The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...
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<strong>The</strong> ‘realist institutionalism’ <strong>of</strong> <strong>Schmitt</strong> 23<br />
decisive role <strong>of</strong> the ‘state <strong>of</strong> exception’, which permeates both his domestic and<br />
his international reflections and founds his very definition <strong>of</strong> sovereignty<br />
(<strong>Schmitt</strong> 1988). His constant references to the classics <strong>of</strong> political realism, from<br />
Thomas Hobbes to Jean Bodin to Donoso Cortés and the counter-revolutionary<br />
Catholicism <strong>of</strong> the nineteenth century, which he also conceives to be decisionist<br />
(ibid.), further support this point.<br />
Nevertheless, the retrospective reconstruction <strong>of</strong> the history <strong>of</strong> modern international<br />
relations which <strong>Schmitt</strong> <strong>of</strong>fers reveals not a history <strong>of</strong> power politics,<br />
but, basically, one <strong>of</strong> institutions (<strong>Schmitt</strong> 2003). From the recognition <strong>of</strong><br />
foreign states to the legitimation <strong>of</strong> territorial changes, from the succession <strong>of</strong><br />
states to the occupatio bellica, from the system <strong>of</strong> international conferences to<br />
the status <strong>of</strong> neutrality, the jus publicum Europaeum is a monument to the<br />
impact <strong>of</strong> institutions on international life. Through the secularization <strong>of</strong> the<br />
public sphere and the neutralization <strong>of</strong> conflicts that resulted from the civil wars<br />
<strong>of</strong> religion, its fundamental contribution has been to transform international<br />
cohabitation into a ‘relation between specific, spatially concrete, and organized<br />
orders’ (<strong>Schmitt</strong> 2003: 158), ‘able to be conducted with comitas (courtesy) and<br />
with jus (probity)’ (ibid.: 146). Modern international politics becomes in the era<br />
<strong>of</strong> the jus publicum Europaeum, not the materialization <strong>of</strong> the Hobbesian state <strong>of</strong><br />
nature, but, rather, the political and juridical response to it, as well as to the<br />
experience that provides its ‘existential truth’ (ibid.: 127): civil war.<br />
This interest in the institutional dimension <strong>of</strong> the international sphere<br />
distinguishes <strong>Schmitt</strong>’s thought in two fundamental ways from the kind <strong>of</strong><br />
realism that has prevailed in <strong>International</strong> Relations. First, without renouncing<br />
the idea that international politics is characterized by the absence <strong>of</strong> government,<br />
<strong>Schmitt</strong> explicitly puts the significance <strong>of</strong> anarchy into perspective, not only<br />
by recognizing that order can exist in anarchy, as realists and neorealists also<br />
do, but, beyond them, by understanding that the international order is something<br />
more than the (ever changing) result <strong>of</strong> power relations; it also depends, at a more<br />
pr<strong>of</strong>ound level, on a (more persistent) set <strong>of</strong> political, juridical and cultural<br />
restrictions which, over the last three centuries, have allowed international<br />
competition to develop according to certain rules and, above all, in keeping<br />
within certain limits; namely, the limits whose crisis <strong>Schmitt</strong> witnessed.<br />
As in the parallel reflections <strong>of</strong> the English School <strong>of</strong> <strong>International</strong> Relations<br />
– although clearly outside its Grotian cadence (Bull 1966; Wight 1994) – the jus<br />
publicum Europaeum places international anarchy in a societal and, more<br />
importantly, juridical web. As <strong>Schmitt</strong> puts it in Der Nomos der Erde:<br />
From Hobbes and Leibniz to Kant, from Samuel Rachel to Johann Ludwig<br />
Klüber, all significant authors have claimed that in international law states<br />
live as ‘moral persons’ in a state <strong>of</strong> nature, i.e., that the representatives <strong>of</strong><br />
jus belli, without a common, institutional, higher authority, confront one<br />
another as sovereign persons with equal legitimacy and equal rights. One<br />
can view this situation as anarchistic, but certainly not as lawless....<br />
At first glance, everything in this interstate international law among equal