Carlo Galli

CARL SCHMITT AND THE GLOBAL AGE

1. Schmitts thought is the deconstruction of modern political theory: this is true
both in internal politics for the exception/decision theory and the political theory
(which is a genealogy of the Hobbesian rational state theory) and in international
politics with the theory of nomos and the theory of the partisan (which are
genealogical complications of geopolitics and state-based international rights). This
means that the conflictual element in Schmitts political thought (the enemy has an
ineradicable role in the creation of order both in the theory of the political, in the
theory of decision of the secularized theologico-political matrix, and in the theory of
constituent power) is not an apologia for absolute conflict but serves the orientation
of order and the political unity inherent in modern political theory, as well as in
Schmittian thought. In Schmitt, this functionality is never complete instrumentality of
the conflict of order, nor complete subordination: rather, it is the perpetual
disturbance of that order by originary, internal conflict, as well as perpetual
indeterminateness of order on the part of the conflict through which originally
determines it.
From the viewpoint of internal politics, the political, through its friend/enemy
relation, is the permanent presence of the conflict at the origin of order and, through
decision, at its interior; it is thus a radical and determinate conflict which exists
always in relation with order, inasmuch as it is a deficiency which demands and
provokes a regulating political resolution. In short, the political is a function of
dismantling but, at the same time, it is a structuring function: it is crisis, but also
order. In this way, modern political form, in that it openly utilizes the political, is
architectural nihilism.
The spatial difference between internal and externalcorresponding to the
distinction between enemy and criminal, peace and war, police and militarywhich
constitutes modern politics is welcomed by Schmitt as strategic; but confining
disorder to the exterior while keeping peace in the interior requires that the state
recognizes, preserves, and manages the originary disorder. For the state to be closed,
capable of setting boundaries and of separating order from disorder, it must be open
to the political, it must therefore know how to initiate coercion to form and the coimplication of order and disorder when deciding upon the exception.
The thesis of the existence of a dialectic of Modernity is central to Schmitts
thought.
Political, ideological and material forcesa social interlacing of
individualism, liberalism and liberal democracy, normativism and moralism,
technology, and capitalist and communist economies form within the state, robbing
it of its sovereign governing capabilities, substituting indeterminate universality for
concreteness and requiring that the political take the place of economics, law, and
technology (from the Hobbesian origin of state). Logics of Modernity run from
concrete to abstract, from determinate to universal, and from political to social.
1

The evolution of the Modern requires that decision be supplanted by reason as

the origin or order. Reason, for Schmitt is as much liberal discussion as it is every
attempt to completely eliminate conflict and political action and to trust instead in
rational hypotheses of automatic reconciliation. Societymost of all the political
organizations born within society, the political parties and advocacy groups that are
the essence of democracyinvades the State, and ends up transforming its own
pretext of stability and form into mobilization and formlessness: the result is the
total-through-weakness state posited by Schmitt in 1931-32, to which he opposes
the total state, then the empire and the greater space. Schmitts objective, already
evident in his early works, is to oppose himself to this drift from modern nihilism and
this abstraction of the concrete, to delay it and combat it from the interior, to renew
the Moderns capacity for concreteness by using its highest moments of crisis as
points of departure, and to see the katechon (the slowing, formative force of
immanence processes which deals with the opening into transcendence and the
irruption of the eternal, but not a foundation of politics over religion) where there is
danger. The various strategies that Schmitt employs over the course of his life to
interpret the state as a case determined by modern political form serve this objective,
and Schmitt thinks beyond the state in order to conceive of possible modalities of
concrete political form.
2. Schmittian analyses and diagnoses of external politics also have a backdrop
of state crisis caused by the powers and contradictions which operate in modern
society. In other words, these analyses move from the crisis of state sovereignty, no
longer able to produce an adequate concrete political form, to new historic
developments, all oriented towards the discovery of a new, modern katechon.
2.1. Schmitts first polemical targetidentified in 1925 1is Genevan
universalism, which he sees as the political/juridical projection of individualism,
liberalism, normativism and their pretext of eliminating the political from internal
and external politics. It is a manifestation of the now irreversible crisis of modern
sovereigntys spatial essence, the distinction between internal and external. This
regulatory distinction ends up provoking confusion between war and crime: with the
Treaty of Versaillesfrom which the League of Nations was born in Genevawar
ceases to be a right of state sovereignty and becomes a crime against international
law, which may be punished by just war and discriminatory penal measures
towards the defeated. Universalism, then, is the representation of the international
scene as a smooth and homogenous space which is morally and legally malleable; but
for Schmitt, this space is actually functional for those in power (the Anglo-Saxons
and their economic potential) who act politically by way of the moral disqualification
C. Schmitt, Die Kernfrage des Vlkerbundes (1926), in Id., Frieden oder Pazifismus? Arbeiten
zum Vlkerrecht und zur internationalen Politik 1924-1878 (hrsg. von G. Maschke), Berlin,
Duncker & Humblot, 2005, pp. 73-128 (alle pp. 128-193 le Note del curatore). This collection,
along with C. Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos. Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916-1969, hrsg. von G.
Maschke, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1995, contains many Scmittian essays dealing with
internationalism.
1

of their enemies. The League of Nations is, in short, an indirect political

instrument which protects the victors and their spoils and punishes the defeated,
while its universalism is in reality imperialism, a weapon masquerading as an
instrument of peace.
Beginning with his book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes,
and further articulated in Il concetto dImpero nel diritto internazionale (The Concept
of Empire in International Law), Land and Sea, The Nomos of the Earth, and The
Theory of the Partisan, not to mention numerous essaysamong which Lunit del
mondo (World Unity), La contrapposizione planetaria tra Oriente e Occidente
(Planetary Opposition Between East and West), and Lordinamento planetario dopo
la seconda guerra mondiale (Planetary Organization After World War II), Schmitt
puts forward a second interpretation of the Modern, the state, and international
politics. 2 If the first interpretation is focused on decision, exception, sovereignty,
political theology, the political, constituent power, and concrete order, the second
2

