#state-quotes SEP on Carl Schmitt >  Political decision-taking on the basis of the simple majority rule is legitimate only if citizens share a political identity, in which case they will also agree on a set of constitutional fundamentals. Where they don’t, the identity of ruler and all ruled no longer obtains, and majority rule will consequently become a mere license for the oppression of those who happen to be in the minority. > Two important consequences for international theory of Schmitt’s conception of politics are immediately obvious. First, it implies that every true political community must claim a legally unrestricted ius ad bellum. If the distinction between friend and enemy that constitutes a group’s political existence is not drawn by the group itself but by someone else, or if the decision whether to go to war in a concrete situation is no longer taken by the group but by some third party — be it a hegemonic state, an international organization, or an international court — the group no longer exists as an independent political community (CP 45–53). > . Schmitt therefore aimed to assess the chances for the emergence of a new global order analogous in structure to ius publicum Europaeum and he made an attempt, in _The Nomos of the Earth_, to explicate the presuppositions of the kind of international order exemplified by ius publicum Europaeum. For it to be possible for groups that are related by enmity nevertheless to co-exist in a shared framework which limits the consequences of war mutual enmity must be prevented from reaching the level of absolute enmity. Enmity, even while it may require one to defend one’s own political existence against the enemy, must not require the complete destruction of the enemy’s political and perhaps of his physical existence. Ius publicum Europaeum, in Schmitt’s view, had been capable of preventing absolute enmity through an alignment of friend-enemy distinctions with territorial boundaries (Zarmanian 2006). > All political conflicts, under such circumstances, can be reduced to territorial conflicts, and this entails that all conflicts can in principle be contained as long as it is possible to divide territory in a way that will allow both groups to maintain their form of life (NE 143–8). > For political conflicts to be reducible to territorial conflicts, opposing political communities must of course accept the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other political communities. The reduction of political conflict to territorial conflict would be impossible if political allegiances were spread out across borders. If some of those who share the identity that we have made into the basis of our political life live in a territory controlled by another political community we will have to concern ourselves with their fate. If we perceive them to be oppressed by that other community, we may feel compelled to go to war for them, even if the other community has not aggressed against our own territory. To territorialize the friend-enemy distinction, hence, one must ensure that all and only the people who share the same political identity live in the same territory (GO 86–8, 96–101). Some political identities, however, do not lend themselves to a spatialization of the political. A community whose political identity is premised on the promotion of liberal-humanitarian values which it takes to be universal, for instance, must concern itself with the question whether other political communities respect those values and be willing to interfere if they don’t. It cannot accept a reduction of political conflict to territorial conflict, as its political identity purports to be non-exclusive. A global order on the model of ius publicum Europaeum will therefore remain unattainable, and a global civil war characterized by absolute enmity will be unavoidable, Schmitt concludes, as long as the world’s foremost powers are committed to universalist ideologies that imply a rejection of the spatialization of political conflict (GO 90–5; VA 375–85). catch 22 > But political communities are unlikely to be able to enforce internal homogeneity if they have to live in an international environment that lacks a clear spatial order because it is controlled by powers that are ideologically hostile to the spatialization of conflict. Legitimate domestic order and legitimate international order, for Schmitt, are thus two sides of the same coin. Both require a defense of the political, as Schmitt understands it. (Axtmann 2007)