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

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