Fatal Attraction: A Critique of Carl Schmitt's International Political and Legal Theory

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
BENNO GERHARD TESCHKE
Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
E-mail: [email protected]
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
180 BENNO GERHARD TESCHKE
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; Müller 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; Müller 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 émigrés – 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), Žižek (1999), Dyzenhaus (1999),
Hardt and Negri (2000), Balakrishnan (2000), Zolo (2002), Rasch (2004), Agamben (2005),
Stirk (2005), Ojakangas (2006), Axtmann (2007), and Shapiro (2008).
Fatal attraction: Schmitt’s international theory 181
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 (Žižek 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).
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
political decisionism (politics of the exception), the concept of the political

(friend/enemy distinction), and concrete-order-thinking (land-appropriations
as determinants of changes in international law and order). This point of
departure – the historically specific conditions of knowledge production –
affords a better understanding of how these premises translate into a
particular, though specious and defective, reinterpretation of the history
of international law and order. This operation of contextualization pro-
vides a privileged view on the anatomy and limits of Schmitt’s interna-
tional political and legal theory.
The article also suggests that the neo-Schmittian turn in IR pays insuffi-
cient attention to Schmitt’s political context and his politics of concept-
formation, which governed the construction of his history of international
law and order. Its followers tend to take Schmitt’s theoretical premises and
his historical narrative for granted in order to project his interwar critique
of American imperialism onto the 21st century. This compromises their
attempts to use his thought for purposes of international theorizing. To
demonstrate these claims, the article performs four analytical moves. First, it
sets out the context-dependent conception of Schmitt’s triple axiomatic
premises (decisionism, concept of the political, and concrete-order-thinking).
Second, it provides an exposition and critique of the explanatory limits of
this theoretical architecture. Third, it shows by means of a reconstruction
and critical examination of Schmitt’s account of the rise and fall of the
ius publicum europaeum across the four ‘spatial revolutions’ that defined his
intellectual terrain of engagement – from the Discoveries to Hitler’s
Großraumpolitik – how the defects of his theoretical assumptions expressed
themselves in a problematic history of the European interstate system. The
argument is that the discrepancy between Schmitt’s explanans – concrete-
order-thinking – and his explanandum – transformations in the structure of
political authority, international law, territorial order, and war and peace –
reveals fundamental deficiencies in the explanatory power of Schmitt’s
theoretical approach. Given these defects, the article finally questions IR
theorists’ reliance on Schmitt’s history and theory for the purposes
of formulating a general, plausible, and coherent international theory
(given its context-dependent purpose). It concludes by drawing out how
Schmitt’s problematic history and the limits of his theory manifest
themselves in their interpretation of 20th and 21st Century international
relations and, in particular, the War on Terror.
To bring Schmitt’s distinct approach into sharper relief, the article
contrasts his international political and legal theory throughout the text
with the alternative paradigm of International Historical Sociology.
As Schmitt’s intellectual preoccupations moved from constitutional to
international law during the mid-1930s, he realized that political decisionism
was insufficient to capture the geopolitics of land-appropriations and

spatial revolutions, which he now privileged as foundational world order-
constituting acts in order to re-conceive his history of international law and
order as an anti-liberal and anti-normative tract. This shift from decisionism
to concrete-order-thinking as a sociologically enhanced new type of juristic
thought was meant to remedy this explanatory vacuum. Yet, Schmitt’s ren-
dition of the sociological that drove geopolitical expansion never incorpo-
rated the social sources and social processes that caused geopolitical conflict,
spatial revolutions, and world-order projects. This resulted in a gap between
the objectives of his theoretical premises and his de-sociologized and de-
subjectified historiography that regressed into the power-political reifications
of geopolitics as such. This suppression and elimination of social relations
was already prefigured in his concept of the political – an ontologized friend/
enemy distinction – that now informed his concept of the geopolitical. Both
detached the (geo-)political from the social – in fact, prioritized and valorized
the (geo-)political over and against the social.
Accordingly, Schmitt’s work is engaged not solely in terms of interna-
tional political theory – a mode of theorizing that all too often remains
unchecked by its confrontation with its empirical referent – but is set in
dialogue with international history and, ultimately, international histor-
ical sociology. For it is this absence of an international historical sociology
in Schmitt’s work – an explanation of the differential relations between
historically varying forms of authority relations, geopolitics, law, and
spatiality in their articulation with changing social relations – that ulti-
mately renders it defective.
Given these liabilities, the article raises the question as to how neo-
Schmittians, given the anti-sociological cast of Schmitt’s theoretical tools,
can counter and diffuse the restrictions and limits of his premises. It also
suggests that any de-contextualization of Schmittian insights from their
contextual purpose and detachment from their theoretical presupposi-
tions threatens to imperil the theoretical standing of attempts to apply his
categories to an altered contemporary geopolitical configuration. For
those IR theorists who endorse Schmitt’s theoretically informed history in
toto, any salvaging of the Schmittian research programme seems proble-
matic; for those authors who draw on discrete Schmittian concepts and
insights in a more eclectic and syncretistic manner, the challenge arises
how to re-anchor, secure, and integrate these disparate insights theoreti-
cally in line with the normal protocols of social science to satisfy the
requirements of theorizing. Even if particular Schmittian claims may
illuminate aspects of international relations, both groups of authors need
to address the question as to whether decisionism, the concept of the
political and concrete-order-thinking, combined or each on its own, can
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
Rüthers (1988, 1990), Haggenmacher (2001), and Mehring (2009).
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
tendency to provide a de-contextualized and de-politicized account of

Schmitt’s recasting of international thought, dissociated from his concrete
intellectual project, contradicts and remains unaligned to Schmitt’s own
method of concept-formation.
What constituted the polemical object of Schmitt’s interventions?
During the Weimar period, Schmitt formulated his definition of sover-
eignty in terms of political decisionism as an ultra-authoritarian solution
to the intractable crisis of the Weimar Republic, destabilized by coup d’États,
strikes, civil unrest, and revolutions. The option for defining sovereignty in
terms of the exception was not the result of a dispassionate and scholarly
observation on the ultimate locus of sovereignty, but a politicized and
normative intervention into the jurisprudential debates on the interpretation
of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution – the scope of presidential emer-
gency powers and executive government by decree for the restoration of
social order. Similarly, the attempt to define the political in terms of an
existentialist, ontological, and agonal friend/enemy grouping served the
purpose to unify a fragmented industrial and mass-democratic society as a
homogeneous community against outside threats and to redeem Weimar
Germany’s lost right to conduct war.
Equally, Schmitt’s reinterpretation of the history of international law
during the 1930s and 1940s is bound to the concrete situation of the
intellectual and political crisis of legitimacy generated by Hitler’s spatial
revolution, for which Schmitt offered the most incisive and comprehensive
politico-jurisprudential justification, grounded in concrete-order-thinking.
This prepared the formulation of an alternative geopolitical order, pre-
dicated on ‘land-appropriation’, conceptualized in Großraum. Consequently,
Schmitt’s research-organizing Leitmotiv revolves around the central axis of
the pre-juridical and legitimacy-constituting act of ‘land-appropriation’ that
establishes a radical title to land and, by extension, a new nomos of the
earth. The Nomos, written between 1942 and 1945, and Land and Sea,
published in 1942, were conceived as long historico-legal detours to accu-
mulate the intellectual resources and arguments to legitimize Hitler’s
Raumrevolution – a rewriting of history by one of the leading intellectuals of
the ascendant axis-power. Schmitt pursues the dual strategy of developing a
conceptual counter-vocabulary to rewrite international history geopolitically
as a series of ‘spatial revolutions’, inserting Hitler’s Großraumpolitik into a
transhistoricized continuum of ‘land-appropriations’; and, inversely, mobi-
lizing this reconstructed history to ascribe historical legitimacy and direction
to Nazi-Germany’s wars of conquest. The conjunction of both strategic
moves generates a perfect argumentative circularity. History is rewritten in
the light of Schmitt’s (geo-)politics and Schmitt’s historical revisionism jus-
tifies German imperialism. Although the recovery of the ideological purpose
that motivated the conception of Schmitt’s political and international ana-

lytics does not per se invalidate his account in an aprioristic manner, it
demands nevertheless a careful re-examination of its implications for his
theoretically informed history.
Against the background of this working hypothesis, the article starts with
a survey summary of the neo-Schmittian argument, followed by an expo-
sition of Schmitt’s theoretical premises – political decisionism, concept of the
political, and concrete-order-thinking. In the three substantive historical
sections, the article deconstructs Schmitt’s account of the Discoveries, the
age of absolutism and the ius publicum, and the specificity of England. This
is followed by a critique of his interpretation of early modern international
law and warfare. The third historical section interrogates Schmitt’s inter-
pretation of Versailles, the League of Nations, the Monroe-Doctrine and his
concept of the Großraum – notably against the background of his shift from
concrete-order-thinking towards an international political economy (IPE) of
capitalism. The penultimate section returns to the critique of Schmitt’s
theoretical premises, whereas the conclusion draws out some implications of
the deficiencies in Schmitt’s thought for the neo-Schmittian revival in IR.
The (neo-)Schmittian history and theory of international law and order

