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

virtue, and is undermined by the habits of thought encouraged by Just War
thinking. Schmitt offers a far more basic critique of the idea, locating it within a
particular account of international order which is subversive of the public law of
Europe as the latter developed out of its medieval roots, an account of international
order which in the twentieth century was particularly associated with
Anglo-American thought. Exploring Schmitt’s critique will give us a stronger
case against the notion of the Just War – but it may also, indirectly, give us
reasons to defend this notion.
Carl Schmitt and the jus publicum Europaeum
From humanized war to intervention 59
In The Nomos of the Earth Schmitt offers an account of the rise of the modern
European territorial state, and the spatial differentiation upon which that institution
is based, that runs contrary to a great deal of the conventional wisdom of the
early twenty-first century (Schmitt 2003). Whereas a number of modern writers
have noted with disapproval the emergence of a clear distinction between intraand
extra-European international relations and with it notions of ‘difference’ that
have, arguably, underpinned European racism and imperialism – see, for
example, Todorov’s The Conquest of America (1987) – Schmitt regards the
emergence of this distinction as a basic achievement of Renaissance humanism.
Equally, the Catholic natural lawyers of the Salamanca School, usually admired
for their defence of human equality and decent treatment for the ‘Indians’ of the
Americas, are regarded by Schmitt as reactionaries trying to sustain an outmoded,
theological conception of world order. Schmitt’s reasoning here is
largely based on his critique of the notion of the Just War, which he regards as
an essentially theological notion which legitimized total war. Just War theorists
may have attempted to limit the role of violence in human affairs, and the
Catholic Church in the Middle Ages certainly did try to use its influence to ban
certain weapons and enforce truces, but these measures were always subverted
by the basic logic of the Just War, which, according to Schmitt, by inviting the
judgement that one side in a conflict is ‘just’ involved identifying the other as
‘unjust’, with the concomitant that the unjust must be defeated whatever the
cost, even if this meant using banned weapons or taking the conflict to extremes.
The line of argument here is immediately, if superficially, familiar: Just War
justifies escalation, feeds self-righteousness, legitimizes war – this is very much
the contemporary critique of Just War thinking as presented, from different perspectives,
by Booth and other critics. There is, however, an important difference;
Schmitt does not dodge the Henny Youngman question. He is quite
clear that there is an alternative normative and conceptual framework against
which Just War thinking ought to be judged, and much of The Nomos of the
Earth is devoted to defending this alternative and bemoaning its delegitimation
by the sea-going Anglo-Saxons, who promote a conception of world order that
has had the effect of reinstating the medievalism and extremism of the Just War.
This alternative framework emerges from the development of the sovereign,
territorial state in Europe, which involved a spatial disposition of the Continent