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

46 M. Luoma-aho
Aberystwyth in 1939, Carr often wrote leaders for the paper and two years later
became its assistant editor. Thus far, Carr’s grosspolitics has received very little
scholarly attention, despite – or perhaps because of – the link to the ostracised
Schmitt.
Even though Carr cites Großraum as an economic concept, his theory had an
explicitly geopolitical dimension. Carr, like Schmitt, premised his theory on the
fact that the era of the jus publicum Europaeum, grounded in the political
subjectivity of the state, was irrevocably over. Carr, again like Schmitt, identified
the Monroe Doctrine as the precursor of the new international order, where
some states had great power and others had much less. He, moreover, similarly
acknowledged the power of the United States and the Soviet Union in their
respective Großräume, and invested hope in Europe as a potential power
between the two.
Where Carr and Schmitt clearly disagreed was on the question of the Reich of
the European Großraum. For Schmitt it was Adolf Hitler who had articulated
the political idea of the European Monroe Doctrine, asserting responsibility for
protecting German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. 3 Carr’s international
order also required the emergence of a European Großraum to neutralise
the pseudo-universalism of liberalism and bolshevism, but one led by the
British Reich. Alone, Great Britain was no match for the great powers, and was
beginning to look like a secondary power. As such, Britain would be faced by a
fearful dilemma: ‘it would have the choice of subordinating itself to the policy
either of the Soviet Union or of the United States of America’ (Carr 1945: 71).
If there was anything Britain could do to avoid this fate, it must begin, Carr
asserted, by radically altering its international policy. What was needed was a
shift of focus from an empire in ruin – the Commonwealth – to a continent in
ruin:
[W]estern Europe, even if she can renew her vitality and escape from the
thrall of traditions once glorious, but now stifling to fresh growth, still lacks
the leadership and central focus of power which would be necessary to her
among the great multi-national civilizations of the ‘hemisphere’ or Grossraum
epoch.
(Carr 1945: 73)
Rome, France and, most recently, Germany had all claimed leadership of
European civilisation, but had abused their power and fallen from grace. After
the Second World War, Carr wrote, the unprecedented situation had arisen in
which ‘the two European powers most able to influence the destinies of Europe
– Russia and Britain – are situated at its eastern and western extremities and are
not exclusively or primarily European powers at all’ (1945: 73). It seemed
inevitable that the nations of continental Europe were to be drawn into closer
relations with either (or both) of these two powers. Writing in the early post-war
years, he could already see signs of the Soviet Union asserting ‘hemispheric’
political subjectivity over the states of Eastern Europe. ‘A natural corollary’ to