The contemporary international system appears increasingly resistant to the normative architectures designed to regulate it. Wars conducted outside established legal frameworks, unilateral military actions, and the erosion of institutional authority all suggest a structural transformation rather than a temporary deviation. In this context, the political and legal theory of Carl Schmitt—long regarded as controversial yet diagnostically incisive—offers a framework through which current global dynamics may be more clearly interpreted. His seminal work, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, provides concepts that resonate strongly with the present moment, particularly his critique of “empty normativism” and his advocacy of spatially grounded orders organized around spheres of influence.

Schmitt’s core insight is that international order is never sustained by norms alone. In The Nomos of the Earth, he argues that every durable legal order rests upon a concrete spatial and political foundation—a nomos, understood as an original act of land appropriation, distribution, and the production of order. Law, in this conception, does not precede power; rather, it crystallizes from historically contingent political equilibria. When legal norms are detached from such equilibria, they become what Schmitt described as empty normativism: a formalistic system of rules lacking both the authority and the material capacity necessary for enforcement.

The ambition to regulate international relations through normativism is not a contemporary invention. Its intellectual and political origins can be traced back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which inaugurated the modern state system based on sovereignty, territorial integrity, and juridical equality among states. Westphalia did not eliminate war, but it sought to contain it within a shared legal and spatial framework. Over the subsequent three centuries, nearly every attempt to stabilize the international system involved not only a reconfiguration of power relations but also the establishment of supranational (or quasi) structures designed to embody and supervise normative principles.

This historical pattern is particularly evident in the Congress of Vienna of 1815. Emerging from the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars, the Vienna settlement remains the most successful attempt to reconcile normativity with power. Its principal architect, Klemens von Metternich, recognized that stability required restraint rather than moral absolutism, balance rather than ideological expansion. The Concert of Europe that resulted did not abolish rivalry among the great powers, but it institutionalized mutual recognition and self-limitation. For nearly a century, Europe avoided systemic great-power war—an achievement unmatched by later normative experiments.

By contrast, the League of Nations and, subsequently, the United Nations represent efforts to universalize normativism beyond the conditions that Schmitt deemed sustainable. Both institutions sought to transcend power politics through legal equality, collective security, and the moral stigmatization of aggression. Yet, in Schmittian terms, they lacked a corresponding nomos: there was no shared spatial order, no accepted hierarchy of power, and no autonomous capacity for enforcement. Their authority therefore remained derivative, dependent upon the political will of dominant states rather than upon law itself.

Recent international developments strongly reinforce this assessment. Russia’s war in Ukraine, conducted in open defiance of the post–Cold War European security architecture; the bombing campaign against Iran during the summer of last year; the ongoing and expanding conflict in the Middle East; and the rapid, elite-driven operation by U.S. forces aimed at the overthrow and arrest of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela all illustrate a profound erosion of respect for international normativism. These actions were not merely violations of international law; they were executed with minimal concern for institutional legitimation. The United Nations continues to exist formally, but its role has increasingly been reduced to procedural symbolism.

From Schmitt’s perspective, this erosion is neither accidental nor anomalous. As he argued in The Nomos of the Earth, when a legal order ceases to correspond to the actual distribution of power, it forfeits its binding force. The persistence of legal discourse under such conditions does not signify resilience, but exhaustion. Norms are invoked precisely because they no longer command obedience.

Schmitt’s proposed alternative was not global disorder, but a pluralistic system structured around large spatial units (Großräume), each dominated by a leading power and shielded from external intervention. Within such regional spheres of influence, order could be maintained through geographic proximity, shared interests, and credible authority, rather than abstract universalism. This vision directly challenges the post–1945 aspiration toward a single, homogeneous international legal order.

Nevertheless, Schmitt’s framework does not fully converge with the contemporary geostrategic outlook of the United States. Official American strategic documents do not conceptualize the United States as merely a regional power presiding over a delimited sphere, but as a superpower with globally interwoven interests. The prevailing American vision of world order is vertical rather than horizontal. It prioritizes the Western Hemisphere—from Canada through Latin America, stretching from the Arctic to Antarctica—while simultaneously identifying the Indo-Pacific, particularly China, as the principal arena of long-term strategic competition. Beyond these core zones, the United States selectively engages in various regions and states perceived as structurally aligned with American interests, irrespective of geographic continuity.

This approach diverges from Schmitt’s emphasis on spatial containment and reciprocal recognition among great powers. Rather than accepting a multipolar equilibrium of distinct Großräume, American strategy seeks to preserve freedom of action across multiple regions, maintaining operational presence wherever strategic imperatives arise. Normativism is neither abandoned nor fully embraced; it is instrumentalized—affirmed when it reinforces strategic objectives and circumvented when it constrains them.

At a deeper level, this behavior reflects a historical logic intrinsic to superpower status. For a superpower to fulfill its historical cycle, it cannot afford the posture of a gentle or passive hegemon. Continuous operational readiness, strategic decisiveness, and the willingness to act unilaterally when required are structural imperatives rather than policy anomalies. This logic has manifested, in varying forms and rhetorics, across successive American administrations. Each has adapted its methods to changing circumstances, yet all have operated within a durable tradition of foreign policy that privileges action over abstraction.

In this sense, Carl Schmitt does not offer a blueprint to be adopted wholesale, but a conceptual lens through which prevailing illusions may be dismantled. His critique of empty normativism exposes the fragility of a system that confuses moral aspiration with political order. His insistence on spatially grounded authority underscores the limits of universal governance in a world marked by unequal power and divergent interests. While contemporary strategies—particularly those of the United States—do not conform neatly to his prescriptions, the trajectory of the international system increasingly validates his central warning: where law is unmoored from power, it becomes ceremonial; and where order ignores geography, it dissolves into rhetoric.

The present era thus appears not as the end of international order, but as the end of a particular illusion regarding how such order can be sustained. / ADN

*The author completed a PhD dissertation in the history of international relations at the University of Vienna, Austria; an MA in Geopolitical Studies at the University of Toulouse, France; and a degree in International Relations from the University of Graz, Austria.