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

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