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

Nomos: word and myth 251
ence of 1885. Later the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 manifested
the movement from a Eurocentric world order to one grounded in the ‘spacelessness
of a general universalism’ (Schmitt 2003: 230–232). This movement was
consolidated in the League of Nations and effected a transformation of the
meaning of war first at Versailles and then in the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928.
Now there would be a criminalization of aggressive war by the outlawing of war
for national purposes and its replacement with a new kind of just war for international
purposes (ibid.: 279–280). The bearers and beneficiaries of this liberal
universalism and new approach to war would be, moreover, the great seapowers
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, first Britain and then the
United States.
For Schmitt, then, the Leviathan/Behemoth myth thus links the individualist
critique and hence weakening of the state with the universalist dismantling of
European international law. In this sense it might appear significant that an
English political thinker – Hobbes – would seek to describe a settled land-based
geography of the state by the symbol of a sea monster just when Britain was
about to establish the most extensive Empire on earth by means of its maritime
superiority. For Schmitt, however, it is no accident that the sea mammal
becomes the symbol of a peacemaking order and that the English would view
this order as linked to an image of their maritime destiny.
From the Odyssey to the discovery of the New World and the voyages of
Columbus and company, from Hugo Grotius’s doctrine of the mare liberum and
the law of the seas to the desire for ‘oceanic consciousness’ of idealist philosophy
and mysticism, from twentieth-century Atlanticism and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization to the deployment of American military power in the
Persian Gulf, land and sea, and often the domination of the latter over the
former, have been powerful ways of imagining the earth (cf. Connery 2001).
Indeed, for Schmitt, the Cold War could be characterized as a dialectical opposition
between a continental and a maritime power, a power at the heart of the
earth’s greatest landmass and the decisive force on the world’s oceans (Ulmen
1987: 44).
Today, the relation of sea and land is still fundamental to thinking international
concerns. Perversely, contrary to Schmitt, the ‘theory of offensive
realism’ of Mearsheimer (2001) views the ‘stopping power of water’ as presenting
a limitation to the hegemonic ambitions of states in the case of insular
powers such as Great Britain and the United States. Moreover, this relationship
of sea and land also helps constitute the ways in which we think of ‘regions’ and
their associations such as the Mediterranean, the Baltic States, Oceania, Asia-
Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). The struggle of refugees to arrive by
boat to Australia (largely successfully extinguished by draconian measures and
an upstream ‘people smuggling disruption unit’ run from the Prime Minister’s
office) or to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa – whether viewed as
heroic or criminal – entails far more potent narrative imagery than that of those
many more who arrive through the airport on a temporary visa and abscond
later. The world is no longer waiting to be discovered and settled in the heroic