Where’s the just enemy of the American empire when you need it? A Schmittean response to Robert D. Kaplan

In an editorial in the Washington Post titled “Where’s the American empire when we need it?” (Kaplan, n.d.), Robert D. Kaplan worries about the recent decline in America’s capacity to respond to events that threaten to destabilize the international security system. Kaplan is concerned that the slow but steady erosion of American power will leave the current administration little choice but to recalibrate its international security commitments to better reflect America’s increasing inability to effectively fulfill its security obligations as the lone superpower in the post-Cold War era. If the United States is compelled to vacate some of its international security responsibilities, then for Kaplan the important question is who among the other powers in the system will assume the obligations that the United States can no longer fulfill?

Kaplan begins to answer this question with the less than sanguine observation that not all empires are built alike. His fear is that while rising powers such as China and India will gladly reap the benefits of their expanding geopolitical influence, these same nations are unlikely to adopt an approach to international security that operates on the assumption that with an increase in power comes an increase in responsibility. This potential threat to the security of the international system is the source of considerable unease for individuals like Kaplan who tend to view international politics through the power-based lens of the realist school(s) of International Relations[i] . That is not to suggest that realists of Kaplan’s persuasion have a monopoly on international security concerns, but it is to suggest that the source of Kaplan’s unease can be traced to the inability of realists to both find their bearings in the post-Cold War era and arrive at policy prescriptions that can effectively address security problems in an age where the risk environment has become globalized.

Kaplan illustrates this difficulty for realists in his description of the tough choices facing policy makers in the United States. On the one hand, he notes that the United States is in the midst of a seemingly inexorable decline of its power relative to other nations in the international system. Given this state of affairs, Kaplan is quite sympathetic to the current administration’s desire to reduce its role as the world’s policeman. Indeed, from a realist perspective, a foreign policy decision aimed at promoting the national interest by reducing its international commitments for the purpose of conserving the nation’s dwindling resources seems to meet the very definition of political rationality. On the other hand, if the new world order that is emerging in the wake of America’s decline as the global hegemon is populated by a number of regional powers, and one or a few of these powers choose to operate as free-riders on the international security system, then, Kaplan fears, any reduction in America’s commitments to international security will create a vacuum that will expose the United States in particular, and international society in general, to grave security risks. Taken together, the dilemma for the United States as described by Kaplan is that it chooses either to slow down its rate of decline as a world power by reducing its security commitments, a choice that would expose the international system to higher levels of risk, or it chooses to maintain its current level of security commitments and continues to pay the price that all overextended powers pay. These are difficult and rather unpalatable options for Kaplan, as he doesn’t believe that either choice promotes the long-term interests of the United States. If forced to choose between these two undesirable options, Kaplan seems reluctantly to prefer the latter. However, as indicated in the wistful question that he poses to open the editorial – “Where’s the American empire when we need it?” – we see that Kaplan would prefer a third solution to this dilemma: an American empire that has the wherewithal to maintain its international security commitments without suffering the fate of empires past.

Of course, while an American empire capable of assuming the responsibilities of a global Leviathan would conceptually resolve the concerns raised by Kaplan, his invocation of a solution that simply wishes away the problem that America is no longer in a position to assume those responsibilities, is a perfect illustration of the inability of political realists to find their bearings at a time like the present when the power structure of the global order is itself in flux. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Kaplan’s claim, as noted above, that not all empires are built alike, it can also be said that not all political realists are cut from the same cloth. Indeed, a strong counterpoint within the tradition of political realism can be found in the work of the controversial figure of the former Weimar and Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt. Whereas Kaplan’s diagnosis of contemporary international politics leads him to the conclusion that global security is best achieved if a unipolar power structure emerges in the post-Cold War era, Schmitt’s political philosophy leads him to an altogether different conclusion. Namely, Schmitt believed that not only was a multipolar world order preferable to a unipolar world order, but that rather than promoting security and peace, a unipolar world order was more likely to create the conditions for a global state of emergency that would usher in a new era of unregulated and unlimited warfare. While even a cursory engagement with Schmitt’s prolific output is not possible in this limited space, a brief consideration of just a few of the themes raised in his work can help us to open a conceptual space in which Kaplan’s prescription for world order can be critically assessed by helping us to understand Schmitt’s concerns about the inherent dangers of a unipolar world order.

