Carl Schmitt and the air war: looking for a katéchon

In the concluding pages of his Nomos der Erde, Carl Schmitt emphasised the absence of any regulation of air warfare within the international legal system. This reflection enshrines the coordinates of his geophilosophy. Schmitt noted that, after land and sea, air had become the new elementary sphere of human existence. However, at the outcome of this grand historical process, the element that loomed large on the horizon of the human sphere seemed rather to be fire. Schmitt’s diagnosis is ruthless: the conquest of the air implies the verticalisation of conflict and the erosion of all limitations to the use of violence. Air bombing, in particular, has taken on the exclusive purpose of annihilation. The parallel is disturbing: flying over the earth’s surface has simultaneously made it possible to ignore every physical barrier or legal constraint. This has coincided with the verticalisation of violence, which has become one-sided. The archetype of monomachy, which Schmitt interpreted as a lever for erecting the international legal system, disappeared with the advent of air bombing. A katéchon, or restraining force, needs to be found.