What is the secret behind Schmitt’s contemporaneity? The essential line
taken by neo-Schmittians (Kervégan 1999; Rasch 2004; Mouffe 2005,
2007; Odysseos and Petito 2007) relies on a broad endorsement of Schmitt’s
interpretation of the age of the ius publicum – the body of maxims and
praxes of early modern international law that prevailed, roughly, through-
out the period from 1492/1648 to WWI – as a functioning system of legal
norms, regulating the excesses of interstate anarchy in a geopolitical plur-
iverse without erasing the essence of sovereign statehood: the public decision
to conduct war. This unity of space and law – termed by Schmitt as nomos
in contradistinction to the universal medieval and liberal-capitalist cosmos –
revolved around the core categories of the state as the only legitimate subject
of war and peace, secularized and absolute state sovereignty, the executive
as the final arbiter over the state of exception, the idea of iustus hostis (just
enemy) and the associated concept of ‘non-discriminatory war’. According
to Schmitt, the monopolization of warfare by states (ius belli ac pacis)
removed violent conflict from the ideological struggles of ‘civil society’
and re-concentrated on organized violence at the level of the state. This
arrogation of the monopoly of violence by plural absolutist states for-
malized a double distinction – between public and private, de-legitimizing
and de-militarizing private actors (lords, cities, estates, pirates, military
orders) while elevating the public state to the only subject of international
law and politics, and between inside and outside, separating a domes-
tically neutralized and pacified ‘civil society’ from an international sphere
of interstate war and peace. This dualism fortified the distinction between
public international law and private criminal law.
Although war remained an indispensable and irreducible manifestation of
concrete political communities – indeed, the essence of ‘the political’ – it was
the crowning achievement of early modern public law to have channelled
collective violence among a variety of actors – an ongoing European civil
war – into a ‘war in form’. This move towards a ‘non-discriminatory
concept of war’ entailed, according to Schmitt, the ‘bracketing of war’ –
including its civilization, rationalization, and humanization – and a clear
distinction between belligerents and neutrals, combatants and non-
combatants, states of war and states of peace. ‘War in form’, that is, modern
interstate warfare, came to be conducted among equals according to certain
inter-subjectively agreed and commonly binding legal conventions – a
combination of ius ad bellum and ius in bello – that also implied
the positive making of peace. The ius ad bellum came to be divorced from
‘just cause’ considerations (iusta causa), which were declared immaterial
for determining the legitimacy of war. This gave rise to the notion of a
‘non-discriminatory concept of war’, which superseded medieval just war
doctrines. Thus, juridically externalized, the reasons for war-declarations
were placed outside any legal, moral, or political judgment, implying the
retention of the status of the enemy, even during and after war, as a just
enemy, rather than its demotion to a foe, criminal, or barbarian. Morality, in
that sense, came to be divorced from politics proper. A destructive moral
universalism, as expressed in the 15th and 16th century wars of religion,
was replaced by a salutary moral relativism in interstate relations.
Accordingly, the ius publicum implied a decisive rupture with medieval just
war theories, grounded in the moral universalism of the respublica christiana.
This new concept of war – at once: public, that is, restricted to interstate war,
bracketed, that is, circumscribed by rational rules of conduct, and non-
discriminatory, that is, morally neutral – sealed the shift from the medieval
ius gentium to the ius inter gentes. It established a historically unprecedented
and exemplary nomos, capable of combining untrammelled state sovereignty
with the anarchy-mitigating effects of international law.
This line of reasoning was powerfully invoked by Schmitt against the
post-World War I (WWI) criminalization of the German Reich as an
‘outlaw nation’, whose distinctly political status as a sovereign state was
revoked by the ‘Versailles Diktat’. As Germany was not admitted to the
peace negotiations, and as ‘war guilt’ and ‘war crime’ were not juridical
concepts in interstate relations (nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege),
their formulation and intrusion into international law after 1919 transformed
public interstate law into an incipient world domestic law, starting to

re-moralize and juridify the inter-political by introducing a new ‘dis-
criminatory concept of war’. This re-inserted just war considerations into
the definition of the legality of warfare. This move castrated, according
to Schmitt, the essence of the political – the sovereign decision to go to
war against an enemy. Versailles thereby abrogated the cornerstone of
the classical ius publicum, undermined war’s status as the autonomous,
purest, and highest form of interstate relations, transformed war into a
policing exercise, and thus re-domesticated warfare. Worse, the Wilsonian
invocation of the concept of humanity reconnected post-Versailles concep-
tions of international law to medieval just war doctrines that contained a
tendency towards the total negation of the formerly ‘just enemy’ and its
degradation to an enemy of mankind – a non-human. Correlatively, it gen-
erated a new and distinct liberal way of war – more total in its war aims than
the bracketed and limited wars of pre-1914 Europe – as it aimed, next to the
killing of non-humans, at the direct transformation of politics, society, and
subjectivities: the making of liberal subjects.
Neo-Schmittians detect in the United States hubris of the neo-
conservative imperial moment – and its morally recharged discourse of good
vs. evil, humanity against terrorists, and the impossibility of neutrality – a
replay, if in intensified form, of the spectre of Versailles. This is embedded in
a much broader and essentially continuous proclivity in United States
foreign policy since WWI and its redefinition of international law. In this,
the invocation of humanity leads, paradoxically but logically, to the
de-politicization of former ‘just enemies’, their criminalization as outlaws,
even their de-humanization as foes, and the radicalization and bestialization
of warfare through its transformation into an annihilatory exercise of
unqualified killing, the return of torture as a legitimate means against what
are by definition non-combatants, and the structural impossibility of con-
cluding peace in the absence of a legal enemy – a war without end. Its
temporal ending is equivalent to either the murder of the last terrorist, his
incarceration without trial, or the creation of liberal subjects. The ‘war
against terror’ is also regarded as another incarnation of Wilson’s ‘war to end
all wars’, being paradoxically total in purpose and unending in space and
time. The totalizing character of the ‘liberal way of war’, then, is manifested
in its war-aims, informed by a re-moralization of international law and
politics. This invariably includes the liberal transformation of targeted states,
societies, and subjectivities, structurally incapable of leaving an enemy state
and its society intact after defeat and of re-admitting a defeated state into the
‘international society’ or ‘international community’ – a historical practice
ideal-typically exercised with post-Napoleonic France’s readmission into the
‘Concert of Europe’, agreed at the Vienna Congress – without its constitutional
and social alignment with liberal norms. Strictly speaking, the ‘liberal way
of war’ deserves no longer the appellation ‘war’ – hence the commotion
around the ill-chosen term ‘war on terror’ – but is transformed into a
series of policing actions, including the bio-politicization of populations,
otherwise known as humanitarian intervention. Furthermore, the ‘war
against terror’ after 9/11 does not constitute a departure from more law-
based cosmopolitan forms of international politics, but represents an
intensification of the logic of liberal world-ordering – the ‘neo-conservative
turn’ in the United States Administration notwithstanding. In the end, the
argument is that the contemporary period presents a return to the civil wars
of the pre-Westphalian period, even though American ‘world unity’ has
immeasurably expanded the efficacy of universal law in a global age, defined
as a ‘spaceless universalism’ driven by the ideology of ‘pan-interventionism’.
All of this, according to neo-Schmittians, is inscribed in the long-term
logic of the world-historical departure from Schmitt’s golden age of limited
interstate wars, which then appears in retrospect as – and is accordingly
elevated to the status of – the highest achievement of European civilization:
the genius of European jurisprudence. Beyond this deployment of Schmitt,
some neo-Schmittians re-mobilize, normatively, Schmitt’s idea of Großraum –
a greater territorial space or a pan-region – as the elementary building
block for an anti-cosmopolitan, anti-universal organization of inter-
national order, based on a plurality of coexisting Großräume, each one
under the leadership of an imperial nation. Against the imminent threat of
a ‘spaceless universalism’, pan-regions are meant to provide guarantees
against the homogenization of the world into a liberal flatland – essential
for the maintenance of difference and pluralism – indeed essential for the
very possibility of the political, the friend/enemy distinction, encased in
mutually exclusive regional blocs. Viewed synthetically, this account
presents a powerful counter-narrative and conceptual apparatus to the
reigning discourse of liberal cosmopolitanism and requires a careful
re-examination.
Schmitt’s method: from political decisionism to concrete-order-thinking

Any critique of this Schmittian argument will have to start from Schmitt’s
context-bound method and his shifting position during the mid-30s from
political decisionism to concrete-order-thinking. Schmitt famously rede-
fined sovereignty from the angle of the emergency situation, captured by
Schmitt’s decisionism, forged during the early Weimar period in his cri-
tique of Kelsen’s legal normativism (Kelsen 1967). ‘Sovereign is he who
decides on the emergency situation’ (Schmitt 1985b). As legal norms
could only function in normal situations, legal normativism was liable to
a de-personalized, apolitical, and ahistorical blindness. Sovereignty,

according to Schmitt, is not invested in the state as an impersonal and
objective legal subject (an aggregate of rules and statutes), but inter-
mittently crystallizes if and when political crises and social disorder –
liminal situations – escape constitutional norms. Such constitutional crises
require an extra-legal and eminently political executive decision by a
single authority for the reassertion of order, grounded in the state’s right of
self-preservation. Moments of indeterminacy and indecision in the objective
legal order require rapid and firm, essentially discretionary if not arbitrary,
fact-setting acts of subjective decision. Decisionism captures the idea that
sovereignty resides ultimately in that power that can declare and enforce
the state of exception, suspending the constitution in an emergency, whose
declaration cannot be derived from extant legal norms and standard
procedures of decision making. Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem. The
sovereign decision is a self-referential and unmediated act of authority –
singular, absolute, and final. Jurisprudentially, it appears ex nihilo. This
discretionary element of ‘political surplus-value’ re-established the primacy
of politics over the rule of law. Legality does not exhaust legitimacy.
Decisionism was complemented by Schmitt’s concept of the political. It
was formally defined in terms of an intensification of antagonisms that
escalated towards the friend/enemy distinction (Schmitt 1996), which
demanded at some unspecifiable point a political decision on the identi-
fication of the internal and external enemy to forge a decisive political
unit and to maintain existential autonomy. The decision activated the
differentiation between the inside and the outside and, within the inside,
that which had to be externalized. This precipitated a redefinition of the
meaning of democracy. For Schmitt, ‘democracy requires therefore, first
homogeneity and second – if the need arises – elimination or eradication
of heterogeneity’ (Schmitt 1985a, 9), rather than the ‘perennial discussions’
of parliamentarian democracy grounded in liberal pluralism. This instan-
tiated the consolidation of an otherwise intensely fragmented industrial and
mass-democratic society into a socially homogeneous political community –
an ethnically defined demos – through the joint first principles of autono-
mous executive sovereignty: external war and internal repression. By
appealing to the prima ratio of self-preservation, the overriding threats to
security and national independence demote and flatten all domestic differ-
ences and generate the required unity and unanimity. Democracy, according
to Schmitt, is thus redefined in identitarian terms as the direct representation
of a unified people (Volk) by the political leadership, possibly weakly
mediated by irregular acts of spontaneous acclamation and plebiscitary
elements that intermittently renew the bond between the leader and the
led – the national myth of direct democracy.
Although Schmitt criticized through decisionism legal normativism ‘from

above’, his growing interest in international law and geopolitics precipitated
a move after 1933 towards an alternative method – concrete-order-thinking –
which attacked normativism and decisionism ‘from below’ (Schmitt 2004b).
This revealed another weakness in normativism as it declared the original
formation of statehood and interstate order a non-jurisprudential problem.
Neither normativism nor decisionism had an answer to the question what
foundational ur-act of legitimacy precedes acts of international legality.
What constitutes territorial order and international law? But any answer
to this question had to revise constitutional law in the direction of
a sociologically and politically expanded notion of jurisprudence as a new
type of juristic thought – differentiated from normativism and decisionism –
which Schmitt referred to as concrete-order-thinking. In this, the term nomos
was designed to fill this deficiency in conventional jurisprudence. For ‘nomos
is precisely the full immediacy of a legal power not mediated by laws; it is a
constitutive historical event – an act of legitimacy, whereby the legality of a
mere law is first made meaningful’ (Schmitt 2003, 73).
What is concrete-order-thinking as a sociologically enhanced jurisprudence
in international law?6 Schmitt exemplified his paradigmatic turn most clearly
in The Nomos. It is premised on a single thesis, stating that all legal orders
are concrete, territorial orders, founded by an original, constitutive act of
land-capture. This establishes a primary and radical title to land. Acts of
land-appropriation and distribution, their partition and classification, form
the material matrix that constitutes a nomos. Schmitt derives the term
nomos – in contradistinction to law as statute (Gesetz) – from the Greek verb
nemein, meaning the tripartite act of appropriating, dividing, and pasturing.
‘Nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a
people becomes spatially visible – the initial measure and division of pasture-
land, that is, the land-appropriation as well as the concrete order contained in
it and following from it’ (Schmitt 2003, 70). Concrete-order-thinking grounds
legal order in a prior act of soil appropriation, creating a unity of space and
law. Against the prevailing aspatial, ahistorical, and de-politicized legal
positivism in European jurisprudence that conceived of law as an abstract
web of norms, tied together in a seamless hierarchy, ultimately derived from
the Grundnorm of the constitution to which even the state is subjected,
Schmitt explicitly opts for this brute act of seizure and occupation to argue
the case for the meta-legal origins of any international order, grounding its
law in a material–terrestrial reality. The great land-appropriating powers are
6
For a rich, but ultimately un-critical, exposition of concrete-order-thinking, see Ojakangas
(2006, 149–72).
the historical carriers of international law projects. Legal concepts have

spatial origins. Might generates right.
The rise of the early modern interstate nomos