Perhaps the most well known of Schmitt’s contributions to political thought is his claim that the constitutive feature of the political is the friend/enemy distinction (1996, 26). In order to understand the specific meaning and function this distinction has for Schmitt, it is necessary to understand how he differentiates the friend/enemy distinction from other constitutive distinctions such as good/bad, beautiful/ugly, and profitable/unprofitable, constitutive distinctions that gives rise to the ethical, aesthetic, and economic orders, respectively. As Sergei Prozorov suggests (2007), there are two important senses in which Schmitt distinguishes the constitutive distinction of the political (the friend/enemy distinction) from the constitutive distinctions that comprise the social order. First, for Schmitt the constitutive distinction of the political is the very condition of possibility of all order as such. This means that the positivity of all social orders, whether legal, moral, aesthetic, or economic owe their existence, in part, to a constitutive outside. As a consequence, if the political is presupposed by any and all orders, then, of course, the corollary is that in the absence of the political, there can be no order. Second, and just as importantly, Schmitt’s understanding of the friend/enemy distinction is not defined by the content of any of the other constitutive distinctions (e.g., “friend” is not defined as beautiful, profitable, or good and “enemy” is not defined as ugly, bad, or wasteful). Indeed, the political is not defined by any content at all, but instead is defined in terms of an intensity of an “association or dissociation of human beings” (1996, 38) that, consistent with the existential character of Schmitt’s political thought, simply is.

From this existential and hence non-normative criterion for establishing the friend/enemy distinction, comes a conception of the political enemy that is critically important to Schmitt’s claims concerning the conditions of possibility of arriving at a relatively peaceful and stable international order. It is the conception of the political enemy as a justus hostis, an equal and just enemy that comes into being, Schmitt argues, around the same time that we see the emergence of the modern-nation state (and modern politics) in the wake of the dissolution of the political authority of the church (Odysseos, 126-7). For Schmitt, the importance of this new conception of the political enemy was that it marked a revolutionary transformation in the conduct of war. Specifically, this transformation was marked by the transition from the just war doctrine that he believed was ascendant in the historical era preceding the emergence of the Westphalian state-system. Schmitt argued that whereas the just war led to inhumane and unlimited wars of conviction wherein parties aimed to annihilate their enemies because one does not make peace with an unjust enemy, the concept of the justus hostis gives war an institutional framework that humanizes the conduct of war because the political enemy is now treated as a just enemy with whom one can make peace.

This concept of the justus hostis was central to the establishment of the jus publicum Europaeum (JPE), the public international law that Schmitt believed was responsible for the relative peace and stability among the sovereign states of Europe from the time of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 up to the collapse of the JPE in 1914. According to Schmitt, the JPE is the first nomos of the earth: an international, legal, and, most importantly, a global spatial order that regulates the political life of sovereign European states for nearly three centuries. As Chris Brown notes (2007, 61), Schmitt’s account of the JPE should not be confused with the idea of international law that is typically associated with political liberalism. Indeed, Schmitt’s entire oeuvre is in many respects a sustained defense of the friend/enemy distinction from what he sees as liberalism’s effacement of the political and hence of order as such. To put it simply, in the liberal conception of domestic and international law, all political entities are legitimized by the norms of the legal system, a conception that gives rise to the familiar phrase ‘no one stands above the law’. From a Schmittean perspective, however, all regulative orders, legal and otherwise, are legitimized by a sovereign political decision, and because this sovereign decision is itself the very condition of possibility of order, we can say, as Luoma-aho aptly phrases it, “the sovereign stands above the law of the land” (2007, 38).

