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

52 M. Luoma-aho
Freedom, one of the highest civilian awards in the United States, for ‘an especially
meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United
States, or to world peace’. 6
Discussion
Essentially, Schmitt’s post-1936 writings on international law and geopolitics
can be interpreted as elaborations of his conception of the political, which he
first articulated in 1927, but they also established a larger conceptual apparatus
that broadened his theorem of the political into something of a geopolitical
philosophy of history. This work culminated in the publication of Der Nomos
der Erde in 1950 (Schmitt 1997).
Schmitt was not alone in his project. Inter-war Germany, fertilised by intense
nationalism and revanchism, 7 virtually blossomed with geopolitical pseudoscience,
demanding to take on Europe, if not the world. In this intellectual
climate Schmitt was among the most consistent and systematic, and certainly
among the least völkisch thinkers. This, however interesting it may be, does not
make Schmitt’s grosspolitics important. What makes it important is that it was
in accordance with the facts, and that Schmitt was quite possibly the first theorist
of international law and international relations to articulate what exactly happened
when President Monroe gave his seventh annual address to the United
States Congress, and what had really begun almost a decade before in the Congress
of Vienna: the dismantling of the Peace of Westphalia. The world was no
longer legally divided into independent, autonomous states – if indeed it had
ever been – but into a limited number of powerful super-states reigning over the
vassal states within their sphere of interests.
This dismantling might not have been quite as discernible to an average interwar
German as it certainly must be for almost everyone today. There is a world
of difference in the sovereignty enjoyed by the United States of America and by,
say, the state of Iraq. Both have the formal legal status of independent,
autonomous states, but this is where the similarities end. Even if you find it
useful to call Iraq today a state, you simply cannot call it the political subject of
the territory of Iraq.
E. H. Carr wanted Britain to do with Western Europe what Schmitt wanted
Germany to do with Central Europe: take responsibility for conceiving a superpower
strong enough to stand its ground in the new international order. The
means to this end were of course different and in some ways conflicting, but the
ends were conceptually indistinguishable. Both Schmitt and Carr saw the potential
of Europe in the new nomos of the Großräume, and also saw that to realise
this potential fully Europe had to have a political subject, a Reich willing and
able to make authoritative decisions in Europe’s name. Decades of economic
and political integration since the world wars have not constituted a Reich out of
the European Union, and there is little indication of anyone letting the EU
become the political subject of Europe any time soon. The discussion on the
future of Europe, as it is debated between the ‘federalists’ and the ‘intergovern-