The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
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Against world unity 173<br />
an impossible effort to overcome the tragic nature <strong>of</strong> politics and finally transform<br />
it into a worldwide bureaucratic and rational administrative machine (cf.<br />
McCormick 1993). It should now be clear why <strong>Schmitt</strong> could argue that ‘today<br />
the destiny <strong>of</strong> the world is technology not politics, technology as unstoppable<br />
process <strong>of</strong> absolute centralization’ (1996b: 118) and link this major shift with<br />
the scenario <strong>of</strong> world unity as well as, contra Fukuyama, with Marxism and the<br />
experience <strong>of</strong> real socialism (more on this unexpected association later).<br />
Globalization as spatial revolution<br />
Finally, I want to suggest some way in which <strong>Schmitt</strong>’s thought might contribute<br />
to reflections on the global nature <strong>of</strong> world order or, in other words, the<br />
issue <strong>of</strong> globalization. In <strong>The</strong> Nomos <strong>of</strong> the Earth <strong>Schmitt</strong> argues that during the<br />
nineteenth century the rise <strong>of</strong> a global economy brought about a common economic<br />
law, a private international law, whose liberal constitutional standard was<br />
more important than the political sovereignty <strong>of</strong> each politically self-contained<br />
(but not economically) territorial state (2003a: 235). In other words, <strong>Schmitt</strong> had<br />
seen with clarity the growing role <strong>of</strong> economic power to the point where he<br />
argued that it was ‘precisely here – in the economy – [that] the old spatial order<br />
<strong>of</strong> the earth lost its structure’ (ibid.: 237). Importantly <strong>Schmitt</strong> observes that this<br />
epoch-making revolution could not have taken place if the international law <strong>of</strong><br />
laissez-faire had not joined together with the principle <strong>of</strong> the freedom <strong>of</strong> sea,<br />
whose interpreter was the British Empire. England, which had not developed the<br />
dualism between public and civil law characteristic <strong>of</strong> the continental state, was<br />
able to enter into a direct relationship with the private component present in<br />
every European state. This reconstruction – already a powerful argument in<br />
favour <strong>of</strong> an earlier periodization <strong>of</strong> globalization to the nineteenth century –<br />
seems also to suggest that contemporary economic globalization cannot be<br />
grasped without reference to the implicit (legal and economic) common constitutional<br />
standard and the role <strong>of</strong> the US as the protector and guarantor (as lord <strong>of</strong><br />
air and space technology) <strong>of</strong> the stability <strong>of</strong> the system.<br />
What is, however, perhaps more interesting is the notion <strong>of</strong> spatial revolution<br />
that <strong>Schmitt</strong> develops in Land and Sea (2002) a short book from his later writings,<br />
which Franco Volpi has aptly referred to as ‘one <strong>of</strong> the first books to tell<br />
the history <strong>of</strong> globalization’ (2002: 135). According to <strong>Schmitt</strong>, the very essence<br />
<strong>of</strong> every great historical transformation is the change in the images and concepts<br />
<strong>of</strong> space that embraces all aspects <strong>of</strong> human existence (2002: 59, 70). Such a<br />
transformation took place in the age <strong>of</strong> the discovery <strong>of</strong> America and <strong>of</strong> the first<br />
circumnavigation <strong>of</strong> the earth and this is why we can talk <strong>of</strong> the first global<br />
spatial revolution between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This spatial<br />
revolution <strong>of</strong> the new globale Zeit found its political synthesis, its new nomos, in<br />
the spatial ordering <strong>of</strong> the jus publicum Europaeum. But this product <strong>of</strong> Western<br />
rationalism was based on the fundamental contraposition between Land and Sea<br />
that took shape as a result <strong>of</strong> a unique historical event, the British conquest <strong>of</strong><br />
the seas, ‘when at the end <strong>of</strong> the Sixteenth century, the British island detached