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

Geopolitics and grosspolitics 39
footsteps of another political catholicist, Joseph de Maistre, Schmitt saw humanitarianism
as a dangerous political ‘religion’, which in its attempt to neutralise
the political nature of man succeeded only in bringing chaos and violence in its
wake.
In the place of jus publicum Europaeum another international order was
developing but, in Schmitt’s view, it was an order without a territorial orientation.
While the shell of the old order continued to provide a kind of a model,
international law had become a collection of loose principles existing in a
geopolitical chaos. Once it had become difficult to distinguish a European state
from a colonial or other quasi-state outside Europe, the European state system
had lost its homogeneity. Confusion resulted from the fact that no new geopolitical
concepts had been developed to grasp the new concrete situation. Schmitt’s
conceptual solution to the problem was Großraum (see Ulmen 1987: 43–71).
The term Großraum was not Schmitt’s own invention, but he conceptualised
it with the means and methods of his training in international law. The term was
not first used as a juridical concept. It gained general currency in Weimar
Germany as Großraumwirtschaft (bloc economy), an idea that fertilised the
ground for claims to German hegemony in Europe (see Murphy 1997: 61–63).
Schmitt dissociated his Großraumtheorie from the geopolitics of the notorious
Haushofer school (Schmitt 1991: 15–19) which understood Geopolitik as a
scientific aid to the conduct of statecraft (see e.g. Toal 1996: 46). One of the key
concepts of Haushofer’s geopolitics that came to link political geography with
the Third Reich was Lebensraum, a term that became well known with Friedrich
Ratzel’s Der Lebensraum of 1901. Ratzel equated the Darwinian idea of the
struggle for existence with the struggle for space: all life forms on the planet
were involved in a ceaseless quest for living space. Although his work was
mainly in plant and animal geography, Ratzel emphasised the existential
meaning of Lebensraum, and the analogy with Darwinism among nations was
picked up by the geopoliticians of the Haushofer school.
For Schmitt, the political form of Großraum stood between the political categories
of the state and the universe (Schmitt 1995: 237). A Großraum, Schmitt
asserted, was an area dominated by a power representing a distinct political idea,
which was formulated with a specific opponent in mind – that is, the distinctions
between friend and enemy were determined by this particular political idea.
Schmitt saw the legal precedent for the international order of Großräume being
set in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Geopolitically, the Monroe Doctrine designated
an area far exceeding the territorial boundaries of the United States, thus
creating a new form of political subjectivity above and beyond the territorial
nation-state. At the time of its declaration, the American government avowed it
would not intervene in European political affairs and reciprocally forbade extraneous
intervention in the Western Hemisphere. With the Monroe Doctrine, the
United States accepted the responsibility of protector of independent ‘Western’
nations and affirmed that it would steer clear of European affairs (Schmitt 1991:
22–33). The Monroe Doctrine not only sought to isolate the Western Hemisphere
from Europe and the rest of the world but, for Schmitt, constituted a