This conception of a law-antecedent act of legitimacy came to inform
Schmitt’s interpretation of the history of international law – from the
Discoveries to the Großraum – for it put the question of the origins of
international spatial and legal order centre stage. For Schmitt, the early
modern interstate order, grounded in the new spatial–political config-
uration of a territorial pluriverse of sovereign absolutist jurisdictions, tied
together and regulated by the rise of the ius publicum europaeum, con-
stitutes a world-historical achievement par excellence. For the nomos of
the age of Westphalia combined a multiplicity of domestically autono-
mous and internationally sovereign states with an international-order
facilitating code of international public law, circumscribing external
sovereignty without abrogating it.
How does Schmitt’s concrete-order-thinking explain and periodize the
formation of this interstate order? And how plausible is his account of the
Discoveries, the absolutist state, early modern public law and international
relations and, in particular, his notion of non-discriminatory warfare?
Schmitt vacillates between three poles of explanation – the Discoveries
(1492), the rise of the absolutist state (1648), and English balancing (1713).
In the end, he fails to clarify their interrelation and causal hierarchy. This
explanatory vagueness is compounded by an unsure periodicity and an
untenable idealization of the form and substance of early modern inter-
national relations. The next section clarifies his argument by reconstructing,
in turn, his discussion of the Discoveries, the new post-Conquest global lines,
the rise of the continental absolutist interstate order, and the specificity of
England. This provides a far more complex, inconclusive and, ultimately,
unsatisfactory composite picture than the neo-Schmittian literature allows.
But none of these fragmented causes, even combined, can explain the nomos-
constituting act of the Discoveries – Schmitt’s ur-cause – and link it to the rise
of the Westphalian interstate system. The problem of causality extends to the
very core object of Schmitt’s analysis – the European nomos.
The discoveries: geopolitics without social process

For Schmitt, the Discoveries mark the crucial historical moment that
founds the European nomos, for this original act of land-appropriation,
grounds law in two directions: internally and externally. Internally, the
first order of all ownership and property relations is created by the initial
division and distribution of land (y) externally, the land-appropriating

group is confronted with other land-owning groups and powers. In this
case, land-appropriation represents a legal title in international law
(Schmitt 2003, 45).
If this sounds like the tautological identification of power with legitimacy
that generates legality, Schmitt charges legal positivists of being ‘content to
reject as ‘‘unjuridical’’ the question of what processes established this order’
(Schmitt 2003, 82), raising the expectation of an extra-jurisprudential
explanation of the Conquest. Does concrete-order-thinking capture the nexus
between the sources and dynamics of the conquest and the spatial ordering
of the new nomos? If Schmitt’s institutional historicism immunizes against
the timeless verities of realist provenance, it embraces simultaneously an
asociological and non-geopolitical stance that fails to decipher the encounter
between the land-appropriating and land-owning group: the nature of 16th
Century Spanish absolutism, the relations between the Conquistadores and
the Spanish Crown, the spatio-temporally differentiated inter-imperial rela-
tions between the expanding European overseas empires remain unexamined.
Schmitt’s non-sociological account of the Discoveries is compounded by the
absence of an enquiry into the ‘inter-national’ nature of the encounter. The
native Amerindians remain missing from his account of the regionally dif-
ferentiated resolutions of land and property conflicts in the Americas. They
are not even acknowledged as passive bearers and victims of the incoming
Spaniards and Portuguese. They are nullified and written out of history, as
Schmitt conceived of the Americas as a de-subjectified vacuum. The concrete
processes of land-appropriation, distribution, and property-relations in the
Americas – the geopolitical encounter with the natives as historical subjects –
remain not only off-screen, but by definition outside any purely (geo-)political
notion of conquest-as-concretion (Anderson 1974, 60–84; Wolf 1982;
Cocker 1998). In this sense, concrete-order-thinking remains blunt, as the
concepts for specifying the dynamics of social property and authority rela-
tions that drive overseas expansion are nowhere developed or deployed.
Schmitt’s concrete-order-thinking does not provide an international his-
torical sociology of clashing property relations and subsequent geopolitical
world-ordering, but a rudimentary and failed attempt to develop a con-
ceptualization of international law and geopolitics that ultimately regresses
into a eurocentric historico-legal theory of geopolitical occupation.7 A void
opens up at the centre of Schmitt’s concrete-order-thinking – the absence of a
7
Even sympathetic commentators criticize that Schmitt’s ‘own ideas on concrete orders
were the least detailed and developed parts of his work. (y) We are left not only with a sense
of incompleteness, but with a general vagueness’ (Bendersky 2004, 30).
sociology of property and power. In the end, Schmitt provides no answer to

his own question: What processes established this order?
This gap between theoretical ambition and substantive result leads to
another contradiction. Schmitt’s discussion of the rationalization –
jurisprudentially and materially – of the colonization process by the Christian
powers of Spain and Portugal reveal, quite paradoxically, that the Conquests
did not precipitate the ‘spatial revolution’ and the subsequent rise of the new
European interstate nomos that he generically associated with the enclosure
processes overseas. This is most clearly expressed in his differentiation
between the rayas and the amity-lines. The first repartition of the oceans after
the Discoveries in form of the rayas (divisional lines) meant the territor-
ialization of the seas and the newly discovered lands. America, the Atlantic
(and the Pacific) remained firmly within the reach of the late medieval pre-
global law-governed cosmos of the res publica Christiana, including the
papal missionary mandate and the just war doctrine over and against non-
Christians (Schmitt 2003, 80). At least formally, the Vatican remained the
central supra-territorial source of adjudication in catholic Europe.8
The initial post-Conquest partition of the world between the Catholic
powers along the rayas was only challenged by the Spanish–French Treaty of
Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) and the subsequent Anglo–French and Anglo–
Spanish 17th Century treaties that fixed the amity-lines, dividing the world
into a civilized – law-governed – zone within these lines and an anarchic zone,
a state of nature, ‘beyond the line’. This designated not only the land, but also
the sea ‘beyond the line’ as ‘free’ and lawless. Res nullius is also res omnius –
up for grabs by the strongest taker. Schmitt therefore locates the decisive
break from the medieval-Christian ius gentium to the ius inter gentes not
in the fact of the Discoveries per se, but in the transition from the Spanish–
Portuguese rayas-system to the Anglo-centric amity-lines. This initiated
America’s redefinition from an integrated appendix of the euro-centric
‘Old World’ to a distinct ‘New World’ to be re-appropriated and divided
in a morally neutered agonal contest according to the law of the stronger.9
Absolutism: public state or dynastic sovereignty?

Having delinked the Discoveries from the rise of the European nomos, the
decisive passage from the ius gentium to the ius publicum europaeum is
now precipitated by the rise of the state. ‘The conceptual elaboration of
8
This practice of conditional territorialization was in line with prevailing feudal social
property relations (Teschke 1998).
9
There is no evidence, according to Jörg Fisch (1984), that the European legal profession
distinguished at the time between a law-bound sphere ‘within the line’ and a lawless sphere
‘beyond the line’.
international law in this epoch had only one axis: the sovereign territorial
state’ (Schmitt 2003, 127). Schmitt equates the generic term ‘state’ with the
absolutist state. It is defined as a concrete phenomenon, characterized by
absolute and secularized sovereignty, legal-administrative centralization and
rationalization, the monopolization of the means of violence, and bounded
territoriality – a unitary state. The ius inter gentes is predicated on this spatial
structure of mutually exclusive jurisdictions as an interstate law, supplanting
the supra-territorial ius gentium. Schmitt grounds its genesis not in the
Discoveries, but in the emergence of a new form of sovereignty that trans-
cended and pacified the religious wars, generating a de-theologized and
secular concept of ultima potestas – absolutism (Schmitt 1995a).
Absolutism referred to a state strong enough to de-politicize and neu-
tralize civil wars domestically. For it was, according to Schmitt, its his-
torical achievement to have carried through and institutionalized the
separation between the private – the world of clashing ultimate validity-
claims – and the public, the sphere of a morally neutered sphere of raison
d’État, whose overriding interest resides in the security of the state itself
(the governance of the ius belli ac pacis). And as the absolutist state was
pre-representational or pre-parliamentarian, as it conceived of itself as
legibus absoluta, it provided the ideal-type for Schmitt’s theory of the
‘modern state’, encapsulated in its decisionist nature, that is, the power to
decide by dint of authority and not debate or legal normativity –
‘absolved from law’. Correlatively, as the domestic sphere was ration-
alized, its inter-national flip side was the rationalization of interstate
conflict by means of a non-discriminatory and bracketed concept of war.
But if Schmitt’s account of the rise of the absolutist interstate system is
substantively causally unrelated to the Discoveries – occasional verbal
counter-assertions notwithstanding (Schmitt 2003, 140, 183) – his ana-
lysis proceeds at the level of a de-contextualized interpretation of a
selection of political theorists, eclectically mobilized to construct an ideal-
type of absolutism and the attendant ius publicum.10 The corollary is an
idealized, de-sociologized and historiographically discredited politicist
account of absolutism, supplemented by an à la lettre acceptance of the
legal normativism in international law, which Schmitt condemned so
unequivocally in relation to the Weimar public law, weakly codified in
le droit public de l’Europe (Koskenniemi 2004, 497). For how could he
reconcile his full and literal embrace of the ius publicum as an adequate
representation of the praxis of early modern international relations with
10
De-contextualized in the sense of reading Bodin and Hobbes as thinkers of a generic
theory of absolutism, rather than as formulating arguments that responded to and intervened
into spatio-temporally specific socio-political contexts (Wood 1983).
his general rejection of Weimar legal positivism? And how could Schmitt’s
insistence on absolutism as the historical model for a decisionist polity
that gave free rein to the will of rulers in the imposition of domestic law
and order be squared with their purportedly law-abiding disposition in
foreign affairs and the rationalization of military conduct, formalized in
the ius publicum? This pretence to legality by the Great Powers is char-
acteristically un-Schmittian. Logically speaking, the legal groundlessness
of the subjective decision should have operated in external relations as
much as in internal relations – a conclusion that Schmitt failed to draw.
For absolutist sovereignty, as the revisionist literature in early modern
historiography (Parker 1996; Ertman 1997; Bonney 1999; Potter 2003;
Beik 2005; Gerstenberger 2007; Miller 2008) has demonstrated time
and again, was never de-personalized, politically autonomous, absolute,
or ‘over and above society’.11 Sovereignty did not belong to the state as a
de-personalized and autonomous sphere of the political, but was a
property of the Crown or the ruling dynastic family – it was personalized.
Sovereignty could never be exercised over and above ‘societal interests’;
rather, absolutism relied on ‘social collaboration’ (Beik 2005) with an
increasingly amorphous ruling class, most notably the regional and court
nobility of both aristocratic and bourgeois origin, including the financiers,
tax-farmers, jurists, and the venal office nobility. This rendered the exercise
of absolute sovereignty dependent on social coalitions and interests: indeed,
re-privatizing its absolutist pretences, as the bombastic court society of
Versailles – clientelism, venality, nepotism, patrimonialism all inclusive –
represented a deeply socialized and non-rationalized picture of the seat of
French sovereignty and state administration. The distinction between the
state as an abstract entity and dynastic sovereignty, which implied divine
kingship and the Crown as the ultimate holder of all land (proprietary
kingship), was not carried through in absolutist France. The deeper
preconditions for this form of sovereignty are anchored in the absence of
the rise of capitalist private property relations in the country-side.12
11
For the following confer Teschke (2002, 2003, 2006).
12
Koskenniemi’s reading of French absolutism follows too closely Perry Anderson’s (1974).
‘Schmitt was putting his finger on the fact that European statehood did not emerge alone but as
the political form specific to capitalist social relations that presumed a constitutive distinction
between public power, exercised through claims of sovereign jurisdiction (imperium), and
private power, exercised by private law ownership (property, dominium), paradigmatically
through the market’ (Koskenniemi 2004, 498). If that was the case, then the droit public de
l’Europe, rather than codifying an inter-territorial order of exclusive jurisdictions, would have
already contained the tendency towards a concrete-order-transcending liberal ‘spaceless uni-
versalism’ that Schmitt did not associate with the continental interstate civilization, but with
19th Century liberal England.
The dynasty remained in personal union, the physical carrier of sover-