C. Schmitt, Il Leviatano nella dottrina dello Stato di Thomas Hobbes. Senso e fallimento di un
simbolo politico (1938), in Id., Scritti su Thomas Hobbes, Milano, Giuffr, 1986, pp. 61-143; Id., Il
concetto dImpero nel diritto internazionale. Ordinamento dei grandi spazi con esclusione delle
potenze estranee (1939), Roma, Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista, 1941; Id., Terra e mare. Una
riflessione sulla storia del mondo (1942), Milano, Adelphi, 2002; Id., Il nomos della Terra nel
diritto internazionale dello jus publicum europaeum (1950), Milano, Adelphi, 1991; Id., Lunit
del mondo (1951), in C. Schmitt, Lunit del mondo e altri saggi, Roma, Pellicani, 2003, pp. 197208; Id., La contrapposizione planetaria tra Oriente e Occidente e la sua struttura storica (1955),
in E. Jnger-C. Schmitt, Il nodo di Gordio. Dialogo su Oriente e Occidente nella storia del mondo,
Bologna, Il Mulino, 2004, pp. 131-163; Id., Lordinamento planetario dopo la seconda guerra
mondiale (1962), ivi, pp. 209-224 (ne esiste anche una tr. it. dal tedesco e non, come questa, dallo
spagnolo, in C. Schmitt, Un giurista davanti a se stesso. Saggi e interviste, Vicenza, Neri Pozza,
2005, pp. 217-247); Id., Teoria del partigiano. Integrazione al concetto del politico (1963), Milano,
Adelphi, 2005; La rivoluzione legale mondiale. Plusvalore politico come premio sulla legalit e
sulla superlegalit giuridica (1978), in Id., Un giurista davanti a se stesso, cit., pp. 187-215. Sullo
Schmitt internazionalista cfr. C. Galli, Genealogia della politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del
pensiero politico moderno, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1996, pp. 864-889, as well as, A. Colombo,
LEuropa e la societ internazionale. Gli aspetti culturali e istituzionali della convivenza
internazionale in Raymond Aron, Martin Wight e Carl Schmitt, in Quaderni di scienza politica,
1999, n. 2, pp. 251-301; C. Resta, Stato mondiale o nomos della Terra. Carl Schmitt tra universo
e pluriverso, Roma, Pellicani, 1999; F. Blindow, Carl Schmitts Reichsordnung. Strategie fr einen
europischen Grossraum, Berlin, ???, 1999; G. Maschke, La unificacin de Europa y la teoria del
gran espacio, in Carl Schmitt Studien, 2000, n. 1, pp. 75-85; N. Casanova, Justissima Tellus.
Figure dello spazio nel pensiero di Carl Schmitt, in Quaderni Forum, 2001, n. 4 (monografico);
F. Volpi, Il potere degli elementi, in Schmitt, Terra e mare, cit., pp. 113-149; A. Campi,
Introduzione alla nuova edizione, in Schmitt, Lunit del mondo e altri saggi, cit., pp. 9-37; J.-W.
Mller, Visioni di un ordine globale nell et post-europea. Carl Schmitt, Raymond Aron e il
funzionario dello spirito del mondo, in Ricerche di storia politica, 2004, n. 2, pp. 205-226 (a
chapter. pp. 87-103 in his book A dangerous Mind. Carl Schmitt in Post-war European
Thought, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2003; J.-F. Kervgan, Carl Schmitt et
lunit du monde, in Les tudes philosophiques, 2004, n.1, pp. 3-23; Th. Zarmanian, Carl
Schmitt and the Problem of Legal Order: From Domestic to International, in Leiden Journal of
International Law, 2006, pp. 41-67.
3

instead analyzes the spatial dimension of politics, the opposition between land and
sea, the concept of nomos and of jus publicum europaeum.
In this second phase, Schmitt models his thought in an openly post-decisionist
way, and consequently attempts to think the origins of politics using categories
uncompromised by nihilism, and to think an order that doesnt originate in a
nothingness-of-order, but rather in a Measure. Still, this second interpretation of the
origins and drift of Modernity and statality, like the first, has at the center of the
argument the idea that political order is made possible through disorder and conflict,
and that it is effective and concrete only when it consciously incorporates and
expresses it. However, this leitmotiv is articulated differently and (in Land and Sea)
gives life to an interpretation of the Modern which discerns its origin not only in the
secularization of the conceptual framework of theology, but also in the spatial
revolution which took place after the discovery of America opened a new world of
land to Europe, throwing the spatial features of traditional politics (the respublica
christiana) off balance and compelling it to reorganize global political space along
amity lines, while simultaneously projecting it on the vastness of the oceans. 3
For Schmitt, the European state derives its origin and political centrality from
the decision for politics in the closed, territorial sense, that is, the decision for state
sovereignty and the subsequent ability to build relationships with other territorial
states, even through war as a form of reciprocal recognition (realizing in this way a
structural and functional limitation of war, which evolved from bellum iustumas it
had to be in a theological context, either traditional or relatively modernized 4into
regular armed conflict, bellum utrimque iustum, between regular armies of sovereign
states, who are, precisely for this reason both justi hostes.) 5 In its historical
concreteness, however, the European state exists solely within the state systemthe
jus publicum europaeumwhich involves the English naval state as a necessary
element alongside the continental state. The English decision for the seaalready
present in the Elizabethan eracreates a new political form which is not politicoterritorial (for which home is the symbol) but individualist and at the same time
techno-artificial (for which ship is the symbol); a political form which is the bearer of
not limited, but limitless enmity. Indeed, naval warfare is so different from
conventional warfare, and so much more oriented towards absolutes and nonrecognition of the enemy, that it is essentially the figure of the pirate: irregular,
criminalized, and painted as the enemy of humanity. It was not by chance that
Schmitt had already intuited in the 1930s6 that the pirate was not an obsolete subject,
but rather, that the new attention paid him by Anglo-Saxon powers, which in point of
fact politicized him, had a historico-political meaning that signaled a tendency
towards limitless struggle.
Schmitt, Il nomos, cit. pp. 79-103
See for example F. de Vitoria, De iure belli (1539), Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2005, of which one sees
Schmitt, Il Nomos, cit., pp. 104-140
5
ivi, pp. 179-206
6
C. Schmitt, Il concetto di pirateria (1937), in Id., Posizioni e concetti. In lotta con WeimarGinevra-Versailles 1923-1939 (1940), Milano, Giuffr, 2007, pp. 399-404
3
4

