Zemlja i more u Carl Schmittovoj povijesti međunarodnog prava. S ekskursom o Golom otoku
Land and see in Schmitt's history of international law. With an Excursus on Goli otok

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses Schmitt's assertion, presented in his major work ‘The Nomos of the Earth,’ that law is bound to the earth, which follows from the postulated unity of order (Ordnung) and localization (Ortung). Schmitt’s view on the terrestrial localization of order is considered in the light of the antithesis of land and sea, which was the topic of his previous book Land und Meer. This antithesis is of cardinal importance for the world-historical meditation of the jurist Schmitt, as it was built into the foundation of the first global international law in the age of the discovery of the ‘new world.’ However, the epoch-defining foundation turned out to be unstable because the sea element constantly threatened the terrestrial localization of the law. The antithesis has its metaphysical background, which Schmitt elucidates by resorting to myths, legends, and Greek elemental philosophy. The introduction of speculative and mythopoetic reflections into the rigid jurisprudential, concrete-order thinking is explained by Schmitt’s own phenomenological accounts of the difference between Land and Sea. It is Sea, intrinsically lacking any firm traits, that resists a precise, objective account and that can be concretely described only in mythopoetic terms. Following Schmitt’s elemental conceptions, particularly that of Sea as a space of de-location (Ent-Ortung), the excursus deals with the famous concentration camp (dis)located in the Adriatic Sea in the early days of ‘really existing socialism.’ It is concluded that the camp, at the time of its operation (beyond an exclusively terrestrial order), occupied a non-place (u-topos) and in fact did not exist at all, or certainly not on the island called Goli otok.

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