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

168 F. Petito
writings of the 1950s and 1960s Schmitt briefly speculated on the possible ‘third
factor’ that might inaugurate this new era of pluralism (of greater spaces); in one
place (1986: 4) he specifically identified ‘China, India, Europe, the Commonwealth,
the Hispanic world, the Arab bloc, or some other unpredictable grouping’
as possible candidates, while, in an another article (Schmitt 1990; cf.
Kervégan 1999), he saw the rise of the ‘Third World’ as the third power that
could break the bipolar configuration of the world and open the way for the
emergence of a plurality of Großräume. But none of this had happened when in
1985, at the beginning of the end of the Cold War, Schmitt died at the age of 97.
I will come back later to the possibility that the post-1989 international situation
might be vindicating Schmitt’s predictions and desiderata.
The second possible form of a new nomos would be ‘a continuation of the
former hegemonic balance structure . . . [whereby] . . . America is, so to speak,
the greater island that could administer and guarantee the balance of the rest of
the world’ (2003d: 355). Schmitt saw this scenario as having ‘the greatest
chance of accepted tradition and custom on its side’ (ibid.) not only because it
had been the form of the jus publicum Europaeum, grounded in a spatial order
where the balance of territorial states on the European continent was related to
the maritime British Empire; but also because, in my view, his understanding of
the Cold War was close to the reading of those who interpreted it primarily as a
Pax Americana and who postulated, as for example did Robert Gilpin (1981,
1987), a parallel between the nineteenth-century British Empire and the twentieth-century
US as the indispensable provider of last resort of an international
liberal economic order.
In fact the similarity between Schmitt’s second scenario and certain major
theorizations in International Relations scholarship does not stop here: Schmitt
also discussed the central issue of American power in his late writings. The
reconceptualizations of power in international relations – beyond its exclusively
military connotation – as soft, structural or cultural hegemony (Nye 1990;
Strange 1996; Cox 1981) all point, in fact, independently of their irreducible
theoretical differences, to the consensual and ideological dimension of American
power, which Schmitt described as that mix of ethics and economics, of ‘official
absence and effective presence’, representing the ‘real magnetic fields of human
energy’ of American consensual leadership (2003a: 255). It is interesting to note
that when Schmitt tries to articulate these American ‘magnetic fields’ as a space
of authentic US influence that goes beyond the Western hemisphere as asserted
in the Monroe Doctrine, he includes a space of economic wealth (internal and
external markets), a space of influence of the dollar and a space of cultural
expansion of language and of moral prestige – ‘Caesar dominus et supra grammaticam’
(Schmitt 1994: 202) – which closely resemble the three structures of
power that Susan Strange identifies in the description of American global reach,
namely the structures of production, finance and knowledge – beyond of course
the traditional one of security (Schmitt 1990; cf. Ulmen 2003: 29–30; Piccone
and Ulmen 1990: 31–32; Strange 1996). 2
Finally, Schmitt articulates the overwhelmingly feared (though perceived as