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

162 D. Zolo
or may be, shared by all humankind. The United States advocates a monotheistic
world view – biblical and fervently Christian in the case of President George W.
Bush – in the face of the value pluralism and social complexity of the world.
While fighting the inhumane and bloody ideology of global terrorism, the United
States claims it is waging a ‘humanitarian war’ – hence a ‘just war’ in the classical,
theological and imperial meaning of the phrase – against the enemies of
humankind who deny the universality of such values as liberty, democracy,
human rights and the market economy. It is therefore a ‘discriminating’ war in
Schmitt’s meaning: a war that makes enemies criminals in order to dehumanise
their image and legitimise perhaps extremely inhumane behaviour against them,
as enemies of humankind. Think of Guantánamo and the special tribunal which
sentenced Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s former dictator, to death in November 2006.
Conclusion
In my view, if we acknowledge that the United Nations is paralysed and there
are currently no prospects for an effectively binding ‘supranational’ international
law, then we should revalue Schmitt’s ‘macro-spatial’ perspective. Of
course, before this kind of order can be achieved complex economic, technological,
cultural and religious conditions must be met that make a dialogue
between the world’s major civilisations possible. A united Europe comes to
mind first: a Europe that rediscovers its political autonomy and cultural identity
– its Mediterranean roots, first of all – and can start a dialogue across the
Mediterranean and with Arab-Islamic cultures in general. And we cannot but
think of China, whose ambition to hold the balance of world power over coming
decades is ever more apparent and plausible. Nor should we overlook the strategies
that such countries as Argentina and Brazil are endeavouring to devise in
order to resist the US pan-Americanist attack (in the form of the Free Trade
Area of the Americas) on the economic and political autonomy of the Mercosur
area and the whole of Latin America. We should also pay attention to the
processes of polarisation of African economies and politics around such gravity
centres as Nigeria and South Africa. In this picture the proposal by the current
Brazilian government of a strategic alliance between countries such as China,
India, South Africa and Brazil against the economic unilateralism that currently
dominates globalisation processes might be a valuable project. In sum, we
should acknowledge that today there are no alternatives to ‘macro-spatial’ interaction,
other than the current clash between the US hegemony and the terrorist
response, between the nihilism of imperial wars and the anarchical nihilism of a
terrorism that is becoming widespread in all continents.
Carl Schmitt wrote, once again with surprising far-sightedness: ‘contrasted
with the nihilism of a centralised order, achieved through the modern means of
mass destruction, anarchy may appear to desperate mankind not only as the
lesser evil but indeed as the only effective remedy’ (Schmitt 1950: 18).