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

62 C. Brown
by the Monroe Doctrine to be an anomalous power – neither ‘European’ in the
spatial sense conveyed by the notion of the JPE but equally not non-European. It
is this anomalous status (partly shared by the other English-speaking sea power)
which, once US power becomes actual rather than latent and the form of rule
embedded in the Monroe Doctrine becomes potentially universal, destroys the
old order, in a way that a purely outside power (Bolshevik Russia, for example)
could not, although the Bolsheviks could, perhaps, physically destroy the old
Europe.
The League of Nations Covenant (which specifically endorses the Monroe
Doctrine) represents the global extension of this hegemony. The US did not join
the League, but American economic power underwrote the peace settlement and,
eventually, in the Second World War, US military power was brought to bear to
bring down the jus publicum Europaeum and replace it with ‘international law’,
liberal internationalism and, incipiently, the notion of humanitarian intervention
in support of the liberal, universalist, positions that the new order had set in
place. On Schmitt’s account, the two world wars were fought to bring this about
– and the barbarism of modern warfare is to be explained by the undermining of
the limits established in the old European order. In effect, the notion of a Just
War has been reborn albeit without much of its theological underpinnings. The
humanized warfare of the JPE with its recognition of the notion of a ‘just
enemy’ is replaced by the older notion that the enemy is evil and to be destroyed
– in fact, is no longer an ‘enemy’ within Schmitt’s particular usage of the term
but a ‘foe’ who can, and should, be annihilated.
Schmitt and the modern left
It is easy to see the attraction of Schmitt’s international thought to radical critics
of humanitarian intervention and the Just War tradition. His opposition to liberalism
and progressivism is highly congenial to post-Marxist, post-modern
writers as well as to conservatives (and reactionaries), while his critique of the
hypocrisy of the English-speaking powers is attractive to more modernist,
Chomskyan, thinkers. His account of American imperialism in Latin America
cloaked in a mantle of humanitarianism provides an obvious model for a critique
of later humanitarian interventions, and his sensitivity to the new forms of
power represented by American economic hegemony is equally congenial.
Moreover, he provides a full-blown framework within which these critiques can
be situated. The kind of ad hoc critique of Just War thinking offered by Booth
and other radicals suffers because it is ad hoc – the points made have resonance,
but there is little sense of how they fit within a coherent vision of the world.
Schmitt offers such a vision; he can tell us where notions of humanitarian intervention
come from, he can show us an alternative account of ‘humanism’ that
does not grow out of the barrel of a Western gun, he can give us a conception of
war which purports to be more humanitarian than that which emerges from the
Just war tradition. He can answer Henny Youngman’s question: ‘Compared to
what’ is Just War thinking flawed? In short, he offers the fullest, most intellectu-