The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
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<strong>Carl</strong> <strong>Schmitt</strong> viewed <strong>The</strong> Nomos <strong>of</strong> the Earth (2003: 37–38) as a work with<br />
‘essentially jurisprudential foundations . . . although much indebted to geographers’.<br />
Notwithstanding this, ‘the ties to mythological sources are much<br />
greater’. Indeed, the author <strong>of</strong> that book, the earlier Land and Sea (1997), <strong>The</strong><br />
Leviathan in the State <strong>The</strong>ory <strong>of</strong> Thomas Hobbes (1996b), and the post-Second<br />
Word War essays on nomos (2003: 324–355), reveals himself as philologist,<br />
mythologist, student <strong>of</strong> geo-politics and legal historian, as much as a legal theorist.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se various guises raise fundamental questions about how we can read<br />
and appropriate <strong>Schmitt</strong> today given the political choices and moral decisions he<br />
made in the years before and during which these key works were written. While<br />
recognizing the importance <strong>of</strong> his historical jurisprudence <strong>of</strong> international law,<br />
the present chapter focuses on his mythology and philology.<br />
<strong>The</strong> recovery <strong>of</strong> nomos<br />
Nomos: word and myth 243<br />
As in many conservatives, there is a sense <strong>of</strong> loss in <strong>Schmitt</strong>. <strong>The</strong> Nomos <strong>of</strong> the<br />
Earth could be read as an ode to the loss <strong>of</strong> a particular world order, that<br />
governed by European international law, the jus publicum Europaeum. <strong>The</strong> story<br />
<strong>of</strong> the term nomos is also presented as a loss. <strong>The</strong> other side <strong>of</strong> loss, however,<br />
is recovery. ‘I want to restore to the word nomos its energy and majesty’<br />
(ibid.: 67).<br />
According to <strong>Schmitt</strong> (ibid.: 325), nomos is usually translated by jurists and<br />
historians as law in the sense <strong>of</strong> tradition or custom. It is, however, more than<br />
that. Rather than a simple noun, the word is a nomen actionis which indicates an<br />
action as a process whose content is given in the verb. <strong>The</strong> action and process <strong>of</strong><br />
nomos is given by the Greek verb nemein meaning ‘to take’, ‘to allot’ and ‘to<br />
assign’, which in turn is the root <strong>of</strong> the German words nehmen and Nahme.<br />
<strong>Schmitt</strong> himself uses the term Landnahme meaning ‘land-taking’ or ‘landappropriation’<br />
to capture this primary sense <strong>of</strong> the term:<br />
<strong>The</strong> history <strong>of</strong> peoples with their migrations, colonizations, and conquests is<br />
the history <strong>of</strong> land-appropriation. Either this is an appropriation <strong>of</strong> free land,<br />
with no claim to ownership, or the conquest <strong>of</strong> alien land which has been<br />
appropriated under the legal title <strong>of</strong> foreign-political warfare or by domestic<br />
political means such as the proscription, deprivation and forfeiture <strong>of</strong> newly<br />
divided land.<br />
(ibid.: 328)<br />
However nomos has two other meanings given by other verbs. One is teilen<br />
(German) meaning ‘to divide’ or ‘to distribute’. For Hobbes, for instance, nomos<br />
is that act <strong>of</strong> the sovereign power that introduces and then distributes property:<br />
‘And this they well knew <strong>of</strong> old, who called that Nomos (that is to say, Distribution,)<br />
which we call Law; and defined Justice, by distributing to every man his<br />
own’ (Hobbes 1996: 171, original emphasis, quoted by <strong>Schmitt</strong> 2003: 327). <strong>The</strong><br />
distributional question is a social question and thus a question <strong>of</strong> justice. It