ABSTRACT
Against this harmonious chorus, the apocalyptic warnings of Carl Schmitt, who throughout his life saw a unified world as the reign of the Antichrist, are a disturbing but beneficial dissonance for they allow us to highlight the implicit problematic assumptions and political dangers of this dominant view. This is even more urgent in the present moment of world politics when we see the apparently paradoxical convergence of unilateral-militarist and liberalhumanitarian themes that immediately remind us of Schmitt’s powerful indictment, ‘whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’ (1996a: 54), as well as of his perceptive remarks on the two-sided political nature of the concept of humanity, whereby the fight in the name of humanity implies the denial to the enemy of the very quality of being human (2003a: 103-104). But let us proceed gradually: in the first part of this chapter, focusing on Schmitt’s post-Second World War writings on world order, I critically discuss Schmitt’s speculations on the possible configurations of a ‘new nomos of the earth’ emerging from the ashes of the traditional Eurocentric order of international law, the jus publicum Europaeum;
in the second section, while criticizing some aspects of his analysis of the postSecond World War world order, I argue that his international thought offers some interesting theoretical insights into the post-1989 international condition and, in particular, what I see as its Western-centric, liberal and global nature; the final section refers back to the beginning of this chapter by making a ‘Schmittian’ critique of Wendt’s above-mentioned argument according to which a world state is, in the long run, inevitable. The conclusions, proceeding from Schmitt’s stance against world unity and going beyond (and, perhaps, against) him, point in an evocative and rather preliminary manner to an intellectual strategy for articulating a more pluralist world order adequate for a multicultural and globalized international society.
