5.5 schmitt's begriffsmagie

Schmitt offers no theory that falsifies opposing approaches - such as a cooperation-oriented public international law in general, and reconstructions of the law of international institutions by legal scholarship in view of inter­national public authority, a transnational common good and an inclusive shaping of politics in particular - nor tells us why such approaches are unfounded.

One of Schmitt's major achievements is that he brilliantly coins concepts which potently rearticulate the ancient world-view of particularism. Ernst Jünger considered these coinages as Schmitt's actual genius - to borrow Jünger's vivid metaphor, Schmitt's concepts are like a ‘mine that explodes silently'.^[351] This achievement is easier to understand when one thinks about what constitutes a Begriff. As Schmitt states, minting concepts requires more than just describing the discursive usage of a word; a concept needs to be filled with genuine insight.^[352] That is why Schmitt denies the conventional definition of the state as ‘the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit' any conceptual character.^[353] In Schwab's translation, The Concept of the Political holds that a concept ‘can speak clearly for itself.^[354] The German original makes an epistemologically stronger claim: a concept is ‘ohne weiteres einleuchtend', that is, self-evident.^[355] However, the friend-enemy distinction is by no means self- evident, as is shown by the existence of many different concepts of the political.^[356]

More recent research, for instance the works of the historian Reinhart Koselleck, fares better at explaining what Schmitt actually achieved by coining his concepts. Words express a concept when they identify or distinguish something, combining various phenomena, experiences, theories, or data so as to provide insights that transcend the mere designation of situations or issues.^[357] Assessed against this standard, Schmitt indeed coins strong concepts.

In this way, Schmitt renews, reformulates, and focuses raison d'etat assump­tions from two thousand years of political thought for his era: the primacy of foreign policy, the precariousness of a law-based international order, the omnipresence of life-threatening forces, the need for leadership and a high degree of social integration as preconditions of domestic order, but also the appeal of heroism, of the readiness to sacrifice, of heartfelt community, centred in a political leader, and not least the unease vis-à-vis a commodified and technologised society craving for continuous progress.

Furthermore, Schmitt provides a highly illuminating reconstruction of the history of international law, a history of rise and decline rather than of linear progress. Very few have succeeded in crafting a similarly gripping history of international law. Milestones such as Wilhelm Grewe's The Epochs of International Law or Martti Koskenniemi's Gentle Civilizer of Nations are hard to imagine without Schmitt's writings.^[358]