eignty, and the centre of the political economy of venal fiscal officialdom,
mediated by the construction of a non-bureaucratic tax/office state,
erected against the background of pre-capitalist social property relations:
L’État, c’est moi!
Absolutism was not de-theologized, secularized, and neutralized either.
Rather, early modern polities were confessionalized dynastic-composite
states claiming a sacralized form of sovereignty (Gorski 2000). Although the
age of absolutism did break with the trans-territorial theological absolutism
of the Vatican, it simultaneously fragmented the unitary confessional papal
claims and reassembled them across the spectrum of a pluriverse of creedal
mini-absolutisms post-1555 and post-1648. Cuius regio, eius religio –
contrary to mainstream IR thinking – did not endorse religious toleration at
the level of private subjects, but sanctioned the right of regional rulers to
determine and enforce, if in internationally agreed form, the faith of the
land. In the French case, the nascent absolutist state did not simply guard
over the de-politicized and neutral character of domestic politics and
religion, but actively established during the Reformation and the Wars of
Religion (1562–98) its catholic absolutism in a violent, directly politicized
century-long campaign, leading to the repression and expulsion of the
Huguenots with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Absolutism
did not rise above the warring civil parties, but repressed one of them.
Yet, even within Schmitt’s own analysis, there is ample evidence that
absolutism failed to generate the distinction between the private and the
public, dominium and imperium. Schmitt was acutely aware of his proble-
matic ascription of public sovereignty to the absolutist state, conceding that
princely ‘‘houses’’, such as the Hapsburg and the Bourbon, i.e. the great
dynastic families, aggregated various crowns under one power, such as
the Bohemian and the Hungarian, as well as lands, rights of succession,
and other legal titles. They became and remained, into the 18th century,
the true agents of European politics and, thus, also the subjects of
international law. Most European wars were waged as wars of succes-
sion and had their justa causa in the divine right of kings. But all of this
was only preliminary (Schmitt 2003, 129).
This preliminariness, by Schmitt’s own reckoning, is not a transient
anomaly, but expresses the very essence of the droit public de l’Europe.
These sovereign persons created and sustained the ius publicum euro-
paeum, thereby maintaining their mutual relations with one another as
human individuals, clearly not as small men, such as private individuals
dominated by the state, but as ‘‘great men’’ and personae publicae
(Schmitt 2003, 146).
These magni homines were not simply at the metaphorical centre of

what Schmitt calls an ‘international personal analogy’. They did not just
represent their respective states, they realiter embodied a personalized
form of sovereignty, ultimately grounded in their status as owners of
their diverse domains – a fusion (or rather: non-differentiation) between
the political and the economic, power and property (Schroeder 1994, 8).
Absolutist polities were conceptualized in anthropomorphic, but not in
anthropocentric ways. Early modern ‘international’ relations and their ius
inter gentes expressed interpersonal, primarily inter-dynastic, relations.
English balancing: transition from feudalism to capitalism or

‘sea-appropriation’?
Next to the Conquest and absolutism, Schmitt adduces a third spatial phe-
nomenon to account for the rise of the ius publicum: English balancing. The
Discoveries – at least, after the rayas were displaced by the amity-lines – had
transformed the European terrestrial order by introducing the antithesis
between firm land and free sea, opening up two distinct spatial orders. They
were characterized by regulated interstate wars on terra firma and anarchy
‘beyond the line’. England’s turn towards the sea extends across two distinct
periods, pre- and a post-1713.
Sea-roamers of all kinds, pirates, privateers, sea trade adventurers, together
with the whale hunters and the sailors, formed the vanguard of that ele-
mental surge toward the sea (y) their heroic period lasted approximately a
century and a half, from 1550 to 1713, or said differently, from the beginning
of the struggle carried on by the Protestant powers against the world power
of Catholic Spain, and until the Peace of Utrecht (Schmitt 1997, 19–20).
While this initial period undermined Spanish maritime supremacy and
hardened a tough-minded amphibious national character, England only
fully embraced this ‘maritime existence’, based on its ‘sea-appropriation’,
at Utrecht.
England alone took the step from a medieval feudal and terrestrial
existence to a purely maritime existence that balanced the whole ter-
restrial world. (y) England thereby became the representative of the
universal maritime sphere of a Eurocentric global order, the guardian of
the other side of the ius publicum europaeum, the sovereign of the
balance of land and sea – of an equilibrium comprising the spatially
ordered thinking of international law (Schmitt, 2003, 173).
From 1713 onwards, the ius publicum came to be externally regulated
by British balancing, conjoining the two spatial orders – land and sea.
Which extra-juridical processes, in line with Schmitt’s demand for
concrete-order-thinking, drove Britain’s ‘spatial revolution’? What

accounts for the specificity of England’s re-definition of overseas space in
the 17th century and its rise and centrality at Utrecht? Absent a discussion
of the transformation of English social property relations, British sover-
eignty and foreign policy after the Glorious Revolution – Britain’s tran-
sition from a late feudal divine monarchy to a capitalist-parliamentarian
constitutional monarchy – Schmitt relapses into a geo-mythological
register, revolving around Britain’s ‘maritime existence’ (Schmitt 2003,
178, 183–84).13 Geo-elemental categories start to naturalize and mystify
specific property and authority relations that informed state interests that
diverged significantly from continental patterns, as the neo-Weberian and
the neo-Marxist literature has established (Brenner 1985, 1993; Brewer
1988, 1994; Wood 1991; O’Brien and Hunt 1999; O’Brien 2002; Prados
de la Escosura 2004; Gerstenberger 2007). Schmitt’s intuitive under-
standing of Britain’s exceptionality leads him ultimately to mobilize his
generic land/sea dichotomy, a move that drives a wedge into the West-
phalian Order, without developing a conceptual vocabulary that articu-
lates how and why Britain was unique, what it was in the nature of British
sovereignty that informed Britain’s position at Utrecht as the balancer,
and how this difference was co-articulated with European developments.
Schmitt concludes with a broad analogy: ‘There is a historical and struc-
tural relation between such spatial concepts of free sea, free trade, and world
economy, and the idea of free space in which to pursue free competition
and free exploitation’ (Schmitt 2003, 99). Yet, this allusion to worldwide
capitalist competition is precocious and obscures the fundamental distinction
between ‘free’ and ‘open’ seas. The notion of ‘free sea’ (mare liberum) simply
referred to its non-law-governed status and implied permanent military
conflict over the control of trading and shipping routes, as states tried uni-
laterally to territorialize the seas, rather than declaring them multilaterally
‘open’. In this sense, the new ‘beyond the line’ only extended prevailing
practices of militarized trading routes – armed merchant-men and convoy-
sailing tactics – characteristic of the age of mercantilism. This did not imply
free economic competition, governed by competitiveness and market-pricing,
but free politico-military competition, creating a morally and legally unen-
cumbered state of nature ‘beyond the line’. Free trade across open seas had to
wait until the 19th century.
13
The prevalence of ‘geo-mythology’ – the grounding of geopolitics in the elemental
opposition of land vs. sea (Behemoth against Leviathan) – over and against property and
authority relations is particularly acute in Land and Sea. Its core thesis is that ‘world history is
the history of the wars waged by maritime powers against land or continental powers and by
land powers against sea or maritime powers’ (Schmitt 1997, 5).
But if capitalist free trade was not the inner secret of England’s
17th Century ‘spatial revolution’, the island was, according to Schmitt,
decisive in dissolving the terrestrial-Christian order and in altering and
co-determining, from 1713 onwards, the ius publicum – a rupture
that opens up an explanatory vacuum amply filled with geo-elemental
reifications and mythological allusions. ‘So it came that England became
the heiress, the universal heiress of that great change in the existence of
the European nations. How was that possible’ (Schmitt 1997, 27)?
England ‘turned her collective existence seawards and centred it on the
sea element’ (Schmitt 1997, 28), turning into a big fish – a leviathan.14
Schmitt, as an interim result, provides ample evidence – rayas, scho-
lasticism, res publica Christiana – that the Discoveries, rather than dis-
solving the old medieval cosmos, were jurisprudentially assimilated to
prevailing discourses of Christian expansion and aligned to late medieval
practices of conditional territorialization. Furthermore, the rise of the
ius publicum was internal to European politics, resting on a double
narrative of spatio-temporally diverging Anglo–French developmental
trajectories, geopolitically articulated and synchronized from 1713
onwards. British balancing conjoined a land-based interstate order, which
had overcome confessional wars, with England’s own ‘spatial revolution’
premised on its ‘sea-appropriation’, grounded in a geo-elementary
account of its maritime existence.
During the course of The Nomos, the starting assumption of the
ius publicum covering an undifferentiated unity of European states, the
‘Westphalian System’, is progressively dissolved. Their assimilation is
challenged by a surprising absence of any analysis of 1648 in The Nomos,
while the Westphalian Peace Treaties are mentioned only once, and then
in passing (Schmitt 2003, 145).15 The European interstate civilization did
not originate in 1492, assembled its geographically specific defining fea-
tures between 1555 and 1648, remained premised on dynastic sover-
eignty, and was decisively altered and co-articulated by British balancing
after 1713. Henceforth, it was outflanked and progressively dismantled
by a British sea-based semi-universalism operative in its confetti-empire
that finally culminated in the hegemonic transition from the British
Empire to an US-dominated ‘spaceless universalism’ first codified at
Versailles. Schmitt’s periodization of the rise and fall of the ius publicum
14
Elsewhere, Schmitt notes that ‘a turnabout was implicit in the transformation of a nation
of sheep-breeders in the sixteenth century into a nation of sea-children. It was the fundamental
transformation of the political and historical essence of the island itself’ (Schmitt 1997, 50).
15
The Westphalian Peace Treaties are rarely referred to in Schmitt’s entire opus. Two passing
references can be found in Schmitt (1995b, 241 and 1995c, 311).
presents less a succession of distinct orders than a cumulative accretion of

