By Linas Jokubaitis
Telos · Tuesday, February 18, 2014
When Schmitt drafted his lecture “The Plight of European
Jurisprudence” in 1944, he had reasons to believe that it would be his
last lecture. After a failed assassination attempt on Hitler, his friend
Johannes Popitz was arrested as an important conspirator in the plot
and was later put to death. This is why the article by Paul Piccone and
Gary Ulmen on this lecture is called “Schmitt’s ‘Testament’ and the
Future of Europe.” The lecture did not prove to be Schmitt’s last. The
irony is that what Schmitt wrote as his own testament can today be read as a testament of Europe. The validity of this claim depends only on how one views the current state of Europe.
In 1990 it was clear that the Cold War was coming to an end, and this
meant that there would be new and important political developments in
Europe. Piccone and Ulmen were cautiously optimistic about the future of
Europe. Their meditations on the possibilities that remained open for
the European project were based on Schmitt’s insights developed mostly
in his lecture “The Plight of European Jurisprudence” and his book The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum,
in which the German jurist had shown that “the sovereign state that had
been the foundation of the Eurocentric order of international law for
almost 400 years began to decline as a result of the disappearance of
the qualitative distinction between state and society after 1848. This
signalled the approaching end of that international order, the jus publicum Europaeum,
which began to dissolve at the close of the 19th century. International
relations were losing their Eurocentric character as a result of the
rise of Russia and the U.S. as super-powers and the internationalization
of the economy” (3–4).
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