This inversion of political liberalism’s reverence for and dependence on the institutionalization of legal norms for the maintenance of order into a political decisionism wherein the possibility of order is seen to rest with the sovereign’s decision to identify who is the friend and who is the enemy, helps us to make sense of the famous line that opens his Political Theology “sovereign is he who decides on the exception”. Moreover, it also helps us to understand the nature of the concrete and spatial ordering that Schmitt saw as constitutive of the first global order (nomos) of the earth, the JPE.

If, as Schmitt believes, all institutional orders presuppose the concept of the political and the concept of the political presupposes the friend/enemy distinction, then there is the question of who decides on this distinction. For Schmitt, the decision is made by the sovereign. The sovereign is a quasi-transcendental concept that stands both inside and outside the political order. He is outside the political order in the sense that he constitutes it by deciding who is a friend and who is an enemy of the state, and he is inside in the sense that he is the titular head of that very same order. Given this understanding of the sovereign decision and its relation to political order, there remains the question concerning the nature of the exception. Broadly speaking, for Schmitt the exception is simply that which defines the rule. If there were no exceptions, there would be no need for rules, for laws, or for order. This explains Schmitt’s claim that liberalism’s belief in equality under the law, a form of jurisprudence that countenances no exceptions, is entirely inimical to the maintenance of order. In its concrete application in politics, the sovereign decision on the exception is the declaration of a state of emergency in which the rule of law is suspended in order to preserve it[ii]. In domestic politics the decision on the exception is aimed at dealing with the enemy within. Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, Roosevelt’s internment of the Japanese during World War II, and the numerous invocations of Article 48 during the troubled years of the Weimar Republic are all examples of the sovereign decision on exception. In each case, the extra-legal treatment of the exception may vary from one polity to another, but in all cases the label of justus hostis is denied.

This brings us to the question of the sovereign decision on exception as it relates to international relations. In particular, we are interested in looking at how the exception plays a constitutive role in Schmitt’s understanding of the JPE as the first truly global order (nomos) of the earth. As mentioned above, Schmitt claims that a shift from the just war doctrine to the doctrine of the just enemy, the justus hostis, was decisive in the transition from the unregulated wars of annihilation that ravaged Europe prior to the Treaty of Westphalia to the more limited and humane wars that occurred between sovereign states for the nearly three centuries during which European international politics were regulated by the JPE. Whether or not the historical record supports Schmitt’s claim about the humanization and limitation of war in Europe under the JPE, the question remains as to why Schmitt believes that a pact of mutual recognition among sovereign European states constitutes a global order rather than simply a European order. The answer to this question lies in Schmitt’s understanding of the ‘nomos of the earth’ not as an abstract legal order, but as a legal order that is territorially or spatially defined: i.e., “law is law only in a particular location” (2003, 98). Thus, a condition of possibility for the rule of law to effectively regulate conduct, in both domestic and international contexts, is that the legal-political order be tied to a distinct geopolitical territory. Moreover, if we recall that Schmitt understands the exception as the definition of the rule, then a further condition of possibility for a legal-political limitation and humanization of war is the very literal drawing of a line in the sand in order to designate a territorial zone in which the rule of law in Europe has no application. For Schmitt, that line emerges with the discovery of the New World in 1492, a geopolitical space in which “for want of any limits to war, only the law of the stronger applied” (2003, 94). Seen from this perspective, the New World becomes the exception to the legal-political order of the JPE. It is the constitutive outside of an interior geopolitical space (the Old World) that has successfully bracketed, Schmitt argues, the war of all against all from contaminating the conduct of interstate relations on European soil. To contemporary ears, the creation of a lawless zone wherein sovereign states are free to pursue their struggle for power without limitation (even if this struggle results in genocide), in order to make possible a zone of limited and humane warfare, does not seem like a bargain that anyone with the slightest concern for social justice would consider striking.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the inherent risks that accompany efforts to appropriate the political thought but not the politics of a controversial figure like Schmitt, there are two aspects of his thought discussed above that offer a valuable critical perspective from which to view contemporary efforts to establish a secure global system, a new nomos of the earth, for the post-Cold War era. These are 1) his identification of the concept of the justus hostis with the golden age of international relations as opposed to the just war doctrine which he believes creates the conditions for unlimited and unregulated warfare and 2) his understanding of the legal-political order of the JPE as a global order that presupposes an internally differentiated geopolitical space. As will be discussed below, each of these aspects of his thought reveal a uniquely pluralistic thinker, a political pluriversalist, whose thought not only draws our attention to the limitations associated with Kaplan’s preferred solution to the problem of global security, but draws our attention to what Schmitt sees as the limitations associated with any solution to the problem of global security – including those advanced by the cosmopolitan school of conflict resolution – that embraces a monistic or universal conception of the nomos. In order to help us understand how the pluralistic underpinnings of Schmitt’s thought can be appropriated to provide both a critique of, and an alternative to, the solution to the problem of global security advanced by Kaplan, we will juxtapose Kaplan’s preference for a unipolar world order (where the American empire sits at the head of the table) with Schmitt’s preference for a multipolar world order that establishes – as he believed it had during the time of the JPE[iii] – a connection between a legal-political order regulated by the doctrine of the just enemy with a concrete spatial ordering that clarifies the rules of application for that very doctrine, i.e., it meets Schmitt’s criterion that “law is law only in a particular location” (2003, 98).

To begin, let’s briefly look at two of the features of Schmitt’s political thought that help to explain why he prefers a multipolar to a unipolar world order. First, recall that for Schmitt the very condition of possibility for any semblance of order, political or otherwise, rests on the friend/enemy distinction. Therefore, a Schmittean solution to the problem of global order is by definition a pluralistic solution as it requires the existence of at least two political entities[iv] (at least one collective “us” and one collective “them”) both of whom must recognize one another as a just and equal enemy if the struggle for power is to be prevented from dissolving into unregulated and unlimited warfare.

Second, and related, is Schmitt’s well known criticism of the way in which he believes that political liberalism advances a universalistic ideology that wraps itself in the concept of ‘humanity’ in the hopes of delegitimizing and then overcoming the distinctly political barriers that the Westphalian state system, regulated by the JPE, posed, to what Schmitt believed, were liberalism’s underlying goals for a new global economic order. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt made two arguments, one logical the other political-practical, against liberalism’s use of the concept of humanity that bear directly on his preference for a multipolar rather than a unipolar world order. The first of these arguments was to simply point out that liberalism’s claim that it fights its political enemies in the name of ‘humanity’ is logically impossible as the very concept of a unified humanity excludes the possibility for a human enemy: the concept of humanity in a political context, writes Schmitt, “excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being” (1976, 54). The second, and more important argument Schmitt makes is the political-practical one. To wit, Schmitt understands liberalism’s embrace of the concept of humanity as nothing more than a sleight of hand that is intended to mask the particular economic interests of the state by identifying the state’s interests with the interests of humanity. However, in the context of a political world where war remains an ever-present possibility of human existence, Schmitt argues that when the liberal state “fights its political enemy in the name of humanity” (ibid.), the enemy is necessarily defined as inhuman, as the unjust enemy with whom one cannot make peace. As a result, Schmitt argues that the liberal state’s embrace of the concept of humanity in the early half of the 20th century was, for all intents and purposes, a political act aimed at transcending the political as such (i.e., overcoming the friend/enemy distinction). However, what Schmitt reveals in his interpretation of this period of world history is that rather than transcending the political with a war to end all wars, the liberal state simply intensified the constitutive distinction of the political, unleashing a particularly destructive form of politics that marked the end of the era of the justus hostis and the return of the just war doctrine to the European continent and beyond.

