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

mentalists’ in the member states, is a purely theoretical one which tries to grasp
the problems of contemporary existence with the concepts of a bygone era.
In fact it was James Burnham who presaged Carr’s worst fear – that Britain
might ignore the post-war opportunity to assert itself as a Western European
Großraum. By suggesting a union of unequals between Britain and the United
States in 1947, Burnham eased the political terms of what is known as the
‘special relationship’ between the two nations today. Burnham also presaged
Schmitt’s nightmare by trading political pluriversalism for the national interest
of the United States of America. This Burnham achieved by articulating
America’s policy of world order in terms of democracy. According to Schmitt,
every Großraum defines itself not only territorially but also ideologically, and
this definition is always made with a specific opponent in mind. During the Cold
War, America’s ethos became that of democratic order in a world endangered by
the dictatorship of communism. The fact that the political idea of democracy
does not imply any general or specific form of social or international order 8 did
not present a problem for Burnham – after all, it was America that fought in
democracy’s name, not vice versa. This was the political syllogism that led it to
victory against the Soviet Union, and one that continues to guide it today in its
War against Terror.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the politics postgraduate seminar at the University of
Lapland for valuable comments and criticism while I was working on this chapter.
Notes
Geopolitics and grosspolitics 53
1 The term Großraum does not translate well into English, though ‘greater region’,
‘large space’, ‘supra-state’, ‘sphere’ and ‘bloc’ have been used in the literature.
2 According to Schmitt (1996: 53),
The political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence
with another political entity. As long as a state exists, there will thus always be
in the world more than just one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe
and all of humanity cannot exist. The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.
3 For Schmitt (1991: 46, 47), this protection did not in any way compromise other
nations or nationalities in Germany’s zone of influence.
4 For a good biography of Burnham’s, see Kelly (2002).
5 According to Schmitt (1996: 58), all genuine political theories presuppose man to be
evil, with a predisposition which may appear as ‘corruption, weakness, cowardice, stupidity,
or also as brutality, sensuality, vitality, irrationality, and so on’.
6 Quote from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom.
7 Revanchism (from the French revanche, ‘revenge’) is defined as ‘a policy of retaliation,
especially to recover lost territory’ (Compact Oxford English Dictionary).
8 I suppose this can be debated. According to Michael Doyle (1986: 1156), an apparent
absence of war between liberal democracies for two decades provides statistical
grounds to argue that liberal democracies establish ‘a separate peace’ within the international
system.