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

66 C. Brown
of political judgement that Schmitt regularly invokes, while ‘proper authority’
requires a combination of political, legal and ethical judgement. 8 Whether violence
is actually the ‘last resort’ can only be decided on the basis of a diplomaticstrategic
judgement, likewise issues of proportionality and a reasonable prospect
of success. ‘Innocence’ is a moral category, but whether proper care is taken to
protect the innocent requires a different, more complex judgement. In short,
what we have here is neither a pro-forma check-list of criteria whereby action is
deemed just only if we are able to put a tick into each box – Schmitt is right to
resist this notion – nor do we have a set of criteria that can be interpreted solely
by theologians, ethicists or lawyers. Indeed, most of these questions invite the
judgement of politicians, diplomatists and strategists, with only occasional assistance
from lawyers or ethicists. 9
By employing Just War thinking in this way, one is neither endorsing the
kind of theological position that might cause one to become convinced of one’s
own sanctity and thereby lose all sense of restraint, nor allowing legal/moral reasoning
to swamp the kind of essentially political judgements that Schmitt
believes to be central. It is, however, the case that, underlying this way of thinking
about Just War, an essentially moral position is being taken more or less for
granted, namely that, other things being equal, violence is undesirable, and
therefore that resorts to force require some kind of special justification. Is this
necessarily a theological position? Obviously it could be, but I see no necessity
here – there are good secular reasons for believing that violence is, other things
being equal, a ‘bad thing’. This is certainly a moral judgement but it is one that
can be arrived at from a number of different political and ethical positions; to
employ a couple of Rawlsian terms, there is an overlapping consensus between a
fair number of reasonable, comprehensive doctrines around the general undesirability
of violence as a mode of human interaction.
Schmitt would not be part of such a consensus. His account of the jus publicum
Europaeum and the notion of war as a duel, something that can be bracketed
as between justis hostes, is specifically based on the notion that the use of
force does not have to be justified to any external authority or to oneself. This is
an essential feature of the ‘humanized war’ that Schmitt endorses as an alternative
to the horrors of Just Wars. Although he does not put the matter in this
way, he is effectively offering us a devil’s bargain; accept that violence is
simply a part of human existence – forget the attempt to require that violence be
justified – and in exchange you will have a world where violence will actually
be more controlled and less dangerous to human well-being than it otherwise
would be (Luttwak 1999).
Should we accept this bargain? More to the point, can we accept this bargain
– is the offer still on the table? The answer to both questions is, I think, no. To
give up the attempt to control and minimize the role of violence in human affairs
would be pure defeatism, but, in any event, as Schmitt himself acknowledges,
the world of the jus publicum Europaeum is gone and gone for good. Much to
his regret – but should it be to ours? – the old European world has been undermined
by the new universalism. The successive attempts by Wilhelm II and