What is clear from the discussion above is that Schmitt’s preference for a multipolar world order stems from his unwavering belief that the political world is a pluriverse, not a universe (1976, 52). From Schmitt’s perspective, whether a global order is unipolar in the sense of a world government that ostensibly represents the unification of the global community, or, alternatively, as Kaplan prefers, unipolar in the sense that a single political entity assumes the responsibility of political decisions — of deciding on the exception — for a plurality of apolitical communities, neither alters the fundamental fact of the political: as long as we live in a political world there will always be a plurality of political entities, where some of these entities will be friends and some will be enemies. For Schmitt, the ever-present danger of unipolarity is that a single political authority will inevitably identify itself as the friend of humankind and its enemies as the enemies of humankind. The risk of this state of affairs is that when the discourse of humanity gets integrated into the discourse of the political, all political opposition and resistance to the prevailing authority tends to be treated as opposed to humanity in general rather than opposed to a particular form or life or political rule. That is, the space for legitimate and justified opposition to a unipolar legal-political order is more or less foreclosed. As a consequence, we can see that for Schmitt one of the primary reasons that he prefers a multipolar world order is that in a unipolar world the concept of the justus hostis fades from the political horizon and with it the capacity of the political to humanize and limit the conduct of war. In its place the just war doctrine, along with its wars of annihilation, returns.

That we’re living in a time where the just war doctrine is in political ascendancy hardly needs justification. In the name of national and/or international security, the United States (along with the coalition of the willing) has declared that they will not negotiate with terrorists or the rogue states that support their operations. Those parties have been designated as the unjust enemy with whom peace cannot be made. In Schmittean terminology, one can say that the United States’ War on Terror is a war of annihilation on the exception to the rule, and although there is little doubt that as a national security issue Schmitt would have been highly sympathetic to this position, the global nature of this war would have caused him considerable discomfort. Notwithstanding the fact that Schmitt was perfectly comfortable, too comfortable with wars of annihilation, as demonstrated by his understanding of the role that the lawless zone of the New World played in civilizing the institution of war in Europe during the time of the JPE, he was only comfortable insofar as those wars of annihilation were geopolitically, that is, spatially, circumscribed. It is here that we encounter the other aspect of the pluralistic underpinnings of Schmitt’s thought that reinforces his arguments for a multipolar nomos of the earth. This aspect of his thought is the spatial corollary to his reflections on the problems that inevitably arise when a political entity invokes the concept of humanity for specifically political purposes. In such cases, the political enemy loses its moral standing as a human being and becomes, in the eyes of those on the side of humanity, justifiably subject to extra-legal processes including torture and murder. However, whereas during the era of the JPE this state of exception was confined to the New World, in the current geopolitical climate there is no ‘safe haven’ for the political enemy of humanity. That is, there is no geopolitical space that stands as the exception to, and the condition of possibility for, a unipolar legal-political order, because in the post-Cold War era the legal-political order has become unmoored from any specific location precisely so it can function effectively in any and all locations. When coupled with both the political appropriation of the concept of humanity and the ascendancy of the just war doctrine, this lack of an internally differentiated geopolitical space would have been of grave concern to Schmitt if he were alive today. In Schmittean terms, we can say that in the absence of a geopolitical designation for both the rule (international order) and the exception (the perceived threats to this order), the war of all against all is no longer bounded in the territory of the exception, but instead becomes a global condition of unending, unregulated, and unlimited warfare.

