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