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

22 A. Colombo
law, Europe stumbled into a world war that dethroned the old world from
the center of the earth and destroyed the bracketing of war it had created.
(Schmitt 2003: 239)
Overcoming this disjunction between law and politics marks not only the
historical and conceptual foundation of Schmitt’s reflections on both Staatsrecht
and Völkerrecht, but also his distinctiveness in International Relations theory,
what I shall call his ‘realist institutionalism’. First, I will analyse the meaning of
this concept, which can legitimately seem an oxymoron in contemporary International
Relations theory, since most institutionalists reject realist assumptions
and most realists downplay the role of institutions. Second, I will focus on the
fundamental subject of Schmitt’s institutionalism: the state. Schmitt places it at
the centre of modern international politics, as do realism and neorealism.
However, he attributes to it a totally different role: the state is not conceived to
be the sole, real actor behind the institutional scene but, rather, the very creator
and guarantor of that scene. Finally, I will discuss Schmitt’s image of history,
which also escapes the common realism–institutionalism distinction. On the one
hand, it rejects the realist dogma of the immutability of international politics,
clearly recognizing the important changes that the jus publicum Europaeum had
introduced into the international sphere. On the other hand, Schmitt’s image of
history also rejects the progressive and optimistic image of contemporary institutionalism,
opposing it with Schmitt’s own catastrophic and somewhat nostalgic
vision of the demise of European international law.
This inevitability of demise is, at the same time, the outcome and the inspirational
source of Schmitt’s thought. If he recognizes in the institutional dimension
the connective tissue of the international scene, it is precisely because he is
observing that scene’s collapse, the moment when ‘the plankings begin to creak’
– as a German poet contemporary of Schmitt, Gottfried Benn, put it. Instead of
continuing to support the building from the inside, the planks come to the
surface, become visible, and allow us to read their history in their cracks. Facing
such a crisis landscape Schmitt, first, retraces its origin, then its long course,
until the institutional dimension reveals itself to be very different from how it is
portrayed in most of the so-called institutional theories of International Relations:
that is, it is not an innovation of the twentieth century, but, rather, the
most impressive element of continuity in the modern history of international
politics; not the negation of power relations, but, rather, the expression of their
ability to give form to international life; not a manifestation of universalism, but,
rather, the last sign of the exceptionalism and centrality of Europe.
A realist institutionalism
That Carl Schmitt belongs to the realist tradition cannot be seriously put into
doubt. All of the major assumptions that underlie his thought prove it: the preeminence
of political over economic relations; the centrality of conflict, upon
which his concept of the political rests (Schmitt 1996); and his insistence on the