The Impossible Unity.: Carl Schmitt against the World State

Abstract

This article examines the shifting strands of Carl Schmitt’s critique of the
project of a “political unity of the world.” I show that Schmitt’s polem-ic against both the feasibility and the desirability of global political uni-fication wove together distinct – and in part ambivalent – elements. On the one hand, Schmitt was acutely aware of the “despatializing” thrust of modern technology, its capacity to dissolve the spatial order of modernity and, at least potentially, to propel a movement toward worldwide political unification. On the other hand, he remained attached – perhaps even nos-talgically – to the framework of the jus publicum Europaeum: to the image of the modern state and to the idea of conflict juridically “formed” by inter-national law. His opposition to a future world state thus rested not only on his concept of the political but also on a backward-looking attachment to a lost order, which led him to look more to the past than to acknowledge the full scope of transformations he had himself early identified.