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

Geopolitics and grosspolitics 45
Carr’s second premise was that political units would retain their distinctively
territorial form. Power had never been entirely divorced from the possession of
territory, and ‘[m]odern technique, military and economic, seems to have indissolubly
welded together power and territory’, to the extent that ‘[i]t is difficult
for contemporary man even to imagine a world in which political power would
be organized on a basis not of territory, but of race, creed or class’ (ibid.: 211).
However, Carr marked a trend in territoriality towards integration and formation
of ever larger political and economic units. This trend began in the latter part of
the nineteenth century and was connected with the industrial revolution and
growth of capitalism, and with the development of ‘technical instruments of
power’ (ibid.). In Nationalism and After (1945), Carr ventured to predict – not
inaccurately, as the post-1945 settlement moved – the shape of the political units
of the coming international order. Having eliminated, on the one hand, the possibility
that independent sovereign states could claim the international power they
had lost or were losing in Europe and the world over and, on the other hand, that
a single world power exercising supreme control over mankind was conceivable
in the near future, Carr forecast a compromise between the two poles. Political
power in the post-war international order was likely to be redivided on a continental
scale:
If these predictions are realized, the world will have to accommodate itself
to the emergence of a few great multi-national units in which power will be
mainly concentrated. Culturally, these units may best be called civilizations:
there are distinctively British, American, Russian and Chinese civilizations,
none of which stops short at national boundaries in the old sense.
Economically, the term Grossraum invented by German geo-politicians
seems the most appropriate. The Soviet Union is pre-eminently a Grossraum;
the American continents are the potential Grossraum of the United
States, though the term is less convenient as applied to the British Commonwealth
of Nations or the sterling area which are oceanic rather than continental
agglomerations. Militarily, the old and useful term ‘zone of influence’
has been discredited and may well have become too weak to express the
degree of strategic interaction required; but the United States has coined the
convenient ‘hemispheric defence’ to cover the zone of influence defined by
the Monroe Doctrine.
(Carr 1945: 52)
The ‘German geo-politicians’ Carr refers to means just one: Carl Schmitt. Carr
nowhere cites Schmitt directly, but both cite Friedrich Naumann’s Mitteleuropa
(1915). It was Schmitt, however, who build his Großraumtheorie on the legal
precedent of the Monroe Doctrine. It is not entirely clear whether or not Carr
had read Schmitt at some point between The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Nationalism
and After, but he certainly had read about him: on the eve of the war, The
Times had reported on Schmitt as the mastermind behind Hitler’s foreign policy
(see Bendersky 1983: 257–258). Even though he was still acting as professor at