Toward Perpetual War?: The Stakes and Limits of Schmitt's Critique of Kant's Cosmopolitanism

Is war something that can be surmounted once and for all, banished from relations between peoples and states? Conversely, is peace something that can be established definitively between peoples by political and legal means? Or does the prospect of such a peace hold itself beyond the realm of the political, like a promise that is, in a sense, the very promise of Messianism? So that any claim to realize via politics a state of perpetual peace, or the political unity of humanity, would not only be destined to fail, but would betray a profound misunderstanding, as well as an exorbitant and dangerous vanity?

These questions are not new. They have been asked, within the framework of European history and Christianity, since St. Paul, although it was St. Augustine who posed them in a more articulate and developed way. Yet I have no desire to return to these theological issues; rather, I want to examine the resurgence of these questions in the twentieth century, that is, at a moment where certain international institutions began to be put in place, institutions that condemned "wars of aggression" and whose stated goal was the establishment of peaceful relations between peoples. In a sense, these institutions, like the League of Nations, or later the United Nations, represent a step toward the fulfillment of hopes formulated during the Enlightenment, notably—and eminently—by Kant. Are not these international institutions a kind of realization of the "alliance of peoples" whose contours Kant had sketched at the end of the eighteenth century?

My remarks here will not touch on Kant directly, nor on the relationship of his thought with these contemporary international institutions; rather, they will focus on the critique of cosmopolitanism and of a certain form of "banishment" of war elaborated in the twentieth century by another German thinker generally thought of as diametrically opposed to Kant, Carl Schmitt. There are a number of ways to approach this question.

The first would evidently consist in locating and commenting on those texts in which Schmitt treats this question directly. There are certainly passages in Schmitt in which he explicitly discusses Kant's philosophy of law, including his understanding of international law and of peace and the possibility of its cosmopolitan fulfillment, notably in The Nomos of the Earth. But it would be unfortunate, I think, to restrict ourselves to this limited discussion, for one can also "construct," on the basis of Schmitt's theory on the concept of the political (taking into account, of course, the role that the friend/enemy dichotomy plays in it, his privileging of the "limit," his critique of claims that we can surpass spatial limits or truly represent humanity politically), a typical (in the weberian sense) "position" opposed to cosmopolitan ideals, in one sense, perhaps, the antithesis of "Kantian" positions (because this is not the only reading possible). In any case, this is how Habermas proceeds in the last chapter (chapter 5) of his book, Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years' Hindsight.

In a certain fashion, Habermas constructs "a dialogue among absents," between a Kant brought up to date and rethought in light of that which separates us institutionally and legally from the eighteenth century, and a Schmitt "reconstructed" as the bearer of strong objections to the cosmopolitan project. But Habermas, it seems to me, fails to bring together all the resources offered by Schmitt's thinking on this subject.

Notably, he fails to examine in greater depth Schmitt's alternative to cosmopolitanism, which does not simply consist of a "return" to the sovereign nation-state, but in the imagination of a political "pluriverse" (Pluriversum), based on the notion of Großraum. Habermas, however, has good reason not to undertake this examination: Schmitt himself made use of this notion, with the aim of defending the expansionism of the Nazi Reich between 1933 and the beginning of the 1940s, in a whole series of texts in which the rejection of cosmopolitanism and of "humanitarianism" had dreadful consequences...