The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

2 Geopolitics and grosspolitics
From Carl Schmitt to E. H. Carr and
James Burnham
Mika Luoma-aho
Introduction: Schmitt and grosspolitics
In 1939, with Germany’s foreign policy becoming a major issue in European
affairs, Carl Schmitt’s Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot
für raumfremde Mächte was certainly noticed. Several German newspapers
published long articles describing Schmitt’s Großraum-theory, and the foreign
press also took notice of Schmitt’s lecture: two British newspapers presented
Schmitt as the theorist behind Hitler’s expansion in Europe (Bendersky 1983:
237–242, 250–252). Though it is not often recognised as such, Völkerrechtliche
Großraumordnung is also an academic landmark: it anticipated a genre of International
Relations (IR) theory that emerged in the 1940s, the subject of which
was international order in the post-war era. Recurrent in all this speculation was
an attempt to come up with new concepts to replace the traditional national state
with something geographically bigger and more powerful. For Schmitt, this
concept was of course Großraum 1 (Schmitt 1991). In Schmitt’s Großraumordnung,
the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British and Japanese empires
had their respective Großräume, with Central Europe fast becoming the backyard
of the German Reich.
Schmitt’s predictions on the future of Germany soon proved wide of the
mark. Where he did fare better was in foreseeing the political form of the emerging
international order. Schmitt’s was a geopolitical (or geo-jurisprudential, see
Gyorgy 1943: 682) conceptualisation to mark the end of the era of international
politics and the beginning of that of ‘grosspolitics’ (if I may), where the world
political order was ruled by, not territorial states, but ‘hemispheric’ powers. This
order was premised on a de facto repudiation of one of the fundamental norms
of state sovereignty laid down in the Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück signed
in Westphalia in 1648: equality of states in international relations.
The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it discusses the evolution of
Schmitt’s geopolitics from his Weimar works to his post-1936 writings, from the
state to the Großraum. In his Weimar writings, and especially in his 1932 essay
Der Begriff des Politischen, Schmitt developed a historical understanding of the
state as the political form of the international order of Westphalia. In the late
1930s and early 1940s, Schmitt articulated the foundations of a new order in