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

Nomos: word and myth 253
picture. Schmitt surveys three possibilities of the new nomos of the earth in an
essay of the same name (2003: 351–355). The first is a unipolar world in which
the victor of the Cold War would be sole sovereign. ‘He would appropriate the
whole earth – land, sea and air’ (ibid.: 354). The second one retains the balance
structure of the old nomos in which the United States administers and guarantees
the balance of the rest of the world by ‘a joint domination of sea and air’ (ibid.:
355). In other words, America becomes the larger island, following in England’s
footsteps in Mahan’s sense. The third is one of a balance between several Grossräume
or regional blocs (literally, large spaces). What is interesting about this
survey is that Schmitt is still toying with the idea that air-power has displaced
the earlier opposition of land and sea. There are clearly limits to geo-mythographical
thinking generally and to Schmitt’s playing with the four classical elements
in particular.
Schmitt tends to hedge his bets about the elemental irruption he notes and
about the new nomos of the earth. However, he is clear that the airplane has
changed the nature of war and military strategy by challenging traditional spatial
concepts of war, especially the idea of a ‘theatre of war’ and ‘the front’, and
even the distinction between a land-war and a sea-war and the rules governing
them (ibid.: 316–320). Because it is a purely destructive operation, with no relation
between military personnel in the air and those on the earth, as well as no
positive relation to the inhabitants, it is not associated with the attempt to bring
order to territories which depends on the relation between soldiers and civilians
within an occupied territory.
The onset of air-war is connected to the end of the moral ‘bracketing’ of war
and the non-discriminatory concept of the enemy that Schmitt would consider
key features of the jus publicum Europaeum: ‘The discriminatory concept of the
enemy as a criminal and the attendant implication of justa causa run parallel to
the intensification of the means of destruction and the disorientation of the theatres
of war’ (ibid.: 321). This leads Schmitt to another kind of mythology. He
characterizes the allied domination of the air during the latter stage of the
Second World War and its dreadful effects on German civilian populations as a
police action:
Bombing pilots use their weapons against the population of an enemy
country as vertically as St. George used his lance against the dragon. Given
the fact that war has been transformed into a police action against troublemakers,
criminals, and pests, justification of the methods of this ‘policebombing’
must be intensified.
(ibid.)
In doing so, Schmitt has added another twist to his story of Leviathan who, as
we know, can be a monster, a machine, a mortal god, a whale, a huge fish, the
devil, a serpent or, as here, a dragon.
This kind of use of the term ‘police’ in the international sphere is echoed
in contemporary Italian post-Marxist characterizations of nomos. Agamben