Modernity, during the phase in which it was capable of effective politics

during the jus publicum europaeum era, circa 1650-1900is constructed, for
Schmitt, of the balance between the continent and England, between territorial state
and naval state.7 But this originary balance is, at the same time, imbalance; or rather,
even the external political order is not neutral but oriented, and the political existence
of the European states and their system is made possible through the difference
imposed between Europe and the rest of the world, the lines of amity and of enmity
which distinguish the old world from the new. European civilization exists because it
is capable of appropriating, occupying, and dividing the New World, as well as
confining absolute enmity there, in the space of the non-state. The limitation of war
to the states of Europe, who recognize each other as hostes aequaliter justi, is made
possible by the limitless wars carried out against the natives in America (but also in
Asia and Africa) and among European powers outside of the continent8.
This connection of balance (between earth and sea, individual and state,
politics and technology, all of which make up Europe) and of imbalance (between
Europe and the rest of the world) is the nomos of the earth (its concrete and oriented
order) in the era of jus publicum europaeum. Therefore, the concept of nomos as
orientation and organization has nothing to do with an originary rootedness somehow
dissociated from nihilism: rather, it indicates measure born of lack of proportion,
political form born of originary violence, concrete order oriented not by a harmony
but by a cut which creates a political space, instituting normality derived not from
law (nomos is not law) but from a concrete act of differentiation. Originary
opening closes political form without pacifying it, but remains present in order to
identify it. 9
From this perspective, the crisis factors of the jus publicum europaeum reside in
the fact that political form is overwhelmed by very different entities, functions, and
powers such as rationalism, individualism, technological power, moralism and
normativism, which have in common an indeterminateness, or better, the fact that
their actions cause all regulating differences to lose themselves in a neutral and
basically unified space: universalism is therefore discriminatory in and of itself,
because it tends to read the exception as error, injustice, immorality, or as a
disturbance of unity which must be removed in that it is undeserving of existence.
Schmitt regards Kants iniustus hostis theory as responsible for offering the most
powerful justification of the discriminatory dimension of philosophico-moral
universalism, and for having, in other words, re-launched the theologians just wars,
Schmitt, Terra e mare, cit.
Schmitt, Il nomos, cit., parte III (pp. 161-266)
9
Schmitt, Il Nomos, cit., pp. 58-59 on one hand contrasts the Jewish concept of Gesetz (law) to the
Greco-German concept of Nomos (orientation and order); but on the other hand polemicizes against
right-wing authors of the Weimar period such as W. Stapel e H. Bogner (to whom A. E. Gnther
should also be added) because they have mixed the term Nomos (which they introduced into
political debate) with Gesetz giving it a biological declination which Schmitt rejects; R. Gross, Carl
Schmitt und die Juden. Eine deutsche Rechtslehre, Frankfurt a./M., Suhrkamp, 2000, pp. 98 sgg.
insistently underscores Schmitts debt to these protestant right-wing circles.
7
8

thereby supplying the discriminatory wars of the 20 th century with a highly effective
and legitimate model10.
In his reconstruction of the jus publicum europaeums crisiswhich is
certainly endogenous, inasmuch as it is the triumph of the Moderns regulatingabstract side, with the consequent loss of political concretenessSchmitt
underlines in The Nomos of the Earth that the first long shadow that fell came from
the West, that is from the United States 11. Analyzing both the Monroe Doctrines
politico-juridical essence as a tool for the self-justification of the American Empires
sovereign powers, and the conceptual constructions which it integrated and
substituted (economic intervention, movement of the Western Hemisphere line),
Schmitt shows that the passage from isolationism to interventionism is a variant of
United States exceptionalism and the discriminatory moralism that is connected to
it.12 Furthermore, in Sulla relazione intercorrente fra i concetti di guerra e di nemico
(On the Existing Relationship Between Concepts of War and Enemy) 13, Schmitt had
already interpreted discriminatory war as resulting from the confusion of war and
peace, or better, from that intermediate situation (Zwischenlage) in which modern
power had fallen, dissolving its ability (through state decision) to clearly distinguish
war from peace. He accepts this intermediate situation but does not want to leave it
to be managed only by Anglo Saxon powers and their universalistic moralism. 14
Schmitt reacted to this spatial modality of the refusal of the political, to these
tendentially despatialized and indirect politics, and to this absolute and moralistic war
by accepting the conditions of the challenge of post-statality. In Il concetto
dellImpero (The Concept of Empire), he introduces the notions of Reich and of
Grossraum: the latter identifying a space given form by a hegemonic political
command, bearer of the states organizing principle, but more importantly, capable of
giving life to a concrete political order, aware of the necessity of governing a
plurality of national organisms within its interior (which the empire hierarchizes in its
own greater space, excluding foreign powers). 15 Schmitts response to these issues,
from indirect imperialism to naval-technological liberal democratic universalism, is
the empire, with the re-territorialization (which is also direct territorialization) of
politics and with the open affirmation of the logics of political unity (in explicit statist
Schmitt, Il nomos, cit., pp. 201-206; cfr. F. Vander, Kant, Schmitt e la guerra preventiva, Roma,
Manifestolibri, 2004
11
Schmitt, Il nomos, cit., p. 288 trans. E. Fay
12
C. Schmitt, Forme internazionalistiche dellimperialismo moderno (1932), in Id., Posizioni e
concetti, cit., pp. 265-292; Id., Cambio di struttura del diritto internazionale (1943), in Schmitt.,
Lunit del mondo, cit., pp. 177-195 (an important text, in which the definition of nomos is already
present, analyzing the passage from Euro-centric to American-centric international law); the theme
of the Western hemisphere is developed in C. Schmitt, La lotta per i grandi spazi e lillusione
americana (1942), in Id., Lunit del mondo, cit., pp. 171-176 (where the katechon has a negative
value as it delays the passage from modern spatiality to the imperial spatiality of the greater spaces)
13
C. Schmitt, Sulla relazione intercorrente fra i concetti di guerra e di nemico (1938), in Id., Le
categorie del politico, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1972, pp. 193-203
14
Schmitt, Forme internazionalistiche dellimperialismo moderno, cit.
15
Schmitt, Il concetto dImpero, cit., pp. 71-92
10

derivation, even if declined in post-statist form as totality 16). Along these lines,
Schmitt opposes total discriminatory war (the new modality of potestas indirecta)
with total concrete war, conducted at first by the total statewhich is newly able to
distinguish internal from external, peace from war (Totaler Feind, totaler Krieg,
totaler Staat17)and then by the empires, which, in the total hostility of which they
are capable (concurrently political, ideological, social, economic, cultural and
technological) recognize and accept the political without disguising it as something
moral or legal.18 The equalization of just war with discriminatory war is clearly
functional to the positive (inasmuch as it is concrete) definition of the Third
Reichs total war, and to the postwar laments about the just war conducted by the
Allies against Germany and the dehumanization of the enemy carried out in the name
of humanity. 19
It is symptomatic that Schmitt sees no nomos, no spatialized political order in
the postwar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, between
East and West.20 The late-modern, post-statist principle cuius regio eius industria21,
which founded the postwar world, does not have, for him, the organizational value of
the modern principle cuius egio eius religio; for him, the superpowers are unable to
fill the role once held by the states and their confrontation in the Cold War exists
outside any harmony or order.22 For Schmitt, the worldwide dualism of the postwar
era is the intrinsically contradictory and polemical historico-real development of a
precise structural aspect of modernity: the English decision for a naval, and therefore
technological existence (to which war has demonstrated the addition of an aerial
dimension, emphasizing the political loss of land), from which the two
superstructures of the political bourgeois economy and proletarian Bolshevist
Marxism are derived. 23 Each of these (as Schmitt had already observed in Roman
Catholicism) is hostile to one other only insofar as eacharmed with a progressive
philosophy of history which legitimates its claim of surpassing the competitor
declares itself to be the most suitable option to develop all the potentialities of human
liberation and dominance over nature contained in technology and economics. For
Schmitt, capitalists and communists, made enemies by the contradictions of political
economy, are actually brothers: they are two forms of universalism caught up in a
war for world domination, certainly, but they are both children of the same Modern
modality, the naval society of limitless technology.24
Schmitt, Il concetto dImpero, cit., p. 80
C. Schmitt, Nemico totale, guerra totale, Stato totale (1937), ivi, pp. 389-397
18
Schmitt, Stato totalitario e neutralit internazionale (1938) in Id., Lunit del mondo, cit., pp.
119-124
19
On which see D. Zolo, Chi dice umanit. Guerra, diritto e ordine globale, Torino, Einaudi, 2000,
pp. 111-117
20
C. Schmitt, Glossario. Annotazioni 1947-1951 (1991), Milano, Giuffr, 2001, p. 251 (annotation
of 16/VII/1948)
21
Schmitt, La rivoluzione legale mondiale, cit., p. 199
22
Schmitt , Il concetto di politico, cit., p. 99 (Premessa del 1963)
23
Schmitt, La contrapposizione planetaria tra Oriente e Occidente, cit.
24
Schmitt, Lunit del mondo, cit., p. 203
16
17

It is within this uneasy union, within the shared horizon of technology, that the
East-West opposition emerges, described by Schmitt as a war in which the dualism
of two fronts manifests itself as a clear distinction between friend and enemy. 25 This
should be interpreted as though Schmitt were saying that the post-WWII period
recognizes the conflict, even as absolute and irreconcilable, but that if this conflict
truly wishes to define itself as political, it becomes clear that this political,
despite the clear distinction between friend and enemy, is incomplete, confused, and
stripped of its formative factors, and that consequently, the war is not war in the
classico-modern sense (besides, no war of the 20th century has been): if anything, it is
a global civil war. 26 The East-West conflict is, in fact, still an intermediate
situation because its intensity does not produce a regulating configuration; on the
contrary, it becomes clear that the rise of extreme forms of conflict is more likely.
It is thus that Schmitts internationalistic proposal of the post-WWII period is a
plurality of greater spacesof third powers and more (the British Commonwealth,
the Arab world, India, Europe, China)to which Schmitt, in World Unity, entrusts
the possibility of establishing a new law of nations. This plurality of greater spaces
is the new nomos of the Earth which follows the era of ius publicum europaeum. A
new nomos, certainly, but one founded on a declared principle of balance explicitly
analagous to that at the center of the statist, Eurocentric nomos of Modernity. 27
2.2 Another modality of political respatialization is displayed in The Theory of
the Partisan, where Schmitt sketches this last figure of effective political subjectivity:
in other words, a figure composed of equal parts enmity and order. In fact, some of
Schmitt, Lunit del mondo, cit., p. 200. English trans. here by E. Fay. The German text does not
differ from the Spanish version, on which the Italian trans. is based: ein Krieg, bei dem der
Dualismus zweier Fronten als klare Unterscheidung von Freind und Feind hervortritt (C. Schmitt,
Die Einheit der Welt, in Id., Frieden oder Pazifismus?, cit., pp. 841-852, part. p. 843 to pp. 852871 curators notes ). Furthermore, Schmitt uses the friend/enemy distinction as a mere description
of conflict, even when it assumes the charactersistics of mere chaos, even in Premessa alledizione
italiana, in Id., Le categorie del politico, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1972, pp. 21-26 (p. 25)
26
Schmitt, Premessa alledizione italiana, cit., p. 25
27
ivi, p. 201.
Even in Lordinamento planetario dopo la seconda guerra mondiale Schmitts
strategy consists of indicating that in the dualistic phase of the post-war period, incapable of
giving the world spatial order, it would be better to substitute a pluralistic phase, in which a new
nomos is given to the divisione della terra in regioni industrialmente sviluppate o meno sviluppate,
insieme alla questione di chi fornisce aiuti a chi, e anche di chi accetta aiuti da chi. Its as though
Schmitt (influenced by Perrouxs analyses) had foreseen the evolution of the cuius regio eius
oeconomia principle, on which the politics of the Cold War were foundedwhich divided the
world into the space of market economy and of command economy, perceived a tendential
reorganization and a redistribution of world space that was not dualistic but pluralistic, into greater
spaces (one must presume an interior organized hierarchically between rich and poor) determined
by nomos understood as Weiden, or rather from production, and like Teilen, or rather from division
(the third semantic root and logic of nomos for Schmitt is Nehmen, to take.). Schmitt seems to have
the US-URSS composition for establishing clientele and economic areas of influence in developing
countries in mind, but also the establishing of the third world, the result of anti-European anticolonization, as a power which breaks the symmetry of the East-West opposition.
25

