The dynasty remained in personal union, the physical carrier of sover-
eignty, and the centre of the political economy of venal fiscal officialdom,
mediated by the construction of a non-bureaucratic tax/office state,
erected against the background of pre-capitalist social property relations:
L’E´tat, c’est moi!
Absolutism was not de-theologized, secularized, and neutralized either.
Rather, early modern polities were confessionalized dynastic-composite
states claiming a sacralized form of sovereignty (Gorski 2000). Although the
age of absolutism did break with the trans-territorial theological absolutism
of the Vatican, it simultaneously fragmented the unitary confessional papal
claims and reassembled them across the spectrum of a pluriverse of creedal
mini-absolutisms post-1555 and post-1648.
Cuius regio, eius religio –
contrary to mainstream IR thinking – did not endorse religious toleration at
the level of private subjects, but sanctioned the right of regional rulers to
determine and enforce, if in internationally agreed form, the faith of the
land. In the French case, the nascent absolutist state did not simply guard
over the de-politicized and neutral character of domestic politics and
religion, but actively established during the Reformation and the Wars of
Religion (1562–98) its catholic absolutism in a violent, directly politicized
century-long campaign, leading to the repression and expulsion of the
Huguenots with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Absolutism
did not rise above the warring civil parties, but repressed one of them.
Yet, even within Schmitt’s own analysis, there is ample evidence that
absolutism failed to generate the distinction between the private and the
public,
dominium and imperium. Schmitt was acutely aware of his proble-
matic ascription of public sovereignty to the absolutist state, conceding that
princely ‘‘houses’’, such as the Hapsburg and the Bourbon, i.e. the great
dynastic families, aggregated various crowns under one power, such as
the Bohemian and the Hungarian, as well as lands, rights of succession,
and other legal titles. They became and remained, into the 18th century,
the true agents of European politics and, thus, also the subjects of
international law. Most European wars were waged as wars of succes-
sion and had their
justa causa in the divine right of kings. But all of this
was only preliminary (Schmitt 2003, 129).
This preliminariness, by Schmitt’s own reckoning, is not a transient
anomaly, but expresses the very essence of the
droit public de l’Europe.
These sovereign persons created and sustained the
ius publicum euro-
paeum, thereby maintaining their mutual relations with one another as
human individuals, clearly not as small men, such as private individuals
dominated by the state, but as ‘‘great men’’ and
personae publicae
(Schmitt 2003, 146).
Fatal attraction: Schmitt’s international theory 199
These
magni homines were not simply at the metaphorical centre of
what Schmitt calls an ‘international personal analogy’. They did not just
represent their respective states, they
realiter embodied a personalized
form of sovereignty, ultimately grounded in their status as owners of
their diverse domains – a fusion (or rather: non-differentiation) between
the political and the economic, power and property (Schroeder 1994, 8).
Absolutist polities were conceptualized in anthropomorphic, but not in
anthropocentric ways. Early modern ‘international’ relations and their
ius
inter gentes expressed interpersonal, primarily inter-dynastic, relations.
English balancing: transition from feudalism to capitalism or
‘sea-appropriation’?
Next to the Conquest and absolutism, Schmitt adduces a third spatial phe-
nomenon to account for the rise of the
ius publicum: English balancing. The
Discoveries – at least, after the
rayas were displaced by the amity-lines – had
transformed the European terrestrial order by introducing the antithesis
between firm land and free sea, opening up two distinct spatial orders. They
were characterized by regulated interstate wars on
terra firma and anarchy
‘beyond the line’. England’s turn towards the sea extends across two distinct
periods, pre- and a post-1713.
Sea-roamers of all kinds, pirates, privateers, sea trade adventurers, together
with the whale hunters and the sailors, formed the vanguard of that ele-
mental surge toward the sea (
y
) their heroic period lasted approximately a
century and a half, from 1550 to 1713, or said differently, from the beginning
of the struggle carried on by the Protestant powers against the world power
of Catholic Spain, and until the Peace of Utrecht (Schmitt 1997, 19–20).
While this initial period undermined Spanish maritime supremacy and
hardened a tough-minded amphibious national character, England only
fully embraced this ‘maritime existence’, based on its ‘sea-appropriation’,
at Utrecht.
England alone took the step from a medieval feudal and terrestrial
existence to a purely maritime existence that balanced the whole ter-
restrial world. (
y
) England thereby became the representative of the
universal maritime sphere of a Eurocentric global order, the guardian of
the other side of the
ius publicum europaeum, the sovereign of the
balance of land and sea – of an equilibrium comprising the spatially
ordered thinking of international law (Schmitt, 2003, 173).
From 1713 onwards, the
ius publicum came to be externally regulated
by British balancing, conjoining the two spatial orders – land and sea.
Which extra-juridical processes, in line with Schmitt’s demand for
200
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