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

1 The ‘realist institutionalism’ of
Carl Schmitt
Introduction
Alessandro Colombo
It is pertinent to focus on institutions in a part of the book that discusses Carl
Schmitt’s heterodox international thought. In fact, Schmitt’s major concern was
precisely to search for the concrete meaning of institutions, while preventing a
divorce between law and political science. On the one hand, as the jurist that he
still represents himself to be at the beginning of Der Nomos der Erde, he
unequivocally rejects the naively Machiavellian view of politics and its inability
to grasp the cultural and juridical dimensions of order. Schmitt’s thought, on the
contrary, revolves around the problem of reconciling form and decision, effective
and juridical power, in an attempt to distinguish what power always is – the
pure and simple ability to impose one’s will on others – from what it can
become through law – a ‘restraining force’, as Schmitt defines it, borrowing the
Pauline concept of katechon; namely, an instance able to channel the
indomitable lack of restraint of the political into juridical form (Schmitt 1984,
1988).
On the other hand, as a critic of normativism and legal formalism, Schmitt
vehemently denounces the tendency of contemporary legal studies to put
forward an increasingly drastic disjunction between norm and reality, rule and
actual behaviour (Schmitt 2004a), reducing law to nothing more than ‘a collection
of somewhat valid norms’ (Schmitt 2003: 220). In this conception, specific
problems and political, economic and geopolitical issues are banished from the
juridical realm and a technical distinction is drawn between pure sociological
and pure juridical facts. Schmitt sees a real abdication of international law in this
impoverishment, or, more precisely, the end of its centuries-old experiment:
Silete theologi in munere alieno! [Theologians must remain silent within
foreign walls!] So said humanistic jurists to theologians at the end of the
16th century, in order to establish an independent jurisprudence of jus
gentium. Three hundred years later, at the end of the 19th century, jurisprudence,
in the name of legal positivism, chose to remain silent with respect to
all the great contemporaneous legal issues. Sileamus in munere alieno [We
must remain silent within foreign walls]. With this rejection of international