the salient characteristics of the partisan are: possessing an intensive political

character; not being a private individual (as is, or was, the pirate) but being instead
connected to a wide front of combatants; being an irregular, a bearer of specific
spatiality and mobility different from that of the state or the militray. In short, to be
telluric, that is, bound to the land, oriented for Clausewitzmuch as he is
revolutionaryto the defense of a concrete territory and of spatialized institutions. 28
These salient traits define the partisanlands last sentinel 29as a bearer of
authentic, real, historical, and determined enmity, which is intense but limited; a truly
political hostility that exists within the concept of political. The partisan is
therefore a figure of the danger and mortal risk which pertain to political action, but
also possesses a more relevant knowledge of the political in his awareness of a
concrete, real enemy and the political space in which he is acting: specifically, the
partisan cannot be mistaken for the pirate because his irregularity is terrestrial, not
techno-naval, and thus he possesses a point of reference in regularity. 30
This also means that the partisan is determined by real political enmity and by
the real political spatiality of his historical circumstances. Thus, the Maoist
partisan,31 though more dynamic and aggressive than his Stalinist counterpart, is far
more spatially determined, and therefore far more political, than the possible
developments seen in the figure of the Leninist partisan, a revolutionary activist
who is much more abstact and indeterminate because he is less connected to the
land.32 Indeed, for Schmitt it was Leninwho was well aware of his own concrete
historical enemy: the bourgeoisiewho inaugurated the figure of the revolutionary
by profession who, tied to a totalitarian revolutionary party and engaged in a global
civil war (not limited to national territory), transforms the real enemy into the
absolute enemy, the object of limitless hostility.
This possible development is among the first radical transformations of the figure,
regulating in that it introduces the partisans concrete hostility, transforming him into
a mere passive executor of unchecked ideologico-nihilistic logic. For Schmitt,
another limitless and nihilistic transformation of the partisan is due to technology. If
the political combatant becomes a partisan in the industrial age, he finds himself
among weapons rendered so destructive by technological developments that
legitimizing their use requires that the enemy at which they are aimed be completely
evil and inhuman. 33 Technology therefore promotes the adoption of the valorial,
nihilistic types of moral logic described by Schmitt in The Tyranny of Values34 which
brings about an inordinate increase of enmity.
Schmitt denies that this absolute and limitless hostility, this nihilism unconnected
to concreteness or orientation in the form of real enmity has a connection to the
Schmitt, Teoria del partigiano, cit., pp. 26-35 e pp. 59-69
ivi, p. 99, trans. E. Fay
30
ivi, pp. 42-46, p. 99-100 e p. 127
31
ivi, pp. 82-86
32
ivi, p. 47, pp. 71-75 e pp. 103-105
33
ivi, pp. 108-111
34
C. Schmitt, La tirannia dei valori (1967, ma il testo del 1959), Roma, Pellicani, 1987
28
29

political: for him the essence of the political is not pure and simple enmity, but the
distinction between friend and enemy, and it presupposes the friend as much as the
enemy. 35 This partisan is no longer defensive and telluric but aggressive on a global
scale, expressing the absolute disorder of technology and susceptible to every conflict
and every violence. But this partisan, who cannot be a katechon, is regarded only as
an extreme problem by Schmittian theory: Schmitt prefers to formulate hypotheses
regarding the partisans adaptability to the worldwide techno-industrial civilization in
his role as a subordinate to the superpowers and their absolute war, in the apertures of
which it might be possible to carve out a space for a more circumscribed form of
partisan warfare; or even to imagine that the cosmonauts and astronauts could be
partisan fighters in the future battles for outer space. 36
Apart from their ideologicity, Schmitts analyses have two limits, both obvious
and characteristic: in the first place, they are analyses of his present and not of ours
(Schmitt died in 1985, in the era of the Cold War and East-West opposition), and of
that present, his and ours, they share the same problems and categories. In his
interpretation of the Cold Wars international ordering as ideological (and thus his
criticism of the concept of the West as American and not European) and as
intrinsically unstable and conflictual, he still thinks that there is danger in the
universalistic ideologies and horizons opened during the technological age, with the
sea prevailing, and his objective is to re-balance this dimension with land politics
and with a re-spatialization of politics in general. Secondly, his perspective on
international relationsdespite being focused beyond the state, on the empire (or
greater space), and the partisanis still always oriented towards interpreting every
irregularity and every exception in light of some regularity or normality with which it
is in some way comparable. Thus, the intermediate situation is a specific modality
of the relation between states that can be addressed and resolved with a specific
response (the greater spaces); thus discriminatory war serves the interests of a
specific naval political power (the United States); thus the partisan is backed by the
regularity of an army and the law of the land. In short, Schmitts thought is always
determined concretely, oriented towards a thinking of conflict as a moment of order,
and ultimately always seeking a katechon, even though the aging Schmitt reveals a
suspicion that the re-spatialization of politics might be unproductive and unworkable.
Schmitt does not go beyond this suspicion, and leaves us the task of interpreting that
mass of phenomena and dynamics which is defined as globalization.
3. Briefly,37 one can say that the global age presents itself discontinuously
when compared with the modern age, in that the latter viewed the world as a vast but
Schmitt, Teoria del partigiano, cit., p. 127 trans. E. Fay
ivi, pp. 111-112
37
The following treatment is based on the arguments laid out in C. Galli, Spazi politici. Let moderna e
let globale, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2001; Id., La guerra globale, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2002; Id., La guerra
globale: continuit e discontinuit; in Iride, 2003, n. 40, pp. 433-442; Id., Introduzione di E. Jnger - C.
Schmitt, Il nodo di Gordio. Dialogo su Oriente e Occidente nella storia del mondo, Bologna, Il
Mulino, 2004, pp. 7-30. Ma cfr. anche A. Colombo, La guerra ineguale. Pace e violenza nel tramonto
della societ internazionale, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2006
35
36

10

definite space, while today the world has gotten smaller but at the same time more
infinite or indefinite, or better, infinitely complex and uncontrollable. The essence of
globalization is global mobilization, an intense and chaotic group of processes
which open up and break through all defined spaces. But the global age is not just
characterized by a paradoxical spatiality which is at once multiple and polydimensional, but also by a new relation to the dimension of time: in it events connect
not consecutively but simultaneously, and thus chronological succession is not in and
of itself random succession. The present is not determined by history, and on the
contrary has no historical structure in the proper sense, nor does it have a progressive
or plan-based orientation.
The political phenomena of the global age are thus different from those of the
Cold War. The sun has set on the modern era of the states monopoly on politics, as
well as the late-modern era of two superpowers. The world unity that many (among
them Schmitt, in his own way) had observed behind the poltical duality of the postWWII period has openly manifested itself.
But todays globalization as world unity certainly does not imply political
world unity, and is not designated as much by the neutral space of technology or the
single-minded goals of industrial enterprise as it is by the disappearance or the
obscuring of the connection between politics and space: violence is not fixed to
territory or confined outside of itself by the state or superpowers, but by now enjoys a
free and random circulation. September 11th can be interpreted as the event which
brings to light the logics and the violent tendencies originally inherent in global
dynamics, which were previously concealed by liberalist and progressive ideologies.
As it is, September 11th is emblematic of the fact that it is no longer possible to
distinguish internal from external. Thus, today we are no longer faced with the
disappearance of the external (or better, of the space of classical war) due to
universalistic tendencies (for example the UN and its ideology) which seek to reduce
the world to an interior devoid of political conflict (if anything, only a course of
crimes to repress with police action), but we are also witnessing the disappearance of
the interior. For terrorists, every part of the planet is potentially immediately exposed
to absolute hostility and is therefore in some way external to itself and always
exposed to war; conversely, for the United States, every part of the planet is a
possible theater of war and of terrorism. It is the evident ineffectiveness of
distinguising interior from exterior (as well as those distinctions which occur between
civilians and military personnel, between private and state), and the consequent
vanishing of one within the other which makes politics in the global age a twilight in
which causes confusion between war and peace, conflict and politics, exception and
rule, all of which appear today as an indistinct continuum. The intermediate
situation between war and peace or between rule and exception is normal today,
which means that any concrete reference to regularity, order, or, obviously, neutrality
is no longer possible. There is no longer any concreteness or regularity from which
irregularity may derive its strategic value of destruction and reconstruction.
Global war is this condition in which violence in the world manifests itself at a
pace that cannot be respresented on a map as a traditional bellic front, but only
11

according to the logic of instantaneousness and punctuality: every part of the planet
is immediately exposed to the global flux of violence which supplants political or
territorial state mediation, by now unable to distinguish internal from external.
Global mobilization, from a political point of view, means that anything can happen
anywhere at any moment. Thus, global war does not occur in the striated space of
politcal powers or in the neutral space of technology, rather, it occurs without any
causativeonly immediaterelationship to space. To put it better, global war is the
fact that space, by now paradoxical and non-Euclidean, is not traveled along paths but
along fractures, which put different times and spaces into immediate communication:
the caves of Afghanistan and the Twin Towers in New York, rural society and
advanced hypermodernity. This paradoxical spatiality is not determined by the
imbalance between land and sea, as it is much more aptly defined as an age in which
the relevance of these two primordial spaces is lost; not so much as a result of the
newfound importance of air spacea phenomenon which already reached its
potential for novelty in the terminal phase of modernitybut more precisely due to
the formation of a hyper-complex global space in which land, like sea, is traveled by
currents and by terrorists who behave like a new breed of pirates.
Multiple spaces and multiple times share the global space in a state of
immediate connection and permanent short-circuit, and of infinite poly-dimensional
wars which, in their whole, are global war. The absolute hostility which emerges
from the permanent twilight of the global war is not exactly political: the terrorist
cannot be described in the terms of hostis, nor those of the partisan, nor those of a
worldwide revolutionary, and perhaps not even as a technological partisan. His is an
entirely new case, as much subjectively (he has no friends, but only enemies, and at
worst is his own enemy, giving up his own body and his own life to suicide) as
objectively (terrorism has no other strategy than terror, nor does its hostility prefigure
any order other than the imaginary); and the religious motivation that he gives for his
hostility is not a political theology (not even in the accepted non-secularized
meaning). In other words, he has no regulating function but rather an immediate or
extreme theology, a paranoid identification with God that has the sole aim of
drawing the conflict out into infinity. Holy War is also a part of global war, not in its
essence or its cause, but in its indefiniteness and elusiveness ; indeed, it turns itself
into its own opposite, diabolical war, a destiny it shares with the just war, the war of
Western anti-terrorist values which tranforms itself into an infinite counterterrorism. Furthermore, global war has no central sphere, no Zentralgebiet,because
its violence is not generated from a precise point but from the entire surface of the
globe. In short, global war is globality as violence, it is a possession of the global
space, it is the chaotic whole of all relations (primarily economic and technological),
it is blind procedurality which, in reality, is controlled by no one; and it is in this
sense that conflict today is automatic. Global war is postmodern nihilism.
3.1 This global disorder, these contradictions of globalization, these politics
which reveal themselves to be less and less political and more and more devoid of a
strategic relationship with space in the form of a de-constituent conflict and a global
12

