ABSTRACT
With the 2003 translation of The Nomos of the Earth, a rather different set of Carl Schmitt’s ideas became accessible to an Anglophone audience. While previously his work had shaped debates on politics, the political, the friendenemy distinction, the question of democracy and the sovereign decision (see Dyzenhaus 1998; Mouffe 1999), his ideas on international politics became available. A 2004 conference session led to a symposium in the Leiden Journal of International Law and an edited book on his ‘international political thought’ (Odysseos and Petito 2006; 2007), in which The Nomos of the Earth is hailed as a ‘missing classic’ of international relations (2007: 2). In a recent book William Hooker describes him as ‘one of the most profound and most prolific theorists of international order in the twentieth century’, with The Nomos of the Earth likely to be guaranteed a place ‘in the canon of essential IR reading’ (2009: 3). In another volume we are told that Schmitt’s work ‘involves a complex theory of political territory’ (Shapiro 2008: 68). Hooker also suggests that Schmitt’s ‘bold vision of the importance of spatial concepts in shaping the possibility of political order’ qualifies him as a geographer (2009: 196). The interest in Schmitt, to an extent, parallels both the appropriations of Giorgio Agamben, whose own ideas draw greatly on Schmitt, particularly in terms of the ‘space of exception’, and the impact of Hardt and Negri’s Empire on the thinking of global order. Schmitt apparently can help us understand terrorism, the ‘war on terror’, responses in terms of security, the post-Cold War world, the European Union and globalisation (see also Rasch 2005; Slomp 2009).
