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

Geopolitics and grosspolitics 47
this ‘would be the establishment of more intimate links, couched in terms appropriate
to the western tradition, between Britain and the nations of western
Europe’ (ibid.: 73–74). For Carr, the ‘appropriate western tradition’ was not of
the sort exported by the United States: under the British Reich, Europe would be
united by the ‘desire to find an answer based on principles which diverge both
from the Soviet ideology of state monopoly and from the American ideology of
unrestricted competition’ (ibid.: 74).
Like all power, power in the new international order was prone to abuse.
There was a danger that the Großräume might develop a new imperialism which
would only be nationalism writ large, and leave the problems of international
relations precisely where they were. Nevertheless, Carr was hopeful: ‘a political
unit based not on exclusiveness of nation or language but on shared ideals and
aspirations of universal application may be thought to represent a decided
advance over a political unit based simply on the cult of a nation’ (ibid.: 66).
Just as the movement for religious toleration had followed the devastation of the
wars ending the order of the respublica Christiana, Carr reasoned, national toleration
would stem from the carnage of the two world wars ending that of the
jus publicum Europaeum.
Carr’s vision of a British Western Europe was, of course, premature. When
Winston Churchill delivered his famous ‘iron curtain’ speech in 1946, the
unfolding of the Cold War became only a matter of time and, in this war, Britain
was not a Reich of its own hemisphere. After accepting Marshall Plan aid in
1947 and allowing the American air force to have bases on British soil in 1948,
Carr had to concede that Britain had no choice but to stand with – or behind –
the United States, and that the only major objective of its international policy
was to prevent war from breaking out between the great powers (see Haslam
1999: 150–153).
James Burnham’s struggle for the world
When Schmitt and Carr published their grosspolitical works, James Burnham
(1905–1987) was teaching at the New York University’s Washington Square
College, holding the position of chief adviser to the exiled communist leader
Leon Trotsky, and serving as leading spokesman for the American section of the
Fourth International, the Socialist Workers’ Party. However, Trotsky’s approval
of some of Stalin’s policies – most importantly, the pact with Hitler and the
Soviet attack on Finland in 1939 – coupled with growing scepticism about
Marxism as an ideology led Burnham to sever his ties with Trotsky and resign
from the party in 1940. 4 The following year Burnham published his first and
probably best-known book, The Managerial Revolution (1941), in which he predicted
that the universal struggle between capital and labour would be won, not
by socialism, but by what he termed ‘managerialism’ – a new kind of society
with its own ruling class and political institutions, which would rule the capitalists
as well as the proletariat (Burnham 1941: 7–11).
Even though he had abandoned Marxism politically, the historical determinism