The first part of this essay was posted yesterday. It concluded with a characterization of the reluctance to criticize terrorism. “Leaden solidarity is this ‘strange emotional mixture’—as Negt called it—that keeps people, who know that terrorist violence is not a viable form of politics, from distancing themselves from terrorism—unambiguously and politically, that is, by rigorous political analysis.”
One would expect both, unambiguous distance and rigorous political analysis, from Chantal Mouffe, one of the most clear-headed and insightful political theorists, who recently published an article entitled “Schmitt’s Vision of a Multipolar World” (South Atlantic Quarterly 104:2, Spring 2003). Mouffe argues that Schmitt’s geopolitical analysis in his Nomos could be usefully applied to contemporary issues. (Schmitt analyzes the nomos, or geopolitical order of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, the law that regulated relations among European states between 1700 and the beginning of World War I. This inter-state law, while guaranteeing the global hegemony of Great Britain, contained war; that is, this international legal order kept wars among European states from escalating into wars of annihilation—until World War I. With World War I this system dissolved.) Mouffe is interested in Schmitt’s solutions to this collapse and what he considered its most dangerous side-effect, the dissolution of the classical state with its specific form of politics.
Mouffe reads Schmitt not merely as competent analyst of this dissolution, but adopts one of his solutions. In 1952, Schmitt argued that the antagonistic struggle between the Soviet Union and the U.S. might end with a new bipolar arrangement; or, and this is Mouffe’s preferred solution, it might lead to “the opening of a dynamics of pluralization, whose outcome could be the establishment of a new global order based on the existence of several autonomous regional blocks” (Mouffe, 249). Mouffe adopts this multipolar model with a few caveats: this new equilibrium would have some semblance to the earlier Nomos, it would have to be truly global, not only Euro-centric, and it would have to avoid the “pseudouniversalism arising from the generalization of one single system” (Mouffe, 250).
