Speaker: Benno Teschke
The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitts reach over the fields of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking. Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitts international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense moment in Schmitts friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitlers spatial revolution into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europes geopolitical history, grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germanys wars of conquest. Consequently, Schmitts elevation of the early modern nomos as the model for civilized warfare the golden age of international law against which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary friend/enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism for past and present analytical purposes. Schmitts defective analytics and problematic history compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory.
Benno Teschke completed his doctorate in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex and a Visiting Research Fellow at the European Research Council funded Research Project Europe 18151914 at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (2003), which was awarded the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize. More recently, he has published in the New Left Review and in International Theory on the international thought of Carl Schmitt and is preparing a monograph on the subject.
This series of podcasts is taken from the Historical Materialism and International Relations seminar series convened by Alexander Anievas. The seminars are given at 5 pm on Thursdays in Seminar Room C, Department of Politics and International Relations.
The Historical Materialism and International Relations seminar series seeks to explore and develop the multiple points of contact between Marxist theory and international relations, most broadly defined. It does so with the double aim of investigating the critical and explanatory potentials of Marxism in the domain of international relations, as well as to probe what an engagement with ‘the international’ might contribute to Marxist theory. The seminar series is associated with the journal of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and its forthcoming ‘Historical Materialism and International Relations’ book series.
For more information, please see the Centre for International Studies website.