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

Introduction 5
Schmitt, necessarily based on a historical event of land appropriation, a foundational
act of force. As this definition suggests, the European modern ‘international
society’, as broadly described by the rationalist and English School
traditions of International Relations (cf. Wight 1994; Linklater 2001), is one
possible starting point within International Relations from which to understand
what Schmitt has in mind when he talks about the jus publicum Europaeum as
the first ‘nomos’ of the earth. Bull, in fact, defines a society of states as ‘a group
of states that conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their
relations with one another’ (1977: 13). Both the concepts of ‘international
society’ and ‘nomos of the earth’ are definitely richer than the realist notion of
‘international system’, for they both outline the dense institutional dimension of
Westphalia as well as its uniquely European origin (see Colombo, Chapter 1 in
this volume). For Schmitt, however, ‘Westphalia’ is a global order from the very
beginning of its inception – well before the process of expansion of the European
international society, which Bull and Watson saw as culminating in its universalisation
in the twentieth century. ‘Westphalia’ is a global order precisely
because its origins lie in the epoch-making discovery of a New World as a free
space, an area regarded as open to European occupation and expansion.
Shortly after 1492, when the first maps and globes were produced, the first lines
were also drawn by the appropriating European powers to divide and distribute this
new global space, signalling the birth of what Schmitt refers to as ‘global linear
thinking’ (2003: 86–100). Schmitt illuminates how the first global lines, the
Spanish–Portuguese rayas (Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494), had a distributive purpose,
that is, they aimed at the internal division of the new lands between two landappropriating
Christian princes within the spatial order of the respublica Christiana
and guaranteed by the common authority of the head of the Church, the Roman
pope. The subsequent French–English ‘amity lines’, established with the treaty of
Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), were based on completely different premises, embodying
an agonal character. They set aside two distinct areas considered ‘open spaces’:
on the one hand, the landmass of the New World, whose belonging to the native
populations was not recognised, and on the other, the newly mapped and navigable
seas (ibid.: 94–95). In both types of ‘open space’, the appropriating European
powers could use force freely and ruthlessly, as these were areas ‘designated for
agonal tests of strength’ (ibid.: 99). In the powerful words of Schmitt:
At this ‘line’ Europe ended and the ‘New World’ began. At any rate, European
law, i.e., ‘European public law’, ended here.... Beyond the line was
an ‘overseas’ zone in which, for want of any legal limits to war, only the
law of the stronger applied.
(ibid.: 93–94)
Schmitt examines how the need to permit and legally justify the appropriation
of these new lands ‘beyond the line’, as well as the marshalling of the seas, led
to the creation of ‘Westphalia’, a uniquely European order that lasted for almost
three centuries, which was the first nomos with a global geopolitical character.