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

176 F. Petito
And in a similar vein, while arguing that the solution of collective security is
still ‘not enough’ (in teleological language, ‘unstable’) because ‘it would have
no right to prevent a state from seceding and then arming itself for aggressive
purposes’, Wendt adds:
more importantly, collective security does not fully satisfy desires for
recognition. For what, in the end, is the retention of sovereignty if not retention
of the right to decide, unilaterally, to revoke an actor’s recognized
status and possibly kill them?
(ibid.: 523)
And, finally, the full power of the ‘Schmittian definition’ is ironically used
against Kant’s opposition to a world state on the grounds that it would be
despotic:
It is the essence of sovereignty that power and violence can be exercised
against non-members without any accountability. Is not that
‘despotism’?. . . Whether justified or not, to whom is the United States
accountable for its recent killing of thousands of civilians in Kosovo,
Afghanistan, and Iraq? Whatever the accountability problems in a world
state might be, they seem far less than those in anarchy.
(ibid.: 526)
As the above quotes suggest, it is the unaccountable nature of the decisionism
associated with sovereignty that, according to Wendt, makes the territorial state
in the long run rationally indefensible from the perspective of the struggle for
recognition. Wendt is to some extent right in defining as ‘unaccountable’ the
state’s decision to resort to the physical killing of the domestic enemy (civil
war) or the public enemy (inter-state war), for these are purely political
decisions that transcend (and cannot be reduced to) the established state of law:
‘the sovereign is he who decides on the exception’, on the extreme possibility of
conflict and its friend–enemy grouping (Schmitt 1985: 5; Schmitt 1996a:
38–39). In other words, ‘the political entity is by its very nature the decisive
entity . . . [it] decides the extreme case and determines the decisive friend–
enemy grouping’ and, by doing so, reveals itself as the sovereign (Schmitt
1996a: 43).
Here, the first internal contradiction of Wendt’s argument can be outlined. If
Wendt agrees with Schmitt on the ‘unaccountable’ nature of state sovereignty –
to the point of making it a defining pillar of his definition of state – he does not
understand that this can not be ‘blamed’ on the territorial state but on the very
Schmittian notion of sovereignty that he uses. In other words, the cession of sovereignty
from the territorial state to a world state (assuming that this is possible)
would bring about ‘a single sovereign of the world’ (Schmitt 2003d: 355) that
could not escape the logic of the political, that is, the need to decide on the
exception and the friend–enemy grouping. This is why Schmitt could say that