Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's
international
political and legal theory
Article (Published Version)
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk
Teschke, Benno Gerhard (2011) Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political
and legal theory. International Theory, 3 (2). pp. 179-227. ISSN 1752-9719
This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/1671/
This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the
published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to
consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published
version.
Copyright and reuse:
Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.
Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual
author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material
made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.
Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third
parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit
purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic
details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the
content is not changed in any way.
International Theory (2011), 3:2, 179–227
&
Cambridge University Press, 2011
doi:10.1017/S175297191100011X
Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl
Schmitt’s international political and
legal theory
B E N N O G E R H A R D T E S C H K E
Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
E-mail: B.G.Teschke@sussex.ac.uk
The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitt’s reach over the fields
of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his
international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law
and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises –
the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking.
Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitt’s
international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work
requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense
moment in Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitler’s ‘spatial
revolution’ into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europe’s geopolitical history,
grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germany’s wars of
conquest. Consequently, Schmitt’s elevation of the early modern nomos as the
model for civilized warfare – the ‘golden age’ of international law – against
which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is
conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set
of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal
normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this
history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary – friend/
enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism – for past and
present analytical purposes. Schmitt’s defective analytics and problematic history
compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory.
Keywords: Carl Schmitt; international political theory; history of
international law; international historical sociology; genealogy of war
and peace; European system of states
The neo-Schmittian revival in International Relation (IR) and beyond
The publication of Carl Schmitt’s
The Nomos of the Earth and his Theory
of the Partisan (Schmitt 2003, 2004a) has provoked a second wave in the
Anglo-American Schmitt reception and beyond. Whereas the first wave of
179
Schmittiana in the 1980s was largely an exploration of his critique of
liberalism and parliamentary democracy – and thus confined to domestic
political theory and legal studies – this second revival has extended
Schmitt’s reach to international political and legal theory.
1
Unlike the more
critical reception in the wider social sciences, however (Holmes 1993;
Scheuerman 1994; 1999; Lilla 2001; Mu¨ller 2003),
2
Schmitt’s international
thought has not been subjected to a comparable critical interrogation in the
field of IR. On the contrary, Schmitt’s work on international relations has
been largely dissociated from his political commitments and intellectual
liabilities, and mobilized for providing an analytical vocabulary to simulta-
neously conceptualize and criticize,
inter alia, the ongoing US-imperial turn
and its ‘war on terror’ after 9/11. Paradoxically, Schmitt’s double attraction
as a modern classic on the executive state and a significant figure against
liberal universalism has led to a convergence – perhaps in a surprising
complexio oppositorum – between the neo-Conservative Right and the
post-Marxist Left. Schmitt has thus become both an intellectual influence on
neo-conservative thought and United States foreign policy and a critical voice
against liberal imperialism. This has positioned the neo-Schmittian literature
simultaneously to the right and to the left of the predominant Kantian
cosmopolitanism in the field of IR, outflanking the liberal mainstream in a
pincer movement (Balakrishnan 2000; Mu¨ller 2003, 219–43).
In this perspective,
The Nomos provided the missing substantive
historical–juridical backbone, only alluded to in his much better known
The Concept of the Political (Schmitt 1996), for a full-scale rehabilitation
of Schmitt’s international political and legal theory. Schmitt’s history of
international law and order is held to present a historical extension
and contextualization of his interwar critique of the Anglo-American
transformation of international law. For, according to some theorists,
the misguided invocation of ‘just war’ concepts and ‘humanity’ in
1
For statements in the IR literature, see Odysseos and Petito (2007), Hooker (2009), and
Slomp (2009). The journal
Telos introduced Schmitt’s work into the Anglo-American world
from the late 1980s onwards and published excerpts from
The Nomos during the early 1990s.
Several journals dedicated special issues to its English translation, see
Constellations (2004),
South Atlantic Quarterly (2005), and the Leiden Journal of International Law (Odysseos and
Petito, 2006). Koskenniemi (2001, 413–509) and Scheuerman (2008) trace Schmitt’s influence
via a range of German
e´migre´s – most notably Hans Morgenthau – on the bifurcation of
international studies in post-World War II (WWII) United States academia. This generated a
distinct field of IR revolving around power politics, and a separate field of international law,
revolving around jurisprudential ‘formalism’. For Schmitt’s influence in International Law see
Grewe’s (2000) ultra-realist update of
The Nomos, and Koskenniemi’s (2002) critical review.
2
For the wider Schmitt revival see Mouffe (1999, 2005), Z
ˇ izˇek (1999), Dyzenhaus (1999),
Hardt and Negri (2000), Balakrishnan (2000), Zolo (2002), Rasch (2004), Agamben (2005),
Stirk (2005), Ojakangas (2006), Axtmann (2007), and Shapiro (2008).
180
B E N N O G E R H A R D T E S C H K E