Of course, Kaplan would probably respond to these arguments in favor of a multipolar world by suggesting that since the end of the Cold War, the nature of the threats to the security, and perhaps even viability, of the international system (e.g., the nexus between weapons proliferating states and transnational terrorism) have rendered the idea of a territorial exception to the rule and the concept of the just and equal enemy obsolete. The gist of Kaplan’s argument would simply be that if any one of the powers in a multipolar world order failed to meet their security obligations the entire international system would be exposed to an intolerable level of risk because in a globalized risk environment it’s extremely difficult to contain the threat in the region where it originated. For example, if China is responsible for securitizing East Asia and it fails to commit the necessary resources to monitor the North Korea’s weapons proliferating programs, eventually that gap in the system could result in the detonation of a WMD on U.S. or European soil. On the face of it, the argument advanced by Kaplan here is an extremely powerful argument for a unipolar world.

Nevertheless, when the logic of this argument is viewed in the light of Schmitt’s critique of unipolarity, we find that one of the central planks on which this argument rests may be on considerably weaker ground than first appears. This is the argument that whether we are dealing with rogue states, terrorist networks, or some combination of the two, there are actors on the international stage that, if given the means, would seize on any and every opportunity to inflict as much damage on the West as humanly possible. Rightly or wrongly, these actors have been labeled the enemies of the civilized world (i.e., the enemies of humanity) and the normal rules of conduct in warfare have been suspended until these enemies are annihilated. In Schmittean terms, these political enemies have lost their moral standing as members of the civilized world and as such they represent the very personification of the unjust enemy with whom peace cannot be made. Kaplan’s preference for a unipolar world ultimately stems from his belief that the real and potential threat these actors pose to the West provides a sufficient, and perhaps from his perspective, necessary reason for the United States to maintain its global hegemony in the post-Cold War era. Notwithstanding the fact that Schmitt would almost certainly have considered it the height of irresponsibility if the United States had failed to declare a state of emergency in order to remove any legal and/or moral constraints on the prosecution of the War on Terror, his critique of unipolarity illuminates a fundamental paradox at the very foundation of Kaplan’s logic. Namely, Schmitt directs our attention to the fact that in a unipolar world order the monistic face of the political does not eliminate, but instead simply masks the fact that there is a political pluriverse beneath the appearance of political universe. That is, the condition of unipolarity does not eliminate political antagonisms. Indeed, as Schmitt argues, in the condition of unipolarity the political enemy becomes identified with the enemy of civilization, the global order, and/or humanity, and as a consequence the figurative and literal space for legitimate political opposition to the prevailing power structure is foreclosed. If the normal political and legal channels for expressing grievances are foreclosed, then we should not be surprised when political opposition to the prevailing order turns to forms of violence that a ‘civilized’ society would consider beyond the pale[v]. While this is not to suggest that terrorism and the War on Terror can simply be explained by the fact that we are currently living in a unipolar world, it is to suggest, as indicated by Schmitt’s reflections on unipolarity, that Kaplan’s solution may in fact create a paradox wherein his solution to the problem of order may be at the very heart of, or at the very least a contributing factor in, the problem he seeks to address.

