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

emerging global constitution.... In short, better to ‘get with the program’
than wait till it gets you.
(2003: 529–530)
In other words, when it comes to politics, the only thing Wendt can say is: better
to be on the side of the things to come. And by doing so, his teleological explanation
is revealed for what it really is: a philosophy of history in the sense that
Schmitt had identified as the problem behind any argument for world unity.
In the economy of the chapter’s overall argument, a ‘Schmittian’ reading of
Wendt reveals two key normative working logics of the present preference for
world unity: the identification of territorial sovereignty as the dark side of politics,
the summum malum (the greatest evil) to be got rid of, and an implicit
philosophy of history aiming at a summum bonum (the greatest good). Unfortunately,
as Alessandro Colombo clearly shows in Chapter 1 of this volume, rather
than opening the way to an eternal peace, the end of state sovereignty and the
endorsement of philosophy of history mark, for Schmitt, the end of a limitation
and humanization of war and the entrance to the dangerous era of the limitless
intensification of war and global civil war.
Concluding remarks: for an intellectual strategy beyond
Schmitt
Against world unity 179
Schmitt’s post-Second World War writings on world order offer a fascinating
journey, bounded by two lines that could not be crossed: the first line is that of
the past, of unrepeatable and unique history, the line of jus publicum
Europaeum, and the second one is that of the future, an impossible concept
beyond history, the line of World Unity. Between these two lines Schmitt
searched for a new nomos of the earth. His predictions, or perhaps hopes, of the
emergence of a pluriverse of Großräume through the fragile structure of the
Cold War turned out to be in vain or maybe only premature. Schmitt’s thought,
however, provides a wealth of insights and intellectual resources to articulate
our present global condition and, in this respect, The Nomos of the Earth should
be numbered among the classics of international political thought.
I have tried to show the potential of his thought by articulating an understanding
of contemporary international relations as a Western-centric and liberal
global international society. Schmitt’s analysis confirms what Hedley Bull and
Adam Watson wrote in the introduction to their The Expansion of International
Society: ‘[w]e certainly hold that our subject can be understood only in historical
perspective, and that without an awareness of the past that generated it, the universal
international society of the present can have no meaning’ (1984: 9). Not
only that: the international society tradition associated with the English School
should be enriched by an encounter with the philosophical depth of the notion of
nomos, in order to avoid the reification of the inter-state system and its modern
matrix and to face the challenge posed by the deeper layer of ‘spatial revolution’,
legitimacy and intellectual sphere (concretely, in my view, this would