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

26 A. Colombo
While being the result of the absence of government par excellence, war also
becomes, at the same time, the place of the highest institutionalization of international
life – guerre en forme, as Schmitt writes, in contrast to the frightening
lack of form of civil war. It is something similar to a duel, an armed clash
between territorially determined personae morales who recognize the jus belli in
one another, and, thus, manage to give legal form to enemies, clearly distinguishing
them from criminals (aliud est hostis, aliud rebellis).
In this historical and juridical reconstruction, the meaning of inter-state war is
radically different from how it is portrayed in both orthodox realism and liberal
institutionalism. The latter, comparing inter-state war to domestic pacification,
considers it the paramount expression of international anarchy. Schmitt, on the
contrary, comparing it to civil war, considers inter-state war the paramount
expression of how anarchy is put into form by the jus publicum Europaeum.
Compared to the complete indefiniteness of civil war, inter-state war turns out to
be a circumscribed phenomenon, clearly delimited in space and time, and open,
not to whomever has the power to fight – as would be the case in unlimited
anarchy – but only to those who assume the juridical form of the state and
respect the norms and procedures of the jus publicum Europaeum. The historical
significance of inter-state war is to be found in its restrictions as well as its
acceptability. As another realist scholar interested in the institutional dimension
of international relations, Hedley Bull, puts it,
the development of the modern concept of war as organized violence among
sovereign states was the outcome of a process of limitation or confinement
of violence. We are accustomed, in the modern world, to contrast war
between states with peace between states; but the historical alternative to
war between states was more ubiquitous violence.
(Bull 1977: 185)
The state as the adequate bearer of the European order
The realist stamp of Schmitt’s institutionalism becomes clearer when confronted
with the problem of the persistence and/or the crisis of institutions. Consistent
with his anti-formalistic approach, Schmitt makes the persistence of the jus publicum
Europaeum dependent on two concrete historical conditions. The first is
the twofold dichotomy between land and sea and between European and non-
European space (Schmitt 1997, 2003), which Schmitt sums up in the concept of
nomos and the connection it establishes between Ordnung (order) and Ortung
(orientation). This dichotomy, the product of the great appropriations of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, is the concrete foundation of the jus publicum
Europaeum, namely, its nomos.
The concrete, practical, political forms, arrangements, and preconceptions
that developed for the cohabitation of continental European power complexes
in this interstate epoch clearly demonstrates that the essential and