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

Against world unity 171
this triple nature of the present order and in the remainder of this section I
briefly sketch some of these possibilities.
The ‘global linear thinking’ of a US-centred Western hemisphere
The Western-centric nature of the present world order can be fruitfully comprehended
from the viewpoint of the global linear thinking, which Schmitt develops
in The Nomos of the Earth (2003a: 86–100). Schmitt talks of the Western
hemisphere as a central category of US foreign policy discourse since the
formulation of the famous Monroe doctrine in 1823. The Western hemisphere
represented, in Schmitt’s language, the American Großraum defining the US
sphere of special interests, namely the American continent. It originated as a
defensive line around a security zone, a line of self-isolation, as well as an anti-
European line based on contempt for the old and corrupt Europe and, in this
sense, it was, according to Schmitt, a kind of quarantine line, a cordon sanitaire
which separated a contaminated region from a healthy one. At the same time,
however, it carried with it the moral claim, grounded in the Calvinist-Puritan
belief of being ‘elected’, to express the true European civilization and international
law. In the powerful words of Schmitt, this meant that the true ‘Occident’,
‘the centre of civilization shifted further West, to America’ (2003a:
281–294). But it was during the transition of ‘the twenty years’ crisis’, to use E.
H. Carr’s words (2001), that the originally isolationalist nature of the Western
hemisphere – still visible in the 1939 Panama declaration in which the European
belligerents were told not to take any hostile actions within the security zone of
the American continent – degenerated into a universalistic-humanitarian global
interventionism, articulated for example in the 1941 official declaration of the
US entry into the war as a reversion to the older and sounder views of the Just
War tradition (Schmitt 2003a: 259–280). With this act, the most essential
component of the jus publicum Europaeum, the rationalization and limitation of
war, chanted its swansong and, with it, the old nomos of the earth.
The global interventionism of the US as the defensor fidei of the Free World
continued throughout the Cold War, justified by the ideological bipolar confrontation;
and it has arguably been intensified in the post-1989 era in the name of
human rights (humanitarian interventions) and more recently in the name of the
need for a global security and democracy (preventive war and war against terror).
The change is well exemplified by the fact that Central and Southern America, still
perceived as the special interest of the US, the Reich of the Western hemisphere,
in the original formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, are today only secondary strategic
areas compared to the Greater Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East,
that is, the rest of the world. In this context, Schmitt’s analysis of the Western
hemisphere is also still very topical because it does not hide, as many uses of this
concept tend to do, its political origin as the first counter-attack of the New World
against Old Europe and therefore foregrounds the issue of so-called transatlantic
tensions with a strength necessary, in my view, to capture the centrality this issue
will have in the future of international politics. 5