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

252 M. Dean
manner of the forefathers of the New World and punishment and prevention
await those who try such acts of discovery (whatever one might make of the trajectory
linking penal colony and detention camp in Australia). Even with the
addition of birth, our account of nomos would be seriously incomplete without a
consideration of the open sea and of territorial waters, the role of the coastguards
and navy patrols, and its relation to the ‘bare life’, as Agamben puts it, and the
plight of the refugee.
There is a stronger sense in which the domination of the sea element obtains
today and Schmitt is prescient in his characterization of the smooth, scratchless
surface of the free seas. The two great periods of globalization, those of the
nineteenth century until the First World War and of the last half-century, are
periods of the hegemony of maritime powers, the Pax Britannica and the Pax
Americana. In the most recent period, particularly since the end of the Cold
War, the world is imagined as a smooth surface of free global flows of trade,
investment, capital, information and culture, and hence a kind of great ocean.
And when defenders of the freedom of virtual space or cyberspace look for a
principle on which to ground that freedom it is to Hugo Grotius’s doctrine of the
freedom of the seas that they turn (Connery 2001: 178, 13n.). Note too that
cyber-crime is described as ‘piracy’.
Schmitt also envisages that in his time the relation of land and sea is being
changed by the possibility of domination of a new element – air. Already in
Land and Sea he notes that the British maritime existence was being transformed
by the mutation occasioned by the industrial revolution within the island
itself. This in turn maintained and extended British maritime domination during
the nineteenth century but led to its meeting new rivals by the end of that
century in Germany and the US. Schmitt cites the American admiral Alfred
Thayer Mahan (1984), the author of The Influence of Sea Power upon History,
who argued for an Anglo-American reunion for the purposes of maintaining
Anglo-Saxon domination of the seas. Mahan imagines that the United States is
destined to realize itself as a maritime power, and as the ‘larger island’ bound by
two great oceans, is in the peculiar position of being able to secure the trade
routes on which Britain, now grown too small, would have to depend to maintain
its empire. But Schmitt depicts Mahan as a conservative who feels, but
cannot understand, the ‘energy of the elemental irruption’ of his times and who
seeks geo-political security in hauling the old island towards the new, bigger
island ‘as by a gigantic trawler’ (1997: 56). Yet Schmitt himself remains unclear
about this irruption. He is unsure whether humankind has turned away from the
opposition of land and sea to air with the invention of the airplane, or whether it
had established a new elemental relation with fire in the form of the combustion
engine. Thus, on the one hand he suggests that to ‘the two mythical creatures,
leviathan and behemoth, a third would be added, quite likely in the shape of a
big bird’. On the other, ‘if one thinks of the technology necessary for human
prowess to manifest itself in the air space . . . it seems that the new element of
human activity is fire’ (ibid.: 58).
In 1955 he appears to adopt a vision in which fire has dropped out of the