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

68 C. Brown
2 The French situation was somewhat different: they had extensive interests in Rwanda
but, embarrassingly, these interests meant they were committed to supporting the perpetrators
of the genocide rather than its victims.
3 Thanks to Bill Galston for reminding me of this line in another context.
4 I am aware that there is a line of thought in Schmitt interpretation that sees him as
essentially a theological writer who places the issue of God’s order in the world at the
centre of all his thought; a central concept here is that of the katechon, the being
referred to in a (contested) interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2:1–8 as having the role
of staving off the Apocalypse and the coming of the Antichrist. Although in the original
Greek text ho katechon seems to refer to a person, Schmitt interprets the term
more widely; in this context, it should be noted that, to Schmitt’s way of thinking,
although the modern state system does not understand itself as ho katechon, it operates
as such by preventing the world-unity that is a necessary precondition for the Apocalypse.
I am grateful to Will Hooker for this point.
5 The ‘Amboyna Massacre’ of 1623 is perhaps the most famous illustration of this point.
The Dutch and English East India companies were then competing for the spice trade
of the East Indies; neither was satisfied with the division of the spoils set out in a trade
treaty between the United Provinces and England of 1619, and in retaliation for an
English attack on the Dutch ‘Factory’ on Jakarta, the Dutch at Amboyna on the
Molucca Islands turned on the English Factory there – the ten English factors (i.e.
traders) who survived the initial attack, and their nine Japanese assistants, were subsequently
tortured to death.
6 During the Seven Years War between Britain and France – more accurately, of course,
between George II and Louis XV – the English novelist Laurence Sterne describes
absent-mindedly in A Sentimental Journey his attempt to take the regular packet-boat
between Dover and Calais, the war having slipped his mind. Fortunately he was able to
attach himself to the entourage of a French nobleman returning to Paris after a trip to
London, so all was well. Even during the Napoleonic Wars, where national emotions
were certainly engaged, there was a regular cross-channel service under a flag of truce,
and British scientists attended conferences in France under safe-conducts, and vice
versa.
7 It would be easy to latch on to particular cases where Allied behaviour fits Schmitt’s
pattern (for example, over area bombing) but this does not validate the picture taken as
a whole – and there are sins of omission here which need to be taken on board. The
fact that several times more civilians died in the siege of Leningrad than from the
Allied bombing campaign does not excuse the latter, but deserves a mention somewhere.
8 Originally, the notion of proper authority was designed to exclude ‘private’ wars –
proper authority meant the prince; nowadays it is sometimes taken to refer to some
kind of international legitimation – a UN Security Council vote, perhaps – but this
needs to be argued for as an interpretation, rather than assumed.
9 And there is no legitimate role for rentaquote archbishops, unless it be to insist that the
questions are posed – certainly there is no reason to think that the views of theologians
and clerics on the strategic consequences of the use of force are of any more significance
than those of any other citizen.
Bibliography
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958) ‘Modern moral philosophy’, Philosophy, 33: 1–9.
Baldwin, D. A. (ed.) (1993) Neorealism and Neoliberalism: the contemporary debate,
New York: Columbia University Press.
Booth, K. (2000) ‘Ten flaws of just wars’, in K. Booth (ed.) ‘The Kosovo Tragedy’,
special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights, 4: 315–324.