ABSTRACT

Only a few months after the Schuman Declaration in May 1950, the basis of the Treaty of Paris one year later, and thus the forerunner of today’s European Union, another engaged European, the controversial Weimar jurist Carl Schmitt, published his paradigm-rattling TheNomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. For many years leading up to the publication of Nomos, Schmitt had argued that European jurisprudence was all but obsolete, cut off from its sources and under the negative influences of an increasingly technological culture (Balakrishnan, 2000: 5; Dyzenhaus, 1998). This way of thematizing European intellectual evolution converges with the array of political positions that mark Schmitt’s intellectual career. He is, by and large, indifferent to traditional left-right oppositions of traditional politics, seeing them as secondary to his project of re-founding contemporary jurisprudence. Through his career, he adamantly argued for the autonomy of the sovereign state, seeing in its decline the loss of legitimacy, the weakening of economic integrity and the detachment of law from its historical roots. In the Nomos book, he focuses on the relation between European and international jurisprudence, and what he calls the ‘spatial order’ that has always supported it. In his analysis, Schmitt describes the end of a global era and the rise of a new era, starting in the mid-1940s, that is approximately simultaneous with the origins of the European Coal and Steel Community. This chapter investigates the degree to which the historical confluence

of European construction and the Schmittian European nomos bears any deeper, more substantive, links. It will advance the hypothesis that Schmitt’s critique of what he called European International Law reflects to a compelling degree the complex geometry of the emerging European legal system. By examining the architecture of European law in the light of Schmitt’s concept of nomos, it attempts to contribute to clarifying the unique logic of legitimacy and authorization that make up the European juridical space.