uprooting of permanent exceptionality, are often greeted today with several types of
concrete political responses, some of which are often combined with one another.
The principal characteristic of the response is that it paints terrorism as being at
the heart of global war and as the origin of its novelty, which makes the terrorist the
enemy and the conflict against him the politcal and the Zentralgebiet of our time,
or better, the origin not only of the current crisis but of a new political order
determined by the excluding terrorist/avenger relation.
This response implies, in the first place, the tendency at the level of internal
politics to surpass the formal and garantist sides of the state of modern law in favor of
security, in single cases or in the case of the state itself, which attempts to restore the
spatial differentiation between external and internal (to carry out identification,
imprisonment, and expulsion of the enemy). This politics of security travels along
the two-lane street of stabilizing rootednessthrough the production of legitimating
discourses at various levels through which we discover our ethnic, religous,
cultural, and ethical rootsand of the conflict (internal before external) through
which we oppose ourselves to them in a perennial short-circuit between identity
and threat, between violence and law. 38 This constituent use of exception seems at
first glance not to be far from a Schmittian conceptual universe, or at the least
decipherable through it.
A strategy which is only partly analogous is applied to international politics:
indeed, even in this sphere terrorismas a form of evil which also has statist
determination (Iraq, North Korea, Iran)serves to construct an identity: the identity
of civilization opposed to barabarianism; civilizations permanent line of action
is actually the just war, even preventative war, against an unjust threat and against
terroristic barbarianism. But there are no borders here: given that in principle
civilization (i.e. the United States) coincides with humanity, bellic police action in the
name of humanitywhich, as Schmitt underlined in his time, is particularly intense
and discriminatoryis not concerned with putting up borders or generating spatial
order but rather with ridding the world of mankinds enemies, specifically the
terrorists, in a moralist and discriminatory universalism which has as a theoretical
objective a regime change on a global scale. According to this neo-conservative
thoughtwhich goes far beyond classical realismonly a democratic world is safe
and peaceful, is useful in and of itself for the United States interests. 39
In reality, there is a legible intent woven into this neo-conservative ideology
which cannot have been influenced by Schmitt40that is closer to traditional political
realism: the intent of the United Statesthe political subject which acts as the
38

See for example A. Gamberini R. Orlandi (a c. di), Diritto politico e diritto penale del nemico,
Bologna, Monduzzi, 2007, on the so-called enemys criminal law; see also, though not strictly
limited to the question of terrorism, L. Re, Carcere e globalizzazione. Il boom penitenziario negli
Stati Uniti e in Europa, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2006
39
J. Lobe - A. Olivieri (a c. di), I nuovi rivoluzionari. Il pensiero dei neoconservatori americani,
Milano, Feltrinelli, 2003; M. Del Pero, Henry Kissinger e lascesa dei neoconservatori. Alle origini
della politica estera americana, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2006; A. K. Nardini, La concezione della
guerra secondo il movimento neoconservatore americano, in AA.VV., La guerra tra morale e
politica, Bologna, Bonomo, 2007, pp. 233-278
13

nucleus of society, no longer generically human but Western (a West guided by

America including Europe and other allied non-Western countries)to reterritorialize politics and globalized war, beginning with the unilateral definition of
terrorism and the unilateral singling out of the enemy terrorist against whom it is
permitted to wage absolute and discriminatory war. A war, however, that even with
all its agressive aspects is waged with the intent of constructing a limes towards
foreign barbarians and stabilizing the internal space through the taking and the
control of portions of space in the Middle East and central Asia, (unstable and
therefore requiring stabilization) directed towards impeding Chinese designs,
according to the implicit logic of greater spaces. In short, at stake is the
transformation of the informal empire of the first days of globalization into a direct
and territorial Empire, which is therefore in many respects traditional. 41
4. The congruity of political categories around which Schmitts thought is
structured in its interpretation of global war should be measured both in its analysis
of phenomena and its proposed solutions to the problems at hand.
4.1 As far as analytic effectiveness is concerned, the most typical categorical
apparatus in Schmitts thought are not fully adaptable to the phenomenology of
global war, as Schmitt himself lets on in his last phase of production (especially in
Theory of the Partisan). In fact, it is precisely Schmitt who explains that absolute
enmity is not political; and consequently it is not absolute disorder, but refers
instead to a concrete situation which contains a possibility of order; the immediately
polemico-identitary use of religion which does not follow a cuius regio eius religio or
any other regulating stabilization. It is not poltical theology but extreme
theology, and the planets power differences do not define the greater spaces; the
terrorist is not a partisan because he is neither telluric, spatial, or defensive, and his
absolute and systematic irregularity, his nihilism towards himself, and his exception
without the rule all exist outside of the Schmittian historical and intellectual horizons.
The modern era was born of the opening of oceans, while the global era was born of
the opening of land which took place at the end of the East-West opposition. Global
mobilization is not imbalance (in favor of the techno-nautical element) between
land and sea, but rather confusion of the two within a different type of space. Global
war is not total war because it presents a more complex spatiality with regard to the
interchange between military and non-military levels, and above all because, contrary
See on the contrary, Leo Strauss and the American Right, New York, St. Martin Press, 1999, pp.
94-95 e p. 178, in which it is posited that neo-conservaties derive from Strauss and thatsince this
is drawn from from Schmitt and his criticism of liberalismSchmittian elements would be present
in neo-conservatives, such as hate of pluralism, nationalism, religious foundation of politics, the
friend-enemy logic. The argument seems much more ideological that structural, much more
analogic than conceptual.
41
To offer a simple example, see the rich literature on the imperial dimension of the United States
discussed, among the most recent texts, by V.E. Parsi, LImpero come fato? Gli Stati Uniti e
lordine globale, in Filosofia politica, 2002, n. 1, pp. 83-113, da H. Mnkler, Imperien. Die Logik
der Weltherrschaft vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten, Berlin, Rowohlt, 2005 (IV
ed.), pp. 213-254, e da A. Cols, Empire, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007, pp. 158-191
40

