ‘upset the axis of the spatial order
of the respublica Christiana of the Middle Ages, and replaced it with a completely
different type of spatial order’ (Schmitt 2003: 127). It was not only the
actual evolution of the state that resulted in this new nomos of the earth; it was
also the fact that this type of political entity could, and did, seek to establish a
balance among all such recognised entities (ibid.: 126).
What makes Schmitt’s understanding of ‘Westphalia’ radically different from
other prevalent interpretations, however, is his conviction that this political-legal
European order was global from its very genesis and could not have been possible
without the unrepeatable historical event of the discovery of the New
World at the end of the fifteenth century. Schmitt, in fact, argues that only since
discovering the New World and exploring the earth as a true globe – scientifically
measurable as space – could one view the earth as a whole and reflect on
its spatial ordering, the nomos of the earth.
The ‘nomos of the earth’ and the discovery of the New World
The concept of nomos has very little to do with the positivist idea of ‘law’ as an
abstract command, as a superficial literal translation might suggest. For Schmitt,
nomos is the foundational act that creates a concrete territorial order as unity of
(legal) order and (spatial) orientation (Ordnung und Ortung) (ibid.: 67–79). The
concept of nomos makes visible the truth that every legal order is, first and foremost,
a spatial order constituted by a process of land appropriation, for ‘all law
is law only in a particular location’ (ibid.: 98). For Schmitt, as we noted above,
it is the historical turning point of the discovery and appropriation of the New
World which prompted the emergence of the first nomos of the earth: the jus
publicum Europaeum.
The nomos of the earth is, therefore, the order of the earth, ‘the community of
political entities united by common rules . . . considered to be mutually binding
in the conduct of international affairs’ (Ulmen 2003: 10). Such an order is, for