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

30 A. Colombo
Finally, there remains one last, but not less important, deviation from the
most prevalent kind of realism in International Relations. The realist and neorealist
obsession with power tends to dissolve the expression ‘state’ into the more
generic expression ‘international actor’ so as to completely lose its historical and
legal peculiarity with respect to other influential actors. Schmitt, on the contrary,
never ceases to consider the state itself to be a specific institution, historically
and legally determined and, therefore, historically and legally reversible. As he
puts it,
you hear one speak of the ‘ancient state’ of the Greeks and Romans rather
than the polis and Romana respublica, the ‘Germanic Medieval state’ rather
than the Reich, and even the Arab, Turk and Chinese states. In this way, a
concrete and specific form of political organization absolutely temporally
and historically conditioned loses its historical localization and its particular
content.
(Schmitt 1958: 376)
A reversed image of history: from anarchy to nihilism
The last and most decisive particularity of Schmitt’s realist institutionalism also
results from his interest in the constituent institutions of modern international
politics as well as their concrete foundations. The image of the twentieth century
put forward in Der Nomos der Erde is exactly the opposite of how it is portrayed
in both liberal institutionalism and the kind of institutionalism epitomized in the
League of Nations and the United Nations. For Schmitt, the twentieth century
appears to be, not the century of a difficult but unrestrainable construction of a
large web of (new) international institutions, but, rather, a century that sees the
collapse of the classic institutions that constituted the European system. It is no
longer the century of international law par excellence, but, quite the opposite,
the powerless witness of its self-destruction. It is, above all, no longer the chief
protagonist in the overcoming of anarchy and war, but instead the battleground
of wars lacking any limits and rules.
At this point, two facts should be remembered: first, international law
sought to prevent wars of annihilation, i.e., to the extent that war is
inevitable, to bracket it; and second, any abolition of war without true
bracketing resulted only in new, perhaps even worse types of war, such as
reversions to civil war and other types of war of annihilation. In Geneva,
however, there was much talk about the proscription and abolition of war,
but none about a spatial bracketing of war.
(Schmitt 2003: 246)
This dissolution of the jus publicum Europaeum is the result of the collapse
of both historical-concrete pillars of its foundation. The first pillar, upon which
the original linkage between Ordnung and Ortung was founded, is the centrality