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

38 M. Luoma-aho
Schmitt’s famous dictum of the political always came – for him at least –
with temporal and spatial coordinates. Since ‘the political’ concerned relations
with the enemy, any organised entity able to distinguish its friends from its
enemies can, by definition, be identified as a political entity. Keeping strictly to
Schmitt’s use of the term, the political condition could exist only between territorial
entities, i.e. in the geopolitical sphere of international relations, which was
by nature a domain of enmity par excellence (Schmitt 1996: 46–47; see also
Ulmen 1996: 12–13). Schmitt operationalised his conception of sovereignty in
terms of political subjectivity. For Schmitt, the temporal criterion of state sovereignty
was the authority to distinguish friends from enemies in a concrete political
situation: the moment ‘in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognised
as the enemy’ (Schmitt 1996: 67).
In his 1925 critique of the Versailles Treaty, Schmitt argued that the
Rhineland had been made an ‘object’ of international politics: its destiny was no
longer in the hands of the German state, but in those of the ‘Pact powers’. This
new form of political subjectivity exercised in the name of the League of
Nations was rendered possible by giving primacy to international law over international
politics. Since objects are created in terms of international law by subjects
powerful enough to create and enforce that law, entities thus created are
devoid of the ability to make their own political decisions. If the interests of the
controlling political subject are at stake, it uses its right of intervention to overstep
the sovereignty of the controlled political object (Schmitt 1988a: 28–29).
For Schmitt, political subjectivity – that is, the authority to make the
friend/enemy distinction and the power to enforce it territorially – was a conceptual
marker for indicating sovereignty in international relations.
Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty derived meaning from his polemics
against Hans Kelsen’s pure normativism. For Kelsen, the state was not sovereign
but only part of a hierarchical structure of norms, of which the highest was
international law (1967). The occupation and demilitarisation of the Rhineland
on the pretext of international law diminished the territorial sovereignty of the
Weimar state. Schmitt argued contra Kelsen that political life cannot be regulated
by legal norms, because societies encounter crises that must be resolved by
use of political authority (see Gottfried 1990: 57–62; Schwab 1989: 44–51). The
nature of the state that emerged as a result of Schmitt’s polemics against normativism
was decisionist: the will of the sovereign stands above the law of the
land.
The reason why Schmitt chose to speak of international relations in terms of
political subjects and objects, and not simply states, was the fact that, for him,
modern states were no longer the political subjects of international relations.
Yes, Schmitt admired the state because, as the main agency of secularisation, it
had ended the religious wars of the respublica Christiana by limiting them territorially
to duels between earthly sovereigns (Freund 1995: 15). Since then, new
‘religious’ wars had begun against which this limit no longer functioned. Legal
texts such as the Treaty of Versailles and the Kellogg–Briand Pact had criminalised
war and transformed it into international police action. Walking in the