  This containment of war, Schmitt claims, was premised on the willingness to bracket the question of justice on the level of ius ad bellum. Once one takes the view that a war can be legitimate on one side, while being illegitimate on the other, one is forced to conclude, Schmitt argues, that it is morally wrong to grant the status of legitimate belligerency to those who are judged to fight without a just cause, and equally wrong to assume that they ought to enjoy the same in bello-rights as those who fight justly (NE 320–2; CP 54–7). Moreover, once one separates between legitimate and illegitimate belligerency, it will no longer be possible to argue that other states have the right to side with either belligerent or to remain neutral. Rather, third parties will be seen to have a duty to side with those who fight justly (DK 26–53). The abandonment of the idea that all participants in a war among states are equally legitimate belligerents, Schmitt concludes, inevitably undercuts the containment of war achieved in ius publicum Europaeum (PB 286–90). Unsurprisingly, Schmitt rejected the project of creating an international legal order based on a ‘discriminating concept of war’ that would subject the use of force on the part of sovereign states to substantive criteria of moral legitimacy and external legal control. He regarded such developments as little more than attempts on the part of the victorious western allies to brand any violent German effort to revise the outcomes of WWI as illegal and thus as unjust, and to give themselves license for the application of means of coercion and for the use of methods of warfare that would have been considered as illegitimate in the context of mutually legitimate belligerency (PB 184–203; NE 259–80). Schmitt argued that international legalization on the model of just war theory would not prevent coming wars. It would merely make them more total, as it would encourage opponents to regard each other as absolute enemies worthy of elimination (NE 309–22; Brown 2007; Slomp 2009, 95–111).