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

172 F. Petito
Liberalism, technology and a worldwide centralized and rational
administrative machine
But the central role of the only world superpower is insufficient to articulate the
meaning of the new world order, in the same way that nomos cannot be reduced
only to its spatial orientation (Ortung) but must include also a politico-legal
order (Ordnung) for ‘all law is law only in a particular location’ (2003a: 98). In
my view, therefore, liberalism is the other necessary ingredient to describe the
present global predicament. Liberalism, however, is an extremely flexible and
multifaceted concept, and Schmitt, who was well aware of that, defined it as an
‘extraordinary intricate coalition’ of many different things: subjectivism, individualistic
thought, parliamentary democracy, economy, ethics and technology
(1996a: 26, 76; cf. Galli 2000). Overall, liberalism was both the ideology incapable
of grasping the defining distinction of the political – that between friend
and enemy – and the key to ‘the politics of the Anglo-American sea-powers oriented
towards global trade and competition, and only indirectly – through universal
ethics – towards conflict and war’ (Galli 2000: 1598).
The centrality of liberalism as the structuring and sustaining pensée unique of
the post-Cold War condition is both a self-evident truth and, at the same time,
something in need of greater theoretical elaboration in the context of international
relations. In terms of dominant political discourse, however, the
strongest argument remains that of Francis Fukuyama according to whom world
history reached its end as a dialectical process with the defeat of communism,
and liberalism, now the only game in town, represents the only rational model
available worldwide in the now final consolidation of the linear progress of
mankind (1992). From this perspective, the problem of the new international
order is greatly simplified – if not finally resolved – by the globalization of liberalism,
i.e. the greater international homogeneity based on the liberal values of
free market, democracy and human rights, the new forms of legitimacy of the
system, which provides the conditions to develop some form of cosmopolitan
governance and fulfil the Kantian ideal of perpetual peace; in International Relations
jargon, the final victory of liberalism, by expelling or at least substantially
mitigating the two defining features of modern international society, war and
anarchy, marks the end of history of international relations as we have known
them.
For Schmitt, however, the unstoppable force that was already operating
behind liberalism was technology: not only the material impact of technology on
politics, which he also recognizes with reference, for example, to military issues,
but also, and more essentially, the nature of technology as a new pseudo-religion
or Weltanschauung of the masses in the successive stages of neutralization and
depoliticization that characterize the dynamics of modernity. In his view, the
European mind had moved in the last four centuries from one central sphere of
neutrality to another – ‘from the theological, over the metaphysical and the
moral to the economic . . . to the absolute and ultimate neutral ground [of
technology] . . . since apparently there is nothing more neutral’ (1993: 138) – in