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

28 A. Colombo
break from, the development of international institutions, but as the instance that
brings the new legal order, the chief protagonist of the secularization of public
life and the guarantor of its main task, that is, the bracketing of war.
All definitions that glorify the state, and today no longer generally are
understood, hark back to this great accomplishment, whether or not they
later were misused and now appear to have been displaced. An international
legal order, based on the liquidation of civil war and on the bracketing of
war (in that it transformed war into a duel between European states), actually
had legitimated a realm of relative reason. The equality of sovereigns
made them equally legal partners in war and prevented military methods of
annihilation.
(Schmitt 2003: 142)
Nevertheless, the centrality of states, like the centrality of war, has a different
meaning from that ascribed to it by orthodox realism and neorealism,
according to which the state appears as the permanent monopolizer of politics,
a rational egoist (with an inclination towards autism), a power pole and a
generic actor simultaneously. First, unlike in the most naive realism, the
equivalence between state and politics is not taken for granted by Schmitt. On
the contrary, he recognizes this equivalence as the primary ‘locus’ for the
tension between the secularized and disruptive logic of modern politics and
the opposite need for a constraining force – a force that is itself immersed in
the loss of foundation that marks the Modern. On the one hand, by defining
the political as the intensity of the degree of association or dissociation of
men, and not as a particular and separate domain (Schmitt 1996), Schmitt conceives
of it as a perpetually disruptive force, destined to continuously shift
from one spiritual centre to another and to undermine, each time, the political
unity founded upon the previous centre (Schmitt 1993). As Schmitt puts it, the
European people continuously migrate from a battlefield to neutral terrain, and
neutral terrain, as soon as it is conquered, immediately transforms itself into a
battlefield again, so it becomes necessary to search for new neutral spaces
(ibid.). On the other hand, the state is seen as the last subject able to oppose
this lack of restraint. As the heir to the essentially juridical logic of the
Church, the state arduously (if not desperately) aims to keep in check and to
give form to the ‘fanatical roughness of unrestrained prophecies’ (Schmitt
1984: 24). Suspended over the abyss of the eternal flow of the political from
which it has emerged, the equivalence between state and politics always
appears to be on the point of sinking into it again, just as inter-state war
always seems to be on the point of sinking anew into the unlimited violence of
civil war.
Second, the egoism of each state as a bearer of special interests is limited not
only by the egoism of other states – as strategic discourse holds – but also by
their reciprocal recognition. According to Schmitt, this is the other major
achievement of the jus publicum Europaeum: its ability to overcome the old