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

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