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

12 L. Odysseos and F. Petito
discourse (ibid.: 281–308). Behind all these processes lay a major historical and
epoch-making shift: the end of Europe as the centre of the earth. In the previous
centuries, European conferences had determined the spatial ordering of the
world; after the First World War, as was evident at the Paris peace conference, it
was, for the first time, the world which would decide on the spatial ordering of
Europe.
According to Schmitt, the League of Nations system failed to replace the jus
publicum Europaeum because it could not provide any spatial ordering. Rather,
the League was built on a highly unstable disorder made visible first of all in the
way it dealt with the issue of the limitation of war, the central purpose of any
international law. Its central aim became the abolition, rather than the limitation,
of war via the introduction of new concepts of discriminatory war and war as a
crime. In classical European international law, the concept of war crime only
referred to particular actions undertaken during the war against jus in bello;
now, in article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles, Schmitt notes, the German
Emperor Wilhelm II was explicitly accused of an international crime whose
content was ‘the supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity
of treaties’. These attempts to criminalise wars of aggression, to create an international
tribunal and to claim reparations for damages deriving from the legal
responsibility of having waged an unjust war of aggression, all pointed to an
epochal transformation in the meaning of war and signalled, in the clearest way
possible, the end of the era of the old nomos of the earth. The consequences of
the end of what might well be the major achievement of European legal rationalism,
‘the bracketing of war’, would become clear in the emergence of the new
total wars of the twentieth century – wars of annihilation fought in the name of
humanity, which had been, thanks to the modern means of destruction (air
power), transformed into a police action against the perturbers of peace, criminals
and others.
This transformation, however, would not have been possible without the new
fundamental role of the United States, which Schmitt analyses by looking at the
Western hemisphere as a central category of its foreign policy discourse. Since
the formulation of the famous Monroe doctrine in 1823, the Western hemisphere
represented, in Schmitt’s language, the American Großraum (greater space),
defining the US sphere of special interest, namely the American continent. In
terms of ‘global linear thinking’, the line of the Western hemisphere, different
from a distributive raya and from an agonal amity line, was a defensive line
around a security zone, a line of self-isolation, as well as an anti-European line
based on contempt for the old and ‘corrupted’ Europe. But it is during the interwar
years that the originally isolationalist nature of the Western hemisphere
gradually moved into a universalistic-humanitarian global interventionism,
which would seek to justify US intervention in all the relevant political, social
and economic issues of the earth on the basis of a return to the older and sounder
views of the just war tradition. This is the background that the contributors to
Part II of this volume have in mind when they approach the current international
political situation under the heading of ‘crisis of order’.