distinct moments, from 1492, via 1555/1648, to 1713 and beyond – each
contributing to and redefining the ius publicum.16
The ius publicum and early modern warfare

If the central plank of Schmitt’s golden age of the ius publicum – the
absolutist state – was unable to generate an absolute, de-personalized,
rationalized, and secular form of sovereignty, what are its implications for
Schmitt’s thesis that ancien régime warfare became limited, rationalized,
and humanized? For Schmitt
post-medieval European international law from the 16th to the 20th
century sought to repress the justa causa. The formal reference point
for determining just war no longer was the church’s authority in inter-
national law, but rather the equal sovereignty of states. Instead of
justa causa, international law among states was based on iustus hostis.
Any war between states, between equal sovereigns, was legitimate.
Given this juridical formalization, a rationalization and humanization –
a bracketing – of war was achieved for 200 years (Schmitt 2003,
120–21).
This thesis was encapsulated in his notion of a non-discriminatory
concept of war among iusti hostes – a claim that ties the rise of ‘total war’
to the liberal universalism of the French Revolution and, more decisively,
to the Anglo-American age of liberal international law (Schmitt 2003,
140–51). What was the nature of early modern warfare?
Although the demise of medieval feuding through the arrogation of
sovereignty and the ius belli ac pacis by multiple dynasties had decisively
transformed the subjects and nature of warfare, it simultaneously aug-
mented its magnitude, frequency, duration, intensity, and costs. In addition,
absolutist sovereignty gave military conflict an unlimited, irrational, and
de-humanized character that could not be controlled by the amorphous
collection of texts (treaties, diplomatic protocols, juridical treatises) that
constituted the ius publicum (Gross 1948, 38). These developments have
prompted scholars of early modern Europe to characterize the age of
absolutism as the age of the ‘military revolution’, the ‘permanent-war
state’ and the ‘fiscal-military state’ – an age organized for warfare (Tilly
1975; Brewer 1988; Parker 1988; Downing 1992; Bonney 1995, 1999;
16
Schmitt, throughout the course of the book, progressively shortens the duration of the ius
publicum lasting ‘for 400 years’, for ‘300 years’, and finally ‘for more than two centuries’
(Schmitt 2003, 49, 140, and 181).
Contamine, 2000a, 2000b).17 But in contradistinction to what the neo-

Weberian literature tends to argue – war made states and states made
wars – the mismatch between public resources and military expenses
changed in the longue durée the sociopolitical complexion of anciens
régimes and ultimately destroyed the very financial-fiscal foundations
of the absolutist interstate system. Its dynamics did not lead to a self-
reinforcing dialectic between war and modern state-making, but to a
destructive downward spiral driven by military overstretch, financial
bankruptcies, and social revolt – the unmaking of the absolutist state
(Teschke 2003). This was linked to the superior military-fiscal and eco-
nomic capacities of the capitalist constitutional monarchy of balancing
Britain. It finally prepared, in conjunction with the Britain-monitored and
balanced ‘Concert of Europe’, the 19th Century Hundred Years’ Peace –
an empirical result un-noted by Schmitt, which also counters his thesis
that this century belongs to the liberal era of ‘total war’.
The scale of fighting units grew rapidly in the transition from the age of
feudal hosts to the age of standing armies and navies. Whereas late-
medieval armies fielded rarely more than a few thousand combatants, the
size of early modern armies and navies escalated, if in non-linear ways
and with important regional variations, from the mid-16th to the late
18th century (Lindegren 2000, 131). Inflation in numbers, in conjunction
with innovations in weapons technology, translated into a new quality of
military intensity. While it may be otiose to compare absolute casualty-
figures to the age of ‘total warfare’ in WWI and WWII, a relative measure
provides a better understanding of post-1648 lethal warfare. For example,
at the end of the Seven Years’ War, casualty figures in the Prussian Army
stood at 180,000 soldiers, which was the equivalent of two-thirds of
the Prussian army, and one-ninth of the Prussian population (Anderson
1988, 180).
Scale and intensity, in turn, were radicalized by the frequency of war.
Quincy Wright noted an uninterrupted rise in the incidence of major
battles during this period, before we see a significant reduction in the 19th
century (Wright 1964, 641–44). This was compounded by their prolonged
duration. If post-1648 wars were no longer ‘perennial’, like the Eighty Years
War of Dutch Independence or the Thirty Years War (these wars were, of
course, composite conflicts that consisted of a series of separate, but inter-
connected smaller wars), the Nine Years War (1689–97), the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–14), the Great Northern War (1700–21), the War
17
Scheuerman’s suggestion that ‘much of what Schmitt claims for this period has been
corroborated by historians of international relations who by no means share Schmitt’s
profound hostility to modern universalism’ cannot be supported (Scheuerman 2004, 538).
of the Polish Succession (1733–38), the War of the Austrian Succession

(1740–48), and the Seven Years War (1756–63) – all of which were multi-
lateral, if not European-wide wars – were long-drawn-out affairs.
If these observations do not per se falsify Schmitt’s thesis of a ‘war-in-
form’, they are thrown into sharp relief when read in conjunction with the
‘rationality’ of war-declarations, aims, and endings and the actual con-
duct of war. Given that military conflicts were essentially inter-dynastic
conflicts between magni homines, the predominant contemporary form of
conflict was, next to naval trade wars, the war of succession. This
appellation indicates that the casus belli were rarely, if ever, motivated by
a rational calculus of costs and benefits – a self-limiting Clausewitzian
move that calibrated the war-effort as a rational exercise to a clearly
defined political interest. The proximate causes of these wars of succes-
sion resided in the ‘irrational’ biological accidents of dynastic vacancies
and inheritance disputes among the European fraternity of princes
(Kunisch 1987). War-declarations, aims, and endings were decisively
shaped by these inter-dynastic conflicts that were, at a deeper sociological
level, property disputes. As sovereignty was a personal adjunct of dynastic
houses, every death of a reigning monarch led to succession crises that
turned immediately into multilateral affairs, as most royal houses were
connected through elaborate marital strategies in which states married
states to aggrandize their territory-as-property. Correlatively, the logic of
trade wars, notably the sequence of Anglo–Dutch naval wars, was
grounded in the mercantilist imperatives for the militarized control of
exclusive trading routes.
In this context, war aims were not ‘limited’, but assumed an imperial,
totalizing character, as Europe was regarded by dynastic rulers as a kind
of property-map. As control over ‘land and people’ constituted the main
source of income for rulers in pre-capitalist Europe, even though it was in
finite supply as a natural monopoly, geopolitical accumulation – the
horizontal need to accumulate territories – led to intense re-distributional
conflicts among the personalized owners of sovereignty in zero-sum
conflicts over limited European territory. The divisions of Poland exem-
plify this totalizing logic. It was this, given Schmitt’s lack of any causal
account of war, which drove the intense military rivalries at the time.
Wars were not ended by rational design, but by mutual exhaustion and
financial-military attrition, leading to unsustainable public debts and,
repeatedly, to public bankruptcies. These deepened the concessions that
rulers had to make to their nobilities, tax-farmers, and financiers. But as
absolute sovereignty was essentially a contested institution – relying on an
unstable compromise between dynasties and their nobilities – war-endings
also blended quickly over into prolonged civil wars, as evidenced by the
French Fronde, a noble rebellion against the cutting of their privileges

after the Peace Treaty of Westphalia.
The conduct of war was not humanized, either in terms of ius in
bello, or in terms of a clear distinction between combatants and non-
combatants. The effects of war on civilian populations were devastating.
As war-logistics were not properly developed and soldiers lacked per-
manent provisioning, early modern armies lived ‘off the land’, either from
looting and pillaging on foreign soil, or by way of sequestration and
ransom. Armies tended to ransack civilian areas in an effort to feed
themselves, causing plunder, rape, famines, and population displacement.
Bellum se ipse alet (war feeds off itself) captures this predicament.
The absence of a clear set of rules and powers of enforcement concerning
the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants implied their ransom for
money or other prisoners, if they were not killed outright.18 Forced
conscription of civilians was a common practice. Any sociology of con-
temporary armies shows that in spite of all the (Weberian and Fou-
cauldian) emphasis on the increasingly rationalized, professionalized, and
disciplined character of the new standing armies, soldiers were generally
not salaried bureaucrats, but ‘in pay’ of noble officers who had usually
themselves bought their military commissions. Armies were not public
armies, but precisely ‘the king’s armies’; yet, essentially beyond their
disciplinary control (Kroener 2000, 205).19
War was not, as Schmitt suggests, an intermittent, temporally limited,
and formalized affair of a polity’s outward relations, neatly divorced from
the inner constitution of pre-existing entities, but the central preoccupa-
tion of early modern polities that directly penetrated their internal con-
stitution and their very raison d’être. War was the central axis of early
modern geopolitics and money its engine (pecunia nervus rerum) – and the
ultimate arbiter over defeat and victory. Across Europe, public finances
were dominated by war expenditures and associated debt-servicing.20
War was the state’s prima and ultima ratio. As wars grew ever costlier,
taxation-rates increased, social discontent mounted, public debts multiplied,
and royal bankruptcies proliferated, until revolution and reform reconfigured
property and authority relations, tax systems and public finance – and
18
For the slow and uneven growth of state control in relation to these practices, see
Contamine (2000b).
19
Nor did a ‘non-discriminatory concept of war’ imply that moral–legal war legitimations
were no longer required by the ius publicum, or provided by warring parties (Repgen 1985).
20
‘The great scourge of public expenditure was the growing proportion devoted to war
(y) – 40 per cent of the total in the fifteenth century, 27 per cent in the sixteenth, 46 per cent in
the seventeenth and 54 per cent in the eighteenth’ (Körner 1995, 416; cf. Bonney 1999).
sovereignty. Schmitt’s metaphorical depiction of early modern warfare as

