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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32 A. Colombo<br />
liberal critics <strong>of</strong> realism, <strong>Schmitt</strong> does not attribute this crisis to the dissolution<br />
<strong>of</strong> politics into economics, or the state into economic globalization; on the contrary,<br />
he attributes it to the state’s inability to grasp the new current <strong>of</strong> political<br />
intensity (<strong>Schmitt</strong> 1996, 2004b). Once enmity retransforms itself from the relative<br />
into the absolute, states are ‘no longer able to integrate their own members<br />
and adherents so totally as a revolutionary party does its active fighters’ (<strong>Schmitt</strong><br />
2004b: 10). As always in <strong>Schmitt</strong>’s reflections, it is the evolution <strong>of</strong> the political<br />
that breaks up the old politico-juridical edifice <strong>of</strong> politics and war. Once the ‘old<br />
regularity’ <strong>of</strong> the state is ‘worn down to mere convention and game’, a new<br />
figure capable <strong>of</strong> restoring ‘the seriousness <strong>of</strong> war’ arises (<strong>Schmitt</strong> 2004b: 63).<br />
This figure is the partisan, not the technician or the entrepreneur, who sweeps<br />
away the state’s grip on politics and war. <strong>The</strong> inconceivability <strong>of</strong> war among<br />
states promises not peace but, rather, an outflow <strong>of</strong> violence that overcomes the<br />
state.<br />
<strong>Schmitt</strong>’s realist institutionalism reveals itself to be a philosophy <strong>of</strong> crisis.<br />
Lacking a spatial localization and an adequate bearer <strong>of</strong> order, the new international<br />
law is condemned, on the one hand, to mirror the modern utopia <strong>of</strong> malleability<br />
and social engineering and, on the other, to lose itself in modern<br />
immanence, in a historically unavoidable degenerative process that recalls the<br />
opposition between Kultur and Zivilisation, typical <strong>of</strong> German culture <strong>of</strong> the<br />
period. It is no accident that <strong>Schmitt</strong> compares the ‘generic international law’<br />
that emerges from the dissolution <strong>of</strong> the jus publicum Europaeum to other ‘generalizations’<br />
deprived <strong>of</strong> a topos: first, that <strong>of</strong> the Hellenistic age, when the polis<br />
had already been transformed into a cosmopolis (<strong>Schmitt</strong> 2003: 50); and second,<br />
to the declining stage <strong>of</strong> the concrete Christian medieval order, when the concepts<br />
<strong>of</strong> scholasticism and medieval jurisprudence were maintained while<br />
deprived <strong>of</strong> their spatial dimension (ibid.: 133–138; 181–182). In the latter case,<br />
<strong>Schmitt</strong> interestingly observes that the combination <strong>of</strong> the concepts <strong>of</strong> scholasticism<br />
and medieval jurisprudence with those <strong>of</strong> humanistic juridical science or<br />
the preceding Roman law resulted in a ‘manner <strong>of</strong> thinking and speaking reminiscent<br />
<strong>of</strong> the disorientation <strong>of</strong> many purely juridical apologists during the last<br />
world war’ (ibid.: 182).<br />
<strong>The</strong> demise <strong>of</strong> the anarchical society <strong>of</strong> states, which liberal institutionalism<br />
and democratic globalism see as paving the way towards a global society and a<br />
universalistic vision <strong>of</strong> international law and order, is reversed by <strong>Schmitt</strong> in the<br />
fall into a formless universe, the last manifestation <strong>of</strong> the ‘connection between<br />
utopia and nihilism’ (ibid.: 66). Instead <strong>of</strong> focusing on the proliferation <strong>of</strong> international<br />
regimes and organizations, so celebrated by liberal institutionalists,<br />
<strong>Schmitt</strong> shifts his attention to the new law’s inability to give war a legal answer,<br />
that is, to provide the response on which the effectiveness <strong>of</strong> international law<br />
always depends. <strong>The</strong> revival <strong>of</strong> the doctrine <strong>of</strong> the just war, in which legal globalism<br />
recognizes a return to the most ancient and sound conceptions <strong>of</strong> war,<br />
appears, according to <strong>Schmitt</strong>, as the very expression <strong>of</strong> the powerlessness and<br />
abstractness <strong>of</strong> the new law (ibid.: 119–125). In comparison to its medieval<br />
precedent, it lacks reference to a concrete institutional order, an adequate bearer