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

10 L. Odysseos and F. Petito
history’. For him, Schmitt can indeed ‘tell us where notions of humanitarian
intervention come from, he can show us an alternative account of “humanism”
that does not grow out of the barrel of a Western gun’; nevertheless Brown criticises
both ‘Schmitt’s politics and his rather selective use of historical materials’,
calling into question the notion that the humanised wars of sovereign states were
an advance over the ‘just wars’ that preceded them, and the ‘humanitarian wars’
that have followed them.
For both Brown and Colombo, however, Schmitt’s place as a classic of International
Relations should be guaranteed. For Colombo, this is because Schmitt’s
Nomos gives pride of place to a peculiar type of ‘realist institutionalism’, ‘which
can legitimately seem an oxymoron in contemporary International Relations
Theory, since most institutionalists reject realist assumptions and most realists
downplay the role of institutions’, while, for Brown, it is because Schmitt ‘offers
the fullest, most intellectually substantial critique of the recent revival of Just
War thinking available, a critique that anyone who wishes to continue to work
within that tradition must confront’ and a critique which is absolutely essential
to contemporary theoretical and political debates alike.
What makes Schmitt’s international thought even more topical for
contemporary theorising, however, is that, while narrating the history of the first
state-centred global nomos, it was, at the same time, trying to understand the end
of the state, its consequences, and the need for a new world order for international
politics. Mika Luoma-aho’s Chapter 2, therefore, examines the evolution
of Schmitt’s geopolitical thinking from his Weimar works to his post-1936
writings, and in particular his search for the foundations of a new order in which
multinational Großräume, led by great powers, would replace the geopolitical
form of the state. He importantly traces, moreover, how such concerns about
grosspolitics were at the centre of the thought of E. H. Carr, whose importance
in International Relations is well known, but also of James Burnham, now
widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of American neo-conservatism.
Ethical, metaphysical, mythopoetic? Critical rereadings of Schmitt’s
thought
While much of the discussion in this introduction has focused on a critical
exposition of Schmitt’s international political thought, it is also as, if not more,
important to give a sense of the philosophical, philological and ethical contours
of Schmitt’s writings. The articles found in the fourth and final part of the book
generally provide such a critical and in-depth discussion of the philosophical
and ethical basis of Schmitt’s earlier thought as well as his later international
thought. In so doing, they rely on contemporary critical continental thought in
order to engage with, and evaluate, Schmitt’s corpus.
In Chapter 12 Mika Ojakangas explores the metaphysical foundation of
Schmitt’s thought through the question: ‘why is [Schmitt] so afraid of globalization
and the unity of the world – a world without an exterior?’ Opposing the
hitherto influential theological reading of Schmitt offered by Heinrich Meier