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

180 F. Petito
require a confrontation of the issue of liberalism and technology in the context
of international politics). Conversely, Schmittian analysis of the present global
condition should confront the central intuition of the English School’s reading of
the expansion of international society, that is, the challenge, intensified from the
Second World War onwards, to Western dominance within universal international
society, what Bull calls the ‘revolt against the West’, and especially its
cultural stage characterized by a search for the cultural authenticity of the non-
Western world (Bull 1984). Today Schmitt’s argument (1990) that anti-colonialism
lacks the capacity to create a new spatial order is insufficient because we have
entered the era of cultural revolt against the West, something that a selfconfessed
Eurocentric thinker living spatially and temporarily at the very heart
of twentieth-century Europe could not really see – and in this respect Schmitt
knew very well that the view from an island (and what an island, he would have
added) such as England is very different to the one from the landmasses of
continental Europe (cf. Schmitt 2002).
Perhaps it is in connection with this last point – the return to a world politics
of cultures and religions challenging the very liberal and Western-centric matrix
of contemporary international society (cf. Petito and Hatzopoulos 2003) – that
the supreme topicality of Schmitt’s apocalyptic stance against world unity lies. 11
The future nomos of the earth, adequate for a multicultural and globalized international
society, cannot be only liberal and Western-centric: it will require a
significant conception of the presence of different cultures and civilizations. A
fundamental void looms with cosmopolitan liberalism, a political tradition that
forecloses the centrality of cultural and religious identity in the everyday practices
of existing communities, reducing politics to what Havel has polemically
called a technology of world order (cf. Petito 2003).
Against this background, we need an intellectual strategy that problematizes
any cosmopolitan international theorizing constructed, as in the case of Wendt,
through an easy opposition to territorial sovereignty seen as summum malum and
the endorsement of a philosophy of history aiming at a summum bonum. From
this perspective, the call for a ‘dialogue of civilizations’ is not wishful thinking
but a realistic response to the political need to create the intellectual and practical
preconditions of a future jus gentium and pluralistic world order whose aim
is not to create a paradise on earth, but rather and in the first instance to prevent
the earth becoming a hell (cf. Palaver 1995). 12 Ab integro nascitur ordo, out of
integrity order is born, Schmitt used to say, and he ended the foreword to his
masterpiece by recalling that ‘the earth has been promised to the peacemakers.
The idea of a new nomos of the earth belongs only to them’ (2003: 39).
Notes
1 Schmitt always maintained that the historical exemplification of his idea of Großraum
was the Western hemisphere as conceptualized by the Monroe Doctrine (2003a:
251–253). For a discussion of the notion of Großraum and for full bibliographic references
to all Schmitt’s texts on the topic see Luoma-aho (1999). Ola Tunander has
effectively defined the Schmittian notion of Großraum as follows: ‘a cluster of states