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

which multinational Großräume led by great powers would replace the geopolitical
form of the state. Schmitt’s affiliation with the Nazi regime in the years
1933–1936 earned him a reputation as the Kronjurist of the Third Reich, and
stigmatised his work for the rest of his intellectual career.
The second aim of this chapter is to show that while Schmitt might have bet
on the wrong horse, he got it right in principle: post-war international order was
that of the great powers, and in need of theory. In the early 1940s Anglo-
American IR began to work on a post-nationalist or post-authoritarian theory of
‘great power’. William T. R. Fox captures the intellectual mood in his 1944
work, The Super-Powers:
The Western state system has always been dominated by a few great
states.... Because some states have great power and others have much less,
there will always be the danger that the government of some great power
will see in that difference an opportunity for cheap and profitable aggression.
But power can be used to protect as well as to enslave. In the world we
are going to have to live in, differences in power do and will exist. Our
problem is to discover the conditions of security in that world.
(Fox 1944: 4)
In Western grosspolitical theorisation, two intellectuals stand out: the Englishman
E. H. Carr and the American James Burnham. The former stands out as an academic
first and foremost: Carr is today considered not only as an eminent historian, journalist
and diplomat, but as one of the classical writers of political realism and modern
IR. While the latter also had an academic background, he nevertheless stands out as
an influential activist: Burnham is seen today as one of the founding fathers of
American neo-conservatism. Carr and Burnham were different in many other ways
but, like Schmitt, they shared an intellectual passion for Großräume – Carr even
used the term in his work. Unlike Schmitt, however, Carr and Burnham did receive
contemporary acclaim for their theories. Both, like Schmitt, deserve to be read today.
Carr’s post-war political Europeanism serves as a potent antidote to the prevalent
Euro-scepticism in Britain today, and with America’s continuing its war against
terror on a universal front, Burnham has become a true prophet of our time.
Schmitt’s conceptions of the (geo)political
Geopolitics and grosspolitics 37
In his Weimar writings, Schmitt developed a historical understanding of the
state as the political subject of the international order of the jus publicum
Europaeum. To avoid any complications with the Nazis after his dismissal from
the party, Schmitt did not deal with domestic or party politics after 1936, but
turned his attention to the study of international relations instead (see Bendersky
1983: 242). Even though in the 1920s he had still defended the political form of
the state, in the late 1930s and early 1940s Schmitt articulated the foundations of
a new political form to succeed the state: that of Großraum laid on the legal
principle of the Monroe Doctrine.