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

‘the day world politics comes to the earth, it will be transformed in a world
police power’ (1987: 80) and could in no way entertain the optimism of Wendt
about ‘the temporary disruption’ that such a world state would have to face ‘as
crime, not politics or history’ (Wendt 2003: 528). On the contrary, Schmitt
warned against such a development for it would coincide not with the end of
violence but with its limitless nihilist intensification. He was already seeing such
a development in action in the concepts of the discriminatory (just) war and the
enemy of humanity:
And,
Against world unity 177
Given the fact that war has been transformed into a police action against
troublemakers, criminals, and pests, justification of the method of this
‘police bombing’ must be intensified. Thus, one is compelled to push the
discrimination of the opponent into the abyss.
(2003a: 321)
if one discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being
human to a disturber or destroyer, then the negatively-valued person
becomes an unperson and his life is no longer the highest value: it becomes
worthless and must be destroyed.
(1987: 81)
This world is not the World State that Wendt, at the end of his article, sees as
desirable and normatively superior to other solutions, although he immediately
adds that this is irrelevant to his scientific argument (2003: 529). I wonder,
however, whether the civilian deaths of the recent conflicts, to which Wendt
refers in the quotation given on p. 176 above,, could not be thought of (hypothetically)
as unavoidable side effects of a worldwide legal (law-enforcing)
police operation (let’s say led by a WASP sheriff) against criminals (Kosovo),
terrorists (Afghanistan) and outlaws (Iraq). Perhaps not, since Wendt might
agree with Schmitt that ‘a war waged to protect or expand economic power
must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last war of
humanity’ (Schmitt 1996a: 79).
The problem of a philosophy of history
There is a second aspect of Wendt’s article to which I would like to draw attention
via Schmitt’s thought on world unity. Wendt argues that his ‘theory is progressivist,
although in an explanatory rather than normative sense’ (2003: 492).
More importantly, he admits that it is based on a ‘scientific conjecture’ – the
international system will indeed result in a certain end-state – formed on some
relevant (though not decisive) empirical evidence that seems to suggest that
there is ‘a tendency for political authority to consolidate in larger units’ (ibid.:
503). I do not want to engage with the sophisticated epistemological arguments