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

14 L. Odysseos and F. Petito
and, to some extent, even Francis Fukuyama’s (1989) ‘end of history’ versus
Samuel Huntington’s (1993) ‘clash of civilizations’. Following these reflections,
the analyses proposed in the Part III of this volume, under the rubric ‘Searching
for a new nomos of the earth’, examine the nature and possibilities of the future
world order.
Searching for a new nomos of the earth
Using Schmitt’s insights, Chantal Mouffe in Chapter 8 argues that the central
problem that our current unipolar world, under the unchallenged hegemony of
the United States, is facing is the impossibility for antagonisms to find legitimate
forms of expression. Under such conditions, antagonisms, when they do emerge,
tend to take extreme forms. In order to create the channels for the legitimate
expression of dissent we need to envisage, Mouffe suggests, a pluralistic multipolar
world order constructed around a certain number of greater spaces and
genuine cultural poles.
Along similar lines, in Chapter 9 Danilo Zolo draws on Carl Schmitt’s philosophy
of international law in order to argue against certain contemporary uses of
the notion of ‘empire’. He uses the notion of empire, rather, to denote the global
hegemony of the United States according to a complex meaning, which is partially
new with respect to the ‘Roman model’ which functions as an imperial
paradigm within contemporary political theory. Against the United States’ dangerous
imperial tendencies, Zolo argues that world order and peace need a neoregionalist
revival of the notion of Großraum, together with a reinforcement of
multilateral negotiations between nation-states, which continue to be the source
of democratic legitimation of the processes of regional integration.
If these analyses tend to emphasise Schmitt’s preference for the emergence of
a new pluralistic order as the future nomos of the earth, Fabio Petito’s and J.
Peter Burgess’s chapters expand respectively on the possible theory and practice
of this new pluralist nomos of the earth to come. In Chapter 10 Petito critically
discusses Schmitt’s own speculations on the possible configurations of a ‘new
nomos of the earth’ and, moving from his apocalyptic stance against world
unity, sketches the contours of an intellectual strategy in international political
theory to articulate a more pluralist world order adequate for a multicultural and
globalised international society. In Chapter 11 Burgess, moreover, examines the
general elements of the European legal system, and the project of European construction
from 1950 to 2006 more specifically, as expressed in the evolution of
European Union law. Outlining the broad contours of a new European nomos,
which according to Burgess has more modest aspirations than the jus publicum
Europaeum and which contains a particular mix of limited universality and local
particularity, he speculates on the possible connection that this European order
might entertain with a future nomos of the earth.
At the very beginning of this introduction we asked, with Schmitt, whether at
the dawn of the third millennium we were experiencing the emergence of a new
nomos of the earth. Answering this question is, in the very words of the jurist of