The making of the Westphalian state-system: Social property relations, geopolitics and the myth of 1648.

The dissertation presents a theoretically controlled and historically informed inquiry into the formation and dynamics of the European system of states between the 8th and the 18th Centuries. It combines two methods of research and exposition. First, it pursues a comparative-chronological approach by elaborating and contrasting historically diverse logics of territorial and international order - exemplified with reference to the medieval, the early modern, and, partially, the modern geopolitical systems. Second, it adopts a developmental perspective by supplementing the systematic-comparative but static account of geopolitical orders with a more narrative, yet theoretically hedged, exposition of their incommensurable conflictual dynamics and expansionist drives. This processual perspective allows us to address the crucial question of the causes behind the passage from one geopolitical order to another. Contrary to conventional assumptions in the theory of international relations, the thesis is that the diversity of geopolitical systems and the reasons behind their transformations are bound up with different and changing social property relations in the domestic sphere. These social property relations govern the very identity of the constitutive actors of any geopolitical system and inform their modes of territorial order and foreign policy behaviour. Such a thesis has direct implications for a fundamental re-interpretation and re-periodisation of the origins of modern international relations, commonly associated with the Westphalian Peace settlements of 1648. By embedding the demystification of 1648's essential modernity in the wider continuum of European history, the dissertation shows to which degree early modern geopolitics remained tied to its medieval roots. The old pre-modern logic of geopolitical relations is only challenged with the advent of a new social property regime and the articulation of a new state/society complex in late 17th Century England, which starts in the 18th Century to transform the state system of the Old Regime into a modern system of sovereign states

Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory

The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitt's reach over the fields of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises – the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking. Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitt's international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense moment in Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitler's ‘spatial revolution’ into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europe's geopolitical history, grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germany's wars of conquest. Consequently, Schmitt's elevation of the early modern nomos as the model for civilized warfare – the ‘golden age’ of international law – against which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary – friend/enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism – for past and present analytical purposes. Schmitt's defective analytics and problematic history compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory