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

160 D. Zolo
a global empire above all because of its overwhelming military supremacy. If
military force is conspicuously out of balance, the very notion of war decays.
The adversary becomes a mere object of coercion, and hostile behaviour
becomes so harsh that it cannot be limited or regulated (Schmitt 1991:
429–430). Only those who are inescapably inferior appeal to international law
against the overwhelming power of the enemy. On the other hand, those enjoying
full military supremacy assert their justa causa belli on the basis of their
invincibility and treat their enemies as bandits or criminals:
The discriminatory concept of the enemy as a criminal and the attendant
implication of justa causa run parallel to the intensification of the means of
destruction and the disorientation of theaters of war. Intensification of the
technical means of destruction opens the abyss of an equally destructive
legal and moral discrimination.... Given the fact that war has been transformed
into police action against troublemakers, criminals, and pests, justification
of the methods of this ‘police bombing’ must be intensified. Thus
one is compelled to push the discrimination of the opponent into the abyss.
(Schmitt 2003: 321)
Third, I think that Schmitt’s philosophy of international law should be given
careful consideration when he argues that a reduction in the number of international
conflicts and of the destructive power of modern war cannot be
achieved through ‘non-spatial’ and universalist institutions such as the League
of Nations and the United Nations. On the contrary, the project of a peaceful
world requires a neo-regionalist revival of the idea of Großraum, together with a
reinforcement of multilateral negotiation between states as a normative source
and a democratic legitimisation of the processes of regional integration.
Within the framework of this philosophy of international law and relations,
Schmitt’s anti-normativist and anti-universalist position joins the antinormativist
and anti-universalist position of theorists such as Martin Wight
(1966) and Hedley Bull (1977). Bull, in particular, emphasised the need to
detach normative categories from the Enlightenment and Jacobin conception of
the international order. Against Kelsen’s normativist and cosmopolitan view of
the international domain, Bull has again forcefully proposed ideas such as the
balance between great powers, pre-emptive diplomacy, multilateral negotiation
among states, jus gentium as a body of international customs slowly developed
over time, capable not of eliminating war but of making it less discriminating
and less destructive (Bull 1977; Colombo 2003).
Starting from these theoretical premises I contend that the power of the
United States may be called ‘imperial’ according to a complex meaning that is
in some ways different from the ‘Roman archetype’. This new meaning accounts
for the new elements that processes of globalisation and the resulting transformation
of war in a global direction have brought to international relations, as
well as to the realms of the economy, communications and legal norms. I tentatively
propose the following four conceptual specifications of the notion of