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April 30, 2005
From what I can make out Carl Schmitt's The Nomos of the Earth is not available in English. And there appears to be little of this kind of work happening in Australia. So we have to rely on what we can find on the internet.
In his The Nomos of the Earth Schmitt represents the history of international law in three stages: the medieval respublica christiana, the jus publicum europaeum and the liberal universalism or liberal internationalism that started from the post-Versailles system.
The medieval respublica christiana was a religiously-based, homogenous order that received its validity from God as mediated by the right ecclesiastic and secular authorities claiming universal jurisdiction.
It was replaced by the territorial state as the principle of delimitation of spatial authority in Europe that realized a sharp distinction between secular and Church jurisdiction. The jus publicum europaeum that came to regulate the relationship between European states was consolidated through the great discoveries that
opened up non-European territory as a field of unlimited European land-taking and made it thus possible for the European order itself to remain stable.
The great merit of this system for Schmitt lay in the manner in which it was able to limit inter-European warfare by conceiving it as a public law status between formally equal sovereigns, by replacing the medieval notion of the justa causa belli by the formal concept of the justus hostis. This enabled enemies to be treated on an equal basis, through formal rules and without existential enmity.
With the end of the jus publicum Europaeum, the concept of war changed once again. The liberal univeralism, which buttressed the power of Western allies over their enemies, and was premised on the principle of total war, remoralised war. As a result of this remoralization of international relations aggressive war turned out to be a crime and the aggressor a criminal, who should be struggled against without any moral constraint.
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