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

Against world unity 167
in the second section, while criticizing some aspects of his analysis of the post-
Second World War world order, I argue that his international thought offers
some interesting theoretical insights into the post-1989 international condition
and, in particular, what I see as its Western-centric, liberal and global nature; the
final section refers back to the beginning of this chapter by making a ‘Schmittian’
critique of Wendt’s above-mentioned argument according to which a world
state is, in the long run, inevitable. The conclusions, proceeding from Schmitt’s
stance against world unity and going beyond (and, perhaps, against) him, point
in an evocative and rather preliminary manner to an intellectual strategy for
articulating a more pluralist world order adequate for a multicultural and globalized
international society.
In search of a ‘new nomos of the earth’: Schmitt’s reflections
on post-Second World War world order
In a short essay written in 1954 when the bipolarity of the Cold War had clearly
crystallized as the structure of the international system, Schmitt argues that the
new nomos of the earth might have three alternative forms:
The first, and apparently the simplest, would be that one of the two partners
in the present global antithesis would be victorious. The dualism of East and
West then would become only the last stage before an ultimate, complete
unity of the world.... A second possibility might be an attempt to retain the
balance structure of the previous nomos.... That would mean that
England’s former domination of the oceans be expanded to a joint domination
of sea and air, which only the United States is capable of doing.... The
third possibility [would be] a combination of several independent
Großräume or blocs.
(2003d: 354–355)
I cannot do justice to the complexity of the arguments behind each of these three
alternative scenarios here – especially since I agree with the continuity thesis of
Schmitt’s intellectual journey (cf. Burchard 2006) – but for the purpose of this
chapter it will be enough to briefly examine them in their reverse order.
It is well known that in the hypothesis of a balance of Großräume Schmitt
envisaged the possibility of a renewal, at a different level, of the rational construction
of the jus publicum Europaeum, whose end he had dramatically narrated
in the final part of The Nomos of the Earth 1 : the pluriverse of Großräume
would represent a ‘true pluralism’ responding, on the one hand, to the end of the
state’s monopoly on politics and, on the other, to the need for a new jus gentium,
spatially grounded in relatively internally homogenous and meaningfully differentiated
‘greater spaces’ (2002: 355; cf. Piccone and Ulmen 1990). In other
words, this solution would be the opposite of the forcefully criticized spaceless
universalism and empty normativism of the positivist International Law incorporated
par excellence into the project of the League of Nations. In his late