The revival of carl schmitt in international relations: The last refuge of critical theorists?1

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 27-48

  Chandler, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Carl Schmitt; Critical theorists; Ontology

Indexed keywords

EID: 50849105811     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829808093729     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. With apologies for adapting the subtitle of Paul Mattick's excellent book, Marxism: The Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? (London: Merlin Press, 1983).
2. Martti Koskenniemi, 'International Law as Political Theology: How to Read Nomos der Erde?', Constellations 11, no. 4 (2004): 492-511. Available at: http://www.constellationsjournal.org/MKosk11%5B1%5D.4.pdf.
3. See, for example, William Rasch, Sovereignty and its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004)
4. and for a broader collection on the critical use of Schmitt to critique the claims of universal liberalism, Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999).
5. As John McCormick noted in 1998: 'Carl Schmitt is fast becoming recognized as the twentieth century's foremost critic of liberalism', 'Review: Political Theory and Political Theology: The Second Wave of Carl Schmitt', Political Theory 26, no. 6 (1998): 830-54, 830.
6. Koskenniemi, 'International Law', 505-6.
7. For example, Michael Reisman, 'Sovereignty and Human Rights in Contemporary International Law', in Democratic Governance and International Law, eds. G. H. Fox and B. R. Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
8. AnneMarie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
9. Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2004);
10. Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (London: Atlantic Books, 2003);
11. Fernando Tesón, 'Ending Tyranny in Iraq', Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 2 (2005): 73-89.
12. By 'critical cosmopolitans' I refer to theorists who are critical of the state-based UN Charter norms of equal sovereignty and non-intervention and favour, to some extent at least, a liberal internationalism based on upholding the rights of individuals. These theorists would argue that their position is very different to the policies pursued by the US, especially in the war on terror, which is often seen as an attempt to reimpose divisive, exclusivist, 'statist' frameworks legitimized by the idea of 'friend' and 'enemy. A clear example of this position is laid out by Mary Kaldor. Kaldor counterposes her cosmopolitan approach to the allegedly 'Schmittian' frameworks of both opponents of interventionism and neo-conservative advocates for intervention, see, for example, Kaldor, Human Security: Reflections on Globalization and Intervention (London: Polity, 2007), 10.
13. By 'critical post-structuralists' I refer to those who see the US-led war on terror as a global, unlimited and unending war in pursuit of the interests of the global liberal order. These critical post-structuralists are likely to be much less sympathetic to liberal internationalist claims and more suspicious of any universal claims for the cosmopolitan enforcement of human rights. Schmitt is often a key theorist used to critique these liberal universal claims and reveal the interests of political power which lie behind them. This approach is clearly articulated, for example, in many of the essays in the edited collection of Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Perito, The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order (London: Routledge, 2007).
14. On this, see Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe and Alexander Gourevitch, 'Introduction: The Unholy Alliance against Sovereignty', in Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations, eds. Bickerton et al. (London: UCL Press, 2007), 1-19.
15. For discussions of the implications of this shift see, for example: Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity, 2007);
16. Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007);
17. David Chandler, Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-building (London; Pluto, 2006).
18. See, for example: Renato Cristi, Carl Schmitt and Liberal Authoritarianism: Strong State, Free Economy (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1998);
19. Ellen Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (London: Duke University Press, 2004);
20. Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999);
21. John McCormick, Carl Schnitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
22. See Chandler, 'International Justice', New Left Review 2, no. 6 (2000): 55-66.
23. The new hierarchical order is reflected in the questioning of the juridical and political equality of the postcolonial 'pre-modern world', now alleged to be populated by unequal 'quasi-states' seen to be 'failed' or 'failing'. The classic text framing post-Cold War IR as a challenge to views of universal sovereign equality is Robert Jackson's Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
24. but see also: Anne-Marie Slaughter, 'International Law in a World of Liberal States', European Journal of International Law 6, no. 4 (1995): 503-38;
25. David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From, the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 232;
26. and, for the reassertion of great power prerogatives, the concluding chapters of Gerry Simpson's Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
27. See also, Cooper's Breaking of Nations, which explicitly asserts the need for 'double standards' when dealing with 'pre-modern' states. The limited controversy over the broader shift away from formal relations of sovereign equality, in fact, reflects the limited nature of inter-imperialist rivalry.
