ABSTRACT
Schmitt wrote at a time when he believed that ‘Westphalia’ – this spatial, political and legal global order (the ‘nomos of the earth’) embodied in the jus publicum Europaeum – had undergone a momentous process of collapse, which he dates from the later decades of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War. In the foreword to the Nomos, with ill-concealed regret Schmitt notes, ‘[t]he traditional Eurocentric order of international law is foundering today, as is the old nomos of the earth’ (2003: 39). In its stead, Schmitt foresaw many dangers arising from the hegemonic global interventionism of the United States of America, the effects of de-concretisation and universalisation of international law (that is, of ‘order’ without explicit spatial grounding), of diminishing pluralism in the international system, as well as the evolution of partisan warfare and terrorism. It is with these concerns in mind that he posed the question with which we began this introduction to a volume dedicated to his international political thought.
