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

(1998), Ojakangas offers a metaphysical argument, suggesting that Schmitt’s
thought sought to question and, indeed to curtail, the ‘outstanding characteristic
of late modernity’ which was the ‘dominance of the metaphysics of immanence’.
Ojakangas suggests that the metaphysical foundation of Schmitt’s thought
was the centrality of the outside, the exterior which cannot be dispensed with.
He sought to maintain, against immanence, ‘the openness of order towards
transcendence’ but that this is not ‘a transcendence beyond but within immanence’
(emphasis added).
Mitchell Dean’s Chapter 14, however, suggests that perhaps it is not so much
the theological reading of Schmitt’s thought, represented by Meier, which ought
to be at the centre of our critical endeavours but, rather, a reading of Schmitt
which excavates (in an ironic telluric emphasis) the mythopoetic and philological
aspects of his thought on world order. Such an examination as Dean undertakes,
moreover, critically reflects on our own scholarly capacity to appropriate
Schmitt’s thought without reproducing the dangers of his often disturbing
mythopoetics in our contemporary discussions and politics.
Finally, Sergei Prozorov’s Chapter 13 tackles an important lacuna – which
centres on the consideration of the ethical dimension of Schmitt’s thought – in
Schmittian studies but also in critical perspectives of international relations,
where Schmitt’s political realism is ‘often the object of criticism in the name of
a variably construed “political ethics” ’. Reading Schmitt’s existential decisionism
through Foucault, as a form of ‘self-constitution . . . in the absence of or in
opposition to a substantive moral code’, in other words, allows Prozorov to
recast ‘even the most controversial or even scandalous aspects’ associated with
Schmitt’s amoralism ‘as ethical in their own right’.
Below, in the final part of this introduction, we discuss how Schmitt’s heterodox
international thought provides us with a new multidisciplinary research
basis on which to analyse crucial international concerns, such as the contemporary
emergence of global terrorism, the international political environment of the
global ‘War on Terror’, the evolution of US ‘imperial’ hegemony, and the
prevalence of a global, interventionist, liberal cosmopolitanism.
In search of a new nomos: Schmitt and the contemporary
crisis of order
Introduction 11
In the last decades of the nineteenth century the jus publicum Europaeum enters
its twilight years, which would eventually lead to its final dissolution with the
First World War. From then onwards, according to Schmitt, the key issue
became the search for a new nomos of the earth. Schmitt identifies the end of the
first nomos of the earth in three major processes emerging with all their strength
throughout the twentieth century: the dissolution of the jus publicum Europaeum
into a spaceless and generic ‘international law’ and its institutionalisation in the
League of Nations system (2003: 227–258); the transformation of the meaning
of war (ibid.: 259–278, 309–322); the new role of the United States and the
emergence of the Western hemisphere as a central category of its foreign policy