28. Even Kagan swiftly moderated his celebrated 'Mars vs. Venus' view of the US-Europe divide: Kagan, 'America's Crisis of Legitimacy', Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 65-87.
29. Balakrishnan, The Enemy, 264.
30. Richard Devetak, 'Between Kant and Pufendorf: Humanitarian Intervention, Statist Anti-Cosmopolitanism and Critical International Theory', Review of International Studies 33 (2007), 'Special Issue: Critical International Relations Theory after 25 Years': 151-74, 156.
31. Ibid., 152.
32. Ken Booth, 'Ten Flaws of Just Wars', in The Kosovo Tragedy: The Human Rights Dimensions, ed. K. Booth (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 314-24;
33. see also Jürgen Habermas, 'Bestialität und Humanität', Die Zeit, 54, no. 18, 29 April 1999. Franz Solms-Laubach trans available at: http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/011habermas.htm.
34. See, for example, Habermas' 2001 interviews with Giovanna Borradori in Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003);
35. Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
36. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 54.
37. Of course, it could be argued that there is a sense of 'cheating' in that instead of focusing on the collective political subject that could potentially be an agent of emancipation - and thereby materially grounding the critique of the present - there has been an increased tendency towards idealism. See the excellent critique of critical theory on these grounds by Beate Jahn, 'One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back: Critical Theory as the Latest Edition of Liberal Idealism', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 3 (1998): 613-41.
38. Devetak, 'Between Kant and Pufendorf, 160, 166.
39. For an influential statement of this claim see Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', Review of International Studies 17, no. 4 (1991): 313-27.
40. Devetak, 'Between Kant and Pufendorf, 167.
41. Chris Brown, 'From Humanized War to Humanitarian Intervention: Carl Schmitt's Critique of the Just War Tradition', in Odysseos and Petito, International Political Thought, 56-69.
42. Ibid., 65.
43. Habermas makes a similar point with regard to Schmitt: 'it was Schmitt's opinion that the substance of the political, the self-asserting of the identity of a Volk or of a movement, will not let itself be tamed by norms, that every attempt at domestication through law, must accrue to moral savagery', in Habermas, 'America and the World (interview)', Logos, 3, no. 3 (2004). Available at: http://www.logosjournal.com/habermas_america.htm.
44. See Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
45. This comes across strongly in Michell Dean, 'Nomos: Word and Myth', in Odysseos and Petito, International Political Thought, 242-58, esp. 253-4; and in Brown, 'From Humanized War', 63.
46. See, for example, the majority of the papers in the Odysseos and Petito collection, International Political Thought, especially, Alain de Benoist, 'Global Terrorism and the State of Permanent Exception: The Significance of Carl Schmitt's Thought Today', 73-96;
47. Gary L. Ulmen, 'Partisan Warfare, Terrorism and the Problem of a New Nomos of the Earth', ibid., 97-106;
48. Linda S. Bishai and Andreas Behnke, 'War, Violence and the Displacement of the Political', ibid., 107-23;
49. Odysseos, 'Crossing the Line? Carl Schmitt on the "Spaceless Universalism" of Cosmopolitanism and the War on Terror', ibid., 124-43.
50. Odysseos, 'Crossing the Line?', 138.
51. Bishai and Behnke, 'War', 117, 120.
52. See, for example, Mouffe, 'Carl Schmitt's Warning on the Dangers of a Unipolar World', in Odysseos and Petito, International Political Thought, 147-53;
53. Fabio Petito, 'Against World Unity: Carl Schmitt and the Western-Centric and Liberal Global Order', ibid., 166-84;
54. and for more extreme versions, Mika Ojakangas, 'A Terrifying World without an Exterior: Carl Schmitt and the Metaphysics of International (Dis)order', ibid., 205-21;
55. Sergei Prozorov, "The Ethos of Insecure Life: Reading Carl Schmitt's Existential Decisionism as a Foucauldian Ethics', ibid., 222-41.
