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

170 F. Petito
The Western-centric and liberal global order: Schmitt and
the post-1989 condition
That things have not gone as Schmitt predicted is unimportant as well as hard to
express, since nothing was further from his way of thinking than the idea of
social-scientific prediction. Ex post, however, using Schmitt’s three scenarios
against the background of his own ‘predictions’, we could say that from the
dualist phase, which contained elements of ‘hidden unipolarity’ like that conceptualized
by supporters of the thesis of the Pax Americana and arguably also
grasped by Schmitt’s ‘hegemonic balance structure’ scenario, we have moved,
with the victory of the West over the East, to a monist phase – predicated on
some sort of world political unification, arguably to a much greater extent than
in 1942, since there is now ‘only one game in town’ – against which the aspiration
to a counter-hegemonic multipolar scenario is gaining momentum (though
this tells us little about the content of the new jus gentium which is yet to come).
In other words, the Schmittian sequence, monism, dualism, pluriverse, might
well come about in the long run but ex post we have to recognize that the dualist
phase of the Cold War contained more elements of monism than pluralism and
that, in some way, the dualist phase was a sort of bracketing of a stronger
monism that contemporary international politics has still to confront in the very
concrete form of the overwhelming political and ideological dominance of a UScentred
Western and liberal global order. Fred Dallmayr has given a powerful
description of what I have in mind in the first paragraph of his Alternative
Visions:
Ever since the demise of the Cold War, the world finds itself in a situation
that is unprecedented in human history, in which the entire globe is under
the sway of one hegemonic framework: that of Western civilization, with its
economic, technological, and intellectual corollaries. None of the previous
empires in history – neither the Roman, Spanish, and British empires nor
the Chinese Middle Kingdom – had been able to extend their ‘civilizing
mission’ to the entire globe or humankind as a whole. Today all the countries
and peoples in the world stand under a universal mandate or directive:
to ‘develop’ or to ‘modernize’ and hence catch up with the civilizational
standards established and exemplified by the West. ‘Globalization’ involves
to a large extent the spreading or dissemination of modern Western forms of
life around the globe.
(Dallmayr 1998: 1)
As the quote also suggests, this ‘hegemonic framework’ shows an intriguing
resemblance to well-known imperial models but, at the same time, seems to
require substantially different analytical categories if it is to be comprehended. 4
In my reading, any attempt to understand the present world order theoretically
needs to confront its Western-centric, liberal and global nature. Schmitt’s international
thought provides some interesting insights and directions to articulate