Carl Schmitt: Nomos of the Land
In international law Jus Publicum Europaeum Nomos of the Land is an unusual combination of words. The mixture of the ancient Greek nomos (law) and the German der Erde (earth) is by no means accidental. It is to the ancient Greek word nomos, that "proto-word", that Carl Schmitt wants to restore its "original strength and greatness", because, in his opinion, it has preserved its original meaning despite distortions through translations. At the very beginning, it, in the verb form nemein, meant "to divide", and as nomos "division of pasture", the founding appropriation of land. Nomos, therefore, always refers to space. No institution, nor any legislation, can exist without prior demarcation on the ground, without establishing the basic right to the land. The law is tied to the country. However, Schmitt would not be what he is if he stuck to the more or less common-sense insight that stability, immobility, permanence of the earth, firmness of the soil are necessary in order to form some kind of institution. Of course, it cannot do without soil, but something else is needed: an act, a decision, or nomos. Only then, with the decision to establish some kind of order, establish an institution and promulgate a law, the space of the country becomes what Schmitt cares about: order. Only then does the pasture become a political fact. Etymology, however, is only the beginning of a brutal and, in its brutality, seductive theoretical construction that will plunge into European modernity and show that jus publicum europaeum, European public law, is one of the key moments of the detheologizing of war or, in a somewhat more modest variant, an expression of the expulsion of theological moments from war. Namely, earlier we killed and hated each other, while today we can kill each other beautifully and without hatred. Afterwards, Schmitt will engage in consideration of the problem of demarcation at sea and in the air (the land, meanwhile, was (un)successfully divided), touch on the crisis of European public law and the revival of the concept of a just war (namely, it is not known that anyone has ever waged an unjust war in history). Then he will deal with the aporia of the peacemaker, spin his favorite motifs of theologians, enemies and sovereigns, and along the way give us some useful advice for living in an evil liberal-democratic world. Of course, parliamentary democracy cannot be based on Schmitt's theory, and this is probably the most difficult objection to which he has no answer. Despite this, his insights shine with a dark, wicked, cold glow to which we must react so that the darkness, which Schmitt himself happily produced, does not swallow us up.
