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

ent kinds of police action. There would seem to be a prima facie case for distinguishing
between, say, the role of United Nations police and peacekeeping
troops in post-independence East Timor and the kind of police exemplified by
the actions of the US military police in Abu Ghraib. Moreover, we might want
to analyse and even measure the relative police capabilities, defined as the
capacity to bring and sustain civil order within a given territory, of different
agencies in specific contexts. It is the lack of analytical discrimination and
historical sensibility which makes the Left appropriation of Schmitt’s image of
liberal Anglo-Saxon air-power putting an end to the security offered by the
continental Westphalian territorial state, this time in the guise of the Third
Reich, so simply muddleheaded.
Schmitt’s image of the aerial bombardment, presumably of German cities, is
that of St. George lancing the dragon, the Leviathan. In most Renaissance paintings
(such as those of Bellini, Raphael, Tintoretto) of this famous scene there is
a third figure, the Princess Sabra, who was about to be sacrificed to the voracious
beast. Often the dragon is surrounded by the skulls and bones of its previous
victims as in the graphically violent image by Vittore Carpaccio. 4 In some
versions of the story, St George does not kill the dragon but tames it and puts it
on a leash. Here at the very least we have another kind of image of police: the
use of carefully calibrated force and minimum violence to protect suffering (if
feminized) humanity so that it might begin to build a civil society. Whatever the
not insubstantial problems with many police operations in the international
domain, we should at least contemplate through this image the possibility of the
use of police as carefully calibrated force and minimum violence to protect
humanity and build a civil order.
Conclusion
Nomos: word and myth 255
Marti Koskenniemi (2004: 493) has recently argued that, whatever they think of
Schmitt’s political choices, readers of The Nomos of the Earth ‘have been struck
by the expressive force of [its] critiques’. These critiques reveal the war on
terror to be a fully moralized, or even theologized, new form of just war conducted
as a police action against a criminalized enemy beyond the reach of
humanity. They apparently demonstrate that the conditions and interrogation
practices of camps like Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are within a state of
normless exception where torture becomes a matter of juridical interpretation.
And they allow their readers to conclude that universalist appeals to freedom
and democracy justify an unfettered right to decide to engage in military adventures
irrespective of the provisions of international law and the wishes of the
international community. Such critiques, adopted by today’s anti-globalization
militants, are rooted in a very specific mythology.
It would be worth studying the multiple resentments and fears which are condensed
into Schmitt’s mythology. While we might find his critique of liberalism,
particularly in the international sphere, compelling, we might not wish to
partake of an ethnic or national alternative to its universalism. It is this move