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

The ‘realist institutionalism’ of Schmitt 33
of such an order (as the Church was before the civil wars of religion) and also a
substantive idea of justice. While aiming to carry out the summum bonum, transforming
war into an international crime, the revival of the just war actually leads
to the summum malum, the ‘dreadful nihilistic destruction of all law’ (ibid.: 187)
and a return to the legal and moral discrimination of enemies.
The inability of the new international law to keep a hold on reality also
explains the divorce between law and politics we started with. In the preface to
Der Nomos der Erde, Schmitt uses an incisive expression: jurisprudence, he
writes, is today ‘sundered between theology and technology’ (ibid.: 38). Fifty
years later, most analyses of international institutions risk ending up in the same
condition. On the one hand, their focus on technicality has become politicalscientific
as well as legal. This tends to increasingly enclose the study of institutions
in a hortus clausus of norms and policies, shielded by the magic of the
word ‘pure’ and inspired by an almost surrealist notion of ‘concreteness’ that
suggests that all of one’s attention should be devoted to how institutions work,
without wasting time by asking whether or not they affect reality. As Michael
Walzer, whose ideas are clearly divergent from Schmitt’s, puts it:
legal positivism, which generated major scholarly works in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, has become in the age of the United
Nations increasingly uninteresting.... To dwell at length upon the precise
meaning of the Charter is today a kind of utopian quibbling. And because
the UN sometimes pretends that it already is what it has barely begun to be,
its decrees do not command intellectual or moral respect – except among
the positivist lawyers whose business it is to interpret them. The lawyers
have constructed a paper world, which fails at crucial points to correspond
to the world the rest of us still live in.
(Walzer 2000: xviii–xix)
On the other hand, the aspiration to a civitas maxima of legal globalism, the
twentieth-century idea of world government and the more recent idea of a global
democratic governance, all push institutionalism towards an extreme form of
political theology which transforms the recognition of the crisis of the old Eurocentric
world into the heralding of a new world that is freely malleable – a social
construction ex nihilo that only retains the secret, but apparent, stamp of being
Western from its predecessor. In transforming the end of European centrality
into the beginning of a new (albeit abstract) Great Game of Western Universalism,
‘Western global centralists’ (Bull 1977: 302–305) engage in a secret and
paradoxical dialogue with the figures whom Schmitt, from the beginning of
his intellectual life, had recognized as the archetypes of the inability to keep a
hold on reality: Romantics. As products of bourgeois security par excellence
(Schmitt 1991: 78–108), they also perceive their inability to keep a hold on
reality not as a loss but, instead, as the occasio of an endless, individualistic
deception that allows them to continuously create always new, though always
occasional, worlds without substance, without functional relationships, without