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

A terrifying world without an exterior 215
Heraclitus’ word, by this source’ (ibid.: 48). 12 According to Schmitt, the very
possibility of juridical relations is dependent upon this original event and determined
by this original measure. Therefore, land appropriation precedes all fundamental
distinctions of law, such as the distinction between public and private
law and even the distinction between public power (imperium) and private
property (dominium). But land appropriation does not create the historical condition
of possibility of law only within the community. In Schmitt’s view, it
establishes the law beyond communal borders as well, that is, with respect to
other peoples. It establishes the historical condition of possibility for the law of
nations. It is a ‘constitutive event [grundlegende Ereignis] of international law’
(ibid.: 80).
On the level of international order, the real possibility of appropriation is, in
the same sense as the concept of enemy, a guarantee that globalization will not
reach the worldwide enclosure of absolute immanence, the Babylonian unity of
the world. To be sure, Schmitt admits that the stakes today do not consist primarily
of land appropriation, given the fact that it is rarely land which is appropriated.
As a matter of fact, the sea replaced land as the principal target of
appropriation as early as the sixteenth century. And although the sea has also
ceased to be an object of appropriations, appropriation continue to exist today:
there are industry appropriations, even air and space appropriations (cf. Schmitt
2003b: 347). Of importance here, however, is that the real possibility of appropriation
exists, which means that universal history is not concluded and the
world united, as Schmitt’s friend Alexandre Kojève had proposed (cf. Kojève
1980: 158–159), but remains ‘open and fluid’. Conditions are not yet ‘fixed and
ossified’, which means that human beings and peoples have ‘not only a past but
also a future’ (Schmitt 2003a: 78). Admittedly, Schmitt, like Kojève, thought
that the end of history was a real possibility but, unlike Kojève, he did not perceive
this end in the satisfaction of the human desire for recognition. He perceived
it in the real possibility of humanity to commit suicide by means of
developed techniques of total annihilation: ‘This death would be the culmination
of universal history, a collective reality analogous to the Stoic conception
according to which the suicide of an individual represents the culmination of his
liberty’ (Schmitt 1990b: 246). For Schmitt, liberty signifies something completely
different from the liberty to commit suicide. Liberty signifies a state of
affairs in which things are not yet set in stone. It signifies a free space of action:
‘Freedom is freedom of movement, nothing else. What would be terrifying is a
world in which there no longer existed an exterior [Ausland] but only a homeland
[Inland], no longer space [Spielraum] for measuring and testing one’s
strength freely’ (Schmitt 1988: 37).
In The Nomos of the Earth, the concept of appropriation represents this
freedom, freedom of movement. Appropriation is a new decisionist moment,
that is, a rupture in the old international order, but it is simultaneously the constitutive
act of a new spatial order. It is the counter-concept to the unity of the
world, but it is also the fundamental concept. Appropriation designates the
exceptional event on the grounds of which a concrete international order is