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

Großraum in Central and Eastern Europe to counterbalance the universalism of
the Western Hemisphere. In his view, a central component of this Großraum
was the concept of the Reich, which referred to the power representing a distinct
political idea that drew the boundaries for and excluded intervention in the
regional sphere of a Großraum (Schmitt 1991: 23, 49). In Schmitt’s view, the
state of Germany, with around sixty million Germans and located in the middle
of Europe, was not large enough to be a great power in itself, but was powerful
enough to stand its ground (Schmitt 1988b: 107). Just as the United States, the
British Empire, the Soviet Union and the emerging Japanese Empire each had its
Raum, Schmitt hoped that Germany’s would be Europe (see Bendersky 1983:
257).
For Schmitt, the concept of the Reich did not refer exclusively to Germany’s
role in Europe, but marked political subjectivity in all Großräume (see Gruchmann
1962: 23). Still, Schmitt’s reasoning had a distinct meaning in concrete
political existence. The West and the East both claimed the right of intervention
around the world on the basis of universal principles. Schmitt suggested that
perhaps Germany could resist such intervention in Europe in the same manner as
the United States had (originally) done: by prohibiting intervention in its sphere
of interests (Schmitt 1988d: 302). Germany’s Großraum in the middle of Europe
would stand between the universalist projects of liberalism and bolshevism but
this required the emergence of a new type of international law that went beyond
the norm of equality of states.
Schmitt’s Großraumtheorie intrigued domestic commentators in the late
1930s and early 1940s, but, it was also criticised for lacking clarity and being
too abstract. Critics quickly pointed out that Schmitt had said nothing about the
actual internal nature or the precise political order of the German Großraum, nor
had he made any concrete suggestions regarding the new type of international
law he said was necessary (see Gruchmann 1962: 121). According to Bendersky,
this vagueness was often intentional in order to avoid contradicting the official
party theorists (1983: 255–256). It is widely accepted that Schmitt’s 1939
lecture and later publications on the subject were in line with Hitler’s foreign
policy in Central and Eastern Europe. However, Schmitt did not advocate war or
the Nazi conquest of Europe, and neither did his works on Großraum proclaim
such objectives. Once the war began, Schmitt accepted it as a matter of fact and
sought to justify Germany’s position (Scheuerman 1999: 169–173). After 1941
and Barbarossa, however, German foreign policy could no longer be accommodated
even into his conceptual framework.
Großraum theory in the West
Geopolitics and grosspolitics 41
He might not have been an altogether likeable chap, and it certainly is difficult
to agree with him on all accounts, but what follows is a modest attempt to document
that Schmitt’s diagnosis of the history and structure of the international
order was, essentially, correct, in the sense that it was subscribed to by two
leading post-war IR theorists, one in Britain and the other in America. Carr