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

Against world unity 169
unlikely) possibility of the unity of the world. In this case, ‘[t]he victor [of the
Cold War] would be the world’s sole sovereign. He would appropriate the whole
earth – land, sea, and air – and would divide and manage it in accord with this
plans and ideas’ (Schmitt 2003d: 354). A few lines later, Schmitt adds: ‘[g]iven
the effectiveness of modern technology, the complete unity of the world appears
to be a foregone conclusion’ (ibid.). But before turning to Schmitt’s analysis of
this issue – in the final part of this chapter – I would like to suggest a reading of
Schmitt’s three scenarios against the background of his own predictions. In the
above-mentioned article on the post-Second World War world order, written in
the early 1960s, Schmitt (1990) had presented a sort of linear development
scheme: the first ‘monist’ phase of the Cold War, from 1942 to 1947, whose
main manifestation was the creation of the United Nations based on the common
perception of a coming world unity, had been followed by a ‘dualist’ phase with
the emergence of the bipolar confrontation, which, because of its unstable and
fragile nature, was likely to turn – this was Schmitt’s hope – into a third multipolar
phase of the pluriverse of Großräume (cf. Kervégan 1999: 70; Ulmen
2003: 29). In one of his last published articles in 1978, Schmitt confirmed his
view, identifying two industrially developed Großräume, the US and the USSR,
whose ‘internal’ political bottlenecks were overcome in the same way as in a
federal state or confederation of states, and a third one in fieri, China, not yet
completely capable of preventing political interventions by other powers in its
greater space. In this respect, world politics had become again a world balance
of power. However, the picture would have been incomplete if what was beyond
the line, to use the Nomos’s wording, was missed: a sphere ‘of so called nonaligned
states in which there is still a certain political freedom of movement’ but
which had become an area of conflict and competition between the three recognized
Großräume (1987: 80–81). These were Schmitt’s final written explorations
of the issue of a new nomos of the earth: appropriation had now become a
matter of industrial development and markets (cuius industria, eius regio) –
‘only a large industrial sphere allows the possibility of a Weltraumnahme
(global appropriation)’ – with the main division of the earth being between
industrially developed zones and less developed zones (1987: 79 and fn. 18). 3
It was Schmitt’s belief that this ‘trend of supra-state spheres of industrial
development has thus far not led to world political unity’ (1987: 80). Since,
however, a new nomos had not yet crystallized, Schmitt was reasoning in terms
of possibilities which, given his own concept of the political, could not be disciplined
by and reduced to any sort of predetermined and necessary process. That
is why he still kept his critical eye on world unity until the end of his life, suggesting
in the same essay that:
[i]t is possible to conceive of the political unity of humanity through the
victory of one industrial power over the other.... This would be a planetary
appropriation of industry.... The day world politics comes to the earth, it
will be transformed into a world police power.
(ibid.; emphasis in original; cf. Koskenniemi 2002: 419–421)