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

8 L. Odysseos and F. Petito
maintenance of a balance (ibid.: 161), known within International Relations as
the ‘balance of power’. This relates to the avoidance of wars of destruction,
because if balance was the political and military objective, then wars could be
limited to achieving it, unlike wars of substance and just cause which required
the submission of the opponent or their resocialisation. The workings of the
system of a continental equilibrium between European territorial states were predominantly
visible in the resolution of the fundamental problem of territorial
change: how to allow for territorial changes within European soil without endangering
the overall spatial ordering of the jus publicum Europaeum. The problem
was resolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the international
law procedure of the great peace conferences under the leadership of the great
powers. This represented the supreme legal institutionalisation of the foundation
of the European international law, the balance of power, articulated in its two
main principles: first, every important war among European states is a legitimate
concern for all the members of the community of European states and, second, it
is for the great powers as guarantors of the European spatial ordering to recognise
the relevant territorial changes (ibid.: 185–212).
The spatiality of the nomos of the earth, moreover, underscored its longevity
because it allowed European powers to conduct limited, rationalised, wars in
Europe while pursuing appropriation of lands elsewhere. It is important to note,
however, that the ability to balance power was also based on the fundamental
contraposition between ‘Land’ and ‘Sea’ that took shape as a result of another
unique historical event, the British conquest of the seas (Schmitt 1997). Schmitt
argues that it is in the coexistence, full of tensions, of these two different global
spatial orderings, land and sea, that the nomos of the earth was grounded. Within
this framework, ‘the connecting link between the different orders of land and sea
became the island of England’ (Schmitt 2003: 173), ruler of the seas and guarantor
of the equilibrium between land and sea. From 1713 to 1914, then, there
were two main distinctions within the nomos of the earth: a division between
land and sea, relevant to distinguish between land-war and sea-war with their
respective concepts of enemy, war and plunder; and a division of the firm land
between the soil of European states, where the limitation of interstate war
applied, and the soil of colonial territories, where it did not (ibid.: 184).
This brief exploration, taken up, expanded and critiqued by each of the contributors
to the volume, suggests that Schmitt’s Nomos has to be accorded its
proper place, side by side with other major classics, as a founding text of International
Relations, corrective of the ahistoricity of the discipline and its blindness
to the ways in which spatiality, law and politics constitute world order.
Moreover, it opens up the possibility to recast the thought of Schmitt as international
but of a radically heterodox character.
Assessing Schmitt’s heterodox international thought
As the above discussion suggests, Schmitt provides an alternative examination
of the historical emergence and specificity of the Westphalian system of states,