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

Geopolitics and grosspolitics 43
(Carr 2001: 42–61). The doctrine often took the political form of an argument
claiming that every nation had an identical interest in peace, and that any nation
that decided to disturb the peace acted not only against its own interest but
against everyone else’s interest – against the interest of man. This assumption
asserted the primacy of ethics over politics: war was not only irrational, but bad.
Based on the premise that there existed a state of general and universal
harmony among mankind, idealism went on to assume that, under certain institutional
conditions, a system of peace among nations could be established. The
purpose of IR was to discover those conditions, help to design the necessary
institutions and bring about a peaceful revolution in international politics.
President Wilson was a living embodiment of the political logic of idealism. For
him, democracy equalled peace and dictatorship equalled war. Eradicating dictatorship,
by replicating the political institutions that prevented violence in democratic
societies on a global scale, would bring international peace. Institutions
such as the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice
were based on these (ideo)logical foundations.
And all this Carr refuted:
What confronts us in international politics today is . . . nothing less than the
complete bankruptcy of the conception of morality which has dominated
political and economic thought for a century and a half. Internationally, it is
no longer possible to deduce virtue from right reasoning, because it is no
longer seriously possible to believe that every state, by pursuing the greatest
good of the whole world, is pursuing the greatest good of its own citizen,
and vice versa.... The inner meaning of the modern international crisis is
the collapse of the whole structure of utopianism based on the concept of
harmony of interests.
(ibid.: 58)
Realism indicted utopianism for its professedly abstract political principles.
According to Carr, the doctrine of harmony of interests was an ingenious moral
device by the privileged group to justify and maintain its dominant position.
Likewise, theories of international morality were always produced by dominant
nations in international society. International order or solidarity was always the
watchword of those who felt strong enough to impose it on others. Utopian postulates
were not absolute and universal, but political principles based on a
particular interpretation of national interest at a particular time. The Versailles
Treaty of 1919 was Carr’s case in point. The political purpose of the treaty was
not world peace and the good of nations – though they were of course touted on
every occasion – but the elimination of one great power by the others which won
the First World War.
In other words, peace and harmony were sound in principle, but in politics
they had to be backed up by authority. According to realist anthropology, principles
could not command; people did not willingly submit to the will of others
because the others were right or good but because they were stronger. In this