a gentlemanly ‘duel’ – a civilized affair – is a mystification. It is grounded
in an abstract-literal reading of the ius publicum, ultimately rooted in
a wider strategic-rhetorical move to elevate the pre-revolutionary age to
the paragon of civilized warfare – an interpretative foil licensing the
fabrication of a degenerated and inflated ‘total war’ ascribed to Anglo-
American liberal universalism.
Schmitt’s account of the ius publicum europaeum – from the Discoveries
to Versailles – is pervaded by contradictions, omissions, and empirical mis-
judgements, grounded in an oscillation between unlicensed abstraction and
empty concretion. At the centre stands a vacillation between a literal adher-
ence to the minimal positivism of an abstractly accepted ius publicum – an
idealization of absolutist statehood, an un-examined account of early modern
geopolitics and a full embrace of the juristic notion of non-discriminatory
warfare – and a sociologically disembodied and inter-nationally evacuated
notion of concretion, formalized in spatial concrete-order-thinking. This
false notion of concretion – land appropriation, land division, sea parti-
tion – carefully dissociated from processes of contested social property
relations, authority relations, and geopolitical encounters, re-emerges
consequentially as another mega-abstraction: spatial order. In the end,
Schmitt maps the positivistic abstraction of the ius publicum on to the
territorial abstraction of the spatial constitution – combining to form the
nomos. This play of abstractions was to undergo another round in
Schmitt’s interpretation of Versailles and after.
Versailles, the League of Nations and after: from concrete-order-thinking

to the IPE of American grand strategy
The dissolution of the classical ius publicum, grounded in the Euro-centric
spatial order, and its transformation into a universal international law
occurred during a transitional period, marked by the Congo Conference
of 1885 and the Versailles Peace Treaties (Schmitt 2003, 2005a, 2005b).
This interim generated according to Schmitt a general disorientation in
jurisprudence, unable to conceptualize and navigate the tension between a
mere extension of the ius publicum to rising extra-European powers, like
Japan or the Ottoman Empire, the potential pluralization of international
law by the recognition of a series of coexisting regional legal orders
(African, Asian or American inter-regional law), and the full onset of a
single universal international law. This period reached for Schmitt its
zenith in the ‘Versailles Diktat’ that proscribed an unsustainable half-way
house between a legal-normative universalism, master-minded by the
Anglo-American powers and institutionalized in the League of Nations,

and a series of Anglo-American ‘opt-outs’ and provisos, most notably
through the externalization of the US-American ‘Western hemisphere’,
derived from the 1823 Monroe-Doctrine, from the League’s geographical
field of application. This lopsided construction not only undermined and
incapacitated the legal coherence of the new interwar legal order, it funda-
mentally failed to resolve the pivotal question of the nature of the new spatial
order, suspended between monopoly and polypoly – the global monopoly of
a single power and a pluralism of coexisting Großräume.
Schmitt turned his attention to the legal arguments for intervention by
‘space-alien’ Anglo-American powers within Europe, who simultaneously
ruled out the reverse. The Monroe-Doctrine, prohibiting European
intervention in the Western hemisphere, exemplified this ‘spatial chaos’
paradigmatically. Although the United States finally refused to ratify the
Versailles Treaty and failed to become a League Member, Article 21
explicitly recognized the validity of the Monroe-Doctrine within the
League system. This implied an external internality of United States
presence in Europe, as it implied the official acceptance of legal non-
reciprocity between the American and European hemispheres. For the
inclusion of the Monroe-Doctrine into the Covenant did not only exclude
the Western Hemisphere from the League’s jurisdiction, the League
also lacked authority to deal with relations between states within the
Western Hemisphere who were also League members (Cuba, Haiti, Santo
Domingo, Panama, Nicaragua) and with relations between them and
European states. These contradictions were radicalized by the absence
of the Americans and the Soviets, the presence of two European powers
with conflicting spatial–legal traditions (Britain’s elastic sea-based uni-
versalism vs. France’s static terrestrial continentalism), and the exclusion
of Germany and Austria-Hungary from the peace negotiations. For
Schmitt, the spatial disorder of the new nomos had crippled the idea of
a universal international law, bisected into a European sphere of regional
application, supervised by the United States, and an Anglo-American
sphere outside its strictures. The new nomos of the earth was split right
through the middle.
But the legalistic dissection and effective deconstruction of Versailles
and Geneva was ultimately shifted onto a much deeper sociological
terrain that gave Schmitt a privileged insight into the structural trans-
formations of international law and order at the start of the 20th century.
These revolved around the developing dualisms between international
public law and transnational private law, a territorial interstate order and
a sub-territorial world economy, a public pluriverse and a private uni-
versalism, grounded in the separation between the political and the economic
across the member states of the international system.21 Schmitt, in a series of

extraordinary passages, lays bare the structural correspondence between a
trans-nationalizing capitalism and American postwar grand strategy:
Over, under, and beside the state-political borders of what appeared to
be a purely political international law between states spread a free, i.e.
non-state sphere of economy permeating everything: a global economy.
In the idea of a free global economy lay not only the overcoming of state-
political borders, but also, as an essential precondition, a standard for
the internal constitutions of individual member states of this order of inter-
national law; it presupposed that every member state would establish a
minimum of constitutional order. This minimum standard consisted of the
freedom – the separation – of the state-public sphere from the private sphere,
above all, from the non-state sphere of property, trade, and economy’
(Schmitt 2003, 235, italics in the original).
These structural complementarities inform Schmitt’s analysis of the
American vacillation between isolationism and internationalism, encapsu-
lated in the dialectic between political absence and economic presence,
ethical pathos and economic calculation – informal empire. ‘The separation
between politics and economics constituted an indirect method of exerting
political influence. The most important characteristic of this influence was
that it was based on free trade, i.e. on trade free of the state, on an equally
free market as the constitutional standard of international law, and on
ignoring political territorial borders by utilizing such devices as the ‘‘open
door’’ and ‘‘most favored nation’’. Thus, in the sense of the separation of
politics and economics, official absence meant only political absence, while
unofficial presence meant an extraordinarily effective – economic – presence
and, if need be, also political control’ (Schmitt 2003, 255). The United States,
after Versailles, was politically absent in Europe, both as a League member
and as an occupying power, yet economically present by its inscription of free
trade and its political precondition: the generalization of liberal con-
stitutionalism, private property relations, the rights-bearing and free indivi-
dual, and the rule of law, into the League’s Covenant.
This strategy, according to Neil Smith, presented a political project of
global domination – the rationalization of global space driven by a non-
territorial capitalist imperialism for American ‘economic Lebensraum’
(Smith 2004).22 This rested on the central insight that economic expansion
21
Schmitt derived the argument about the separation between the economic and the
political and its international extension, the separation between a geopolitical interstate system
and a transnational capitalist world market, from Karl Marx (Schmitt 2003, 293–94).
22
Smith’s study provides a detailed empirical analysis, rather than just a theoretical deri-
vation, of the formation of a political awareness among US-American policy planners how the
could be de-coupled from territorial aggrandizement, divorcing political

geography from international accumulation. In this way, the flattening of
differentially organized political territories and their submission to com-
mon legal principles sanctioned a constitutive dualism between the pro-
liferation of liberal-constitutional states and the expansion of a borderless
private world-market.
But if Schmitt’s argument demonstrated the structural preconditions for
global American domination, it simultaneously imperilled and trans-
formed three core assumptions of his theoretical–historical axiomatic: an
unwitting erasure of his account of the classical ius publicum; a retraction
from concrete-order-thinking; and a turn towards a transnational
economism, selectively applied to the United States and bracketed for
Germany. For if the separation between the public interstate and the
private sub-state became recognized in international law in the course of
the 19th century and politically operationalized by the United States post-
1919, then this overturned his generic thesis of the status of the
ius publicum as genuinely public interstate law.
Secondly, Schmitt’s theoretical excursion into the field of IPE forced
him to change theoretical register – a volte face not licensed by his method
of concrete-order-thinking. Where Schmitt excavates the roots of the new
universal order, he is pressed into an analysis of the IPE of American
world order – falsifying his axiomatic statement that every international
legal order is grounded in an original act of land-appropriation. The
recognition of the border-cancelling implications of transnational capit-
alism directly negates his generic thesis that every international legal order
is premised on an underlying spatial land-grab – an argument that now
seems suspended by the trans-territorial nature of cross-border capitalist
penetration. Capitalism’s border-cancelling tendency also cancels Schmitt’s
core method and core thesis. As the novelty and distinctiveness of United
States world order is not rooted in a logic of territorialization – but in an
attempt to promote informal empire – this negates and transcends Schmitt’s
now curiously anachronistic notion of concrete-order-thinking and his
politico-normative counter-project: a German Großraum.23
Thirdly, Schmitt had pressed the argument about the geopolitics-dissolving
effects of capitalist expansion too far. For the period between 1880 and
insight into the separation of the economic from the political under capitalism translated into
policy-formation for a new postwar grand American strategy. See also Gowan (2004).
23
Schmitt was preoccupied with the idea of Großraum from the late-1930s onwards
(Schmitt 1988b, 1995b, 1995c, 2003, 281–94). For the wider literature on Großraum,
cf. Gruchmann, (1962), Schmoeckel (1994), Kervégan (1999), Stirk (1999), Balakrishnan
(2000, 235–45), Diner (2000b), Joerges (2003), and Koskenniemi (2004, 420–24).
Versailles and beyond did not simply constitute a passage, however chaotic
and disorderly, from the ius publicum to a universal international law or,
alternatively, from interstate geopolitics to a space-cancelling economic
universalism, auto-generated by the subterranean march of capitalism. It
rather experienced first the intense geopolitical rivalries among the capitalist
European empires and their associated re-territorializations of the world
(Schmitt remains silent on belle époque inter-imperial conflict), before the
settlement of WWI launched a supremely power-political project of the
American state. This involved the territorial, military, political, and con-
stitutional re-configuration of Europe as an ongoing grand strategy of
American power-projection. The result was not a depoliticized ‘spaceless
universalism’, but an attempt to reconstitute and align European political
geography with American economic and security concerns.
This American grand strategy aimed to tie the postwar promotion of
liberal-constitutional Kleinstaaten (small states) on the European Con-
tinent – Europe’s Balkanization – and beyond to their capitalist penetra-
tion by private economic forces and integration into the world-market.
This implied a twofold strategic calculation – territorial-geopolitical and
constitutional-economic. On the one hand, the new principle of national
self-determination was the wedge that dismembered the empires of the
axis-powers – the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires.
This lead to a strategically manageable proliferation of mini-states on
the Continent and, in Central-Eastern Europe, to a buffer security zone
(le cordon sanitaire) against the key remaining out-law state, the Soviet
Union. On the other hand, their simultaneous constitutional transfor-
mation into liberal law-states, as a precondition for their incorporation
into the League of Nations, aligned them with Anglo-American con-
stitutional and economic norms. This enabled their full incorporation into
the system of liberal capitalism. Both moves, as Schmitt rightly observed,
obliterated their political essence – the right to define an enemy and to
wage war.
But although liberal international institutionalism and a capitalist
world market were clearly designed to restructure the Continent, this did
not and could not precipitate a turn towards a non-political ‘spaceless
universalism’ as it did not erase the European interstate system. Schmitt
overlooked the qualitative difference between an America-centric uni-
versal empire and an America-supervised European interstate system.
Although borders became more permeable and porous and territorial
sovereignty geographically trimmed and more conditional, the combina-
tion of United States ‘political absence’ and ‘economic presence’ was
never powerful enough to fully absorb plural territorial sovereignties into
a universal empire. In fact, Mussolini’s turn towards a mare nostrum
conception and Nazi Germany’s progressive construction of an autarchic

