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

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