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

50 M. Luoma-aho
introduced: atomic weapons. According to Burnham, the threat of nuclear war
had become the means for one super-state effectively to rule the world – a fact
he had not been able to see in The Managerial Revolution (Burnham 1947: 59).
World government, grounded in the legal fiction of equality of nations and
embodied in the institution of the United Nations, was not in a political position
to solve the problem of mutually assured destruction in the atomic age. A
‘World Empire’, in which the United States ‘would hold more than its equal
share of political power’ and a world monopoly of atomic weapons, was the
only conceivable solution (ibid.: 60). American Empire extended to wherever its
power would be decisive, not for everything or even nearly everything, but ‘for
the crucial issues upon which political survival depends’ (ibid.: 189); to phrase it
in Schmittian terms: wherever the United States was able and willing to act as
the political subject.
To exercise imperial political subjectivity the United States had to abandon
the norms and institutions of the old international order. To begin with, a
genuine super-state could not afford to respect the equality of states in international
law or a balance of power in international society, but instead must ‘be
prepared to make an open bid for world political leadership’ (ibid.: 184).
Thereby, the doctrine of non-intervention in the affairs of other states – ‘already
little more than a verbal shell’ (Burnham 1947) – would have to be disregarded
altogether and the capability for quick, firm and sufficient US intervention anywhere
in the world maintained. Furthermore, the United States would have to
accept world-wide propaganda as an arm of its imperial policy, the meaning and
goal of which must become ‘publicly intelligible and convincing’ (ibid.) for all
the peoples of the world. It was of utmost importance, however, that the United
States should distinguish its friends from its enemies, and let it be unequivocally
known that there is something to gain from being its friend, and much for
enemies to lose. This distinction could be put into practice only if the United
States was, and was known to be, able and ready to use force: ‘[t]he force may
not have to be used, or may have to be used only sparingly. But it must be there,
as the final premise, or the political syllogism is incomplete’ (ibid.: 186).
As a first strategic step towards the American World Empire, Burnham proposed
that Great Britain with its dominions and the United States become partners
in an ‘imperial federation’ (ibid.: 197). According to Burnham, the two
nations confronted a common fate: either they would survive together or they
would be destroyed together in the struggle against communism. A mere formalisation
of the transatlantic alliance would accomplish nothing, but full political
union between the two nations would ‘be a catalyst which would instantaneously
transform the whole of world politics’ (ibid.: 196). In the first stages of
the federation Britain would necessarily be the junior partner, in light of the disparity
of material power between the two, a fact which Burnham identified as
the greatest political obstacle for the British to the formation of Anglo-America.
As a second step, Burnham demanded that Anglo-America superintend the
political integration of Europe, thereby consolidating it as the continental supplement
of the Western bloc. According to Burnham, politically divided and