56. The current fashion for finding the 'exception' makes the 'exception' another word for power and presents the description of power as an implicit critique of its exercise, see, for example Jabri, War, 95, 99. While, for Schmitt: 'not every extraordinary measure, not every police emergency measure or emergency decree, is necessarily an exception. What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order.'
57. See Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 12.
58. See further, Jan Selby, 'Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance and the Limits of Foucauldian IR', International Relations 21, no. 3 (2007): 324-45, for an excellent critique of the global liberal ontology at the centre of many critical post-structuralist IR frameworks. Through the use of Schmitt, this global ontology is at the same time descriptively constructed and normatively critiqued.
59. They draw out the problematic nature of critiques of 'realism' in contemporary IR, which is paradoxically condemned for both defending sovereignty and non-intervention and for defending war and militarism, reflecting the way in which moralizing has tended to be substituted for political theory within the discipline.
60. In many ways, Nomos reproduces the assumptions behind Karl Kautsky's September 1914 article, 'Ultra-Imperialism', in the possibility of an inter-imperialist alliance sustaining world peace and evading 'the colonial danger'. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1914/09/ultra- imp.htm.
61. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), 219.
62. Schmitt, Nomos, 148;
63. see also 183. A strikingly similar point about the importance of colonial expansion was made by Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Martir Lawrence, 1933).
64. Although he does implicitly make the point that the collapse of the European order after the 1885 Congo conference was essentially a matter of European division: 'Toward the end of the 19th century, European powers and jurists of European international law not only ceased to be conscious of the spatial presuppositions of their own international law, but had lost any political instinct, any common power to maintain their own spatial structure and the bracketing of war.' Schmitt, Nomos, 224.
65. This sense of loss of the old world of the unity of European peoples, often seen as undermined by American power, can be seen in much of the international relations and political theorizing of the period; see, for example, the early work within the English School and for an example of how this division was held to make more difficult the negotiation of European imperial decline, John Plamenatz, On Alien Rule and Self-Government (London: Longmans, 1960).
66. Lenin, Imperialism.
67. Schmitt, Nomos, 335.
68. See his critique of liberal parliamentary democracy, Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), esp. 12.
69. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 35.
70. Ibid., 55.
71. Ibid., 67.
72. Schmitt, Nomos, 118.
73. Ibid., 321.
74. Alessandro Colombo, "The "Realist Institutionalism" of Carl Schmitt', in Odysseos and Petito, International Political Thought, 21-35, 32-3.
75. Schmitt, Nomos, 192.
76. Ibid., 245.
77. For example, Schmitt, Political Theology, 6.
78. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 30-1.
79. Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 10, 12.
80. See also the discussion in Jan Müller, 'Carl Schmitt - An Occasional Nationalist?', History of European Ideas 23, no. 1 (1997): 19-34.
81. Schmitt, Nomos, 230-1.
82. Ibid., 233.
83. Ibid., 234.
84. Ibid., 242-3.
85. Ibid., 252.
86. Ibid., 219-21.
87. See, for example, Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1995);
88. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001);
89. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1978).
90. Brown, 'From Humanized War', 66-7.
91. The sharp disjunctions in opportunist readings of Schmitt indicate that those who use Schmitt as a 'straw man' to legitimize their positions have little concern with Schmitt's actual analysis.
92. Schmitt, Nomos, 321.
93. The contingent nature of these points are addressed in Brown's critique of Booth's 'Ten Flaws of Just Wars', in Brown, 'From Humanized War', 58.
94. Hedley Bull, "The Grotian Conception of International Society', in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Relations, eds. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), 51-73.
95. Schmitt, Nomos, 355.
96. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 36.
97. Ibid., 49.
98. For an excellent analysis of Great Powers and international law see Simpson, Great Powers.