The above engagement with Schmitt’s political thought should give considerable pause to those realists like Kaplan who are under the impression that the risks associated with trusting other powers to share in the securitizing of the international system are potentially far greater than the risks associated with the establishment of a unipolar world order. Nevertheless, while Schmitt’s political thought can provide us with an important critical intellectual tool to assess our current political condition, the politics that issue from his thought – especially his countenance of the treatment of the exception – are simply too dangerous to provide an adequate alternative to the problem of global order raised by Kaplan. Although this is not the place to explore this in depth, a more promising answer to the problem of order than the power political solutions offered by political realism is the cosmopolitan school of conflict resolution that sees social justice as the foundation to any stable and peaceful political order. However, despite the promise of conflict resolution as an alternative to power politics, there are two important and related senses in which Schmitt’s critique of Kaplan applies equally to the cosmopolitan school of conflict resolution. First, with its embrace of universal human rights and its emphasis on the dignity of the individual, the politics of the cosmopolitan school of conflict resolution identifies its interests with the interests of humankind. As a result, there is an inherent risk in this form of conflict resolution that the “other” of the cosmopolitan school of conflict resolution, the political enemy, will be defined as the enemy of humanity. Second, in the post-Cold War era, many members of the cosmopolitan school of conflict resolution have embraced the doctrine of the just intervention which has led to a situation in which the territorial sovereignty of nation-states that fail to protect their citizens from human rights abuses has been significantly diminished. Given these two aspects of cosmopolitan conflict resolution – its politicization of the concept of humanity and its willingness to redraw and perhaps eventually erase the existing internal differentiation of sovereign territorial space – the field needs to be cognizant of the fact that its pursuit of justice for all carries many of the same risks that Schmitt sees in Kaplan’s pursuit of a unipolar global order. Both cosmopolitan conflict resolution and Kaplan’s political realism share a vision of the political world as a political universe rather than a pluriverse and in doing so they both risk that their political enemies, the “Other” to their respective visions of unity, will act out in unpredictable and violent ways. In this regard, Schmitt’s political pluralism serves as a critical reminder that politics is by its nature an exclusionary practice. Every political order, even a global political order predicated on universal concepts of justice, presupposes the concrete existence of an excluded Other. Whether one pursues a secure global order through a realist lens such as Kaplan’s or the lens of conflict resolution, Schmitt’s concept of the just and equal enemy provides an ethical orientation to the constitutive outside of any political order that can help to limit, but not erase, the potentially destabilizing effects of that exclusion.

Works Cited:

Brown, C. (2007). From humainzed war to humanitarian intervention: Carl Schmitt’s critique of the Just War tradition. In L. Odysseos & F. Petito (Eds.), The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order. London: Routledge.

Kaplan, R. D. (n.d.). Where’s the American empire when we need it? The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/03/AR201012...

Luoma-aho, M. (2007). Geopolitics and grosspolitics: From Carl Schmitt to E.H. Carr and James Burnham. In L. Odysseos & F. Petito (Eds.), The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order. London: Routledge.

Mouffe, C. (2005). Schmitt’s Vision of a Multipolar World Order. South Atlantic Quarterly, 104(2), 245-251.

Odysseos, L. (2007). Crossing the line? Carl Schmitt on the ‘spaceless univeralism’ of cosmopolitinism and the War on Terror. In L. Odysseos & F. Petito (Eds.), The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order. London: Routledge.

Prozorov, S. (2007). The ethos of insecure life: reading Carl Schmitt’s existential decisionism as a Foucauldian ethics. In L. Odysseos & F. Petito (Eds.), The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order. London: Routledge.

Schmitt, C. (1996). The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schmitt, C. (2003). The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. New York: Telos Press.

Notes:

[i] Notwithstanding the plural forms political realism has taken over the last century, all forms share a belief that in any historical era the normative order of international politics is invariably constrained by the extent to which the powerful actors in the system are willing to forcefully respond to actors that threaten to destabilize the system. That is to say, contrary to the liberal tradition of International Relations, Kaplan and the realists understand order as an effect of force rather than reason.

[ii] For an excellent introduction to Schmitt’s concept of the exception see Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception. Chicago; Chicago University Press.

[iii] While Schmitt dates the end of the golden age of international relations with the dissolution of the JPE in 1914, he argues in the Nomos that the real beginning of the end of the Westphalian system occurred in 1823 when the United States announced the Monroe Doctrine. For Schmitt, this marked the emergence of a new political entity to replace the nation-state, a regional or hemispheric power that usurped the political power of the traditional nation-state. He referred to this entity as a Groβraum and although he feared that the United States was well on its way to emerging from the Cold War unchallenged as a global hegemon (both ideologically and militarily), he did believe that it was possible, though unlikely, that a multipolar constellation of several Groβraums might emerge to stabilize the global security system in the wake of the Cold War. See Luoma-aho (2007) for an excellent discussion of the Groβraum and grosspolitics.

[iv] “As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than just one state” (1976, 53)

[v] See Chantal Mouffe (2005) for an excellent discussion of this very point.