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

The ‘realist institutionalism’ of Schmitt 29
notion of border as a limit aimed to ‘separate a pacified order from a quarrelsome
disorder, a cosmos from a chaos, a house from a non-house, an enclosure
from the wilderness’ (Schmitt 2003: 52). Different from the mirror images of
the Roman limes (military frontier), the Chinese Great Wall and the Islamic
Dar-el-Islam, ‘the border between two territorial states of modern European
international law did not constitute an exclusion, but rather mutual recognition,
above all the fact that neighboring soil beyond the border was sovereign
territory’ (ibid.). In the very conception of international politics as inter-state
politics exists this pluralistic dimension, which is not accidental, but founded
on the very conceptual nature of politics. The state is the carrier and guarantor
of a political pluriverse, irreconcilable with a universalistic vision of international
law and order and, even more, with any political use of the concept of
humanity (Schmitt 1996, 2003). Far from fortuitous, this pluralistic image
results from the conceptual nature of the political itself. As long as one
state exists, writes Schmitt in The Concept of the Political (Schmitt 1996:
53–54), there will always be other states because it is not possible for one
single world state that includes the whole earth and all mankind to exist. As long
as this political and juridical pluriverse lasts, the recognition of other states
will not only signify the simple factual realization that ‘he dictates to me as
much as I dictate to him’ (Clausewitz 1984: 77), but will also signify the legal
recognition of his right to wage war and, therefore, of his nature as a legitimate
enemy.
Third, the fundamental difference between the state-centrism of Schmitt and
that of contemporary realism and neorealism consists in the very role that the
state performs in the international sphere. While according to orthodox realism
states are considered to be the fundamental actors of international politics
simply because they possess the most power resources (Waltz 1979), Schmitt
claims that the centrality of states expresses itself as much in law as in power
politics. In one case, the state is nothing more than a ‘power pole’. In the other,
it is also, and especially, the carrier of legal mediations, that is, the source from
which all of the institutions and concepts of the jus publicum Europaeum are
born, starting with those that allow war to be put into form. As Schmitt says,
‘the European portion of humanity has lived, up until some time ago, in an age
in which juridical concepts were totally marked by the state and assumed the
state as the model of political unity’ (Schmitt 1972a: 90). The state is the centre
from which all of the lines that give the architecture of European international
law its classical features radiate.
What is classic in such a model of political unity, solidly pacified within
and unified actor towards the outside world, like one sovereign relating to
other sovereigns? Its classicism consists in the possibility for clear and
unambiguous distinctions: inside and outside, war and peace; during war,
military or civilian, neutral or not neutral. All of this is clearly distinguishable
and cannot be intentionally confused.
(Schmitt 1972a: 91–92)