economic Lebensraum and security zone are the clearest examples of the
limits of the apolitical ‘spaceless universalism’ ascribed to the American
project. Although the abstraction of capitalism had dispensed with a
spatial-order constituting act of American ‘land-appropriation’, the
capitalist powers of Italy and Germany could re-embark on a strategy of
concrete-space-ordering – a re-territorialization within an alleged spatial
vacuum of interwar global capitalism.
How was that possible? As Weimar Germany was already fully integrated
into the world economy when Großraum-thinking started to preoccupy
Schmitt in the 1930s, he was forced into yet another theoretical volte-face.
He turned away from IPE and re-embraced a spatial-legalistic register that
capitalist imperialism, by Schmitt’s own reasoning, had either long dissolved
or – but this could not feature in Schmitt’s theory – regenerated through the
general capitalist crisis of the 1929 Great Depression, sweeping fascism to
power. But as the precepts of IPE were reserved by Schmitt to Anglo-
American imperialism and never applied to German imperialism, his
normatively highly charged legal–political argument about the desirability of
a universalism-blocking concept of German Großraum remained strictly
beyond the confines of IPE. Although Schmitt gestured inconclusively
towards the transcendence of the classical concept of the territorial state
driven by the economic imperatives of a Grobraumwirtschaft (economic
greater space) as a sphere of economic performance (Leistungsraum) (Schmitt
1995c, 271), he was theoretically unable to ground the turn towards German
continental autarchy in a series of successive German strategic policy choices
within the wider context of the post-1929 crisis of the world economy.24
Consequently, the legal concept of the Grobraum had to be de-economized
and anchored in a reassertion of ‘the political’ in the abstract, the friend/enemy
distinction, arising like a deus ex machina from an identitarian notion of
völkisch democracy.25
What Schmitt, contrary to his own diagnosis, was witnessing in the
interwar years was the making of an inter-spatial European regionalism,
territorially re-configured at Versailles, transnationally better integrated,
constitutionally assimilated and internationally codified in the League,
24
For the economic calculations behind successive German strategic policy decisions, see
Tooze (2006, 385–425). For the wide circulation of the notion Großraum in pre-WWII
German industrial and policy circles, see Opitz (1977, parts III and IV).
25
Cf. Schmitt’s cryptic statement: ‘The United States believed it could turn the political into
an external façade of territorial borders, that it could transcend territorial borders with the
essential content of the economic. But, in a decisive moment, it was unable to prevent the
political grouping of friend and enemy from becoming critical’ (Schmitt 2003, 258).
supervised from afar by a politically absent isolationist US and, closer to

home, by the weakly committed powers of France and Britain. No
spaceless universalism was on the historical agenda. Schmitt had to wait
until after WWII, when the combination of US-American political and
economic presence on German soil – military occupation plus Marshall
Plan plus Truman Doctrine – moved Europe a step closer to the space-
lessness that he had already envisaged for the interwar period. But even
this did not generate a state-cancelling universal empire.
Salvaging Schmitt for contemporary IR theory? Theoretical reprise

Schmitt’s history of international law and order is deeply problematic due
to the limits of its theoretical assumptions and the explicit ideological
purpose of its context-bound geopolitical revisionism. It fails to function
as a plausible international theory for the historical period (1492–1919/45)
it was designed for. But can we dissociate Schmitt’s theory from his
defective history, extricate insights from Schmitt’s super-politicized pro-
ject, and salvage his theoretical premises – decisionism, concept of the
political, concrete-order-thinking – as generic analytics for IR theory?
Analytically, Schmitt’s notion of the extra-legal decision that instanti-
ates the politics of the exception is little more than a passe-partout that
can be ‘applied’ to an indiscriminate range of polities under duress that
turn to emergency powers. The application of Schmittian concepts to the
exception can only descriptively confirm a posteriori an already instituted
state of affairs as a fait accompli, whose explanation is outside their remit
and whose critique cannot be formulated from within the Schmittian
vocabulary. Why is that the case? As Schmitt’s method is bereft of any
sociology of power, decisionism lacks the analytics to identify what balance
of sociopolitical forces activates in what kind of situation the politics of the
exception and fear. For the state of exception is never a non-relational
creation ex nihilo – a unique and self-referential event equivalent to the
miracle in theology – as it remains bound to the social by an indispensable
act of calculation preceding its declaration with regard to its chances of
implementation, public compliance or resistance by those upon whom it
bears – the social relations of sovereignty. The exception remains quintes-
sentially inserted in a relation of power whose reference point remains the
social. Of the two sides of the exception – the power that invokes it and the
power that is being excepted from the normal rule of law – Schmitt only
theorizes the first. Yet, the decision alone is never decisive.
Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty remains not only de-socialized, but
curiously de-politicized, as he seeks to identify an Archimedean point not
only outside society, but equally outside politics conventionally understood,

super-insulated from any sociopolitical contestation, in order to govern
not only against society, but to neuter domestic politics altogether –
ultra-sovereignty. This extra-political vantage point is deliberately chosen –
and here political theology and hyper-authoritarianism converge – to
pinpoint that chimerical location that re-stabilizes social processes from
nowhere – ex nihilo – yet with overwhelming force. But this ‘place beyond’
really belongs to the sphere of theology proper. Here, at the latest, political
theology – the conception of sovereignty modelled on absolutism and the
papal plenitudo potestatis – risks not only collapsing into unrestrained and
arbitrary state-terror, but being removed from any rational intelligibility
whatsoever – the apotheosis of the state. Sovereignty defined in terms of the
exception constitutes a legal–political category and cannot explain what
provokes and comprises concrete states of emergency as real historical
phenomena. Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty constitutes a normative
prescription, designed specifically for a hyper-authoritarian solution to the
intractable crisis of the Weimar state, and cannot function as a generic
analytic for ubiquitous invocations of emergency powers. It is singularly
unable to gauge the different constellations and transformations between
political authority and social relations, geopolitics and international law,
and, ultimately, spatial world-ordering.
But this was the task set by The Nomos and the turn towards concrete-
order-thinking in the mid-30s, generating a reinterpretation of history as a
succession of spatial–legal nomoi that tied Schmitt’s present to a see-
mingly remote and recondite past. Yet, concrete-order-jurisprudence fails
to provide guidance as to what processes drive the politics of land-
appropriation, enemy-declarations, and world-ordering, leading to an
asociological and curiously non-geopolitical – in the sense of geopolitics
as an inter-subjective encounter between polities – stance. Schmitt’s law-
antecedent act of land-appropriation, which generated the meta-juridical
legitimacy upon which international legality is erected, is itself divorced
from any further theoretical determinations. The ‘concrete’ is largely the
factual. The descending journey from the concrete to its manifold inner
determinations and the ascending return journey to the concrete as a
‘concrete in thought’, captured in its rich inner determinations, is never
undertaken (Marx 1973, 100).26 The concrete – facticity – turns into an
26
The notion of the ‘concrete’ – alongside ‘organic’, ‘soil-bound’, ‘telluric’, and ‘chtonic’ –
enjoyed a steep career in Nazi ideology as part of a wider idiomatic promotion of the ‘ideas of
1914’ against the ‘ideas of 1789’. It was not so much a neo-Hegelian Wunderwaffe, but part of
the fascist jargon whose explicit purpose was to counter the ‘abstract’, ‘rationalised’, and
‘uprooted’ nature of social relations inherent in the community-dissolving character of ‘Jewish’
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 étatist 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).
no categories to capture the sociopolitical (civil war, revolutions, coup

d’États) 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’États, revolution – and a loss of sovereign autonomy from
outside, codified in the Versailles Treaty. Schmitt’s intellectual riposte
revolved around the political reassertion of domestic and international

order. The former was encapsulated in the definition of sovereignty as an
unmediated and subjective decision on the state of exception (and, later,
the full embrace of the Führer-principle and the ‘total state’), and in
the concept of the political, which redefined democracy in identitarian–
existentialist terms through the mediation of agonistic friend/enemy
declarations by the state executive. The latter was captured in his defence
of the sanctity of the legality of Imperial Germany’s war against the Allies
as the highest expression of the state’s ius belli ac pacis of the ius publicum
europaeum and, later, the idea of land-appropriations as the historical
norm. This legitimized Nazi-Germany’s war of conquests and the idea of
coexisting imperial greater regions as the new nomos of the earth. Schmitt
remorselessly dissected the crisis of the legal form, the relation between
constitutionalism, democracy and emergency powers, and the pathologies
of liberal international law in order to fend off the potential of a revo-
lutionary German pouvoir constituant and to deconstruct the practice and
ideology of the legal–political expansion of the liberal-capitalist ‘zone of
peace’ – the incipient legalization and de-politicization of interstate
relations. But rather than developing categories of analysis for the crisis,
he provided normative legal-political categories against the crisis. Schmitt
developed a legal–political–spatial counter-vocabulary – concepts for a
New Order – to stem the tide of the advancing liberal-capitalist ‘spaceless
universalism’ and the threat of socialist revolution.
The ideological purpose, theoretical limitations, and historical defi-
ciencies of Schmitt’s legal–political–spatial register do not per se invali-
date all Schmittian insights. But they do cast doubt on the standing of his
international thought as a plausible and coherent international theory,
and raise a large question mark behind attempts to elevate him to a
hitherto under-appreciated classic of IR, and The Nomos to the status of a
founding text of the discipline (Odysseos and Petito 2007, 8). How can
neo-Schmittians escape these liabilities? Furthermore, its undigested
problems manifest themselves in a number of questions and challenges to
contemporary attempts to mobilize Schmitt as a critic of the liberal
project of modernity.
For at the centre of the heterodox – partly post-structuralist, partly realist –
neo-Schmittian analysis stands the conclusion of The Nomos: the thesis of
a structural and continuous relation between liberalism and violence
(Mouffe 2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007). It suggests that, in sharp contrast to
the liberal-cosmopolitan programme of ‘perpetual peace’, the geographical
expansion of liberal modernity was accompanied by the intensification
and de-formalization of war in the international construction of liberal-
constitutional states of law and the production of liberal subjectivities as
rights-bearing individuals. Liberal world-ordering proceeds via the conduit of

