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

24 A. Colombo
sovereigns appears to have hinged on the thin thread of treaties that bound
these leviathans together.... But, in reality, strong traditional ties – religious,
social, and economic – endure longer.
(Schmitt 2003: 147–148)
In realizing that anarchy can result in something different from the Hobbesian
paradigm – as it already has in history – Schmitt rejects the other cornerstone of
contemporary realism: the assumption that international politics has remained
immutable through the centuries (Waltz 1979; Gilpin 1987). Once placed in its
particular institutional context, each form of international coexistence – from the
Christian medieval up to the modern international system – reveals itself to be
radically different from the others. Continuity and discontinuity, immutability
and catastrophe follow and interweave within institutions; institutions which are
born, on the one hand, to produce expectations and to overcome contingencies,
while being, on the other hand, themselves a contingency, a fact that does not
fundamentally change what is really immutable in politics – Schmitt’s dialectic
between friend and enemy (Schmitt 1996) – but, rather, changes the nature of
the players, the extent of the playing field, and the rules of the game. With
respect to orthodox realism, the meaning of immutability changes in this conception,
becoming more complicated and, at the same time, more accurate. On
the one hand, the assumption of immutability may even be reinforced by the
rediscovery of the institutional framework of the jus publicum Europaeum, not
because it constitutes the only element of continuity in the history of modern
international relations, but, rather, because it constitutes one of them, and precisely
the one that has made it possible to give other mutations a form. On the
other hand, the assumption of immutability emerges relativized by the recognition
that the jus publicum Europaeum also marks the discontinuity between the
modern international system of states and other past, present or future models of
international cohabitation, both in Europe and in the rest of the world.
It is precisely here, in his interest in the modern international system, that
Schmitt’s institutionalism reconnects with the realist tradition. Unlike other more
recent institutionalisms, especially those he saw emerging from the League of
Nations and post-war international law, Schmitt is not interested in the institutions
explicitly created during the twentieth century in contrast to the international politics
of the past; instead, he turns his attention to institutions rooted in the past, as a
cultural and juridical counterpoint to power politics. He does not focus on the
institutions that sprang from a declared (and ideological) project of transformation,
like the League of Nations and the United Nations, but, rather, he turns
his attention to institutions so durable as to have accompanied the entire course of
modern political history and, therefore, naturally able to assert themselves while
no longer being recognized as institutions. Schmitt’s approach does not focus on
specific institutions such as international regimes or formal organizations, but on
the more fundamental practices in which these have been inserted and on which
the very nature of international cohabitation depends: a nature that political
realism also recognizes, while failing to perceive its institutional footprint.