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

The crisis of order (nomos): war, terrorism and the political
Introduction 13
As a preliminary observation, from which Alain de Benoist’s and Gary L.
Ulmen’s chapters move, the emergence of global terrorism and the related
global War on Terror are the most visible symptoms of the major crisis in the
normative structure of international coexistence, for the common agreement on
the laws of war is, according to Schmitt, the most essential pillar of the architecture
of any system of international law. This common Schmittian starting
point, however, does not necessarily grant a univocal interpretation as far as the
post-9/11 developments are concerned: in Chapter 4 De Benoist offers a political
reading of global terrorism as the ‘new enemy’ against the background of
the clearly overwhelming US hegemony and focuses on what he believes to be
the inadequate American reaction to it, in the form of a permanent state of
exception of a war seemingly without end. In a diverging argument, Ulmen, in
Chapter 5, draws a conceptual distinction between the ‘partisan’ and the ‘terrorist’
and argues for what Schmitt called ‘pest control’ in a situation that exhibits,
in his view, the characteristics a ‘global civil war’, again in Schmitt’s sense of
this phrase.
The crisis of order in the structure of contemporary international society is
also manifest in the unexpected links that the contemporary discourse of international
law, inspired by liberalism and cosmopolitanism, entertains with the
practice of current political violence. As Linda S. Bishai and Andreas Behnke
show in Chapter 6, liberalism attempts to turn the pluriverse of international
politics into a universe, in which the effects of difference are controlled from a
‘meta-sovereign’ site through current US-driven attempts to reformulate international
law by conferring a special status on liberal democracies, as well as by
reintroducing a ‘discriminatory concept of war’ in the form of a right to different
forms of interventions from humanitarian to preventive ones. Such a displacement
of the political is also discussed in Chapter 7 by Louiza Odysseos, who
highlights the dangers arising from recent cosmopolitan attempts to erase the
spatial lines drawn by the Westphalian order and inaugurate a new age of
modernity based on a universal humanity. Her analysis illuminates the processes
of world political subjectivisation which ensue from such a cosmopolitan project
and which point to significant but neglected relationships between cosmopolitanism
and the War on Terror.
The crisis of order has arguably become more manifest, however, since 1989
with the end of the bipolar moment of the Cold War. We could go as far as to
argue that the whole ‘global civil war’ between 1918 and 1989 only delayed
confronting the dilemma between universalism and pluralism, which was for
Schmitt the core question that would determine the new international law of the
earth (2003: 243, 247). This point seems to be confirmed by the fact that the
central debates on the post-Cold War international order have been articulated
around different versions of the dichotomy universalism/pluralism, which was
so central to Schmitt’s international thought: unipolarity versus multipolarity,
globalisation versus fragmentation, cosmopolitanism versus communitarianism