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

6 L. Odysseos and F. Petito
The global relations of appropriation – which International Relations has been
forced to recognise as belonging to its domain of study only after persistent
postcolonial and poststructuralist critiques (see for example Hoogvelt 2001;
Campbell and Dillon 1993) – play a central and crucial role in Schmitt’s heterodox
account of international politics and law.
Indeed, Schmitt argues for a history of modern international politics that is
inseparable not only from the rise of scientific rationality (Schmitt 2003: 53), or
even from the spread of capitalism that more commonplace narratives of modernity
emphasise, but first and foremost from the processes of land appropriation of
the New World by the state, which, as we noted above, was a specifically European
form of social organisation. Indeed, he goes as far as to suggest that
[t]he first question in international law was whether the lands of non-
Christian, non-European peoples and princes were ‘free’ and without authority,
whether non-European peoples were at such a low stage of civilization
that they could become objects of organization by peoples at a higher stage.
(ibid.: 137–138)
Having already drawn a line to distinguish European from non-European –
read ‘open’ or ‘free’ – space available for appropriation and agonal struggles for
power, this order, moreover, regulated relations of war in Europe itself (ibid.:
97). Schmitt called this regulation of war eine Hegung des Krieges, a bracketing
of war, which resulted, he suggests, in what might well be the greatest achievement
of the Westphalian order: the limitation and humanisation of war, which
we examine below.
Eine Hegung des Krieges: bracketing war
Highlighting in the Nomos both the advent of the modern European state as the
vehicle of secularisation and also its global geopolitical character allows Schmitt
to trace how this interstate order was able to limit and ‘rationalise and humanise’
war. In acknowledging the patterns of violence in the form of limited interstate
war, Schmitt’s Nomos also recounts the ways in which this order had succeeded
in ‘bracketing’ war, precisely on the basis of drawing such geopolitical distinctions
between European and non-European space and on pursuing land appropriations
in the New World. Schmitt evaluates this occurrence as a significant legal
and political achievement, for it had kept ‘war at bay’ (see Mouffe, Chapter 8 in
this volume) on European soil:
Compared to the brutality of religious and factional wars, which by nature
are wars of annihilation wherein the enemy is treated as a criminal and a
pirate, and compared to colonial wars, which are pursued against ‘wild’
peoples, European ‘war in form’ signified the strongest possible rationalization
and humanization of war.
(Schmitt 2003: 142)