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

42 M. Luoma-aho
(along with Hans J. Morgenthau) must be regarded today as the most genuinely
Schmittian theorist of early IR. Not only did his realism fit precisely into the
same mould as Schmitt’s, but he also attempted to unite Europe as a Großraum
against the political forces of pseudo-universalism. The links between Burnham
and Schmitt are less historical than they are theoretical. While he may not have
read or even heard of Schmitt, Burnham took his warning on the perils of political
universalism, turned it upside down and articulated it in terms of American
foreign policy, the legacy of which we are witnessing today.
E. H. Carr and the British Reich
In 1936, Edward Hallett Carr (1892–1982) was appointed to the Woodrow
Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth –
the first professorship of its kind at any university. Carr’s appointment to the
post was highly controversial, because during his years at the Foreign Office he
had been sceptical of the League of Nations and critical of ‘Wilsonian’ international
relations. This made his accepting the chair seem, to some at least, a
blasphemy.
Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 of 1939 is considered today a
landmark publication in IR’s so-called ‘First Great Debate’: the one in which the
‘realists’ challenged the ‘idealists’ – or ‘utopians’, as Carr preferred to call them.
Though it is misleading to talk of a First Great Debate, as no exchange between
realist and idealist (or utopian) points of view ever actually occurred (see Wilson
1998), Carr’s book and the ensuing discussion did bring about some paradigmatic
organisation into a menagerie of theories and approaches that constituted
early IR. Stanley Hoffmann (1977: 43) has described the work as ‘the first
scientific treatment of modern world politics’, and John Vasquez (1983: 16)
called it ‘a devastating and seminal critique’.
According to Carr, utopian political science paid little attention to existing
facts or to the analysis of cause and effect, but rather devoted itself ‘to the elaboration
of visionary projects for the attainment of the ends which they have in
view – projects whose simplicity and perfection give them an easy and universal
appeal’ (Carr 2001: 6). This was also the teleology of IR as a discipline: its starting
point was the disaster of the First World War and its object was to obviate
the occurrence of another such way. But when these visionary projects broke
down – much as the League of Nations began to break down in the 1930s – the
analysis of reality forced itself upon IR as an essential element of study. At the
heart of the idealism challenged by realism was a political assumption which
Carr called the doctrine of harmony of interests, according to which individuals
pursuing their own good unconsciously encompassed the good of the community,
the ‘whole’. Generalised, the doctrine suggested that there was no conflict
between selfish and moral behaviour, because when individuals were left to act
naturally according to their self-interest, they jointly produced ideal social outcomes.
What was true of individuals was assumed (by the utopians) to be also
true of nations: by taking care of themselves, states did service to all humanity