abstraction in Schmitt’s work. Throughout Schmitt’s work, concrete-
order-thinking remains strictly extra-sociological as the lateral dynamics
of geopolitics and ‘land-appropriations’ are abstracted from and non-
articulated with the vertical dynamics of social property relations. In
fact, it is self-consciously anti-sociological in line with Schmitt’s generic
Weltanschauung as a counter-revolutionary e´tatist thinker. And if the nomos-
constitutive acts of conquests are socially disembowelled, the relevance of
land-appropriations was already historically overtaken by the largely non-
territorial and concrete-order-transcending nature of the US-American
form of capitalist hegemony, which rendered Schmitt’s concrete-order-
jurisprudence anachronistic already at the time of his writing.
The Nomos, in spite of Schmitt’s insistence on the concrete, remains
largely written in the register of a history of ideas, more akin to the
contemporary practice of ‘semantic history’, interspersed with etymolo-
gical derivations, geo-mythology and legal history, conceptually anti-
thetical to any international historical sociology. While Schmitt’s critique
of legal normativism and his partial retraction from decisionism
during the mid-30s predisposes his new programme of concrete-order-
jurisprudence towards sociology – domestic and international – his
definition and handling of the sociological writes ‘the social’ out of the
construction and dynamics of spatial (dis-)orders and replaces it with the
reification of the geopolitical. This suppression and elimination of social
relations was, of course, already prefigured in his concept of the political
(Huysmans 2008) that now informed his concept of the geopolitical. Both
insulated the (geo-)political from the social – in fact, privileged the (geo-)
political over and against the social. And as Schmitt’s definition of the
political referred to the intensification of unspecified antagonisms only –
as it refers to the quality of antagonisms and not to a specific political
process or substances (economic, cultural, ethnic, constitutional, etc.) – it
lacks any indication as to which dynamics activate and intensify latent
geopolitical differences to the point of open friend/enemy distinctions –
or, indeed: forms of international accommodation and cooperation.
Which sociopolitical interests and conflicts around the control of the state
and the direction of public policy – beyond an elementary and ontolo-
gized notion of existential national autonomy – politicize, de-politicize, and
re-politicize geopolitical differences as liminal situations that call for emer-
gency powers and the declaration of states of war? Schmitt’s thought contains
capitalism. The concretely ordered
Raum of German provenance had to be defended and
restored against the geometric notion of territory as an empty and abstract expanse due to
capitalism’s de-territorializing nature (Diner 2000a, 2000b).
Fatal attraction: Schmitt’s international theory 215
no categories to capture the sociopolitical (civil war, revolutions,
coup
d’E´tats) and geopolitical crises (war, terrorism, irregular warfare) against
which he developed his vocabulary of law and order ‘from above’.
Schmitt’s restrictive conceptualization of the political from the angle of
the extreme situation provides no pointers as to what processes lead to the
extremization of politics – the social construction of states of exception
and war-declarations. Ultimately, Schmitt is taking politics and geo-
politics out of his concept of the political. The content of the analysis lies
outside his notion of the political. This renders the jargon of the excep-
tion, the political, and the concrete abstract, formalistic and explanatorily
empty. Schmittian theorems can be applied to geopolitical and legal
configurations from without, but cannot be set to work to ‘get behind’
changes in international law and geopolitics – from Columbus to the Bush
Doctrine – from within.
Conclusion: neo-Schmittian impasses
This article has argued that attention to Schmitt’s political context and
politics of concept-formation provides a privileged vantage-point for
disclosing the purpose and limits of Schmitt’s theoretical premises, which
generated a determinate, but defective, reinterpretation of the history of
international law and order. The theoretical and historical critique of
Schmitt’s triple theoretical axiomatic revealed their one-dimensional
(geo)political cast, which precludes the incorporation of social relations
into Schmitt’s definition of his research premises. These dual deficiencies –
theoretical and historical – suggest a shift to the alternative paradigm of
international historical sociology.
Inversely, the article has suggested that the Schmitt-inspired IR literature
tends to dissociate Schmitt’s thought – history and theory – from his specific
political project. This generates a depoliticized and de-contextualized
acceptance of his conceptual narrative of international law and order, which
translates into an underproblematized projection of Schmittian categories
unto an altered contemporary geopolitical configuration. As a result, the
neo-Schmittian endorsement of Schmitt’s history and theory as international
theory stands on fragile ground.
Carl Schmitt formulated his international thought in the context of the
interwar crisis – IR’s ‘Twenty Years’ Crisis. This crisis of capitalist mod-
ernity had deeply affected the political and geopolitical landscape of all
major powers, but found its most acute expression (next to Russia) in the
crisis of the Weimar Republic, facing disorder from below – strikes, civil
war,
coup d’E´tats, revolution – and a loss of sovereign autonomy from
outside, codified in the Versailles Treaty. Schmitt’s intellectual riposte
216
B E N N O G E R H A R D T E S C H K E