executive government through the invocation of states of exception,
domestically and internationally. Yet, neo-Conservatism reaches beyond a
static friend/enemy dualism by adding an ideologically super-charged dis-
course of democracy and freedom promotion – redefined as polyarchy – that
transcends the mere articulation of geopolitical differences to formulate a
dynamic theory of American imperialism. It is neither ‘world-government’,
nor a
Großraum, nor a ‘spaceless universalism’, but a flexible front of the
willing against the unwilling that feeds on the idea of the theatrical man-
agement and permanent mobilization of the state of exception – a war
without end. The Schmittian net result during Bush’s neo-conservative pre-
sidency, sketched in the Bush Doctrine and executed in the global War on
Terror, includes,
inter alia, the strengthening of executive prerogatives, the
doctrine of pre-emptive war, the abrogation of basic civil liberties, secret
renditions and indefinite detentions, the use of torture, war crimes, the
refusal to apply the Geneva Convention to prisoners of war, and the dis-
regard of basic human rights. These measures diverge from the normal
liberal conception of the domestic and international rule of law and are more
in line with decisionist prescriptions for their suspension and supercession –
legibus absoluta. Significant differences in policy-formation and strategy
disappear from view if Bush junior is equated with Woodrow Wilson.
Critical neo-Schmittians find themselves therefore in the ambiguous
situation of having to reject the programme of legal liberal internationalism,
revalidating pan-regions as bulwarks against a perceived ‘spaceless uni-
versalism’, while simultaneously seeing the idiom of exception usurped by
neo-Conservatives. And as both the neo-Conservatives and the critics of the
politics of the exception draw on Schmitt for policy-inspiration, to what
resources of critique against the politics of fear can these neo-Schmittians
turn without endangering their Schmittian credentials?
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Frederick Guillaume Dufour for pressing me to
write this critique of Schmitt and for his invaluable comments. I am also
indebted to the five anonymous reviewers and to the editors of this journal
for sustained and constructive criticisms and suggestions. Further thanks
are due to Gopal Balakrishnan, Antonio Cerella, Alejandro Colas, Robert
Cox, Jean-Franc¸ois Drolet, Heide Gerstenberger, Sam Knafo, Martti
Koskenniemi, Kamran Matin, Patricia Owens, Maryam Panah, Justin
Rosenberg, Richard Saull, William Scheuerman, Martin Shaw, Robbie
Shilliam, Bo Strath, Jan Selby, Henning Teschke, Kees van der Pijl and
Cynthia Weber for suggestions and discussions, and to the members of the
Fatal attraction: Schmitt’s international theory 221
PM Reading Group at the University of Sussex. Earlier versions of this text
were presented in the Department of IR at the University of Sussex, the
British International Studies Association ‘Historical Sociology and IR’
Working Group, the 76 Congres de l’ACFAS at Montreal University, Canada.
the Department of Politics at Queen Mary’s University London, the European
Research Council funded ‘Research Project Europe, 1815–1914’ at the
University of Helsinki, at the 2010 ISA Annual Convention in New Orleans,
the University of York, United Kingdom, at the 2010 Philosophy of the Social
Sciences Colloquium at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic,
Prague, and at the 2010 SGIR Conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
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