concrete-order-thinking, drove Britain’s ‘spatial revolution’? What
accounts for the specificity of England’s re-definition of overseas space in
the 17th century and its rise and centrality at Utrecht? Absent a discussion
of the transformation of English social property relations, British sover-
eignty and foreign policy after the Glorious Revolution – Britain’s tran-
sition from a late feudal divine monarchy to a capitalist-parliamentarian
constitutional monarchy – Schmitt relapses into a geo-mythological
register, revolving around Britain’s ‘maritime existence’ (Schmitt 2003,
178, 183–84).
13
Geo-elemental categories start to naturalize and mystify
specific property and authority relations that informed state interests that
diverged significantly from continental patterns, as the neo-Weberian and
the neo-Marxist literature has established (Brenner 1985, 1993; Brewer
1988, 1994; Wood 1991; O’Brien and Hunt 1999; O’Brien 2002; Prados
de la Escosura 2004; Gerstenberger 2007). Schmitt’s intuitive under-
standing of Britain’s exceptionality leads him ultimately to mobilize his
generic land/sea dichotomy, a move that drives a wedge into the West-
phalian Order, without developing a conceptual vocabulary that articu-
lates how and why Britain was unique, what it was in the nature of British
sovereignty that informed Britain’s position at Utrecht as the balancer,
and how this difference was co-articulated with European developments.
Schmitt concludes with a broad analogy: ‘There is a historical and struc-
tural relation between such spatial concepts of free sea, free trade, and world
economy, and the idea of free space in which to pursue free competition
and free exploitation’ (Schmitt 2003, 99). Yet, this allusion to worldwide
capitalist competition is precocious and obscures the fundamental distinction
between ‘free’ and ‘open’ seas. The notion of ‘free sea’ (
mare liberum) simply
referred to its non-law-governed status and implied permanent military
conflict over the control of trading and shipping routes, as states tried uni-
laterally to territorialize the seas, rather than declaring them multilaterally
‘open’. In this sense, the new ‘beyond the line’ only extended prevailing
practices of militarized trading routes – armed merchant-men and convoy-
sailing tactics – characteristic of the age of mercantilism. This did not imply
free economic competition, governed by competitiveness and market-pricing,
but free politico-military competition, creating a morally and legally unen-
cumbered state of nature ‘beyond the line’. Free trade across open seas had to
wait until the 19th century.
13
The prevalence of ‘geo-mythology’ – the grounding of geopolitics in the elemental
opposition of land vs. sea (Behemoth against Leviathan) – over and against property and
authority relations is particularly acute in
Land and Sea. Its core thesis is that ‘world history is
the history of the wars waged by maritime powers against land or continental powers and by
land powers against sea or maritime powers’ (Schmitt 1997, 5).
Fatal attraction: Schmitt’s international theory 201
But if capitalist free trade was not the inner secret of England’s
17th Century ‘spatial revolution’, the island was, according to Schmitt,
decisive in dissolving the terrestrial-Christian order and in altering and
co-determining, from 1713 onwards, the
ius publicum – a rupture
that opens up an explanatory vacuum amply filled with geo-elemental
reifications and mythological allusions. ‘So it came that England became
the heiress, the universal heiress of that great change in the existence of
the European nations. How was that possible’ (Schmitt 1997, 27)?
England ‘turned her collective existence seawards and centred it on the
sea element’ (Schmitt 1997, 28), turning into a big fish – a leviathan.
14
Schmitt, as an interim result, provides ample evidence –
rayas, scho-
lasticism,
res publica Christiana – that the Discoveries, rather than dis-
solving the old medieval cosmos, were jurisprudentially assimilated to
prevailing discourses of Christian expansion and aligned to late medieval
practices of conditional territorialization. Furthermore, the rise of the
ius publicum was internal to European politics, resting on a double
narrative of spatio-temporally diverging Anglo–French developmental
trajectories, geopolitically articulated and synchronized from 1713
onwards. British balancing conjoined a land-based interstate order, which
had overcome confessional wars, with England’s own ‘spatial revolution’
premised on its ‘sea-appropriation’, grounded in a geo-elementary
account of its maritime existence.
During the course of
The Nomos, the starting assumption of the
ius publicum covering an undifferentiated unity of European states, the
‘Westphalian System’, is progressively dissolved. Their assimilation is
challenged by a surprising absence of
any analysis of 1648 in The Nomos,
while the Westphalian Peace Treaties are mentioned only once, and then
in passing (Schmitt 2003, 145).
15
The European interstate civilization did
not originate in 1492, assembled its geographically specific defining fea-
tures between 1555 and 1648, remained premised on dynastic sover-
eignty, and was decisively altered and co-articulated by British balancing
after 1713. Henceforth, it was outflanked and progressively dismantled
by a British sea-based semi-universalism operative in its confetti-empire
that finally culminated in the hegemonic transition from the British
Empire to an US-dominated ‘spaceless universalism’ first codified at
Versailles. Schmitt’s periodization of the rise and fall of the
ius publicum
14
Elsewhere, Schmitt notes that ‘a turnabout was implicit in the transformation of a nation
of sheep-breeders in the sixteenth century into a nation of sea-children. It was the fundamental
transformation of the political and historical essence of the island itself’ (Schmitt 1997, 50).
15
The Westphalian Peace Treaties are rarely referred to in Schmitt’s entire
opus. Two passing
references can be found in Schmitt (1995b, 241 and 1995c, 311).
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