generate a plausible international theory, rather than advancing localized
commentary. For without an attempt to secure empirical propositions
theoretically, the mode of analysis tends to become
ad hoc and descrip-
tive, rather than general and explanatory. While few authors who draw
on Schmitt selectively would call themselves neo-Schmittian without
multiple qualifications, even a partial appropriation becomes problematic
if discrete insights are not realigned with and tested against the theoretical
premises of his work. Failing that, a dissociation of these categories from
their abandoned premises threatens to compromise their standing as
coherent international theory.
Re-reading Schmitt contextually: the politics of concept-formation
This article draws on a contextualized close reading of Schmitt’s writings
on international politics, law, and history between 1934 and 1950, notably,
in descending order, on his four major publications –
The Nomos, The
Order of Greater Spaces in International Law (Schmitt 1995c), Land and
Sea (Schmitt 1997), and On the Three Types of Juristic Thought (Schmitt
2004b) – supplemented by his wider articles and interventions from that
period.
4
This re-reading of pre-war and wartime texts is, where necessary,
informed by his wider Weimar writings on constitutional theory, state
theory, and the history of political ideas.
The article adopts a threefold interpretative strategy. It situates
Schmitt’s intellectual production within his politics and his explicit and
ideologically super-charged view of concept-formation as political combat.
5
Simultaneously, it proceeds by way of immanent critique – testing the
intellectual coherence and explanatory power of his substantive account
against his underlying method. Can concrete-order-thinking generate a
plausible international theory? In addition, it enjoins a standard of
external critique, adducing the findings of the contemporary state of the
art in the more specialized sub-literatures in the historiography, political
sociology, and political geography of the early modern and interwar
periods to interrogate Schmitt’s empirical–historical conclusions.
For the neo-Schmittian reading of Schmitt relies on two interconnected
moves. Author and text form the primary object of enquiry in abstraction
4
The Nomos was published in 1950, but written between 1942 and 1945. The Order of
Greater Spaces was published in 1939; fourth edition 1941. An English translation is still
missing.
Land and Sea was published in 1942 and The Three Types in 1934. Most of Schmitt’s
articles and shorter interventions from that period are collected in Schmitt (1988a, 1995d,
2005a).
5
For the nexus between Schmitt’s politics between 1933 and 1936/45 and his work, see
Ru¨thers (1988, 1990), Haggenmacher (2001), and Mehring (2009).
Fatal attraction: Schmitt’s international theory 185
from the specific sociopolitical context, concrete referent problematique,
and authorial intent that informed intellectual production. This operation
of de-contextualization generates a regrouped and consolidated set of
categories and methodological principles that metamorphoses into a for-
malized approach ready to be re-deployed across the terrain of historical
enquiry – the making of a timeless classic. This process of abstraction leads
to conceptual reification as the authorial definition of concepts forms the
given
a priori for ‘application’. In a second step, contemporary real-world
phenomena – the ‘war on terror’, emergency powers, wars for humanity,
conditional sovereignty – are then analysed through this conceptual prism
with a view to validate or ‘prove’ the categorical apparatus. Schmittian
concepts are lifted from their original context of formation and application
and grafted onto radically different sociopolitical contexts.
This article restores the relation of text to world (applying Schmittian
categories to the present) into a relation of world to text (recovering
Schmitt’s present for understanding the formation of his categories). What
particular questions and what power-relations drove the construction
of concepts in relation to which they were articulated as solutions? This
retrieval of the context of concept-formation leads to an enquiry into
Schmitt’s politics of concept-formation – a political sociology of concept-
formation and, ultimately, an ideology-critique. Schmitt’s considerations
on concept-formation warrant this procedure as his work is littered with
sharp and apodictic assertions, encapsulated exemplarily in his axiomatic
statement that ‘all political concepts, images and terms have a polemical
meaning (in the literal meaning of Greek
polemos, i.e. war). They are
focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation’
(Schmitt 1996, 30). Elsewhere, Schmitt avers that intellectual labour
invariably involves ‘the forging and re-forging of scientific concepts as
political concepts in a wider ongoing struggle over existential autonomy,
individually and collectively’. Similarly, in a passage on the legal inno-
vations and conceptual neologisms that accompany modern American
imperialism, Schmitt notes that ‘he who has real power is also capable of
determining concepts and words;
Caesar dominus est supra grammati-
cam: Caesar is also the lord of grammar’ (Schmitt 1988c, 202). For
Schmitt, political science and jurisprudence are themselves subject to and
in the service of the highest and most intense differentiation – the friend/
enemy distinction that demands an existential act of decision. Conse-
quently, a German legal–political counter-vocabulary was required to
regain spiritual and existential autonomy in a geopolitical struggle for
survival. The deconstruction of Schmitt’s thought requires therefore an
auto-application of his guidelines for concept-formation to his reformu-
lated history of international law and politics. For the neo-Schmittian
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