21st Century United States foreign policy marks a dramatic departure from
the norms of international law and forms of conflict and cooperation that
Schmitt located in the age of absolutism – the ‘golden age’ of the classical
interstate system. This was a departure whose origins Schmitt had already
diagnosed and lamented in the transition from the
ius publicum europaeum
to a universalizing Anglo-American international law during the interwar
period.
The Nomos, in short, furnished the historical legitimation and
accumulated intellectual resources for a sustained neo-Schmittian critique
of a revitalized just war tradition, the re-moralization and juridification
of international politics, and cosmopolitan humanitarian intervention
(Zolo 2002; Rasch 2004; Slomp 2006; Brown 2007), total war and liberal
world-ordering, and the end of interstate politics and political geography
threatened by the ‘spaceless universalism’ of an Anglo-American imperial-
ism (Z
ˇ izˇek 1999; Stirk 2005; Shapiro 2008; Prozorov 2009; Slomp 2009).
In addition, it also enabled a new reading of the return to the politics of the
exception (Agamben 1998, 2005; Hardt and Negri 2000, 16–18; de Benoist
2007) and a reappraisal of the figure of the partisan, the terrorist, and
new modes of irregular warfare (Behnke 2004; Mouffe 2005; Werner 2010).
Finally,
The Nomos set out an alternative vision of future world order in
terms of a pluriverse of regions, revolving around the category of the
Großraum (pan-region). This category acknowledged the end of the clas-
sical interstate system, while refusing to accept a de-territorialized model
of world unity (Mouffe 2005; Petito 2007; Zolo 2007).
3
In this context,
the Schmittian vocabulary – decisionist sovereignty, state of exception,
friend/enemy binary, pan-interventionism, discriminatory concept of war,
re-politicization of constitutional and international law, greater regions –
presents not only a rediscovery and addition to the mainstream IR academic
lexicon, but has also become a significant idiom for the social sciences in the
21st century at large.
The Nomos, furthermore, did not simply provide additional historical
gravitas, but seemed to demonstrate that Schmitt’s interwar critique of
liberal internationalism could not be dismissed as a series of disconnected
and
ad hoc polemical tirades of an embattled Nazi intellectual. Rather, it
was grounded in a systematic reconstruction of the entire history of
European politics and international law from the Discoveries to the Cold
War, exceptional in scope and ambition. This original project revolved
around the central category of the nomos, conceived as a unity of law
3
Even Habermas, who once opined that ‘Carl Schmitt will [not] have a similar power of
contagion in the Anglo-Saxon world’ [as Nietzsche and Heidegger] (1989, 135), now renders
his reflections on world politics in terms of an elementary opposition between the Kantian
project and Schmitt’s ultra-realism (Habermas, 2006, 188–93).
Fatal attraction: Schmitt’s international theory 181
and space. Its attraction resides in its apparent ability to function as a
fundamental world-ordering device, enabling a macro-periodization and
interpretation of world history in terms of a succession of distinct nomoi –
from the
Conquista and the absolutist interstate order, via Britain’s sea-
appropriation and the US-designed post-Versailles transformation of
international law, to Hitler’s
Großraumpolitik and beyond. Each new
nomos was initiated by, and grounded in, comprehensive world-order
constitutive acts of land-appropriation, referred to as ‘spatial revolutions’.
In each case, ‘spatial revolutions’ reconfigured the relations between the
spatial structure of world politics and the changing role of international
law in mediating inter-spatial relations.
Against this background, some writers mount the even more ambitious
thesis that Schmitt’s wider international thought transcends the politicized
and temporally circumscribed remit of his insights into the nature of interwar
geopolitics. The argument is that
The Nomos ‘offers perhaps the most
compelling history of the development of international law from the ashes
of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Cold War’ and ‘a fully fledged
alternative historical account of international relations, of the genesis,
achievements and demise of modern ‘‘international society’’, often referred to
as the ‘‘Westphalian system’’ in the field of IR’ (Odysseos and Petito 2007, 1).
Moreover,
The Nomos, it is claimed, not only proposes a superior narrative
to the conventional IR story of ‘Westphalia’, but also articulates a distinct
theoretical framework: an amalgamation of Schmitt’s concrete-order-
thinking and his concept of the political. This paradigmatic innovation
carries the prospects for a new method to conceptualize world-order
formation. Accordingly, the conjunction of both moments – a theoretically
anchored and critical new conceptual vocabulary ready to be deployed in the
contemporary geopolitical conjuncture, secured by and extracted from a
reinterpretation of the trajectory of the European interstate civilization –
establishes Schmitt not only as a radical voice against American liberalism,
but as a hitherto underrated classic in the field to be incorporated into the
canon of IR’s most influential critical figures (Odysseos and Petito 2007,
2009; Hooker 2009, 3).
The limits of Schmitt’s international theory
This article provides a critical reappraisal of Schmitt’s international the-
ory, developed from the angle of its specific political context and ideo-
logical purpose. It suggests that a re-contextualization of Schmitt’s
thought in the interwar period discloses a distinct view on the construc-
tion, objectives, and limits of his theoretical premises: a combination of
182
B E N N O G E R H A R D T E S C H K E