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

44 M. Luoma-aho
sense, politics was always power politics. Carr applied the term ‘political’ to
those issues that involved, or were thought to involve, the power of one state in
relation to another: ‘[o]nce this conflict has been resolved, the issue ceases to be
“political” and becomes a matter of administrative routine’ (ibid.: 97). The
ultima ratio of power in international relations was war: ‘[e]very act of the state,
in its power aspect, is directed to war, not as a desirable weapon, but as a
weapon which it may require in the last resort to use’ (ibid.: 102). War was the
extreme of international politics just as revolution was the extreme of domestic
politics.
Carr’s conception of the political – a conflictual relation between states contained
in the context of violence – is unadulterated Schmittian political theory. I
cannot document Carr having read Schmitt, but he certainly seems to have taken
a leaf out of his Der Begriff des Politischen (1996).
The normative order of utopianism having already collapsed, its international
order was on the brink of escalating into the chaos of another world war.
According to Carr, it was simply too late in the day to demand more national
self-determination – as Wilson did with his famous Fourteen Points. The conditions
which had made the rise of nationalism and the institutionalisation of the
sovereign state in nineteenth-century Europe possible were beyond restoration.
In the twentieth century, the status of the national state as the final and acceptable
unit of international organisation was challenged on two fronts. On the one
hand, it was struggling to sustain the moral challenge of internationalism: the
ethos of rights and well-being, not of nations, but of man. On the other hand, its
power was being sapped by modern technological developments which were
making the state obsolescent as the unit of military and economic organisation
(Carr 1945: 38).
Thus, the national state was likely to be superseded by something else and
political power in the new post-war (or post-utopian) international order redivided
(Carr 2001: 207–220). Ideas such as state sovereignty were becoming
more obscure, even misleading, as international power moved away from the
nominal conventions of the old order. Certain aspects of the international order,
however, were not subject to change. Carr’s first premise was the continuing
relevance of political collectivism: units of international power in the post-war
order would be held by groups, not individuals, and antagonism between these
groups would be endemic:
[G]roup units in some form will certainly survive as repositories of political
power, whatever form these units may take.... It is profitless to imagine a
hypothetical world in which men no longer organize themselves in groups
for purposes of conflict; and the conflict cannot once more be transferred to
a wider and more comprehensive field.
(ibid.: 213)
To put it in Schmitt’s terms, Carr was a political pluriversalist, to whom the
world political was one divided into more than one political entity. 2