The Fetish of Geopolitics

Gopal balakrishnan is one of the foremost experts in the Anglo-American world on the life and work of Carl Schmitt, and I am grateful for his response in nlr 68, ‘The Geopolitics of Separation’, to my essay on the thinker, ‘Decisions and Indecisions’, in nlr 67. Balakrishnan’s intellectual biography of Schmitt, The Enemy, remains, according to one eminent voice in the field, ‘the best English-language study’ on the subject. For a critical American scholar, the attraction of exploring and validating Schmitt as a radical and insightful critic of American imperialism and its liberalcosmopolitan apologists would seem unobjectionable. Schmitt deployed a remorseless and uncompromising vocabulary to dissect the crisis of the legal form in the inter-war period, analysing the pathologies of liberal international law and the relations between constitutionalism, democracy and emergency powers, in order systematically to deconstruct the practice and ideology of the liberal-capitalist ‘zone of peace’—and with it, the incipient neutralization of inter-state relations.