  However, Schmitt acknowledged that the era of ius publicum Europaeum had come to an end after WWI, together with the global hegemony of the classical European concert of sovereign states (GO 101–11). Schmitt therefore aimed to assess the chances for the emergence of a new global order analogous in structure to ius publicum Europaeum and he made an attempt, in The Nomos of the Earth, to explicate the presuppositions of the kind of international order exemplified by ius publicum Europaeum.  For it to be possible for groups that are related by enmity nevertheless to co-exist in a shared framework which limits the consequences of war mutual enmity must be prevented from reaching the level of absolute enmity. Enmity, even while it may require one to defend one’s own political existence against the enemy, must not require the complete destruction of the enemy’s political and perhaps of his physical existence. Ius publicum Europaeum, in Schmitt’s view, had been capable of preventing absolute enmity through an alignment of friend-enemy distinctions with territorial boundaries (Zarmanian 2006).  If the forms of life of two opposed political communities are each tied to and expressed in a particular territory, then the two groups will be able, Schmitt argues, to spatialize the friend-enemy distinction between them (NE 42–9). From the point of view of any one of the two groups, the protection of its political existence will require it to repel any attempt on the part of the other group to dispossess it of its territory. But it will not require the one group to interfere with or to destroy the political existence of the other group if to do so is unnecessary for the protection of its own territory. All political conflicts, under such circumstances, can be reduced to territorial conflicts, and this entails that all conflicts can in principle be contained as long as it is possible to divide territory in a way that will allow both groups to maintain their form of life (NE 143–8).