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> 27<br />
very effective bond, without which there would have been no international<br />
law, lay not in highly problematic, voluntary ties among the presumably<br />
unrestrained wills <strong>of</strong> equally sovereign persons, but in the binding power <strong>of</strong><br />
a Eurocentric spatial order encompassing all these sovereigns. <strong>The</strong> core <strong>of</strong><br />
this nomos lay in the division <strong>of</strong> European soil into state territories with firm<br />
borders, which immediately initiated an important distinction, namely that<br />
the soil <strong>of</strong> recognized European states and their land had a special territorial<br />
status in international law. It was distinguished from the ‘free’ soil <strong>of</strong> non-<br />
European princes and peoples open for European land-appropriation. In<br />
addition, there arose yet a third area as a result <strong>of</strong> the new freedom <strong>of</strong> the<br />
sea, which in this form had been unknown to the previous international law.<br />
This was the spatial structure inherent in the idea <strong>of</strong> a balance <strong>of</strong> European<br />
states. It made possible a continental law <strong>of</strong> European sovereigns against the<br />
background <strong>of</strong> the immense open spaces <strong>of</strong> a particular type <strong>of</strong> freedom.<br />
(<strong>Schmitt</strong> 2003: 148)<br />
None <strong>of</strong> the institutions <strong>of</strong> the jus publicum Europaeum are intelligible (or<br />
historically defendable) in isolation from their belonging to a delimited and concrete<br />
space, a space that does not isolate one sovereignty from another but,<br />
rather, compels all <strong>of</strong> them to consider all <strong>of</strong> the others. First, the balance <strong>of</strong><br />
power, as the fundamental principle <strong>of</strong> international cohabitation, was not based<br />
upon a general and spatially undetermined principle. On the contrary, it was the<br />
binding force <strong>of</strong> a specific spatial system within which every power was interested<br />
in any relevant territorial change that occurred within the European state<br />
system, while the great land appropriations <strong>of</strong> extra-European territory, such as<br />
the Russian conquest <strong>of</strong> Siberia, could pass unnoticed (ibid.: 189). Second, the<br />
recognition <strong>of</strong> new states essentially consisted <strong>of</strong> a declaration on the part <strong>of</strong> the<br />
great powers that the relevant territorial change could be sustained by the overall<br />
structure <strong>of</strong> the existing spatial system (ibid.: 191–192). Finally, peace itself, in<br />
the context <strong>of</strong> the jus publicum Europaeum, was not ‘an abstract concept, but<br />
had a concrete meaning in the European spatial order’ (ibid.: 249), as it had previously<br />
had in Christian medieval law, when it was considered ‘not a freefloating,<br />
normative, general concept but, rather, one oriented concretely to the<br />
peace <strong>of</strong> the empire, the territorial ruler, <strong>of</strong> the church, <strong>of</strong> the city, <strong>of</strong> the castle,<br />
<strong>of</strong> the marketplace, <strong>of</strong> the local juridical assembly’ (ibid.: 59).<br />
<strong>The</strong> other condition, which brings <strong>Schmitt</strong>’s reflections on international politics<br />
back to the decisionist approach <strong>of</strong> his juridical thought (<strong>Schmitt</strong> 1988,<br />
2004a), is the existence <strong>of</strong> an ‘adequate bearer’ <strong>of</strong> the system. It is here that the<br />
clearest foundation <strong>of</strong> <strong>Schmitt</strong>’s realist institutionalism, the centrality <strong>of</strong> states,<br />
is found. Emerging from a century <strong>of</strong> civil wars <strong>of</strong> religion, ‘a simple question<br />
was raised with respect to the interminable legal disputes inherent in every claim<br />
to justa causa: Who decides? (the great Quis judicabit?) Only the sovereign<br />
could decide this question, both within the state and between states’ (ibid.: 157).<br />
Unlike most contemporary institutionalisms – but, once again, like the English<br />
School <strong>of</strong> <strong>International</strong> Relations – the state is seen, not as an obstacle to, or a