wars for humanity, leading to Schmitt’s ‘spaceless universalism’. In this per-
spective, a straight line is drawn from WWI to the War on Terror to verify
Schmitt’s long-term prognostic of the 20th century as the age of ‘neu-
tralizations and de-politicizations’ (Schmitt 1993).
But this attempt to read the history of 20th century international
relations in terms of a succession of confrontations between the carrier-
nations of liberal modernity and the criminalized foes at its outer margins
seems unable to comprehend the complexities and specificities of ‘liberal’
world-ordering, then and now. For in the cases of Wilhelmine, Weimar
and fascist Germany, the assumption that their conflicts with the Anglo-
American liberal-capitalist heartland were grounded in an antagonism
between liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany outside its geo-
graphical and conceptual lines runs counter to the historical evidence. For
this reading presupposes that late-Wilhelmine Germany was not already
substantially penetrated by capitalism and fully incorporated into the
capitalist world economy, posing the question of whether the causes of
WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry (Blackbourn
and Eley 1984), or in processes of belated and incomplete liberal-
capitalist development, due to the survival of ‘re-feudalized’ elites in the
German state classes and the marriage between ‘rye and iron’ (Wehler
1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards
the construction of an autarchic German regionalism – Mitteleuropa or
Großraum – was not deeply influenced by the international ramifications
of the 1929 Great Depression, but premised on a purely political–
existentialist assertion of German national identity. Against a reading of
the early 20th century conflicts between ‘the liberal West’ and Germany as
‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal modernity and its
political exterior, there is more evidence to suggest that these confronta-
tions were interstate conflicts within the crisis-ridden and nationally
uneven capitalist project of modernity.
Similar objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the
Western discourse of liberal humanity against non-liberal foes apply to the
more recent period. For how can this optic explain that the ‘liberal West’
coexisted (and keeps coexisting) with a large number of pliant authoritarian
client-regimes (Mubarak’s Egypt, Suharto’s Indonesia, Pahlavi’s Iran, Fahd’s
Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi’s pre-intervention Libya, to name but a few),
which were and are actively managed and supported by the West as anti-
liberal Schmittian states of emergency, with concerns for liberal subjectivities
and Human Rights secondary to the strategic interests of political and geo-
political stability and economic access? Even in the more obvious cases of
Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now, Libya, the idea that Western intervention has to
be conceived as an encounter between the liberal project and a series of foes

outside its sphere seems to rely on a denial of their antecedent histories as
geopolitically and socially contested state-building projects in pro-Western
fashion, deeply co-determined by long histories of Western anti-liberal
colonial and post-colonial legacies. If these states (or social forces within
them) turn against their imperial masters, the conventional policy expression
is ‘blowback’. And as the Schmittian analytical vocabulary does not
include a conception of human agency and social forces – only friend/
enemy groupings and collective political entities governed by executive
decision – it also lacks the categories of analysis to comprehend the social
dynamics that drive the struggles around sovereign power and the even-
tual overcoming, for example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emer-
gency without US-led wars for humanity. Similarly, it seems unlikely that
the generic idea of liberal world-ordering and the production of liberal
subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention seems
improbable in some cases (e.g. Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more
likely in others (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya).
Liberal world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building,
coordinating, and drawing liberal and anti-liberal states into the Western
orbit, and overtly or covertly intervening and refashioning them once they
step out of line. These are conflicts within a world, which seem to push
the term liberalism beyond its original meaning. The generic Schmittian
idea of a liberal ‘spaceless universalism’ sits uncomfortably with the
realities of maintaining an America-supervised ‘informal empire’, which
has to manage a persisting interstate system in diverse and case-specific
ways. But it is this persistence of a worldwide system of states, which
encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American
supremacy possible in the first place.
This raises the final question of how the specificity of the War on Terror
can be aligned with the generality of liberal world-ordering and inter-
national law since WWI? For Schmitt diagnosed the turn towards a
multilateral, if US-directed, liberal institutionalization of world politics
during the interwar years as the key mechanism for the realization of his
age of neutralizations. However, 21st century United States unilateralism
seems to negate this diagnosis frontally, activating Schmitt’s politics of the
exception. If Schmitt’s original position was articulated as a critique of the
Kantian–Kelsian project, neo-Schmittians now have to resolve the ques-
tion of whether the War on Terror grafts a World-Leviathan onto the
liberal project, superseding an incipient world state of law, or whether
United States unilateralism can be squared with the Kantian project of
liberal international law. For the suggestion that the War against Terror
presents a fundamental continuity in American foreign policy, inscribed in
its generic liberal cosmopolitanism, is saddled with a number of para-

doxes. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the literature is internally divided
over whether the War on Terror presents a continuity (Mouffe 2005,
2007; Odysseos 2007) or a discontinuity (Zolo 2002, 2007) in American
foreign policy and a sharp break with liberal international law.
The Bush Doctrine and its ideological underpinning, Neo-Conservatism
and the ‘Project for a New American Century’, were articulated against a
liberal Kelsenite legalization and institutionalization of interstate rela-
tions, embracing the distinctly Schmittian idea of the selective transcen-
dence of the liberal rule of domestic and international law – states of
exception (Drolet 2010). This was expressed in the abrupt decline of the
post-Cold War notion of global governance and its re-politicization even
prior to 9/11 in a neo-authoritarian direction, captured in the discourse
of empire and imperialism – full-spectrum dominance. At the horizon
of this vision – derided by left Schmittians as a political apocalypse and
embraced by right Schmittians as the heroic self-assertion of an American
or Western community of values – looms a world without a political
exterior: a militarized Pax Americana. In the Neo-Conservative project,
Schmitt and Kelsen combine to form a paradoxical (mis-)alliance, as the
political use of Schmitt is reserved for the US state, supervising a Kelsenite
international institutional arrangement for the lesser partners within the
liberal zone of peace. Liberalism is, by definition, a broad concept, but it
cannot be indefinitely expanded beyond breaking point without loosing
some sense of terminological coherence.
Whereas Schmitt articulated his concepts against capitalist crisis to
defend German state autonomy domestically and internationally, the neo-
Conservative ideology sought to defend the domestic autonomy and
international primacy of the United States state in the context of its own
capitalist crisis (Colas and Saull 2005). The basic concept of the political
plus decisionism, which Schmitt constructed to defend Germany against
American imperialism was mobilized by neo-Conservatives to cultivate an
existentialist ethics for a post-welfare, patriotic, and heroic community
of American values. But neo-Conservatism was not originally articulated
as a response to international terror and foreign policy considerations. It
was conceived in the 1970s as an alternative state strategy for the man-
agement of domestic disorder – analogous to the original function of
Schmitt’s decisionism in Weimar Germany – as the long economic
downturn in the United States, the fiscal crisis of the US state, and the rise
of the post-welfare state precipitated the turn towards Schmittian pre-
scriptions (Drolet 2010). This entailed the re-assertion of public order
through the national identity-galvanizing effects of a community of
values, sustained by binary friend/foe declarations and the re-validation of
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-François 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
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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International Theory (2011), 3:2, 179–227 & Cambridge University Press, 2011

Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl

Keywords: Carl Schmitt; international political theory; history of

The neo-Schmittian revival in International Relation (IR) and beyond

Schmittiana in the 1980s was largely an exploration of his critique of

and space. Its attraction resides in its apparent ability to function as a

The limits of Schmitt’s international theory

political decisionism (politics of the exception), the concept of the political

was insufficient to capture the geopolitics of land-appropriations and

generate a plausible international theory, rather than advancing localized

Re-reading Schmitt contextually: the politics of concept-formation

from the specific sociopolitical context, concrete referent problematique,

tendency to provide a de-contextualized and de-politicized account of

that motivated the conception of Schmitt’s political and international ana-

The (neo-)Schmittian history and theory of international law and order

public interstate law into an incipient world domestic law, starting to

Schmitt’s method: from political decisionism to concrete-order-thinking

a de-personalized, apolitical, and ahistorical blindness. Sovereignty,

Although Schmitt criticized through decisionism legal normativism ‘from

the historical carriers of international law projects. Legal concepts have

The rise of the early modern interstate nomos

The discoveries: geopolitics without social process

division and distribution of land (y) externally, the land-appropriating

sociology of property and power. In the end, Schmitt provides no answer to

Absolutism: public state or dynastic sovereignty?

The dynasty remained in personal union, the physical carrier of sover-

These magni homines were not simply at the metaphorical centre of

English balancing: transition from feudalism to capitalism or

concrete-order-thinking, drove Britain’s ‘spatial revolution’? What

presents less a succession of distinct orders than a cumulative accretion of

The ius publicum and early modern warfare

Contamine, 2000a, 2000b).17 But in contradistinction to what the neo-

of the Polish Succession (1733–38), the War of the Austrian Succession

French Fronde, a noble rebellion against the cutting of their privileges

sovereignty. Schmitt’s metaphorical depiction of early modern warfare as

Versailles, the League of Nations and after: from concrete-order-thinking

Anglo-American powers and institutionalized in the League of Nations,

across the member states of the international system.21 Schmitt, in a series of

could be de-coupled from territorial aggrandizement, divorcing political

conception and Nazi Germany’s progressive construction of an autarchic

supervised from afar by a politically absent isolationist US and, closer to

Salvaging Schmitt for contemporary IR theory? Theoretical reprise

only outside society, but equally outside politics conventionally understood,

abstraction in Schmitt’s work. Throughout Schmitt’s work, concrete-

no categories to capture the sociopolitical (civil war, revolutions, coup

Conclusion: neo-Schmittian impasses

revolved around the political reassertion of domestic and international

rights-bearing individuals. Liberal world-ordering proceeds via the conduit of

be conceived as an encounter between the liberal project and a series of foes

its generic liberal cosmopolitanism, is saddled with a number of para-

executive government through the invocation of states of exception,

PM Reading Group at the University of Sussex. Earlier versions of this text

—— 1985b [1922]. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.

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