Heuristic Value of Carl Schmitt’s Political-Philosophical Concept of the Nomos of the Earth for the Study of International Relations in the Arctic

Abstract

As tensions escalate in global politics over international security architecture and global governance, the Arctic has become a region of a recent (since 2020) dramatic transformation of its international political dynamics. Therefore, amid the crisis in international relations theory and practice, it is worth turning to political-philosophical frameworks that can shed new light on the matter of world politics’ problems. Among various philosophical approaches to analyzing international relations, particular attention is drawn to the concept of the Nomos of the Earth, introduced in 1950 by the German philosopher and lawyer Carl Schmitt. This approach offers considerable heuristic value to the analysis of spatial organization (i.e. the principles for establishing legal and political order across territories of varying scales) and thus provides methodological basis for the analysis of the empirics of international relations in the Arctic. Drawing on Schmitt’s work and its critics, the key categories of his philosophy of political and legal space are analyzed: the land–sea dichotomy, land appropriation, “amity lines”, and “large spaces”. To operationalize and interpret these categories more effectively regarding “new” phenomena in world politics, the Nomos concept has been revisited and supplemented with notions of “actors beyond sovereignty”, hierarchy in postmodern international relations, the globalization–regionalization duality, and immaterial “new large spaces”. Using the Arctic’s international relations as a case study, the research overcomes the apparent contradiction between the autonomies of land and sea by their joint construction of the region. It further demonstrates the existence of parallel “large spaces” in the Arctic, highlighting their overlapping territoriality. The conclusion is that the Arctic Nomos is yet transitional, as the region remains a site of struggle for redistribution of resources and the expansion of control over both physical space and immaterial domains.