14

to what Schmitt thinks, it is not the political act of a unified political entity (be it state
or empire) which knowingly takes it onto itself, and which thus gives it meaning by
dint of its own political existence. Global war is, rather, the uncontrolled violence of
a plurality of subjects whose motivations and strategies are, at last analysis,
undetermined. The global age does not display a Zentralgebiet from which troops
may be drafted to neutralize conflicts precisely because it does not know a political
which, taken on in a sovereign and descionist manner, generates an order: global war
is struggle which can not be oriented to a katechon.
Thus global war cannot be totally understood through Schmittian categories: it
is subtly but clearly something other, something postmodern. In truth, Schmitt is
talking about something else. His thought runs counter to this conflictual
universalism with its technological, ideological, juridical and moralistic origins
which serves a unified political power, even if it is post-statist: he conceives of
ideological terrorism in the service of the communist empire, the League of Nations
and the just wars of England and the United States. Schmitt had certainly foreseen
phenomena of madness in these universalisms, and he feared them from the
conception of his thoguht, which is centered on a determinate political conflict
existing within spatial politics and oriented to concreteness and political unity (even
when post-statist).
The complexity of todays world is necessarily lost on Schmitt, which he sees
only at the beginning of the crisis of modern sovereigntys conceptual architecture,
ignoring the more advanced challenges (biopolitical power) as well as the spaces of
action opened by globalization, for example the dialectic between worldwide society
(the cosmopolitan universe of social forces) and international society (the macropolitical functions of states and empires). He can know nothing of multilevel
governance, neo-medievalism, of complex spaces and political forms which are not
hierarchico-Westphalian but multilateral, characterized by a widespread political
power: hypotheses no more risky or hypothetical than those offered by the neoimperialists. 42
4.2. The problem thenleaving aside the analytical perspective and moving on
to the organizationalis understanding if the attempts to re-spatialize war, to reduce
the complexity of the global age, to interrupt the short-circuit that exists between
local and globalconducted with realistic presuppositions (or rather with the conceit
of powers continuing morphogenetic function) motivated by a direct, meaningful
knowledge of Schmitts texts,43 or, as is more likely, from a direct relationship with
Reference to two (of the many possible) circles of the most recent internationalist debates, for the
first see I. Clark, International Legitimacy and World Society, Oxford University Press, 2007, for
the second see J. Zielonka, Europe as Empire. The Nature of the Enlarged European Union, Oxford
University Press, 2006
43
For scientific accountswhich are importantamong H. J. Morgenthau, one of the fathers of
political realism, and C. Schmitt, see W.E. Scheurman, The End of Law, Lanham, Rowman &
Littelfield, 1999, pp. 225-251, as well as A. Campi, Introduzione di H. J. Morgenthau, Luomo
scientifico versus la politica di potenza. Unintroduzione al realismo politico (1946), Roma,
Ideazione, 2005, pp. VII-XXII; but see that critical and restrictive considerations of J. W.
Bendersky, The Definite and the Dubious: Carl Schmitts Influence on Conservative Political and
42

15

the pragmatist juridical tradition and realistic political sciencehave some possibility
of being effective and forming political order. An equivalent question would be if
global war can be a constituent conflict; if the confusion between war and peace, law
and violence could be the origin of a new political form.
With regard to the constitution, formal or informal, of a territorial Western
Empire led by the United States, it is important to note that it is precisely this
morphogenetic use of force, internal and external, which is today being radically put
into question: organizing formally sovereign states in hierarchical imperial
relationships is as difficult as preventing the enemy barbarians from breaching the
borders of the empire. Furthermore, the essential element of globalization is a
worldwide economic development which, with the reciprocal interconnection it has
developed, does not lend itself to the control and confinement that the imperial
hypothesis implies.
Even in the states internal sphere, the relation between exception and normality
(always absent in fact yet always present as an ideal around which to orient
organization), does not institute a concrete order but rather a trick of the eye,
obscuring enemies and friends who are actually ghosts and projections, who feed on
desiderata and agressive nostalgia. This mobilization is the only stability that the
state is currently able to supply, evidently because it is incapable of giving form to its
own internal space, thereby making it distinguishable from the external and from its
own contradictions.
Thus, the probable organizational responses explainable through Schmittian
categories are more productive than not: it seems that attempts to form order based
upon resolution, exception, restoration of space, and the creation of borders are
diluted and liquefied in globalization. It seems, therefore, that new stabilizing
responses are necessary, but above all that we must begin asking new questions
organized around political categories which are oriented towards different horizons
than those offered by Schmitt.
It is certainly true that Schmitts thought can be used today to demystify the
universalistic ideologies of the just war or the war for democracy, or to demonstrate
the indirect political value of such wars in favor of the United States. Similarly, it is
easy to realize that the juridical universalism on which the UN is founded is an
attempt to legalize and reconcile international politics, but in reality is little more than
the evidence of a desire for a humanistic rationalization of the global age, which
believes in the theory of human rights and the equality of sovereign states (which
only retain their phantasmal existence in the UN), and thus does not depart from the
modern connectioncompletely ineffective todaybetween individualism, statism,
and universalism.
In conclusion, Schmitts thought is partially effective today in its pars destruens,
as a possible (but not unique) anti-universalist strategy. But in the pars construens
in the combination of decision and concreteness in the interior, of war and spatitality
in the exteriorit seems confused and inapplicable: it is not sufficient that Schmitt
thinks radical conflict and spatialized political order (of the empire) for us to
Legal Theory in the US, in Telos, 2002, n. 122, pp. 33-47.
16

effectively understand the conlict and the demands todays order through his thought.
In the global age the challenge of planetarische Industrie-Nahme, of unchecked
technological enterprise on a worldwide scale, has extended and intensified
qualitatively, until the terms of the problem and its possible solutions have been
transformed: the last is a radical disorientation of the world due to the power of
capitalism, which is not willing to tolerate its own submission to the constraints of the
spatial and territorial logic of the imperial greater spaces.
Therefore, we must recognize that, beyond their appearance, politics today do not
allow themselves to interpreted or organized, neither in a modern individualist or
statist way, nor within Schmittian coordinates. Schmitts thought is concerned with
an end and the genealogic deconstruction/reconstruction of an era, when what is
needed is a beginning, which in this era of absolute enmity and paradoxical spatiality
would not consist of identifying an enemy, nor entrusting the constituent role of order
to war, nor imagining that the katechon is the sovereign monopoly of resolution in the
interior and of balance among the greater spaces in the exterior. In short, it is not
with ideological pacifism as much as it is realism that we dont assume that
global war become modern war. As Schmitt himself said, historical truths are truths
only once.
If we truly wish to be faithful to Schmitts lessons we must recognize that our
duty now is to imagine the possible interpretations and solutions to the problems of
todays politics which begin where Schmitts thought left off.

17