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

Nomos: word and myth 247
cerned to describe this from the perspective of the earth, not from that of the
human worker or human communities. The obvious charge is that he thereby
universalizes a particular human order and orientation upon the earth by making
that order and orientation constitutive of the earth itself (cf. Aravamudan 2005).
Nomos and earth appear as mutually constitutive.
Schmitt (2003: 50–54) would have no doubt replied that there were plenty of
other mythical images of the earth. He cites forms of ‘pre-global international
law’ among the Ancient Egyptians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Mongols,
within Byzantium, and lastly within the respublica Christiana of medieval
Europe. However, he might have argued, the mythology described above is one
that reflects the orders and orientations of Europeans during the only truly global
system of international law, and the only ‘nomos of the earth’, that of the jus
publicum Europaeum. This international or, to be more precise, interstate, law
existed from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries and had the discovery of
the New World as its precondition. Schmitt felt that, in his time, it was in disarray.
The orientation this mythology encapsulates is ultimately that of Europe’s
coming to legal and political modernity itself.
Terra firma, however is counterposed to mare liberum, the free sea, both in
modern European law and in Schmitt’s mythology. The element of space and
law, orientation and order, finds its antithesis in a characterless (in the sense of
‘scratchless’) element. ‘On the open sea, there were no limits, no boundaries, no
consecrated sites, no sacred orientations, no law and no property’, states Schmitt
(ibid.: 43). It is a sphere of risk, of a hazardous wager in search of booty, and of
the pirate, the word derived from peiran (Latin) meaning ‘to test’, ‘to try’, ‘to
risk’. Only after the rise of maritime empires (Schmitt used the Greek-derived
expression, thalassocracies), do sea-appropriations occur, are security and order
established and is piracy made a crime against humanity. Yet Schmitt is sure
that it is land which is primary and which is quite literally the foundation of law
for ‘the great primeval acts of law remained terrestrial orientations: appropriating
land, founding cities, and establishing colonies’ (ibid.: 44).
The sea is also a domain for mythology. In 1942, Schmitt published a book
intended as a children’s tale for his young daughter Anna, Land and Sea (1997). In
it he insists on the elemental character of human existence and the capacity of
humankind to creatively define and redefine itself in relation to the four elements of
earth, water, fire and air (Schmitt 1997: 3–5). The mysterious routes of the whales
lured the heroic hunters further into the sea (ibid.: 13–17). The adventures of the
whale-hunter, and the pirate, the privateer, sea-adventurers and sea-roamers of all
kinds, figure in the ‘elemental surge toward the sea’ (ibid.: 19). Schmitt’s prose surrenders
to the image of the whale in particular – an animal which is at least one
form taken by the Leviathan, Hobbes’s symbol for the state.
The age of heroism is nowhere better illustrated than by the transformation of
the English from a nation of sheep-breeders, tied to their insularity, regarding
the surrounding waters as forming a moat, into a nation of sea-farers that would
take the inheritance of all the former maritime powers and establish a world
Empire: