On Schmitt and Space

This book represents a comprehensive study of the spatial thought of the

influential German legal and political thinker Carl Schmitt, offering the first
systematic examination from a geographic perspective of one of the most
important political thinkers of the twentieth century.
It charts the development of Schmitt’s spatial thinking from his early work
on secularization and the emergence of the modern European state to his
post-war analysis of the spatial basis of global order and international law,
whilst situating his thought in relation to his changing biographical and
intellectual context, his controversial involvement in Weimar politics and his
disastrous support for the Nazi regime. It argues that spatial concepts play a
crucial structural role throughout Schmitt’s work, from his well-known ana-
lyses of sovereign power and the state of exception to his often overlooked
spatial history of modernity, locating a fundamental relationship between
space and ‘the political’ that lies at the core of his thought.
The book explores the critical insight that Schmitt’s spatial thinking brings
to bear on some of the key political questions of the twentieth century whilst
tracking his profound and enduring influence on key debates on sovereignty,
international relations, war and the nature of world order at the start of the
twenty first.

Claudio Minca is a Professor and Head of Cultural Geography at Wageningen

University, the Netherlands.

Rory Rowan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography at

the University of Zürich, Switzerland.
Interventions

Edited by:
Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Wil-
liams, University of Warwick

The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that
engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psy-
choanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global
politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes.
We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars
working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make
their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics.
Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, poli-
tics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual
studies in international politics.
We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just
contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted
directly to the Series Editors:

Jenny Edkins (jennyedkins@hotmail.com) and

Nick Vaughan-Williams (N.Vaughan-Williams@Warwick.ac.uk)

As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for under-
standing; it is made for cutting’. In this spirit the Edkins–Vaughan-Williams
Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge main-
stream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to con-
tribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm
the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.
Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa, USA

The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scho-
lars working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions
have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of
important topics.
Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology,
politics and other disciplines, and provide situated historical, empirical and
textual studies in international politics.
Critical Theorists and International
Relations
Edited by Jenny Edkins and
Nick Vaughan-Williams
Ethics as Foreign Policy
Britain, the EU and the other
Dan Bulley
Universality, Ethics and
International Relations
A grammatical reading
Véronique Pin-Fat
The Time of the City
Politics, philosophy, and genre
Michael J. Shapiro
Governing Sustainable Development
Partnership, protest and power at
the world summit
Carl Death
Insuring Security
Biopolitics, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Foucault and International Relations
New critical engagements
Edited by Nicholas J. Kiersey and
Doug Stokes
International Relations and
Non-Western Thought
Imperialism, colonialism and
investigations of global modernity
Edited by Robbie Shilliam
Autobiographical International
Relations
I, IR
Edited by Naeem Inayatullah
War and Rape
Law, memory and justice
Nicola Henry
Madness in International Relations
Psychology, security and the global
governance of mental health
Alison Howell
Spatiality, Sovereignty and
Carl Schmitt
Geographies of the nomos
Edited by Stephen Legg
Politics of Urbanism
Seeing like a city
Warren Magnusson
Beyond Biopolitics
Theory, violence and horror in
world politics
François Debrix and
Alexander D. Barder
The Politics of Speed
Capitalism, the state and war in an
accelerating world
Simon Glezos
Politics and the Art of
Commemoration
Memorials to struggle in Latin
America and Spain
Katherine Hite
Indian Foreign Policy
The politics of postcolonial identity
Priya Chacko
Politics of the Event
Time, movement, becoming
Tom Lundborg
Theorising Post-Conflict
Reconciliation
Agonism, restitution and repair
Edited by Alexander Keller Hirsch
Europe’s Encounter with Islam
The secular and the postsecular
Luca Mavelli
Re-thinking International Relations
Theory via Deconstruction
Badredine Arfi
The New Violent Cartography
Geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn
Edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and
Michael J. Shapiro
Insuring War
Sovereignty, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
International Relations, Meaning
and Mimesis
Necati Polat
The Postcolonial Subject
Claiming politics/governing others
in late modernity
Vivienne Jabri
Foucault and the Politics of Hearing
Lauri Siisiäinen
Volunteer Tourism in the
Global South
Giving back in neoliberal times
Wanda Vrasti
Cosmopolitan Government in Europe
Citizens and entrepreneurs in
postnational politics
Owen Parker
Studies in the
Trans-disciplinary Method
After the aesthetic turn
Michael J. Shapiro
Alternative Accountabilities in
Global Politics
The scars of violence
Brent J. Steele
Celebrity Humanitarianism
The ideology of global charity
Ilan Kapoor
Deconstructing International Politics
Michael Dillon
The Politics of Exile
Elizabeth Dauphinee
Democratic Futures
Revisioning democracy promotion
Milja Kurki
Postcolonial Theory
A critical introduction
Edited by Sanjay Seth
More than Just War
Narratives of the just war and
military life
Charles A. Jones
Deleuze & Fascism
Security: war: aesthetics
Edited by Brad Evans and Julian Reid
Feminist International Relations
‘Exquisite corpse’
Marysia Zalewski
The Persistence of Nationalism
From imagined communities to
urban encounters
Angharad Closs Stephens
Interpretive Approaches to Global
Climate Governance
Reconstructing the greenhouse
Edited by Chris Methmann,
Delf Rothe and Benjamin Stephan
Postcolonial Encounters in
International Relations
The politics of transgression in
the Maghreb
Alina Sajed
Post-tsunami Reconstruction
in Indonesia
Negotiating normativity through
gender mainstreaming
initiatives in Aceh
Marjaana Jauhola
Leo Strauss and the Invasion of Iraq
Encountering the abyss
Aggie Hirst
Production of Postcolonial India
and Pakistan
Meanings of partition
Ted Svensson
War, Identity and the Liberal State
Everyday experiences of the
geopolitical in the armed forces
Victoria M. Basham
Writing Global Trade Governance
Discourse and the WTO
Michael Strange
Politics of Violence
Militancy, international politics,
killing in the name
Charlotte Heath-Kelly
Ontology and World Politics
Void universalism I
Sergei Prozorov
Theory of the Political Subject
Void universalism II
Sergei Prozorov
Visual Politics and North Korea
Seeing is believing
David Shim
Globalization, Difference and
Human Security
Edited by Mustapha Kamal Pasha
International Politics
and Performance
Critical aesthetics and
creative practice
Edited by Jenny Edkins and
Adrian Kear
Memory and Trauma in
International Relations
Theories, cases, and debates
Edited by Erica Resende and
Dovile Budryte
Critical Environmental Politics
Edited by Carl Death
Democracy Promotion
A critical introduction
Jeff Bridoux and Milja Kurki
International Intervention in a
Secular Age
Re-enchanting humanity?
Audra Mitchell
The Politics of Haunting and
Memory in International Relations
Jessica Auchter
European-East Asian Borders
in Translation
Edited by Joyce C.H. Liu and
Nick Vaughan-Williams
Genre and the (Post)Communist
Woman
Analyzing transformations of the
Central and Eastern European
female ideal
Edited by Florentina C. Andreescu
and Michael Shapiro
Studying the Agency of
Being Governed
Edited by Stina Hansson,
Sofie Hellberg and Maria Stern
Politics of Emotion
The song of Telangana
Himadeep Muppidi
Ruling the Margins
Colonial power and administrative
rule in the past and present
Prem Kumar Rajaram
Race and Racism in
International Relations
Confronting the global colour line
Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda
and Robbie Shilliam
The Grammar of Politics
and Performance
Edited by Shirin M. Rai and
Janelle Reinelt
War, Police and Assemblages
of Intervention
Edited by Jan Bachman,
Colleen Bell and Caroline Holmqvist
Re-imagining North Korea in
International Politics
Problems and alternatives
Shine Choi
On Schmitt and Space
Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan
Face Politics
Jenny Edkins
Empire Within
International hierarchy and its
imperial laboratories of governance
Alexander D. Barder
On Schmitt and Space

Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan

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First published 2016
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2016 Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan
The right of Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Minca, Claudio.
On Schmitt and space / Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan.
pages cm. – (Interventions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Schmitt, Carl, 1888-1985. 2. Political science–Germany–History–20th
century. 3. Political science–Philosophy–History–20th century. 4.
Sovereignty–Philosophy. 5. International relations–Philosophy. 6. War
(Philosophy) 7. International organization–Philosophy. I. Rowan, Rory. II.
Title.
JC263.S34M56 2015
320.01–dc23
2014030094

ISBN: 978-1-138-00074-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-79620-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1
1 Writing Carl Schmitt 10
2 The return of Carl Schmitt 41
3 Spatializing the political 74
4 Liberal Leviathan 99
5 Nazi Behemoth 129
6 Großraum 153
7 Spatial histories 187
8 A new Nomos of the Earth? 211
Conclusion 245

Bibliography 258
Index 275
Acknowledgements

This book is the result of almost a decade of work on Carl Schmitt and his
reception in English speaking academia. We would thus like to start by
acknowledging the key sources of support that have made it possible to bring
On Schmitt and Space to completion.
The foundations of this book were laid in Rory’s PhD thesis, The Crisis of
Political Form: The Question of Space in the Work of Carl Schmitt, com-
pleted under Claudio’s supervision at Royal Holloway, University of London
between 2007 and 2012. This work would not have been possible without the
generous support and encouragement of his parents, Peter and Briad Rowan
and this project remains indebted to them. He is also grateful to the
Geography Department at Royal Holloway for the support shown during his
time there and to the Cultural Geography Group at Wageningen University
for the financial support provided for the project, without which it would not
have been possible to develop his doctoral work further in collaboration with
Claudio. Rory would also like to give a special thanks to Eva Kenny without
whose tireless support the book would not have seen the light of day. She was
endlessly patient as the project followed us across two continents, three
countries and far too many evenings lost to work. For this, as all else, Rory is
forever grateful to her.
While working for the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, Uni-
versity of London, Claudio enjoyed one semester of sabbatical leave in Van-
couver as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Geography at the
University of British Columbia. During those months in 2010 he was able to
spend long periods in the library without which he would not have been able
to contribute to the later realisation of this book. Claudio is also grateful to
the Environmental Sciences Department, at Wageningen University – where
he is presently employed – for all forms of support received for the realization
of this project.
The publisher, and in particular our editors Paola Celli, Peter Harris and
Kate Reeves have been very helpful and supportive at every stage of the
book’s preparation. We would also like to thank the series editors, Jenny
Edkins and Nick Vaughan Williams for believing in the project. We are very
grateful to all of them.
 Acknowledgements xi
The material used in this book is original and was collected and elaborated
by the authors. However, as is the case with many long term projects like this
one, some of the topics treated here have been addressed in work published in
different forms over recent years. The authors discussed some of the over-
arching themes of the book in a co-authored paper ‘The Question of Space in
Carl Schmitt’ (Progress in Human Geography, 2015) and some of the pro-
blems in approaching his work, analysed in Chapter 1, in ‘The Trouble with
Carl Schmitt’, a guest editorial piece in Political Geography (2014). Both
authors contributed separate chapters on the relationship of space and poli-
tical ontology in Schmitt’s work to the collection Spatiality, Sovereignty and
Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011), edited by Stephen Legg; with
Claudio’s work on Schmitt’s reception in Italian political thought being
reflected in Chapters 5 and 6 and Rory’s engagement with the concept of
nomos and its recent reception of Schmitt in critical International Relations
reflected in Chapters 2, 6 and 8. The discussion of Schmitt’s relation to
Agamben and Italian political thought that appears in Chapters 5 and 6 also
draws on Claudio’s previous work, notably ‘Giorgio Agamben and the New
Biopolitical Nomos’ (Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography,
2006), ‘Agamben’s Geographies of Modernity’ (Political Geography, 2007)
and ‘Carlo Galli, Carl Schmitt and Contemporary Italian Political Thought’
(Political Geography, 2012). The discussion of Schmitt’s relationship to Nazi
spatial thought in Chapter 7 has been previously addressed by Claudio in a
paper co-authored with Trevor Barnes ‘Nazi Spatial Theory: The Dark Geo-
graphies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller’ (Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 2013). Claudio had earlier discussed Schmitt’s concept
of the border with Nick Vaughan-Williams in ‘Carl Schmitt and the Concept of
the Border’ (Geopolitics, 2012). Rory will expand on the discussion of Schmitt’s
spatial histories, geoelemental mythologies, eschatological geopolitics and the
globalization of violence in forthcoming work.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

I am the last conscious representative of the jus publicum Europaeum; its last
teacher and student in an existential sense, and I am experiencing its demise
as Benito Cereno experienced the journey of the pirate ship.
Carl Schmitt, 1950

Carl Schmitt characterized himself thus in autobiographical reflections he

published, after he was released from captivity in Nuremburg, where he had
been held for interrogation by US forces regarding his role in the Nazi regime.
Benito Cereno, the captain of a mutinous slave ship in Herman Melville’s
1855 story of the same name, was an alias Schmitt had adopted to distance
himself from the National Socialist state, even in his wartime corre-
spondences. His friend, the writer, philosopher and then Wehrmacht captain,
Ernst Jünger reported that during a walk around the ‘skulls and masks’ of the
Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1941, Schmitt evoked Melville’s story, telling
him that the situation of ‘conservative intellectuals in Nazi Germany’ was
similar to that of the ‘white captain dominated by black slaves’ (in Hell, 2009:
285). Indeed, as Jan-Werner Müller and Raphael Gross have shown in their
biographical work, during the post-war years, when he was a taboo figure
relegated to the fringes of the fledgling German Federal Republic, Schmitt
spent much of his time attempting to cleanse his record of having been an
influential Nazi intellectual.1 Taking on the guise of Melville’s fictional skip-
per steering a ship of rebellious slaves was just one part of a concerted effort
he undertook in the aftermath of the war to put a wedge between himself and
the Nazi regime through deliberate self-mythologizing. Casting the Nazis as,
presumably, barbarous slaves driving the German Reich to shipwreck allowed
Schmitt to claim the role of the wise world-historical navigator reduced to
merely ‘following orders’.2
According to the logic of this allegory, although Schmitt may have
appeared in a leading position in the Nazi state, as Cereno initially appeared
in control of the slave ship in Melville’s story, he was in fact merely carrying
out demands on pain of death. This attempt to find absolution in a literary
guise seems to reveal that Schmitt was aware, even during the war, that his
relation to Nazism would become a decisive interpretative lens for the
2 Introduction
reception of his work. Yet in the wake of the war, when the full horrors of the
Holocaust had become undeniable, he refused to undergo denazification,
insisting he was innocent of association with any Nazi crimes even though he
had reaped professional reward for his Party membership and had actively
attempted to produce scholarship theorizing and legitimizing the regime. In
his biography of Schmitt, the Marxist critic Gopal Balakrishnan argues that
the German jurist refused denazification because he wanted to avoid his entire
body of work being understood as tainted with ideological contamination, to
keep the record of his work clean (Balakrishnan, 2011: 255–257).3 This refusal,
however, produced the opposite effect, and in fact entrenched the view that
after the war he remained an unreconstructed reactionary, holding steadfast
to the conceptual course that had led him to willingly act in the name of the
Nazi state. The stakes of this decision were high and cost Schmitt not only his
reputation but also his Chair at the University of Berlin and indeed any
future academic position in Germany. However, although marginalized from
academia, Schmitt remained a prolific and influential author until his death in
1985. Indeed, during the post-war period Schmitt was not only celebrated as
a significant thinker by conservative circles in Germany and other parts of
Europe, such as France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, but from the 1970s onward
he became a shadowy influence on a European New Left scrambling to
reconceptualize politics in the face of a growing litany of defeats.
Although ‘forgotten’ for decades in English speaking academia, Schmitt
has recently been ‘rediscovered’ within a new set of intellectual and political
circumstances. The scope of this Anglophone resurgence is broad and has
given rise to an intensive debate over some of his key concepts, Schmitt
having achieved the status of a ‘classic’ in political thought despite persistent
controversy around his collusion with the Nazi regime. Aspects of his work
have been re-appropriated in a number of disciplines – including Political
Theory (Balakrishnan, 2011; Galli, 2010a; Marramao, 2012; Mouffe, 2013;
Rasch, 2005a) and International Relations (Axtmann, 2007; Burgess, 2009;
Hooker, 2009; Neal, 2010; Prozorov, 2010; Vaughan-Williams, 2009; Zolo,
2002) – where a new ‘Schmittian’ debate has taken root, with his ideas of
sovereign exception, nomos (‘spatial order’) and Großraum (‘greater space’)
having recently been employed to describe putatively new global orderings in
world politics, especially amongst thinkers of the left (see Chandler, 2008;
Legg and Vasudevan, 2011; Odysseos and Petito, 2007).
Indeed, over the last decade a new ‘spatial Schmitt’ has also emerged in
Anglophone scholarship, with an increasing number of studies focusing on his
later, more explicitly spatial, writings (Elden, 2010; Hooker, 2009; Legg,
2011a; Meyer et al., 2012; Minca and Rowan, 2014; Odysseos and Petito,
2007; Rasch, 2005a). There are arguably several reasons for this development
in his Anglophone reception. In the first instance, Schmitt’s long and deep
influence on Continental political thought increasingly began to work its
way into his treatment in Anglophone academia over the last two decades.
Thinkers associated with post-foundational political thought (Marchart,
 Introduction 3
2007), such as Jacques Derrida (1997), Chantal Mouffe (2005a) and Slavoj
Žižek (1999), who have seen in Schmitt not only one of liberalism’s most agile
critics, but a ‘thinker of difference’ concerned with the contingent basis of
political order, have done much to shape this recent debate. For these scho-
lars, Schmitt has provided a theoretical basis for a bracing critique of a sup-
posedly ‘post-political’ stalemate that has dominated Western democracies
since the end of the Cold War. Likewise, the interpretation of Schmitt’s
thought by the Italian Left has had a profound impact upon his recent
Anglophone reception, with Giorgio Agamben’s incisive engagement in
Homo Sacer (1998) and The State of Exception (2004) being a key factor
in his ‘renaissance.’ In particular, Agamben’s theory of the state of exception,
widely cited in Geography (see, among many others, Coleman and Grove,
2009; Ek, 2006; Gregory, 2004; Minca, 2006, 2007, 2015; Reid-Henry, 2007),
is largely based upon Schmitt’s speculations on the nature of sovereignty in
Political Theology (1922). Indeed, this influence is so significant that some
have spoken of a ‘post-Agamben’ Schmitt (Legg and Vasudevan, 2011: 10).
Perhaps even more important have been shifts in the political context over
recent decades that have given Schmitt’s spatial thought apparent purchase on
a number of pressing contemporary (geo)political concerns – his analysis of
the collapse of modern global order and critique of humanitarian warfare
considered particularly timely in the context of US military intervention-
ism, exceptional legislation and the spread of extra-legal detentions that
defined the ‘post 9/11’ ‘war on terror’ (see Agamben, 2005a; de Benoist, 2013;
Mouffe, 2005a, 2005b; Neal, 2010; Odysseos and Petito, 2007; Rasch, 2005b;
Ulmen, 2007a).
Our own interest in Carl Schmitt was born of war. Like many others, we
were first drawn to Schmitt’s work in the middle years of the last decade, at
the height of the ‘war on terror’ launched by the Bush administration in the
wake of the September 11th attacks. This was a period when the instruments
of international law and the language of democracy were once again put to
work as tools of imperial power, unfurling international legal order from
within. The blunt contradictions that emerged within the global political
situation seemed to exhaust established avenues of protest and warp the old
coordinates of critique, something confirmed by the apparent irrelevance of
millions of feet marching on the streets of London, Washington and other
Western capitals. For us, as for many others, Schmitt’s work appeared to
somehow speak directly to the tensions of the moment, cutting through the
paralysing ideological fog and hitting precisely on the raw mechanisms of
global power that neoconservative hubris had suddenly exposed. Whilst the
infamous German jurist drew stark conceptual distinctions, he remained sen-
sitive to the ultimate contingency of all norms and institutions, his stringent
realism attacking liberal pieties as it uncovered the perverse logic of state
sovereignty and the duplicity of humanitarianism. Crucially, Schmitt’s analysis
of political space appeared to offer a conceptual key to unlocking the strange
fusion of brute material force, ideological spin and technological virtuality
4 Introduction
that had come to characterize the reigning global disorder in the first decade
of the new millennium. The promise of enigmatic new paths out of a politi-
cally deadlocked present seemed to lie within, but Schmitt was an uncertain
and uncomfortable friend. His sharp insights grew muddy in the light of his
fatally compromised politics, and slipped through the fingers the harder one
tried to grasp them. Concepts that first appeared as incisive critical tools
became double-edged swords that conceded too much ground to opponents.
However, while he shifted shape and frequently disappointed, Schmitt raised
questions that were neither easily answered nor easily dismissed and that we
believe continue to demand our attention today.
As geographers whose work is significantly influenced by the traditions of
Left political philosophy and recent critical debates in ‘continental’ political
theory, we were confronted not only with the obvious difficulties of engaging
with a fascist thinker marked by controversial relations to Nazism, but also
with the notable absence in the existing academic literature of any compre-
hensive study of the role of spatial concepts and theories in Schmitt’s work.
Indeed, although there is a growing recognition of the crucial role that space
played in Schmitt’s thought, notably within Political Theory (Agamben, 1998;
Galli, 2010a; Mouffe, 2005a, 2005b; Toscano, 2008), International Relations
(Hooker, 2009; Odysseos and Petito, 2007) and increasingly in Geography
(Barnes and Minca, 2013; Elden, 2010; Legg, 2011; Meyer et al., 2012;
Minca, 2011a, 2011b; Minca and Rowan, 2014; Rowan, 2011), the scope of
his spatial thought and the importance of its position in his work is yet to
receive sustained attention in the discipline. Indeed, On Schmitt and Space is
the first English language monograph specifically devoted to studying
Schmitt’s thought from a geographic perspective. Until now the majority of
writings addressing the conceptualisation of space in Schmitt has focused on
specific aspects of his work (for example in Agamben’s and Mouffe’s readings),
periods of his production or specific texts – notably his 1950 book The Nomos
of the Earth (Schmitt, 2003a; see also Legg, 2011a; Odysseos and Petito,
2007), without attempting to provide an in-depth account of the role of space
in his oeuvre as a whole, and of its significance for geographical thought more
widely. On Schmitt and Space therefore aims to address what we perceive as a
substantial gap in the secondary literature, both as a whole and, particularly,
in geography, by providing a full investigation of the role of space in his
thought and locating it in relation to contemporary debates on the spatial
dimension of politics within human geography and related disciplines.
This project also has another equally important set of objectives. Given
that Schmitt is one of the most influential European political and legal thin-
kers of the twentieth century, we suggest that by examining the central role
spatial concepts and imaginaries play in his work the wider entanglements
between geography and politics in modern European thought can be engaged
from a fresh perspective. This is particularly true when charting Schmitt’s
relationship to Nazism and the spatial ideologies of the Third Reich.
Schmitt’s work during the Nazi years in fact provides a fascinating case study
 Introduction 5
for reflecting on the tensions inherent to Nazi spatial theory, an area of
emerging interest in a number of disciplines (Barnes and Minca, 2013;
Giaccaria and Minca, 2011a, 2011b, 2015a; Mazower, 2012; Nunan, 2011).
Furthermore, an examination of the broad influence of Schmitt’s spatial
thought across a number of historical and national contexts reveals the
importance of the ‘biopolitical’ in Schmitt’s work. By approaching the com-
plicated legacy his spatial thought has within contemporary political thought,
it is possible to highlight the important role played by the ‘question of life’ in
relation to his concept of the political, and arguably, the broader political
anthropologies that shaped his definition of ‘the people’ as sovereign subject.
Needless to say, the biopolitical dimension of Schmitt’s thought is also parti-
cularly important in examining the entanglements between his writing and
what Roberto Esposito (2010) has called the Nazi ‘biocracy’. This aspect of
Schmitt’s work, under-explored in relation to the spatial dimensions of his
thought in the recent Anglophone literature, has indeed been central to read-
ings of Schmitt offered by Giorgio Agamben (2005a) and a select group of
Italian political philosophers, including, among others, Carlo Galli (2010a,
2010b), Franco Volpi (2002) and Andrea Cavalletti (2005). We thus locate this
project at the cutting edge of attempts to map the historical and theoretical
intersections between Political Geography and Political Philosophy, and
introduce the ‘biopolitical’ as an important point of intersection, clearly
apparent in Schmitt’s work. By analysing the spatial aspects of Schmitt’s
intellectual trajectory, some of the crucial but still unexplored corners of his
work may be cast in a different light, revealing continuities and tensions that show
him not only to be a man of his time, but a presence still haunting the crisis of
contemporary political thought.

The structure of the book

The Italian Schmitt scholar, Carlo Galli has referred to himself as a ‘non-
Schmittian Schmittologist’ and this seems a fitting description for the scholarly
approach we adopt here (Galli quoted in Sitze, 2010: xi). It is an approach
that considers Schmitt’s ideas to be worthy of rigorous investigation but
maintains a critical distance from its object of study, aware of the unavoidable
difficulties of engaging with a thinker complicit with fascism. On the one hand,
we value the contextualization of Schmitt’s work in relation to the complex-
ities of the biographical and historical contexts from which it emerged and in
which it developed, and indeed the multiple historical and national contexts
in which it has been received. On the other hand, we are sensitive to the fact that
Schmitt’s work raises important questions that do not dissolve in historicization,
questions that still have the capacity to unsettle complacency and continue to
demand answers. Hence, although we recognize that Schmitt’s work is irre-
ducibly problematic, we nonetheless approach it in the understanding that, as
Müller argues, he identified problems that ‘transcend both his own answers
and his own times’, and which we would do well to face squarely (Müller,
6 Introduction
2003: 252 n14). Given the importance this aspect plays in framing our
approach to Schmitt and his thought we examine it in detail in Chapter 1.
One of the key aims of this book is to show how spatial concepts play a funda-
mental structural role right throughout Schmitt’s work even before they appear
as the explicit focus of his late writings. Accordingly, the volume is organized
chronologically in order to precisely track the diverse and shifting influence that
spatial categories had throughout his corpus. Methodologically, we focus largely on
Schmitt’s writings, rather than the secondary literature, in order to let Schmitt
speak as far as possible. In trying to achieve this, we deliberately introduce the
main academic and political debates around Schmitt’s work in the two opening
chapters: first, by discussing the relationship between what Balakrishnan refers to
as ‘the textual and biographical planes’ in Schmitt, and highlighting how the
intersections between these two ‘planes’ are particularly difficult to unravel in
his case (Balakrishnan, 2000: 3). Second, we deliberately reflect on the tra-
jectories of the recent interest in Schmitt’s work in English speaking acade-
mia, since it is precisely via these interdisciplinary debates that the relation
between his understanding of the political and the spatial has clearly emerged
as an area of importance.
The remainder of the book largely engages directly with Schmitt’s writings,
which we follow in relation to the shifting historical and political context of
their development, whilst showing that ‘the spatial’ lay at the core of his work
in all periods, and crucially at the centre of his conceptualization of the poli-
tical. Throughout we do so by making reference to the English translations of
Schmitt’s work, by now covering almost his entire oeuvre. We are fully aware
that the choice of working on the translations may be seen as questionable by
some due to what may be missed at the level of conceptual clarity in trans-
lated works and the additional detail afforded by those unavailable. However,
as we argue at various points in the book, the ‘politics of translation’, espe-
cially into English, has been a decisive element in the ways in which Schmitt’s
work has been received into international debates over recent decades. Indeed,
we see this choice as consistent with the book’s overall objectives, including
the attempt to better understand the modalities by which Schmitt’s ideas tra-
velled internationally, generating an interdisciplinary debate on ‘the political’
that would not have had the same scope or nature were it not for a steady
flow of translations into English. We not only claim that these very debates
have been determined by the overall ‘geopolitics of translation’ that has con-
cerned the work of this intellectual figure, like that of many other writers, but
that the strategic ‘forgettings’ of some parts of Schmitt’s thought in con-
temporary discussions, and some equally strategic ‘positionings’ between
advocates and critics, have influenced and been influenced by the trajectory
and present traction of Schmitt’s thinking in Anglophone debate. On Schmitt and
Space was not conceived with the intention of providing a new, original or
somewhat more ‘true’ genealogy of Schmitt in the context of German history
or his reception in Germany; this work has already been done, at least in part,
by many other scholars better equipped to do so than the authors of the
 Introduction 7
current volume. Rather, what we deliberately set out to focus upon here are
the ways in which the spatial dimensions of Schmitt’s work have been incor-
porated into contemporary debates, according to selective modalities, cru-
cially shaped by the politics of translation and highlight those elements
overlooked as a conceptual corrective.
We also suggest that it is only by examining the role of spatial concepts in
Schmitt’s work that their uses and limits for contemporary political thought
can be squarely assessed. Accordingly, while presenting the development of his
political thought chronologically, we focus on the ways it was interwoven with
the parallel development of his spatial thought, presenting a series of original
arguments regarding his work. First, we show how the influential conceptions of
the political and the sovereign exception Schmitt developed in his early work
were fundamentally tied to a conception of order grounded in the division of space.
Second, we argue that a biopolitical dimension emerges in Schmitt’s Nazi writings,
that is in fact grounded in the same political anthropology underpinning his
earlier work, and in particular his conception of ‘the people’ as the subject of
sovereign power. The biopolitical is discussed in this book not only as a con-
stitutive element of Schmitt’s spatial thought, but also as an interpretative tool to
critically connect the controversial Nazi period to the rest of his oeuvre,
something that has long preoccupied Schmitt scholars. Third, we argue that
his biopolitical understanding of ‘the people’ and his attempt to develop a
political form beyond the state converged in his theory of a Großraum order,
developed to theorize the Nazi expansion into Eastern Europe as laying the
basis for a new form of post-state international order. Indeed, we provide the
most detailed analysis of the spatial dimension of Schmitt’s Großraum work
to date in English. Fourth, we contextualize Schmitt’s now much discussed
post-war work on the nomos (or spatial order) of the earth and the changing
nature of the relationship between space and warfare in relation to the often
overlooked ‘spatial history’ of modernity that frames his late thought.
The structure of the book is therefore organized accordingly. In Chapter 1
we present a biographical overview of Schmitt’s life and work in order to
contextualize Schmitt-as-a-spatial-thinker, something particularly relevant in
light of his controversial biography. We also discuss some of the key issues
that emerge when engaging a thinker as politically compromised as Schmitt,
and in particular his relationship to the Nazi state and to anti-Semitism.
Chapter 2 critically reviews what has been considered by many to be a
‘renaissance’ of Schmitt’s work in Anglophone academia over the past two
decades. After illustrating the deeper motives for the renewed interest in his
work in this context, we reflect on the specific trajectories that aspects of his
thought have taken in penetrating English-speaking debates on ‘the political’
and international order, while considering the broader historical framework in
which this reception has taken shape, a period notably shaped by the end of
the Cold War and the ‘war of terror’.
In Chapter 3, we start our journey through his writing, highlighting the
often overlooked structural foundation provided by spatial concepts in his
8 Introduction
early work from the Weimar period, when his thought was fundamentally
orientated towards addressing the crisis of the Weimar state. Here we argue that
Schmitt identified ‘spatial division’ as the means by which political pluralism
could be reconciled with state order. Hence, we claim that in his early work
Schmitt developed a concept of political order fundamentally grounded in the
spatialization of the political, or rather that the antagonistic difference he
understood to define the political realm was necessarily grounded in a foundational
division of space. Chapter 4 contextualizes Schmitt’s early attempts to theorize the
spatial foundations of order within the crisis of the state in the twentieth
century, and particularly that of the Weimar Republic. We pay particular
attention to how Schmitt understood the thought and the practice of liberal-
ism to be undermining the spatial foundations of state order by dissolving the
relationship between space and the political, and on the origins of his search
for a new political form to replace the historic institution of the modern state.
In Chapter 5 we turn to probe Schmitt’s decision to join the Nazi Party in
1933 and the ways in which he attempted to theorize and legitimate the new regime.
Here we engage with an analysis of the biopolitical dimension of Schmitt’s thought
as the category of ‘the people’, already occupying an important place in his ear-
lier thought, undergoes a profound conceptual mutation. The relationship
between these biopolitical stakes of Schmitt’s Nazi writings and the related geo-
political implications are drawn out in Chapter 6, where we closely examine
his theory of Großraum order. Although his Großraum theory was developed to
directly legitimize Nazi expansionist policy in Eastern Europe, it also marked a
shift toward an explicit theorization of the spatial basis of international order
that would dominate his post-war work and significantly influence his reception
in Anglophone academia in recent years.
Chapter 7 maps the development of Schmitt’s largely under-explored spa-
tial history of modernity in relation to his understanding of the geo-elemental
forces of land and sea, and the eschatological philosophy of history that drove
his late work. Land and Sea is a key but largely overlooked text where these
aspects of Schmitt’s work find their clearest expression, but it is also the text
in which the first signs of the arcane millenarian geographies that mark his
later thought start to emerge. Chapter 8 examines The Nomos of the Earth,
Schmitt’s most mature work of spatial theory and the focus of much recent
critical attention. This was an ambitious book that contained both an explicit
theory of the spatial foundations of legal order and a historical account of the
rise and fall of the first global nomos centred upon the European appropria-
tion of colonial lands in the New World and the world’s oceans. Here Schmitt
locates the crisis of the twentieth century state, which had been at the core of
his early work, against the background of a crisis of this Eurocentric inter-
national law, by examining the causes and symptoms of spatial disorder
before suggesting different models for the future global spatial order. We also
discuss here the partisan fighter, an important figure in Schmitt’s final years
that represents his last desperate attempt to conjure up a new spatial foun-
dation to quell the escalating violence of the political crisis defining the
 Introduction 9
twentieth century. In this important final chapter we thus show how Schmitt’s
concepts were increasingly at odds with the emerging realities of a fast glo-
balizing world, his hope of a new nomos of the earth having been washed
away in a tide of historical change.
The concluding chapter returns to the main claims made in this introduction,
reflecting on the key questions that animate On Schmitt and Space. We do so by
identifying some of the limitations of Schmitt’s spatial thought for addressing
contemporary questions concerning the relationship between space and politics,
but also the opportunities for further engagement that we hope our work might
facilitate. The central argument is that Schmitt’s work has an essential spatial
dimension that appears throughout his entire opus, albeit in different forms,
and that only by taking its presence into consideration might the implications
of this controversial but extremely influential body of work for contemporary
spatial thought be fully grasped. Likewise, we argue that his core concepts, so
frequently cited in recent years in a number of disciplines, need to be understood
in relation to the arc of Schmitt’s spatial thought if they are to be engaged
effectively. Further, we claim that ‘the biopolitical’ is a key aspect of Schmitt’s
spatial thought, even if it only becomes explicit in his ‘Nazi writings’. Indeed,
we suggest that getting a firmer grasp of the spatial dimension of these ideas
is crucial to understanding the relevance of Schmitt’s work to concerns
around sovereign exceptionalism, humanitarian intervention and the nature
of political concerns that have forcefully re-emerged as burning political con-
cerns in recent years. Only by facing these challenges might we be able to
fully evaluate the impact of Schmitt’s recent Anglophone ‘renaissance’ and
assess how it may be of use in the understanding of ‘the political’, and its
relationship to space in the context of a post-political present.

Notes
1 See Introduction and Chapter 5 of Gross’ Carl Schmitt and the Jews (2007), and the
detailed probing of Schmitt’s self-mythologizing in the entirety of Müller’s A Dan-
gerous Mind (2003).
2 The irony being that Schmitt’s attempt to show himself as a victim of world-historical
circumstance swept up in events over which he exerted no control displayed pre-
cisely the ‘banality’ of his evil, to use Hannah Arendt’s widely cited phrase. Wil-
liam Scheuerman gives a rather convincing alternative reading of Schmitt’s use of
the Cereno allegory. He argues that the identification of the slaves is steeped in
ambiguity and that it can just as easily be a stand-in for Schmitt’s new ‘piratical’
masters, the Americans. Indeed, Schmitt believed the United States to be a dis-
tasteful racial ‘melting pot’ much like the ship in Melville’s story. This would of
course mean that Schmitt was casting himself as a victim, not just of the Nazis,
but also, and indeed more so, of Germany’s new post-war American masters. See
Scheuerman, 1999: 175–181.
3 Denazification was a series of juridical processes introduced by the Allies in the
years after the war to ensure that the German government, institutions, press, culture
were rid of Nazi influence. Many people in Berlin’s American Zone, where Schmitt
resided, were required to fill out a background check to assess their culpability for
Nazi crimes and graded accordingly for the purposes of re-education.
1 Writing Carl Schmitt

Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d’hommes.

(The spiritual combat is as ruthless as the battle of men)
Carl Schmitt, 1937

Any attempt to approach Schmitt’s thought faces complex hermeneutical

challenges. As Gopal Balakrishnan argues, Schmitt’s work ‘presents a set of
highly specific and unusual problems’ concerning the ‘relationship between
the textual and biographical planes’ of his career (2000: 3). Indeed, this was a
view Schmitt himself supported, noting the difficulty of distinguishing the
political from the merely theoretical, and famously claiming that, ‘all political
concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a
specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation’ (2007b: 30). These
problems are of course most pressing in Schmitt’s case due to his involvement
with the Nazis and anti-Semitism. In addition, Schmitt’s body of work is
extensive and notoriously resistant to systematic reconstruction (see Galli,
2010a; Sitze, 2010: xxvi–xxix). Composed across sixty years, it consists mostly
of short polemical texts targeting the topical political issues of the day. Fur-
ther, it does not follow a neat path of linear development that can be easily
traced chronologically, but is rather beset with terminological slippage and
shifts in conceptual framework. These hermeneutic obstacles are exacerbated
by the fact that during the post-war period Schmitt often revisited his earlier
work from the 1920s and 1930s, reinterpreting and producing commentary on
his own corpus (Schmitt, 2007b, 2008c) and by the persistent interpretative
dissensus in the secondary literature (see, for example, Balakrishnan, 2011;
Teschke, 2011a).
In the pages that follow we examine some of the troubling issues that must
be navigated in traversing the difficult terrain between the ‘textual and the
biographical planes’ of Schmitt’s work. In particular, we discuss the two areas
of consistent contention in debates around his work: his relationship to the
Nazi state and the role of anti-Semitism in his thought. However, before
doing so we start by presenting a brief biographical overview in order to
provide context for our analysis of Schmitt-as-a-spatial-thinker, something all
the more necessary considering the controversies surrounding his life and
 Writing Carl Schmitt 11
work. However, rather than offer an exhaustive or original account of
Schmitt’s life and intellectual lineage, work already done comprehensively by
other scholars, we simply aim to offer here sufficient biographical and intel-
lectual background within which to frame subsequent chapters. For the bio-
graphical details we are particularly indebted to Gopal Balakrishnan’s The
Enemy (2000) and Jan-Werner Müller’s A Dangerous Mind (2003), two works
of enormous scholarly rigour and narrative vigour. Balakrishnan’s ‘intellectual
portrait’ weaves a seamless account of the development of Schmitt’s thought
in relation to his personal history from his early years until 1950, yet con-
siders what came after of less intellectual interest, or rather ‘footnotes to ear-
lier works’ (2000: 260). Müller’s study, by contrast, seeks to dredge Schmitt’s
influence on post-war European thought and hence focuses on the area that
Balakrishnan’s study leaves out. Although this book lacks something of the
biographical detail present in Balakrishnan’s, Müller excels at offering an
extraordinarily rich inventory of Schmitt’s shadowy presence in the recesses of
the debates shaping post-war European thought. The two volumes thus pro-
vide good companion pieces, one passing the baton of analysis to the other
around the pivot of the 1940s. We have also relied significantly on Raphael
Gross’ immensely rich study Carl Schmitt and the Jews (2007), which not only
provides a superbly detailed analysis of Schmitt’s anti-Semitism, but also a
finely researched account of the interwoven vectors of his life and work.1

An intellectual adventurer
‘[A]n obscure young man of modest origins’ was how Schmitt described
himself in later life and indeed his later infamy belied humble beginnings (in
Müller, 2003: 19). He was born in 1888 in the provincial town of Plettenberg,
the same year the young Wilhelm II ascended the throne, to a family on the
lowest levels of the petty bourgeoisie. Plettenberg, located in the Sauerland
region, was at that time an evangelical Protestant area marginalized within
the largely Roman Catholic Rhineland, a region itself on the margins of a
German Empire dominated by the Protestant state of Prussia. Schmitt’s
family background was professional but modest – his father worked at a local
railway station – and intensely Catholic. The family’s Catholic identity may
have been strengthened by their double alienation from the largely Protestant
Sauerland and the official Prussian Protestantism of the German Empire, and
indeed some of Schmitt’s relatives were linked to the Catholic Centre Party.
Schmitt was born some years after the Kulturkampf, the battle between Bis-
marck and the Catholic Church that dominated the 1870s, but it cast a long
shadow across relations between the Rhineland and Prussia, and the Empire and
its Catholic population. The legacy of the Kulturkampf was a self-consciously
politicized Catholicism and a sense of provincial distance from the imperial
metropole of Berlin, something that had a profound effect on the young
Schmitt. He later recounted that during his early years of university education
in Berlin he felt a deep sense of alienation in the capital, as if ‘standing wholly
12 Writing Carl Schmitt
in the dark … [looking] from the darkness into a brightly lit room’ (in Müller,
2003: 18). This early sense of alienation from Berlin and its elites was never to
wholly leave Schmitt, and appears to have fuelled his desire to be close to the
political establishment and his thirst for ‘power over history’ (ibid.: 12).2 It
also allowed him a cold detachment from the pieties of Wilhelmine Kultur
and the orthodoxies of Prussian liberalism, defining those who wished to turn
the clock back to the regime of late nineteenth century Germany as hopelessly
romantic reactionaries, unable to think within the new categories of twentieth
century politics.
The conservative American commentator Paul Gottfried (1990) has sug-
gested that Schmitt’s experience of growing up in a marginalized Catholic
Rhineland may have instilled in him the conviction that the state should stand
firmly above civil society in order to neutralize conflicts. Whilst Müller argues
that this separation has ‘since Hegel, in one way or another … been a kind of
theoretical axis on which much German political thought has turned’,
Schmitt’s theoretical commitment to an understanding of the state as trans-
cendent to civil society was perhaps shaped by his early experience within a
region and a community on the fringes of an empire itself cut of partisan
cloth (Müller, 2003: 5).3 This may seem at odds with Schmitt’s frequent
recourse to Roman Catholic and Christian categories in his theoretical work,
but he always stood at a remove from the tradition of ‘political Catholicism’
in Germany and the Catholic Centre Party. This gap widened after Schmitt’s
failed attempts to get his first marriage to a woman who had claimed to be a
Serbian aristocrat annulled. After divorcing her in 1924 and later remarrying,
he was excommunicated. Schmitt had argued in his 1923 book Roman Cath-
olicism and Political Form that the Medieval Catholic Church could serve an
ailing Weimar state with a model of a higher power standing above a complex
of social oppositions. However, he was not in favour of faith-based political
parties such as the Catholic Centre Party asserting religious authority as a
political force in Germany or beyond. The state was, for Schmitt, to stand
above the conflicts generated by a pluralist society and its party political
representatives, rather than to take sides within those conflicts. The politics of
modern European statehood, in his view, had been shaped by an irreversible
secularization and any attempt to politicize religion would only serve to
undermine the ability of the state to stand above the increasingly conflict-
ridden civil society and risk dragging state institutions into a partisan fray, as
had been the case in the Kulturkampf.4
Schmitt was not especially concerned with political affairs during the
swansong of the Empire, and even the First World War did not seem to gal-
vanize his political feelings the way it did for many young Germans of his
generation. Rather, he spent the war in Munich living the life of a semi-
bohemian romantic adventurer in the city’s coffee houses, moving amongst
the intellectual literati, penning Dadaist musings under a pseudonym and
writing appraisals of the minor expressionist poet Theodor Däubler, whilst
serving in the Bavarian Ministry of War as a propaganda censor. During this
 Writing Carl Schmitt 13
period he seemed largely indifferent to politics and was more concerned with
exercising profound distaste for the official Kultur of the Wilhelmine Reich,
openly satirizing the heroes of the bourgeoisie such as Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thomas Mann and Walter Rathenau, while flirting with the anti-war senti-
ments circulating the cafés he frequented, apparently immune to the ultra-
patriotism sweeping the country. As Balakrishnan has argued in his excellent
reconstruction of Schmitt’s early life and work, he remained curiously aloof
from any strong sense of German nationalism during the war, and initially
unmoved by the collapse of the German Empire into a state of civil war in
the wake of the country’s defeat.
But if his politicization came late, it was all the more sharp in its appear-
ance. In 1919 Schmitt published his first major book, Political Romanticism, a
work of intellectual history indebted to Max Weber, whose lectures Schmitt
was attending in Munich at the time. Political Romanticism was a cultural
critique of bourgeois civilization and particularly of the failure of German con-
servatives to grapple with the wreckage wrought on the political landscape by the
First World War. In his essay, Schmitt mercilessly attacked romanticism –
which he understood to dominate both liberal and conservative political
thought in Germany – for approaching politics through the prism of a ‘cult of
self ’, leaving political thought to the shifting whimsy of subjective bourgeois
occasionalism. It was in a sense a public disavowal of his now former semi-
bohemian existence, but also a polemical rejection of much of what typified
German, and especially Catholic, conservatism in the early years of the
twentieth century: a romantic sense of German nationalism often emphasized
through the idea of a high German Kultur standing above and apart from
Europe, and the celebration of the restless, impressionable and often irrational
will of the individual; all of which Schmitt took as an excuse for deferral of
decisive action in an ‘endless conversation’ (Balakrishnan, 2000: 22).
This abrupt political awakening emerged from his shock at the civil war
that had broken out in Munich the same year. Anarchists had declared a
Council Republic in April 1919 and communist revolutionaries had broken
into Schmitt’s office at the Bavarian Ministry of War, shooting a fellow officer.
This sudden immersion in the disintegration of the old order brought home to
Schmitt not only how radically destabilized the political grounds had become,
but how unfit the conceptual framework of romantic nationalism was to deal
with the advent of mass politics, something which he later argued had vio-
lently exploded in Europe after 1848, but only surfaced in Germany in the
wake of the First World War. Schmitt’s diaries of the time indicate great
anxiety for what he viewed as the wreckage of the old world and for what
might arise from it.5 As he sought to exorcize the remnants of his quasi-
bohemian youth and reckon with the challenges that the changed realities of
the post-war world posed to political thought, he tacked towards the state,
against the revolutionary masses and lurched to the Right.
In the early years of the Weimar Republic, Schmitt seemed to opt for a
path of caution that at once accepted the revolutionary upheaval through
14 Writing Carl Schmitt
which the new Republic was born and attempted to steer the state down a
conservative path, by strengthening its executive arm. He tried to recognize
that it was an age of mass politics in which a revolutionary people were the
agents of an inescapable new reality and that the functioning of the state had
to be reconciled with this in order to guarantee stability. The result was that
Schmitt both defended the new Republic, and began to theorize ways in
which the state might contain the plurality of social and political forces that
threatened to undermine it. He would spend the Weimar years embroiled in
various attempts, in the lecture hall, the courtroom and Berlin’s conservative
salons to assert state power over a volcanic political climate and to maintain the
separation between a civil society driven by fractures and a state struggling to
maintain its grip on order.
Schmitt had written one of his two academic theses on the question of
indeterminacy in jurisprudence, a concern that was soon to lie not only at the
heart of his intellectual pursuit but also of the political fate of the Weimar
Republic. While he held ambitions early on for both his thought and his
career, it was not until the ferment of the Weimar years provided the oppor-
tunity that he moved into the halls of power. Initially Schmitt’s career was
slow to build momentum and in 1921, the same year he published The Dic-
tator, his history of the role of dictatorship in European political and legal
thought, he received his first academic post in the University of Greifswald, a
small provincial town on the Baltic Sea. Although Schmitt found the isolation of
Greifswald difficult, he produced two important books there, Roman
Catholicism and Political Form and Political Theology (both published in
1922), which would have a significant impact on both his reputation and the
development of his thought. As soon as the opportunity arose, he escaped this
intellectual quarantine and took a teaching post in the sleepy but more con-
genial environs of the largely Catholic Bonn, where he was to stay until 1928.
During the seven years in Bonn, Schmitt was remarkably prolific, writing
important works of legal and political thought (most notably The Crisis of
Parliamentary Democracy,6 The Concept of the Political and Constitutional
Theory, published in 1923, 1927 and 1928 respectively) and issuing a steady
stream of interventionist articles commenting on topical affairs. These appeared
in a variety of publications and ranged across a broad set of themes, from
intellectual histories of modern political thought and treatises on the anti-
nomies of liberalism, to fiery critiques of the new international order emer-
ging from the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. These works were
shaped both by the political instability and the sense of historical flux that
characterized the early Weimar period and by Schmitt’s attempt to feel his
way around the question of how to secure order in these conditions, drawing
on an erudite and wide-ranging engagement with European political thought,
both ancient and modern, Latinate, German and Anglophone.
During this period, Schmitt was at once trying ideas out, testing some
against the call of the moment and saving others in a growing armoury of
concepts for later use, as much defining his own method of conceptual
 Writing Carl Schmitt 15
development as trying to negotiate the turbulent politics of the Weimar
Republic. He deployed a magpie technique, appropriating concepts from across
a wide, and often contradictory, range of sources, including nineteenth century
French and Spanish Catholic counter-revolutionaries, Max Weber’s sociology,
and thinkers of the radical Left such as György Lukács and Georges Sorel.
Casting around for models of political order, he looked not only to the med-
ieval Catholic Church and the absolutist princes of the seventeenth century,
but also to Mussolini’s Fascism, which he always held in the highest regard,
and even, begrudgingly, to the Soviet Union. The shadow of the revolutionary
state to the east was more admirable to Schmitt than the invisible influence
the United States exercised through the League of Nations and the world
markets. His reading in a number of major European languages (German,
French, Spanish, Italian and English), as well as the classical languages,
opened him to both the latest theoretical debates and historical discussions
from which many of his contemporaries in Germany were shut out. This often
positioned him at the cutting edge of theoretical developments, and qualified
him to be the first to offer classes in the newly founded discipline of Political
Science at the University of Bonn.
Schmitt’s position as a scholar at the forefront of political thought was
soon consolidated, and he emerged as a leading figure in the intensely poli-
tical and public debates around the Weimar Constitution. Although by the
early 1920s the Weimar Republic had solidified into a more stable form of
institutional order, Germany was still fraught with tensions, the Constitution’s
many areas of ambiguity becoming the focus of serious political contestation.
This thrust Schmitt into public attention as both a potent advocate of a
strong state executive and a virulent critic of the division of powers inherited
from the nineteenth century’s liberal Reichstaat. Schmitt’s argument, that this
division of powers threatened to allow the state’s dissolution, found support
amongst many in the conservative elite. The newly formed state was caught in
the midst of increasingly partisan constituencies vying for power, an already
fragile corporatist compromise between labour and industry being severely
tested by the economic fallout of Germany’s reparations under the terms of
the Versailles Treaty, and the masses that remained politically restive.
Schmitt’s call to strengthen the hand of the executive to ensure order was,
therefore, by no means a fringe view confined to the extremities of the Right.
Although Schmitt was staking a position firmly on the Right and making
enemies on the Left, he was still defending the Weimar Republic, albeit trying
to fashion it into a more authoritarian form to neutralize the influence of
what he considered an outmoded and debilitating liberalism.
By the spring of 1928, when he arrived in Berlin to take up a professorship
at Berlin’s Handelshochschule (School of Business Administration), the battle
lines between Schmitt and the Constitution’s liberal defenders were clearly
drawn. The Handelshochschule was a newly established and less prestigious
institution than the University of Bonn and it is likely that Schmitt’s move
was part of a concerted effort to position himself closer to political influence.
16 Writing Carl Schmitt
Despite his earlier reticence regarding the capital, Schmitt was glad to return
to Berlin’s political and intellectual mêlée and settled easily into the more
metropolitan milieu it offered to an ambitious young professor. Although he
envied the prestige and proximity to power of his counterparts in the Uni-
versity of Berlin, Schmitt began to develop a wide set of contacts within Ber-
lin’s elite society. Even if he remained something of an outsider, he began to
cultivate relationships with business leaders, the city’s cultural salons and the
governing elite. His fashionable Serbian second wife, Duška Todorović,
ensured that their home played host to a mix of Berlin’s leading political and
cultural figures, giving him ample opportunity to impress guests with his
learning and bind himself closer to power.
Even before the move to Berlin, Schmitt had been involved with the pro-
Republic Hochschule für Politik, an academic institution outside the estab-
lished university system, where he first delivered the lectures in 1927 that
would become The Concept of the Political. Here Schmitt mixed with thinkers
of liberal and even Marxist persuasion and built contacts that allowed him to
gain membership in 1928 of the German Sociological Association. Balak-
rishnan speculates that Schmitt may have come across the early work of the
Frankfurt School here, such as that by his former pupil at Bonn, Otto
Kirchheimer. On his move to Berlin, Schmitt’s acquaintance with Johannes
Popitz, the permanent state secretary of the Reich Finance Ministry, perpe-
tuated a shift to more right-leaning circles. He first encountered Popitz
through the Handelshochschule and they soon became close friends. Popitz was
a powerful figure in the Prussian government close to the conservative circles,
and he acted as a gateway for Schmitt to enter into the ‘brightly lit room’ of
Berlin’s elite society, where he soon began to attend meetings of the exclusive,
conservative Gentleman’s Club, eventually publishing in its house journal
Ring, a key forum for the so-called ‘conservative revolution’. The association
with Popitz brought Schmitt simultaneously closer to the intellectual circuitry
of the German far Right and the halls of government power. This furnished
him with the opportunity to shape the political hermeneutics of the Con-
stitution not only amongst legal scholars but also amongst those holding and
angling for state power.
Schmitt’s political involvement in Weimar had two high, or rather, low
points that accompanied the renewed state of crisis the young Republic found
itself in due to the havoc wreaked by the Great Depression. Schmitt was well
known for his call to strengthen Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which
granted the President wide executive power to intervene in a state of emergency.
Against legal positivists such as Hans Kelsen, he argued that the exertion of
presidential power was required to act as a guardian of the Constitution in an
unstable political situation that threatened to sink into civil war. The weakness
Schmitt perceived in the Constitution created the opportunity for partisan
forces to test the coherence of the state, but this structural tendency was
beginning to bear fruit as the nascent Republic was torn between the Nazis
and Communists, two revolutionary parties set against the Constitution,
 Writing Carl Schmitt 17
backed by substantial paramilitary forces and fuelled by deeply antagonistic
ideologies. The Weimar state was already losing its monopoly on violence
and, according to Schmitt, if the President could not stabilize the situation, he
risked losing even his capacity to decide in case of emergency. It was around
the role of presidential power within the Constitution, and particularly by the
use of Article 48, that Schmitt directly entered politics as the Weimar
Republic staggered through its final death throes.
The circle of arch-conservatives around President Hindenburg were well aware
of Schmitt’s work, and Hindenburg’s Chief of Staff, Otto Meissner, had
already drawn on his writings on Article 48 to quash a Reichstag bill
attempting to limit the emergency powers of the newly elected General in the
early days of his Presidency in 1926. Schmitt was brought into the inner
sanctum of Reich power in order to help provide legal defence of presidential
power in a conflict between the governments of the Left-leaning Federal State
of Prussia and the Reich government, which had placed Prussia under martial
law in July 1932. The financial deadlock of the Social Democrat-dominated
Prussian government had provided an opportunity for the Reich’s executive to
exert its prerogatives, the President evoking the emergence powers vested in
him under Article 48 to appoint a commissar in place of the elected govern-
ment and to impose fiscal readjustment. Prussia sought an injunction against
commissarial rule and the case went to the Constitutional Court in Leipzig.
Schmitt was chosen to lead the defense team for the Reich government in the
October trial, providing him with the chance to establish himself as Ger-
many’s premier scholar of constitutional law. Schmitt considered the trial a
failure, as the Leipzig Reich Court did not unambiguously recognize the
power of the Reich government over that of Prussia, ruling that each was in
the wrong yet affirming their rights with regard to the other. Those around
the President, notably the arch-fixer General Kurt von Schleicher, the Reich-
swehr Minister, were nonetheless impressed with Schmitt, and continued to
hold him in close council. Schleicher’s strategy, inspired in part by Schmitt,
was to have the existing Chancellor, Franz von Papen, expelled and Hinden-
burg appoint him. In office, Schleicher sought to radically reshape the Weimar
Republic along lines that solidified a broad-based populism under the pre-
sidency. His plan, the so-called Querverbindung, which Schmitt supported
during the final grasp of the Weimar Republic, was to stabilize the country
around presidential rule, social reform and public works, a programme aimed
to hold Socialist and Nazis at bay. However, Schleicher’s reformist state was
unable to resist the tide of events, lasting only a matter of months, and wit-
nessing a rapid strengthening of the National Socialists among the electorate.
As a result, by 30 January 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor, signalling
the end of Weimar. The proximity to power Schmitt had briefly acquired
under Papen and Schleicher quickly evaporated and he warily looked on,
from the safe distance of a new professorship in Cologne, as the National
Socialist Party concentrated state power in its hands.
18 Writing Carl Schmitt
Although initially reluctant to support the new Nazi government, Schmitt
was soon convinced that it was decisive enough to unite and lead a shattered
Germany, eventually throwing his academic and intellectual reputation
behind the new regime by joining the Party on 1 May. As a reflection of this,
he was appointed to a number of prestigious posts within the Nazi legal
establishment, such as President of the Union of National-Socialist Jurists,
and of Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Berlin. His deeper
motivations for joining the Party and accepting these institutional roles are
still debated today among Schmitt’s scholars, a matter on which we return in
Chapter 5. For now, it may suffice to say that, while from the very beginning
he was accused of opportunism by some Nazi rivals and anti-Fascist critics
alike, his own interpretation of the ‘Nazi choice’ remains highly controversial,
especially given that he refused to undergo denazification, and never pub-
licly disavowed his deep anti-Semitism or showed any remorse for having
contributed to such a genocidal regime.
Arguably, Schmitt saw Hitler as a possible solution to the crisis of the
Weimar Republic and Nazi rule as a viable path to realizing the ‘qualitative
total state’ he had previously theorized as a remedy to the problems created
by the liberal state, even as the regime was de facto dismantling many fun-
damental aspects of constitutional law that he had long presented as key to
the functioning of a viable state. When interrogated at Nuremburg after the
war, Schmitt claimed that he had initially believed he might influence the
regime, but soon realized that this was not the case. Of course, Schmitt used
this argument to distance himself from National Socialism, and particularly
to defend himself against the charge that his Großraum theory had actually
influenced Hitler’s policy of imperial expansion in Eastern Europe. However,
although his Nazi era writings marked a departure from his previous work,
they were in many respects characterized by strong continuities. In addition,
the claim that his commitment to the Nazi state can be identified simply with
a first flush of misguided fervour belies the fact that his attempts to theorize
Nazi rule went through a number of phases leading right up to 1941 and the
midst of war. It is instructive here to detail the nature of his complicity with
the regime.
After joining the Party, Schmitt’s support was vigorous and public. In
March 1933, at a conference in Weimar, he declared the Enabling Act pro-
mulgated by Hitler to have rendered the Weimar Constitution fundamentally
meaningless and to have laid the foundations for an entirely new state form.
In October, Schmitt published State, Movement, People, an ideological text in
which he strained to provide a juridical theory to describe and legitimate the
new Third Reich, while announcing that from the day in which Hitler was
elected Chancellor all traditions of liberal constitutionalism were surpassed
(2001: 35). Here he celebrated the emergence of a radically new state, based
upon the merging of three elements: the apparatus of the State; the collective
will of a unified People; and the ‘Movement’ (embodied by the Nazi Party
and the Führer). This entailed important conceptual changes from his
 Writing Carl Schmitt 19
previous work on the state: in particular, the notion of the ‘people’ took on a
new meaning, echoing the racial discourses typical of Nazi political jargon,
and marking a move towards a biological interpretation of the political,
something to which we return extensively in Chapter 5. The ‘movement’ was
thus to be conceived as immanent to the Volk, that is, to a racialized people.
The coincidence of ‘species’ between the Volk and the Führer fundamentally
positioned the Nazi Party and the Führer to lead on their behalf.
This radical move away from the tradition of German constitutionalism
was confirmed by his 1934 book On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, a
more academic work recalling some of the key issues of the Weimar writings,
but when taken together with State, Movement, People it represented
Schmitt’s deliberate attempt to theorize the changed nature of state politics
under National Socialist rule. Crucial here is the focus on the concept of
‘concrete’: while the ‘concrete’ in previous works had been associated with the
situational nature of politics, here it was given a broader meaning as the
foundational ground for any form of institutional order. ‘Concrete order’
would in fact become a key term in Schmitt’s spatial thought from the late
1930s onwards, including his theorization of the spatial basis of juridical
order that he would develop in books like Land and Sea (1942) and The
Nomos of the Earth (1950), and marked a turning point in his new attempt to
identify sources of political legitimacy beyond the state form.
During these early years of Nazi rule Schmitt tried to offer legitimacy for
the rule of law in line with whatever the Party saw fit. For instance, in his
infamous article ‘The Führer Protects the Law’, written in August 1934, he
recognized the Führer to have a unique legal task, since he was the carrier of
the political will of the National Socialist Party and the German Volk.
Schmitt even went as far as publicly defending the events of the ‘Night of the
Long Knives’ (30 June 1934), Hitler’s murderous extra-judicial purge of his
opponents in Rohmer’s SA,7 when at least eighty-five people, including
former Chancellor and Schmitt’s advisee General Kurt von Schleicher, were
brutally murdered. ‘The Führer Protects the Law’ is considered by many as
the lowest point in Schmitt’s attempt to legitimate the development of the
Nazi’s lawless regime of exception.
However, by the end of 1936 the consolidation of Nazi power made any
liminal legitimacy gleaned from Schmitt’s intellectual and academic con-
tribution increasingly redundant, and his academic rivals, together with those
in the Party who expressed doubts about his ideological commitment, prepared
the conditions for his exclusion from power. The SS magazine Das Schwarzes
Korps launched a campaign against him, accusing Schmitt of being a Catho-
lic thinker more concerned with the fate of the state than that of the Party
and the National Socialist Movement. The campaign forced Schmitt to with-
draw from all his official positions, with the exception of his professorship at
the University of Berlin, kept thanks to the support of prominent Nazi figures
like Hans Frank, the chief Nazi jurist and, most importantly, Herman
Göring. This sudden marginalization from the Nazi mainstream led Schmitt
20 Writing Carl Schmitt
to stop speculating on the constitutional nature of the Nazi state, and to turn to
less controversial issues: the history of the modern state and international law.
The most immediate result of this turn away from the constitutional affairs
of the Nazi state, if such a thing can be said to exist, was The Leviathan in the
State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (hereafter The Leviathan), an attempt to
identify the historical roots of the crisis of the modern European state already
denounced in some of his key Weimar writings (Schmitt, 2008b) (we return to
this text later in the book). Schmitt later claimed that this short book on his
professed intellectual hero represented an implicit critique of the Nazi state, and
its preface contained hints of censoring fears and unspoken threats. However,
the virulent anti-Semitism that permeated its argument makes this claim rather
untenable. Nonetheless, the book did mark a fundamental departure from the
state as the central category of Schmitt’s political thought and, in that sense,
an implicit deflection from his previous attempts to theorize National Socialism.
Schmitt’s first explicit effort to identify a new political form beyond the
state came with the concept of Großraum. Großraum was to become not only
one of the key concepts in Schmitt’s spatial thought, marking his shift to
questions of international law and global spatial order, but also a very con-
troversial one, given its explicit relation to, and presumed influence upon,
Nazi foreign policy. The term was first presented in his ‘The Großraum Order
of International Law with a Ban on Intervention for Spatially Foreign
Powers: A Contribution to the Concept of Reich in International Law’
(hereafter ‘The Großraum Order’), originally delivered as a lecture to a con-
ference of National Socialist jurists in Kiel on 1 April 1939 and then pub-
lished as a book in several editions between 1939 and 1941.8 Although this
essay in fact had little or no direct influence on Nazi policy, it was nonetheless
widely read in Germany and across Europe, where it was often considered an
‘official’ statement of Nazi geopolitical thinking. This intervention, published
at a moment when Hitler’s plans for military expansion were becoming clear
for all to see, represented not only an attempt to provide intellectual legiti-
macy for Nazi foreign policy but also to formulate a new basis for interna-
tional order that reflected the most recent changes in the global geographies
of power. As with Schmitt’s other important Nazi writings, ‘The Großraum
Order’ should not be read merely as a contribution to academic debates, or
solely as intellectual propaganda for the regime: it was both. Indeed any con-
temporary interpretation of this crucial text must take the tensions between
these two objectives into account, and the related difficulties in appropriating
Schmitt’s ideas for contemporary debates on the nature of world ordering (see
Chapter 6).
While Schmitt’s theory of Großraum might have represented his attempt to
formulate a new Europe-wide German Reich in order to keep pace with Nazi
expansion, this expansion left his formulations increasingly out of joint as
Germany drew inexorably towards total war. During the war, Schmitt’s com-
mitments to the Nazi state began to loosen as it became increasingly clear
that Hitler was leading the country not only into a quagmire of legal nihilism
 Writing Carl Schmitt 21
but towards military defeat. He played his part in its propaganda machine,
travelling to Spain, Portugal, Romania and Hungary as a cultural ambassa-
dor, lecturing to jurists and dignitaries. Nonetheless, one of the key lectures he
delivered, ‘The Plight of European Jurisprudence’, emphasized the importance
of jurists as the guardians of the law and of the long influence of Roman law
that tied Europe together to a common juridical tradition (Balakrishnan,
2000: 246–248). Strongly at odds with the official celebration of German law
in Nazi ideology and the miserable deterioration of the country’s juridical
system, it might be read as a tactical retreat from the regime as its enemies
closed in or as a genuine plea for a stabilizing juridical form in the face of the
Nazi state’s nihilistic pseudo-legality.
At the end of the war, Schmitt was drafted as an air raid warden as Berlin
fell – an ironic role for the thinker who understood the development of air
war to have signalled the final cataclysmic erasure of modern European legal
order. In early 1945 his friend Popitz was executed for his role in a plot to kill
Hitler, perhaps marking the death knell for Schmitt’s hopes of reconstituting a
new political form of the Nazi state. Not only had Popitz been his friend, and
more recently host after the Schmitts’ house had been bombed, but also in a
way Schmitt’s political mentor, an upstanding example of what he considered
the ‘classical’ politics of Prussia. As he watched his dreams of a European
Großraum collapse in the rubble of Berlin, Schmitt saw also the death pangs
of the old European certainties and the possibilities of the new politics he had
hoped to salvage from the cauldron of interwar frictions. Land and Sea, pub-
lished in 1942, and originally written as a geopolitical fairy tale for his daughter
Anima, was characterized by a flight away from the destruction being
wrought around him into a mix of world-historical musing and geo-elemental
mythology that marked his growing separation from the realities of the war.
In the months after the end of the war Schmitt was drafting a defence of
the industrialist Friedrich Flick, who was to go on trial at Nuremberg
accused of using imprisoned Jews as slave labourers,9 but he was soon to be
interned as a possible defendant himself. Arrested first in the autumn of 1945,
when US forces held him as a ‘security threat’, he was released the following
year, but in March 1947 was re-arrested and taken to Nuremburg for inter-
rogation by Robert Kempner and Ossip K. Flechtheim, both German-Jewish
émigrés who now acted as lawyers for the occupying forces under the US
army. His library was taken from him and he spent a year under interroga-
tion, defending himself as a scholar innocent of the charges being levelled
against him – that he had, in his Großraum work, provided the legal
legitimation for Nazi expansion in Europe. He found the ‘experience of the
cell’ punishing and suffered from an identity crisis bordering on a psychic
breakdown described in Ex Captivitate Salus, published in 1950, his only
autobiographical book. The period of detention was a time of delirious self-
questioning when Schmitt faced his own moral failures and complicity in
catastrophe, coming to find the answer to the question ‘Who was Carl
Schmitt?’, ‘Murky and unclear’ (Balakrishnan, 2000: 236).
22 Writing Carl Schmitt
Finally released in May 1947 without charge, he returned to Plettenberg as
a ‘freelance scholar’ and claimed he would ‘retreat into the security of silence’
(in Hoelzl and Ward, 2008: 1). In truth, however, this silence was only a
lowering of voice even if he was pushed to the edges of public life in the new
Federal Germany that arose from the ashes of war into the frozen fractures of
the Cold War. As noted above, Schmitt was excluded from holding an aca-
demic post in the new Federal Republic because he refused to sign the certi-
ficate of denazification, arguing that he had always been conceptually aloof
from a regime upon which he had no influence. He depicted forced retirement
in Plettenberg as a form of ‘inner exile’ and referred to his house as ‘San
Casciano’, Machiavelli’s house in exile, while signing his letters as ‘Benito
Cereno’ (see Müller, 2003: Part 1). But Schmitt’s ‘retreat’ was far from com-
plete and he was desperate to maintain influence even as he became increas-
ingly concerned with his own self-image and reception. As Müller clearly
demonstrates, he remained an éminence grise in his internal exile ‘para-
doxically both absent and present in the public intellectual life of the Federal
Republic’ (ibid.: 3). Hence, although his exclusion from academic posts left
him outside the official channels of intellectual influence, he sought to build
an ‘epistolary empire’ (ibid.: 59) that placed him at the centre of an ‘intellec-
tual freemasonry’ stretching across Europe, and taking in many of the con-
servative scholars of the new Republic and some of the major thinkers of
post-war Europe (Balakrishnan, 2000: 260). Like a spider at the centre of its
web, Schmitt would issue polemical bursts in print, first under pseudonyms and
then again in his own name, engaging with issues of the day and exercising his
‘anxiety to influence’ via his chain of interlocutors (Müller, 2003: 60).
Schmitt kept up lively correspondences with figures as diverse as Raymond
Aron, Alexandre Kojève, Julien Freund and his old ‘hostile brother’ Ernst
Jünger. San Casciano became a place of pilgrimage not only for various
members of the West German Right, including Ernst Forsthoff, a former
student of Schmitt’s who sat on the Supreme Court and shaped the constitu-
tional decisions of the new Republic, but also for more unexpected visitors
such as the Jewish scholar Jacob Taubes and the Maoist Joachim Schickel
(ibid.: 97). Through a string of former students, old acquaintances and new
apprentices, Schmitt constructed a group of advocates for his cause who
would resuscitate his reputation and maintain not only his work’s continued
relevance, but also establish his status as a ‘classic’ of modern political
thought.10
Throughout the post-war period Schmitt, perhaps in keeping with this
semi-public ‘taboo’,11 began to fall deeper into a literary style laced with
mysterious allusions, adopting a world-weary tone of one sensitive to the
apocalyptic horizon of modern technological civilization. In part, this was the
result of his increasing immersion in the language of eschatological theology,
a tendency that betrayed a strengthening of faith after the death of his second
wife in 1950. Indeed, it seems that the chill of imprisonment, and the diffi-
culty of facing his own past and Europe’s future, drove Schmitt back to
 Writing Carl Schmitt 23
religion, something that entered his work not merely as a rhetorical flourish
but as the product of a genuine renewal of faith born of despair (Balakrish-
nan, 2000: 255). His last major book, Political Theology II, published in
1970, bore witness to the shift in Schmitt’s views on the political relevance of
theology, holding a position closer to politicized theology – if still remaining
remote from the politics of mainstream Christian parties – and adopting an
increasingly eschatological view where only the representative of Christ on
earth could restrain the acceleration of history towards an apocalyptic end.
This was possibly a symptom of his frequent recourse to self-mythologization
and the construction of an ‘Arcanum’ of which he, in a position of unique
world-historical perception, held the key and from which the ‘initiate’ could
hope to benefit.12 Living on a pension secured by business friends and
cementing the fame he had built before the war in Italy and Spain through
new translations, with new advocates (notably his daughter Anima, who had
married the conservative Spanish judge Alfonso Otero Valera) and occasional
lecturing engagements there and at home, Schmitt’s influence began to creep
back. Balakrishnan (ibid.: 261) argues that after the war Schmitt became a
‘living period piece, to all appearances an intellectual invalid from an ante-
diluvian world’, but as Müller’s painstaking study of Schmitt’s post-war
influence in European thought shows, this is far off the mark.
According to Müller, in fact, Schmitt maintained a close commentary on
the day-to-day politics of the Federal Republic and won new disciples pre-
cisely because his often ‘deeply anti-modern assumptions’ seemed to be ‘far
ahead of [their] time’, placing him at once in the role of a world-historical
clairvoyant and a representative of timeless classical categories, out of joint
with the nihilism of mass consumer society and the blunt ideological force
fields in which Europe was tied (Müller, 2003: 4). When he died in 1985 at the
age of ninety-six, Europe was still embedded in the Cold War, but Schmitt’s
reputation was rising with a tide of conservatism in West Germany. Indeed,
his death came at a moment when the legacy of Nazism was a hotly contested
issue in German intellectual life, with Jürgen Habermas and the revisionist
historian Ernst Nolte battling publicly in the pages of Die Zeit the following
year, in what is known as the Historikerstreit or ‘Historians’ Debate’ (ibid.:
194–207). This context set the stage for a full reappraisal of Schmitt’s work in
West Germany and shortly after his death, in 1986, Helmut Quaritsch, a
former pupil of Schmitt’s, gathered friends and scholarly disciples in Speyer
for the first conference dedicated to Schmitt. The event opened the floodgates
to Schmitt’s academic respectability in Germany and the subsequent spread
of his reception in Anglophone scholarship. Schmitt, the great opportunist
who yearned for ‘power over history’, would no doubt have been pleased
that his work had found a new audience in the heart of enemy territory, where
it became one of the major intellectual sticks with which to beat his old
enemies – liberalism and the United States – precisely at the moment of their
supposed historical triumph.
24 Writing Carl Schmitt
Interpreting the sphinx

Conservative revolutionary?
German legal thinker Erich Schwinge declared in 1930 that Carl Schmitt was
‘the sphinx of German public law, because from the first moment he avoids
precise classification’ (in Carrino, 1999: 191 n5). This ambiguity is not only
the product of Schmitt’s prose style, his Promethean conceptual output and
the debate over the relationship of his thought to his political choices, but
also because of the difficulty in situating him in the intellectual lineages of
German political thought and specifically that of the early twentieth century
milieu from which he emerged, and more broadly, in modern European
thought and conservative philosophy. This is in part because Schmitt was
decisively shaped by his Catholic provincial and petty-bourgeois background
insofar as a lack of ‘conventional allegiances or sentiments’, enabled him to
readily turn his back on ‘the good old days of pre-war Germany’ (Balakrish-
nan, 2000: 5). Thus he was freed from many of the usual associations of
German political thought, both liberal and conservative, that one might
expect of a man of his time and in hindsight of his later politics. It was also
because he had an ‘extraordinarily diversified endowment of cultural capital’
that let him read across many European languages and opened up horizons of
debate, both historic and contemporary, that he could freely draw upon to
enrich his analysis even as they lead it down esoteric blind alleys or to cata-
strophic dead ends (ibid.). Third, Schmitt kept a great variety of intellectual
company across his life, from the Dadaist artist Hugo Ball in his early
Munich days, the French Catholic Renouveau context of 1920s Bonn, to his
friends on the Left in the German Sociological Association and on the Right
associated with the ‘young conservative’ movement during his Berlin years.
Indeed, Balakrishnan compares Schmitt to a bricoleur who, unencumbered
by the conventional investments of German conservatism, ‘could pick up
selected pieces, innovate, improvise and recombine’, a magpie-like intellectual
tendency that makes his intellectual cartography ‘difficult to map’ in relation
to twentieth century German conservatism (ibid.).
The question of the foundations of order was of particular importance for
Schmitt, given the profound malaise of the German state and its compro-
mised experiment with liberal democracy in the aftermath of the Great War.
His most important early contributions to political thought took shape within
the context of this historical and political crisis and bore its impact. His fun-
damental concern was how political and legal authority could be legitimated
and maintained in an age of mass politics lacking theological foundations. In
this sense he can undoubtedly be listed as a thinker of the authoritarian
Right, attached to strong forms of centralized authority and a reactionary
vision of politics with little concern for individual freedom and strictly
opposed to universalizing tendencies of both capitalism and communism.
However, unlike many German conservatives of his time, Schmitt put little
 Writing Carl Schmitt 25
stock in conventional sources of conservative legitimacy, whether nationalism,
class politics or the power of traditional elites. Indeed, the fascinating radic-
alism of some of his thought lay in the fact that he understood there to be no
necessary foundations on which authority could claim to ground itself. In
modernity, deprived of any transcendental foundation, disorder was the nat-
ural state of things, and order had to be produced through political action
(see Galli, 2010a, 2010b; Minca, 2012a; Ojakangas, 2006; Rowan, 2011).
Whilst Schmitt’s work was defined by this tension between order and dis-
order, it left him open to ideas beyond the normal purview of conservative
thought and arguably led him to embrace revolutionary change as the path to
reactionary order during the Nazi years. This paradox running through his
intellectual make up has led some to define him as a ‘conservative revolu-
tionary’ (Wolin, 1992) or a ‘reactionary modernist’ (Herf, 1986), although
neither term quite does justice to the contradictory tendencies of his oeuvre.
In Herf ’s account, ‘reactionary modernists’ were those in the Weimar
Republic who, like Schmitt, were caught in the tension between reactionary
stances on the location and distribution of political and economic power, and
a willingness to embrace the transformative powers of technology and mass
politics after the experience of the First World War and the revolutionary
transition from Reich to Republic.13
Jünger’s one time secretary, the Swiss conservative Armin Mohler, coined
the term ‘conservative revolution’ after the Second World War in an attempt
to distinguish various thinkers of the Weimar Far Right from National Soci-
alism. Mohler listed Jünger, Schmitt, Spengler and the early Thomas Mann,
among others, as ‘conservative revolutionaries’ who stood in relation to Hitler as
Trotksy had to Stalin (Müller, 2003: 104–116). His aim was to rehabilitate
these taboo figures in order to develop an anti-liberal and anti-socialist con-
servatism that could escape the taint of Nazism, whilst providing a Rightist
alternative to the new post-war Federal Republic.14 The tensions within the
concept of a ‘conservative revolution’ certainly pointed to the structural con-
tradictions between the reactionary ends and the revolutionary means that
frequently defined Schmitt’s political positions. However, Schmitt sat uneasily
amongst Mohler’s ragbag of Weimar reactionaries due to his deep institu-
tional complicity with the Nazi regime, in contrast to figures such as Jünger
and Spengler whose relationship to the regime always remained more critical
and indeed neither joined the Party.15
For Müller, Schmitt ‘embodies a European political sensibility which is
rather inadequately described with the concept, conservatism – ‘radical con-
servative’ or ‘reactionary modernist’ come closer to the mark, but they still
miss it’ (Müller, 2003: 11). What we encounter in Schmitt, ‘is a mindset that
could best be described with the term philosophical or anthropological con-
servatism – which might or might not be realized in particularly conservative
positions centered on gradual change in actual politics’ (ibid.). Müller’s iden-
tification of Schmitt’s thought with a European, rather than strictly German
perspective, on the one hand, and with a ‘sensibility’ open to positions not so
26 Writing Carl Schmitt
typically identified as conservative, on the other, provides the opportunity for
a more nuanced approach to understanding Schmitt’s relationship to the
broader trajectory of modern European conservative thought.
Although neither ‘reactionary modernist’ nor ‘conservative revolutionary’
quite meet the mark of defining Schmitt’s conservatism, both help to identify
something of the paradoxical tendencies operating in his work. Indeed, one of
the most characteristic, if unusual, aspects of Schmitt’s thought was the
ambiguous tension between seemingly antimodern categories such as theology
and myth, and a sharp analysis of the effects of technology and mass society
on twentieth century politics. As Müller notes, ‘Schmitt had no illusions
about re-enchanting the world or returning to an ideal past. But neither was
he prepared simply to accept certain elements of modernity such as unrest-
rained development of technology and the supposed rise of mass society’
(Müller, 2003: 11). Müller perhaps overstates Schmitt’s opposition to mass
society, for although he remained ambivalent about an unconstrained rise of
mass politics he acknowledged that it was an irreversible presence in the
twentieth century, even if its energies had to be channelled in ways that
ensured order was maintained. Hence, in works such as The Crisis of Parlia-
mentary Democracy (1923), Constitutional Theory (1928), Legality and
Legitimacy (1932) and his ‘high’ Nazi treatise State, Movement, People (1933)
Schmitt does not oppose the power of the masses, but rather evokes them
as a source of legitimacy for the state. Nonetheless, it was precisely Schmitt’s
simultaneous rejection of a return to a lost political past and his acceptance
of the post-revolutionary realities of mass politics that make him hard to
locate within the intellectual bloodlines of German conservatism.
What Schmitt shared most ardently with the traditions of German con-
servatism was the desire for political renewal. Like many conservatives,
shocked by the political suicide of the old Prussian order in the First World
War and the burst of revolutionary energy it unleashed, Schmitt wanted to
see a renewal of politics in a state form that would provide authority and
stability. However, he did not conceive of this renewal as a ‘restoration’ that
would somehow turn the clock back to some idyll of traditional authority,
recognizing that pre-revolutionary Germany was buried and traditional
authority decentred by the tumultuous shake up of the early century.
Restoration was for Schmitt ‘the always farcical agenda of reactionary Don
Quixotes’ as noted by Balakrishnan (2000: 121). The renewal that he envi-
saged was one that would recognize the irreparable historical losses from
which a new Germany had been born and draw on the revolutionary energy
of the masses to build new forms of legitimate authority. The attempt to
conceive of new forms of authority on the shifting bedrock of the revolu-
tionary masses often opened a profound conceptual gulf between Schmitt’s
thought and some of the key traditions of German conservatism and the
intellectual tendencies festering in National Socialism alike.
 Writing Carl Schmitt 27
The Crown Jurist of National Socialism?
For those approaching his work, Schmitt’s complicity with National Social-
ism raises in stark terms what Peter Caldwell refers to as, ‘the central problem
of intellectual history: how to relate text and context’ (2007: xv). Given that
for some the concentration camps ‘haunt every word Schmitt writes, no
matter how illuminating’ (Dean, 2007: 248), it is not surprising that many
writing about his thought respond to ‘an affective requirement to condemn
Schmitt’s politics’ (Atkinson, 2011: 202), and feel ‘an obligation to give an
account of what in his work is worth the effort’ (Strong, 2008: vii). Schmitt
was of course not alone, as many other prominent intellectual figures in
interwar Europe gave their support to various forms of fascism, from Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger to Louis-Ferdinand
Céline, Benedetto Croce and Emile Cioran. There have been major scholarly
controversies involving other European intellectuals similarly complicit with
fascism, including the well-publicized cases of Paul de Man and Günter Grass
as well as the ongoing controversies around the thought of Martin Heidegger,
the most important intellectual other than Schmitt to join the Nazi Party. Yet,
the situation is ‘more acute’ in Schmitt’s case, as Balakrishnan argues, ‘since
he alone of the high intelligentsia that opted for Fascism, was a political
thinker of the first rank … and he was more institutionally complicitous than
any of the others in this constellation’ (2000: 7). For David Atkinson, Schmitt
was not typical of those ‘European intellectuals drawn to the “seductions of
unreason”, the apparent glamour of “the intellectual romance of Fascism” –
in Wolin’s terms – because he was too significant politically’ (2011: 202). The fact
that Schmitt keenly played the role of legal advisor and jurisprudence propa-
gandist for a regime that slaughtered millions on the basis of a racist ideol-
ogy, brutally eliminated its political opponents and spread war across Europe
and beyond, raises the hermeneutical stakes high indeed. It is understandable
then that Schmitt’s Nazi complicity ‘continues to evoke supercharged partisan
judgements on how to evaluate this episode in terms of what he wrote and did
before and … after’ (Balakrishnan, 2000: 6). Balakrishnan correctly notes the
responses these questions usually elicit: ‘unsympathetic commentators
denounce him as a Fascist or an opportunist; sympathetic commentators
either present neatly sanitized, apologetic accounts of the relationship
between his writings and his political allegiances, or, worse, portray him as
someone with dark, arcane insights into “the political”’ (ibid.: 9).
In order to negotiate a more satisfactory hermeneutical path that does not
fall into either of these polemical camps, and develop an interpretive
approach that treats Schmitt as an object of sober critical reflection rather
than an ‘affectively charged symbol’ (ibid.), it is necessary to probe further
into how Schmitt’s Nazism should be contextualized both textually and his-
torically. Questions thus need to be asked as to whether his Nazi writings may
be separated from his broader thought on the one hand, and his work be
separated from his political life on the other. As Peter Caldwell argues, it is
28 Writing Carl Schmitt
remarkable how many ‘readings of Schmitt, even when critical, have tended
to separate [his] ideas from his personal beliefs’, either by simply ignoring
them or identifying his Nazism as an aberrant ‘phase’ easily quarantined to the
Nazi years (2007: ix). Such arguments were typical of a broad tendency in the
early years of the Federal Republic to characterize Nazism as a coarse anti-
intellectual movement without any relationship to ‘thinkers’ (see Atkinson,
2011; Gross, 2007; Wolin, 1992). This was one of a number of ‘distancing
techniques’ used to paper over the widespread complicity of the German
public with the Nazi regime, something particularly acute in administrative
and bureaucratic bodies such as academia, where any historical reckoning
was displaced onto an Allied sanctioned discourse of ‘collective guilt’.
A number of critics such as David Atkinson (2011), Eric Santner (1993)
and Dirk Moses (2007), have noted the more subtle and complex set of
responses that have been developed in excavating the legacy of Nazism and its
repression in post-war Germany in recent studies. Since the above mentioned
‘historians’ debate’ in the 1980s between Habermas and the Schmitt-influenced
revisionist historian Ernst Nolte, an increasing number of scholarly interven-
tions have sought to address the continuities between Nazi Germany and its
afterlife in the post-war Republic, and the multiple instances of personal and
institutional disavowal that underlay the very public declarations of national
guilt that dominated post-war German discourse. As Atkinson recalls there
had been a dramatic move away from the clearly defined identities as ‘victim’
and ‘perpetrator’ just as there has been a sharp rejection of any notion of a
clean break between pre-war and post-war histories. Indeed, the growing
acceptance of Schmitt as a point of reference in Germany since the shift of
public discourse to the Right from the 1980s reflects these broader changes in
how the legacy of Nazism in post-war Germany is being addressed in both
academic and popular discourses.
Jan-Werner Müller and Raphael Gross have both shown that there was a
concerted effort to draw a distinction between Schmitt’s work and his com-
plicity with the Nazi regime in his post-war reception because it was largely
transmitted through students and friends, keen to act as his advocate (see
Gross, 2007: Introduction and Chapter 5). Indeed, Schmitt was first intro-
duced to Anglophone audiences by Joseph Bendersky and George Schwab,
both of whom were in close friendly contact with Schmitt and acted as quasi-
apologists. As Gross notes, these personal contacts partly enabled Schmitt to
stage-manage his own reception and promote the view that his involvement
with the Nazis was a quickly disavowed mistake that had little or no bearing
on the content of his work as a whole. The most common argument is that
Schmitt’s decision to join the Nazi Party in 1933 signalled a ‘break’ in his
thought as a result of an opportunistic drive for power and prestige, or a
moral lapse, rather than marking any continuity with his previous conceptual
positions or political ideas.16 Bendersky, for example, argues that Schmitt’s
decision to support the Nazis revealed ‘a personal weakness so far as moral
principles are concerned’ (in Neocleous, 1996a: 17). Schwab, likewise,
 Writing Carl Schmitt 29
suggests that, ‘intoxicated by what he believed to be the recognition of his
own importance and convinced he was finally in a position to make a differ-
ence, Schmitt either became oblivious to what was unfolding or deceived
himself ’ (2008: xxxvi).
This argument at once separates Schmitt’s Nazism from his political
thought, relegating the former to a moral lapse or personal ambition, and
neatly limits this failing to the early years of his Nazi involvement. Much is
made of the denunciation of Schmitt in the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps in
1936, which the Right wing German scholar Günter Maschke characterized
as ‘life threatening’.17 Schmitt’s fall from grace with the regime is taken to
indicate a second ‘break’, a brief fascist lapse after which he returned to his
pre-1933 positions. Although Schmitt may have had reason to be frightened
after his marginalization by the SS, it is certainly exaggerated to argue, as
Schwab does, that ‘Schmitt entered the Third Reich as a marked man’ or to
characterize him either as ‘an anti-Nazi’ or ‘an antiracist’ due to his opposi-
tion to the Party during the final years of the Weimar Republic and the fact
he had twice married Slavic women (Strong, 2008: xxxv). Even if 1936 did
‘constitute a watershed for Schmitt’ and his relationship to National Social-
ism, his attempts to legitimate the expansion of Nazi imperialism in his
Großraum work, as well as his role as a roving ‘cultural ambassador’ for the
Nazi state as late as 1944 seem rather inexplicable (ibid.: xxxi). The claim that
Schmitt’s writings on Großraum were an attempt to limit himself to a ‘a
domain he thought would leave him out of the limelight’ is hardly credible
given that he was publically interviewing on a topic that bore directly on
policy questions of the greatest magnitude (ibid.: xxxii). This argument would
quarantine Schmitt’s Nazism within the 1933–1936 period, and seems to
follow closely on from the claim Schmitt made during his post-war inter-
rogation that he ‘considered it possible to give meaning to these [Nazi]
catchwords’ until 1936, after which time he realized he was misguided
(1987b: 99).
Although there are arguably veiled critiques of the Nazis discernible in his
writings from the late 1930s and 1940s, such as The Leviathan (1938), ‘The
Plight of European Jurisprudence’ (1943) and Land and Sea (1943), the idea
that these amounted to much more than a protective distancing from a regime in
which he had lost favour and which was clearly heading to defeat, let alone
some sort of ‘resistance’, is very hard to defend. After the publication of the
Glossarium, Schmitt’s private journals from the years 1947–1951, in 1991, it
was ‘difficult to focus on the stimulating and brilliant texts he had written
outside of their political context’ as Caldwell suggests (2007: xi). The diaries
revealed that even after Nazi defeat, and when the full horrors of the Holo-
caust were becoming apparent, Schmitt’s private writings were still riddled
with anti-Semitism, making it much harder to maintain the ‘opportunism’
thesis. Moreover, if the Glossarium had shown that Schmitt’s private thoughts
were still saturated with anti-Semitism after the war, the 2003 publication of
his diaries from the years 1912–1915, again flooded with anti-Semitic
30 Writing Carl Schmitt
sentiment, made the idea of a clean break between the Nazi years and his
other intellectual output even harder to sustain.18 It would seem – given the
content of his pre- and post-war diaries – that Schmitt’s ‘rock bottom’
years of 1933–1936 were not simply an opportunistic abscess on an otherwise
spotless intellectual career that can be isolated and ignored (Schwab, 2008:
lii n53).
Such apologist arguments are less frequent today in Schmitt’s Anglophone
reception, despite the continued partisan efforts of Schmitt’s character referees
at the US journal Telos, to which we return in Chapter 2. This is perhaps
because such arguments reflect the hermeneutic concerns of an earlier gen-
eration of thinkers becoming less relevant to a new generation increasingly
distant from Europe’s ‘dark century’ and looking for neglected sources of
revitalization for stale political categories left over from it. The separation of
corpus and complicity in Schmitt scholarship, however, may also be a signal
that an earlier generation of his intellectual advocates decisively shaped the
terms of debate concerning his work. It remains commonplace for contemporary
work on Schmitt to acknowledge his Nazi involvement as important before
moving swiftly on to engage specific points of his work, if the concern is
raised at all. Chantal Mouffe (2005a), Schmitt’s most tireless advocate on the
Anglophone Left, presents a particularly clear example of such an approach.
Of course, when the reception of Schmitt’s work is so broad and so often
engaged with particular problems to which his thought is considered ger-
mane, it cannot reasonably be expected that every article should provide a
detailed account of his Nazi involvement or elaborate an ethical position
towards it. The problem arises nonetheless when so much recent Anglophone
literature seeks to utilize Schmitt’s concepts shorn of any relation to their
political and historical context. Schmitt would doubtless have welcomed his
current status as a ‘classic’ of political thought for which no justification is
required to engage. If, however, we consider Schmitt’s Nazism to be a
persistent problem in interpreting his work and recognize some form of con-
tinuity between this period and his thought as a whole, on the one hand, and
between his work and his life, on the other, how is this continuity to be
assessed?
Whilst attempts to isolate Schmitt’s Nazi writings from his entire oeuvre or
to mark a clean separation between his life and work are evidently fraught
with difficulty, arguments on behalf of continuity across Schmitt’s thought
and between his thought and his political choices can likewise be problematic.
There is a danger that a ‘continuity thesis’ may, on the one hand, posit
Schmitt’s Nazism as the necessary product of his work, and on the other,
reduce his entire intellectual output to his Nazism and hence allow it to be
swiftly disqualified on the grounds it is tainted in essence. We believe both
views should be avoided as they rely on crude reductionist accounts of
Schmitt’s work and of its relationship with his political choices.
First, an argument for continuity between Schmitt’s Nazi writings and his
oeuvre must not reduce him to a ‘Nazi thinker’, where his Nazi work is seen
 Writing Carl Schmitt 31
as inevitable, given his previous writings. Such a reading cannot stand up to
the scrutiny of a rigorous textual or contextual analysis which tracks the
development of his thought across the changing historical circumstances of a
career that lasted across seventy years and four periods of German statehood.
Although it can be argued that Schmitt’s post-war writings were shaped by his
attempts to manage his record and reception through intellectual sycophants
and his own intricate commentary on earlier work, his thought in this period
was not without development and did not remain within the framework of his
Nazi writings. Looking further back, his ‘Weimar writings’ were marked by a
staggered conceptual development and a number of sharp oscillations in
response to turbulent historical circumstances he was trying to keep pace
with. Therefore any reduction of Schmitt’s corpus to his Nazi output alone
adopts a crude form of historical determinism that leaves little scope for
understanding the complex relationship between his work, his life and the
shifts in both the biographical and the social context. This is not to say that
his Nazi era writings can be sidelined or ignored, but rather that they must be
contextualized in relation to both his previous conceptual developments and
the volatile historical situation he crafted his work within. A deep immanent
criticism probing the internal lacunae of Schmitt’s oeuvre, such as that carried
out by Carlo Galli, or the ‘diachronic contextualization’ between his life and
work that typifies Balakrishnan’s method appear as more suitable methods of
contextualization.
Second, whilst an argument stressing the existence of clear continuities
between Schmitt’s whole work, his life and his Nazi writings must avoid
identifying his political choices as necessary, it should however try to identify
tendencies in his thought which made them possible. British political theorist
Mark Neocleous may be correct in suggesting that Schmitt’s decision to join
the Nazis was not only possible but ‘probable given the theoretical contours
of his work’ (1996a: 19); however, when he argues that Schmitt’s Nazism fol-
lows ‘logically, theoretically, politically from his [theoretical] premises’ he
risks depicting his political choices as ‘logically’ determined by his thought
(ibid.: 23). It is important to avoid this easy slippage between probability and
determination in assessing the relationship between Schmitt’s Weimar and
Nazi era thought. Although his support for the Nazis was far from a ‘mere
personal aberration’ or even a total ‘intellectual break’, to consider it ‘built
into the theoretical premises of his work’ leaves no room for the element of
personal decision that Schmitt exercised in joining the Nazi regime and takes
no account of his conceptual shifts in relation to transformed circumstances
(ibid.: 17). Such an argument removes Schmitt’s political affiliations from
their historical context and understands them purely on the level of a spurious
logical causation drawn from a necessarily selective reading of his work. As
Galli notes, if Schmitt’s Nazi phase ‘fully realized all of the risks inherent on
the structure of Schmittian thought’ it nonetheless ‘does not occur necessarily
or automatically, but … instead requires a conscious personal will’ (in Sitze,
2010: xxix). In other words, it is precisely because there was nothing in
32 Writing Carl Schmitt
Schmitt’s thought that made his decision inevitable that it represents such an
enormous ethical failure.
This in no way rules out the importance of the tendencies in Schmitt’s
thought that brought him to join the Nazi Party on the heels of Hitler’s
Chancellorship in 1933. Rather, it understands these tendencies strictly as ten-
dencies that made his decision possible or even likely, as opposed to causes
that determined it. This allows for a more complex reading, where Schmitt’s
Nazism was not ‘the bureaucratic baptism of an already essentially Fascist
argument’, but required a decisive act of personal will and indeed an ethical
choice (Neocleous, 1996a: 23). For many years during the Weimar Republic,
he had formulated a conception of totalitarian statehood focused around a
strong presidential executive and built upon a substantive homogeneity
grounded in a national myth. In the later years of the interwar Republic, he
had conceived of such a political form as an authoritarian presidential system
that could replace the liberal Constitution. Although during the Papen and
Schleicher chancellorships he saw this presidential system as a way to exclude
the Nazis and the Communists from power, it is clear that he considered the
Communists the more serious threat (Balakrishnan, 2000: Chapter 12). Argu-
ably, the Nazis provided many of the trappings for what Schmitt had con-
ceived under the label of ‘qualitative total state’, including the strong
centralized executive, a decisive conception of state sovereignty and a clear
national myth built upon a particularly forceful understanding of homo-
geneity. Indeed, the Nazis gave a forceful actualization to his understanding
of an anti-liberal democracy based upon homogeneity directed by a dictatorial
power, something he had proposed since the early 1920s.
Given this previous commitment to an authoritarian form of state, it is not
surprising that, when he believed himself to be presented with a choice
between chaos and Hitler, Schmitt opted for the latter (see Hirst, 1999: 8).
Even by 1941, when it was clear that the Nazis had brought about a state of
complete legal indeterminacy, and he had been pushed to the fringes of
power, the idea of a greater German Reich dominating Europe held strong
appeal to Schmitt. Thus, although some sympathetic readers, like Schwab,
have presented Schmitt’s 1938 genealogy of the modern European state in The
Leviathan as a critique not only of the modern liberal state, but also of
Nazism, the idea of a Nazi-dominated Germany opened up precisely the
avenue for thinking political form beyond the state that this book claimed was
necessary. It is arguable that Schmitt always remained at something of an
ideological distance from the Nazis and was never what Schwab (2008: xliv)
calls a ‘Hitlerian Nazi’, committed to the coarsest forms of biological racism,
but the fact that he had few qualms about throwing his reputation behind the
regime and joining in the anti-Semitic chorus suggests that his affiliation did
not lie only in opportunism, but with the sense of a possibly shared political
purpose. Schmitt’s critique of liberalism does not necessarily lead to Nazism,
just as his concept of sovereignty does not necessitate dictatorship, nor does
his concept of the political presuppose anti-Semitism. However this conceptual
 Writing Carl Schmitt 33
matrix, formulated by an anti-Semite with a taste for authoritarianism who
believed himself to be at the epicentre of an epochal crisis, certainly helped
bring him to the point where he could leave one paradigm of state behind and
step into the uncertainties of a fascist future.
We believe it is therefore important to develop an interpretive approach
that avoids either an easy separation or a reductive continuity between
Schmitt’s Nazi writings and his work as a whole. An interpretive approach
that emphasizes separation and sees Schmitt’s Nazism as an intellectual aber-
ration or an opportunistic lapse risks absolving Schmitt of personal responsi-
bility and repressing the affinities his work shared with Nazi ideology and
practice. Conversely, an approach that foregrounds continuity and under-
stands Schmitt as a ‘Nazi thinker’, whose earlier thought led naturally to his
fascist complicity, reduces the complexity of the relationship between
Schmitt’s evolving thought and developing historical events. It renders
Schmitt’s historical choices inevitable and makes Nazism the secret herme-
neutic key to his entire intellectual corpus. Perhaps more useful is a reading
that, whilst nonetheless remaining sensitive to the tendencies that led him to
make the ethically inexcusable choice to join the Nazis,19 holds that any ser-
ious study of Schmitt’s work can neither reduce his thought to his Nazism nor
clearly separate one from the other. What is needed is an interpretive frame-
work for understanding how Schmitt’s decision to join the Nazis represents a
rupture with certain elements of his thought, whilst remaining consistent with
others, and how it is a decision that needs to be evaluated in relation to a
specific set of historical circumstances. This does not provide a defence of
Schmitt but seeks to understand the conditions under which he made his
decision, precisely as a historical and political choice rather than a deter-
mined act, whilst understanding his work to have a wider relevance than that
dictated by his relationship with Nazism even if this must be dealt with.

The ‘Jewish Complex’

One crucial question is: to what extent Schmitt’s decision to join the Nazis
and his political thought more broadly were shaped by anti-Semitism? That
Schmitt was anti-Semitic has been beyond question since the publication of
his pre- and post-war diaries. The claim, made by apologist such as George
Schwab, that the anti-Semitic diatribes that typified his Nazi-era work were
merely an opportunistic attempt to shroud his work in the rhetoric of the day,
does not stand up in light of his private notes. The paranoid reflections
revealed in the heavily encrypted Glossarium not only were not meant for
public consumption, but came after Nazi defeat, when he had no stake in
focusing a Party line and the full horrors of the Nazi genocidal practices were
well known. However, the question remains as to whether or not Schmitt’s
anti-Semitism played a determining role in his decision to join the Nazis in
May 1933 or in shaping his political thought more broadly.
34 Writing Carl Schmitt
As noted above, there are clear affinities between aspects of Schmitt’s poli-
tical thought and Nazism that are not strictly identifiable with anti-Semitism,
but rather arise more broadly from a shared concept of the totalitarian state.
Therefore, it seems plausible to argue that Schmitt’s affiliation with Nazism
was not based on anti-Semitism alone. This fact does not deny that anti-
Semitism had some degree of influence on Schmitt’s commitment to National
Socialism or provided a point of convergence despite existing ideological gaps.
The argument that Schmitt’s anti-Semitism was confined to his Nazi writings
and served only to please the regime in order to excuse past criticism and
advance his career holds little water, given the revelations seeping from the
pages of his diaries where he devoted so much ink to his ‘Jewish Complex’
(Gross, 2007: 236). This ‘opportunism’ thesis, favoured by Schmitt’s acolytes,
was employed under his influence, as part of an attempt to excuse his Nazi
involvement. The idea was that his Nazism could be explained in terms of a per-
sonal moral failure rather than any intellectual continuity or precedent found in his
work. Hence, denying his anti-Semitism was a way to deny that there were
structural affinities between his thought and Nazism. However, if in Schmitt’s
work anti-Semitism was not opportunistic, was it to be considered con-
ceptually structural? And if it was structural, what role did it play? Furthermore,
what character did Schmitt’s anti-Semitism have? Was it racial or rather, as
some have argued, more ‘philosophical’, ‘traditional’, ‘Christian’, ‘political’? How
should this taxonomy of anti-Semitism be assessed in relation to Schmitt’s
thought and his political career? These will be important questions when, in
Chapters 5 and 6, we will deal with ‘the biopolitical’ dimension of his work.
The argument that anti-Semitism was structural to Schmitt’s work is most
powerfully presented by Raphael Gross in his recent book Carl Schmitt and
The Jews.20 The central claim of Gross’ study, originally published in German
in 2000, and translated into English in 2007, is that ‘anti-Semitism and
Nazism stamped Schmitt’s thinking in a basic way’ (2007: 226). Gross con-
tends that the ‘Jews and “the Jewish” had defining importance for Schmitt’s
work as a whole’, becoming ‘increasingly foundational for his legal theory’ as
his thought developed (ibid.: 227). Caldwell notes in his Foreword to the Eng-
lish edition that ‘Gross’s strong claim is that anti-Semitism is not incidental to
Schmitt but pervades his thoughts on law and state’ (ibid.: xiv). Gross there-
fore argues that Schmitt’s theory cannot be dissociated from anti-Semitism since
it is structured around a series of conceptual oppositions to particularism, uni-
versalism and historical acceleration, behind which lies his anti-Semitism. As
Strong argues, for Gross “the Jew” ‘lies under one pole of each of the binary
oppositions that Schmitt works with: the Jew is the “enemy”, the “Antichrist.”
Lacking spatial and territorial definition they undermine all notions of spatial
order, or “nomos”’ (2008: xiv). Hence, ‘the Jews’ became a stand-in for a
series of enemies in opposition to whom Schmitt formed his thought.
Gross goes further however by claiming that not only is anti-Semitism an
integral part of Schmitt’s thought but it lies at its foundational core. Accord-
ing to him, Schmitt’s work ‘achieves its unity through ideas that take up
 Writing Carl Schmitt 35
anti-emancipatory and secularized anti-Jewish theological motifs of Catholic
and Protestant origin’ (2007: 227). Anti-Semitism is thus for this interpreta-
tion the key lens through which Schmitt’s work should be read, the hermeneutic
key to his supposed ‘Arcanum’. Although his argument is persuasively made,
we would argue that Gross’ analysis goes too far in positing anti-Semitism as
the structural foundation of Schmitt’s thought.
Gross’ book remains an invaluable guide to the question of how to relate
Schmitt’s thought to his Nazism and his anti-Semitism, unmatched by any
other study available in English. However, it does at times appear to be driven
by the demands of a polemical reduction leading to rather monolithic and
somewhat limited conclusions. In our view, Schmitt’s anti-Semitism is not the
structural foundation on which other enmities lie, but one out of a number of
enmities that exist in a mimetic complex and that allows for conceptual con-
vergences between different, but inter-related sources of antagonism depend-
ing on the context. Anti-Semitism is thus not the centre of Schmitt’s thought
but one of a number of centres that resonate with each other in his ‘poly-
centric’ conceptual framework. This accounts for the paranoid nature of his
‘Jewish Complex’ which finds the influence of ‘the Jewish’ scattered in the
most contradictory of places. Hence, in his speech at the 1936 conference he
organized on the influence of ‘the Jewish’ on German jurisprudence he held
forth against the threat presented by ‘Jewish chaos and Jewish legality …
anarchist nihilism and positivist normativism … raw sensualist materialism
and abstract moralism’, each of these distinctions and contradictory positions
being related to Judaism at times, although not consistently (in Balakrishnan,
2000: 206). Likewise, during his post-war internment, Schmitt could identify
his ‘new masters’, the United States, with the victory of the Jews (Gross, 2007:
201). For Schmitt, behind this ‘singular lord of the world, this poor Yankee’
stood ‘his primeval Jews’, a reference to the returning German-Jewish
émigrés like Robert Kempner who interrogated him at Nuremburg (ibid.).
The United States was for Schmitt the heir of all he had identified with ‘the
Jewish’ in Europe: pluralism; particularism; universalism; relativistic science;
technological and economic thinking; spacelessness; the ethnic ‘melting pot’;
historical acceleration (Bolshevism perhaps being the only one of his stereo-
typical connections that Schmitt did not find mirrored in the new ‘lords of the
world’).
The question remains however as to what character Schmitt’s anti-Semitism
took. Should it be understood as a prejudice expressed principally in racial
terms or informed rather by religious, political and philosophical categories?
This is of some importance in assessing anti-Semitism’s structural relation to
his thought as a whole, but also its role in his relationship to National Soci-
alism. The aim here is not to sort ‘better’ or ‘worse’ forms of anti-Semitism,
but rather to understand its role in Schmitt’s thought. Whilst he never
retracted the statements he had made during the Nazi years when he was
publicly airing his anti-Semitism, Schmitt consistently denied after the war
that he was anti-Semitic. Rather, he argued his comments to be only
36 Writing Carl Schmitt
‘judenkritisch – “critical of the Jews”’ (ibid.: 4). This tenuous distinction
between a ‘base’ biological anti-Semitism such as that of the Nazis, and a
supposedly more cerebral form, is a common feature of those accounts that seek
to exonerate Schmitt from his Nazi involvement. For example, George
Schwab argues that Schmitt was not guilty of ‘the biological Nazi version of
anti-Semitism [but] rather … the traditional Christian form’ (Schwab, 2008:
xxxix). Tracy B. Strong likewise distinguishes between the biological anti-
Semitism of the Nazis and Schmitt’s apparently ‘noncrude anti-Semitism’
(Strong, 2008: xvii). ‘Schmitt’s anti-Semitism’ – Strong writes – ‘is first and
foremost an anti-Judaism’, defined by traditional European Christian pre-
judices (ibid.: xv). In Strong’s case, the aim is not to excuse Schmitt’s anti-
Semitism but to understand its conceptual structure more clearly. In Schwab’s
case, however, these distinctions are employed to ensure that Schmitt’s anti-
Semitism, and hence his thought more broadly, is held apart from Nazi
ideology: ‘The charge of anti-Semitism cannot be sustained. Schmitt’s relapse
into a narrow, exclusionary theology, although it overlapped with Nazism and
anti-Semitism and, as such, added to the poisoned atmosphere, lacked the
cornerstone of Nazi ideology, a hodge-podge theory of race’ (Schwab, 2008:
xliv). Regardless of the arguments, such distinctions immediately present two
problems. First, can this distinction between a biological anti-Semitism and a
supposedly non-biological anti-Judaism stand, especially in the context of the
Nazi years? Second, does this distinction itself serve to divert attention from
the role that anti-Semitism, even of a supposedly ‘non-crude’ form, had in
Schmitt’s thought more broadly?
The first thing to note here, as Strong rightly does, is that the demarcation
between a biological anti-Semitism and a more ‘traditional’ anti-Judaism
would have been moot in the Germany of that time (2008: xv). Whilst the
distinction might hold some conceptual water and indeed be important for
assessing the nature of Schmitt’s views and their impact on his thought, they
clearly ‘mattered little if you were in Auschwitz’ (ibid.: xvii). Hence, these
dubious delineations between forms of anti-Jewish sentiment are of little
relevance in how Schmitt’s anti-Semitism is assessed historically or politically.
In other words, whether or not Schmitt shared the biological anti-Semitism of
the Nazis, he was still willing to share in this discourse at a moment when his
voice served to legitimate their racist policies, even if he did not influence
them directly in any significant way. Indeed, as Strong notes ‘his pronounce-
ments … during the 1933–1936 period are of a violence that goes well beyond
a genteel bourgeois anti-Semitism’ (ibid.: xxiii). Schmitt’s identification with
an ‘anti-Semitism of reason’ proves no defence of his relationship with the
Nazis’ biological anti-Semitism, as he was willing to publicize and ratchet up
his own hatred to meet the requirements of the regime (Gross, 2007: 236).
Regardless of what conceptual differentiation may have been possible between
Schmitt and the Nazis on ‘the Jewish Question’ his support for the regime
effectively smeared these distinctions in political terms.
 Writing Carl Schmitt 37
The question of whether a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-
Judaism is of importance in assessing the role of Jews and ‘the Jewish’ in
Schmitt’s thought is however a more complicated matter. This concerns the
role that anti-Semitism played in Schmitt’s conceptual framework rather than
his political adventurism and thus bears directly on how to assess its struc-
tural position in his thought. As has been argued above anti-Semitism repre-
sents one of a number of central categories and concerns through which
Schmitt structured his thought, entering into chains of metonymic association
with liberalism, pluralism, universalism, particularism, historical acceleration
and notions of spacelessness, at times acting as a point of attraction where a
number of these concepts converged. As Strong argues, for example, Schmitt’s
anti-Semitism ‘is of a piece with his reasons for opposing pluralism and
indirect powers’ (2008: xvii).
It is specifically in relation to Schmitt’s understanding of political theology,
however, that anti-Semitism has most significance in his work. Schmitt’s
political reading of theology and the importance he attributed to the ghost of
theological categories within modern political thought and conceptions of
history are of crucial importance here. Schmitt’s anti-Semitism represents, as
Strong notes, ‘the oldest form of anti-Semitism given a new twist: the denial
of Christ as the Messiah constitutes a threat to the possibility of political
order’ (ibid.: xxvi). The fact that Christ has come as Messiah is not simply a
religious event but a political one for Schmitt, one that anoints secular
authority as the representative of God’s law on earth. Thus, secular authority,
in Schmitt’s view, represented the highest law on earth for a Christian. The
origins of Schmitt’s anti-Semitism thus lie in the belief ‘that the event of
Christianity is political rather than religious’ (ibid.: xxiii). That the Jews, in
Schmitt’s view, do not accept this means that they ‘will always be in contra-
diction to a unified society for the reason that [they claim] a source of right
(Recht) that is external to the society (God’s Law)’ (ibid.: xv–xvi). Thus, on
the basis of this idiosyncratic political reading of theology, Schmitt was able
to identify the Jews with all those who open a rift between authority and
association and undermine political order.21 The Jews, for Schmitt, were
politically inclined by theology to undermine order and thus represented a
threat to the political community against which protection was needed. In
other words they represented an enemy. Interestingly, as part of a strained
defence of the German jurist, Schwab draws attention to the fact that in later
years Schmitt’s views on the Jews had altered since the foundation of Israel:
‘On numerous occasions Schmitt expressed the view to me that the situation
of the Jews dramatically changed with the creation of the state of Israel. “At
last they [Jews] again have contact with a soil they can call their own”’
(Schwab, 2008: li n49). Seemingly Schmitt’s anti-Semitism was thus deeply
tied to the Jews’ status as a ‘rootless’ diaspora without land, and hence dis-
ruptive of the relationship between ‘order and orientation’ he believed to
ground political stability and authority. Such a view would potentially support
the forced ‘resettlement’ of European Jews in their ‘homeland’, a topic hotly
38 Writing Carl Schmitt
debated in Nazi circles and one Schmitt alluded to in his Großraum writings
during the late 1930s and early 1940s (ibid.).
It is on this point that there may be a connection between the role of anti-
Semitism in Schmitt’s conceptual framework and his decision to throw his
weight behind the Nazi regime. Although for a time Schmitt stood in oppo-
sition to the Nazis, he also opposed the Socialist parties, whom he saw to be
carrying out a pincer movement on the stability of the German state, his so-
called ‘Jewish Complex’ may have helped push him in the direction of the
Nazis. He had argued since the early 1920s that sovereignty depended on
homogeneity, and hence the Jews, understood as an ‘alien’ people within
Germany, could easily be identified as the enemy within, who needed to be
excluded in order to constitute national identity. Thus, as Gross argues, the
Jews became the ‘concrete enemy’ upon whom Schmitt’s understanding of
the crisis of political form came to turn. The Jews, insofar as Schmitt identi-
fied them with those forces undermining order, could not only be identified as
the political enemy but the enemy of the political, the invisible force hollowing
out order from within. In Chapters 5 and 6 we will try to show how during
his ‘Nazi years’ Schmitt approached the ‘Jewish problem’ through a biopoli-
tical lens, as the enemy to be expelled from the German body politic, a de-
territorialized people populating German lands and exploiting the latter’s
vital space.
Schmitt made precisely these associations, not only in his public diatribes
and writings during the Nazi years, but also in his private diaries in the
aftermath of the Second World War (see Gross, 2007). Although it remains a
matter of speculation whether this was the decisive factor leading Schmitt to
Nazi involvement, it seems undeniable that it would have been hard for it not
to be a factor shaping his decision in some manner. Whether Schmitt had a
different understanding of anti-Semitism to the Nazis is of little importance in
assessing the nature of his co-operation with the regime, but it helps us
understand how he could have made this decision. In the final instance,
however, Schmitt’s anti-Semitism cannot provide the only interpretive key to
understanding his relationship to Nazism, much less to his thought as a
whole. It remains structurally woven into the constellation of oppositions
through which he viewed the world, and as such cannot be separated out
from his work, much less denied. Although it took an unusual form that
needs to be understood within the broader complex of his thought, it was in
many respects not unusual for a conservative intellectual of his time. As
George Mosse has argued, ‘German anti-Semitism is part of German intel-
lectual history. It does not stand outside of it’ (in Caldwell, 2007: xv). Hence
the intellectual work still required is to examine Schmitt’s anti-Semitism both
textually and contextually, locating it in relation to his thought as a whole
and in the intellectual currents of his time within Germany and Europe more
broadly. Although this exercise lies beyond the scope of this study, its neces-
sity hangs heavy on Schmitt’s work and we will face it head on in those areas
where it casts the starkest shadow.
 Writing Carl Schmitt 39
Notes
1 These excellent biographical works have recently been followed by the English
translation of Reinhard Mehring’s imposing Carl Schmitt: A Biography, commonly
considered the most comprehensive account of Schmitt’s life in German thus far
(forthcoming from Polity Press). Mehring’s book is an impressive achievement by
any standard. The current volume was developed before insights from the latter could
be integrated and readers will find a much richer account of Schmitt’s biography
in Mehring’s volume than can be offered here.
2 Müller notes that Schmitt makes frequent use of the term Geschichtsmächtigkeit,
which can be roughly rendered as ‘power to shape history’. Schmitt’s much
remarked upon ambition and political opportunism certainly seems to betray a
deep desire to be at the epicentre of historical developments and political events.
See Müller, 2003: 253 n37.
3 Balakrishnan makes similar speculations and it certainly seems that they are con-
firmed by Schmitt’s own later autobiographical reflections, although these need to be
treated with a critical reserve given Schmitt’s post-war desire to ‘cleanse’ his record.
4 This is a point Schmitt made forcefully in his 1930 article ‘Ethic of State and
Pluralist State’, when he pointed to the structural similarities in the arguments
made for autonomy by German Catholics during the Kulturkampf and theorists of
pluralism at the start of the twentieth century, such as G.D.H. Cole and Harold
Laski. See Schmitt, 1999a: 197.
5 See Bendersky’s review of Schmitt’s wartime diaries (Bendersky, 2009: 171–191).
6 Although this is the English title in Ellen Kennedy’s translation, Balakrishnan
notes that the more precise translation would render it ‘The Intellectual and
Historical Condition of Contemporary Parliamentarism’ (2000: 278 n2).
7 The SA (Sturmabteilung), the brown-shirted Storm Troopers led by Ernst Röhm,
while having been fundamental to the rise of Hitler to power, after the Nazi regime
was established began, in his view, to create several problems for his leadership.
Many members of this corps were of working-class origin and were fanatic believ-
ers in the socialist values incorporated by the original idea of National Socialism,
something that began to worry the big industry representatives willing to support
Hitler’s regime and the preparation for war. In general, many ordinary citizens
resented and felt threatened by the Storm Troopers, who were known for their ruth-
less, and often public, violence. Hitler therefore decided that the SA were potentially
a menace to his political future and the future of Nazi Germany as a whole.
8 The first edition was published before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed on
23 August 1939. This treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet
Union allowed for German expansion in Eastern Europe and the subsequent
additions made to later editions of Schmitt’s text reflect these developments.
9 This text has recently appeared in English, translated by Timothy Nunan. See
Schmitt, 2011d.
10 This case for Schmitt as a ‘classic’ was most forcefully defended in West Germany
by conservatives such as Bernhard Willms and Günther Maschke, but also inad-
vertently by his critic Heinrich Meier.
11 Indeed it is tempting to read Schmitt’s reflections on the historically ‘concrete’
‘taboo’ in Hamlet and Hecuba as a reflection on his own post-war status. See
Schmitt, 2009.
12 The manner in which Schmitt sought to weave influence over the post-war land-
scape of European thought is the subject of Müller’s book, which carries out a rig-
orous labour of excavating the often concealed webs of influence Schmitt
constructed. See Müller, 2003, particularly Introduction and Part 2.
13 See Herf, 1986, particularly Chapter 1 on the ‘paradox of reactionary modernism’
and Chapter 5 on Schmitt.
40 Writing Carl Schmitt
14 Although Mohler’s characterization was originally designed to be exculpatory, it
was later employed polemically against Schmitt by the American critic Richard
Wolin in a 1992 article. See Wolin, 1992.
15 Jünger was under suspicion of the Gestapo from the early 1930s and was banned
from writing after 1938. Spengler was openly critical of the Nazi’s biological
ideology and quarrelled publicly with Alfred Rosenberg.
16 This argument appears in various guises, for example in the work of Mouffe
(2005a) and Freund (1995), but is perhaps most forcefully and consistently made
by Schwab (1989, 2008) and Bendersky (1983).
17 Waldemar Gurian, Schmitt’s former friend exiled in Switzerland, devoted an arti-
cle to Schmitt after his SS condemnation from Swiss exile entitled ‘On the Path to
Emigration or the Concentration Camp’ (see Strong, 2008: xx–xxi).
18 See the Afterword in Gross, 2007. It is interesting to contrast the quotes that Gross
picks out from the diaries with the rather more ‘white-washed’ insights offered to
Anglophone readers in Joseph Bendersky’s 2009 review in Telos (2009). Bendersky
stresses the contacts between Schmitt and Jewish friends such as Fritze and Georg
Eisler and uses these, in a strategy familiar to Gross, to present Schmitt as a phi-
losemite. Gross by contrast picks out those elements where Schmitt refers to Jewish
people as ‘bugs and vermin’, ‘sneaks’, ‘a dangerous rabble’, ‘repulsive’, ‘lovely little
apes’ and so on. See Gross, 2007: 235.
19 As Adam Sitze argues, following Carlo Galli, the task is not ‘to “quarantine”
Schmitt’s Nazism between 1933 and 1936 in order to free the rest of his thought
for “use”. Nor, is it to follow a “deeply ambivalent logic of taboo, to treat the
whole of Schmittian thought as if it were tainted, as though Schmitt’s anti-
Semitism were … akin to a contagious and communicable disease, an incurable
illness” against which a total immunization is needed.’ Rather, ‘it is to understand
Schmitt’s Nazism as the extreme actualization of a potential for regression and
domination that is internal not external to Schmittian thought, but also, as Hor-
kheimer and Adorno argued, the Enlightenment itself ’ although a vigilance to
these tendencies within the project of Enlightenment should not be mistaken for a
dismissal. See Sitze, 2010, xxviii.
20 To a degree, the question of how to read Schmitt in relation to his anti-Semitism
now turns on how Gross’ book is read.
21 This is the subject of Schmitt’s 1938 book The Leviathan. Schmitt argues that the
modern secular state, as conceived by his sometime hero Thomas Hobbes, was
fatally flawed from its inception by a division between public order and private
conscience that allowed order to be undermined. However, he singles out the Jews
as the greatest culprits in the process of unravelling the state.
2 The return of Carl Schmitt

Der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt.

(The enemy is our own question in form)
Carl Schmitt, 1950

[I remember] the deathbed scene of a nineteenth century potentate. Asked by

his spiritual adviser: ‘Do you forgive your enemies?’ he answered with a clear
conscience: ‘I have no enemies, I have killed them all.’
Carl Schmitt, 1978

Why Schmitt now? A reactionary’s renaissance

Carl Schmitt has been referred to as ‘the most controversial German legal
and political thinker of the twentieth century’ and his name continues to elicit
strong reactions wherever it appears (Schwab, 2005: xxxvii). As Schmitt
scholar William Hooker recently noted, ‘it is hard to think of another intel-
lectual figure who provokes quite such polarized views’ (Hooker, 2009: 2). It
is of course not surprising that Schmitt provokes such deeply divided respon-
ses, given that he was not only one of twentieth century Germany’s foremost
legal and political thinkers, but was deeply complicit with the Nazi state, as
we discussed in the last chapter. Despite this controversial political associa-
tion, ‘it might not be an overstatement to say’ as Jan-Werner Müller has
argued, ‘that no twentieth-century thinker has had a more diverse range of
readers’ (2003: 1). His work has indeed attracted comment from a startling
range of readers from different national contexts, theoretical perspectives and
opposing ends of the political spectrum since the 1920s, and continues to do
so. Indeed, reflecting on his historical position whilst in captivity in Nurem-
burg in 1945, Schmitt wrote that ‘through it all I have passed, and through me
it all has passed’ (1987a: 130). Whilst this statement is typical of the world-
historical vanity coursing through his later work, it nonetheless contains a
germ of truth. His life and work can, to some extent, serve as a sort of his-
torical hub at the centre of Europe’s dark twentieth century through which
various lineages of modern political thought and their contemporary
42 The return of Carl Schmitt
trajectories pass and intersect. As mentioned in the Introduction, he has in
fact had a profound influence on political thought not only in his native
Germany since the 1920s, but at various points on post-war developments in
a number of European countries, notably in Italy and, to a lesser extent,
France, Portugal and Spain (see Müller, 2003); as well as a number of other
contexts more recently, for example, Russia (see Ingram, 2001), its neighbour
Finland (see Luoma-Aho, 2007; Ojakangas, 2006; Prozorov, 2007), Korea
(see for example Jang, 2010), and China (see Lilla, 2010; Zheng, 2012) in
addition to his impact in the Anglophone world.1
One upshot of this wide reception is that the secondary literature on
Schmitt’s life and work amounts to a vast and unwieldy mass scattered across
many languages. Hence, attempting to make an assessment of it is a daunting
task. As Müller has noted, ‘the sheer volume of [Schmitt’s] writings and
writings about him’ can create a ‘cauchemar de richesses’ leaving the reader
overwhelmed (2003: 7). Providing a comprehensive overview of such a volu-
minous body of secondary literature is beyond the scope of this book. In this
chapter, our analysis is therefore focused on Schmitt’s ‘revival’ in Anglophone
scholarship since the 1990s and principally on its acceleration during the first
decade of the new century in order to better situate our own study. This pro-
ject is nonetheless undertaken with a critical awareness of how Anglophone
debates have crucially been shaped by waves of translations, of both Schmitt’s
work and the critical secondary literature, from a variety of European con-
texts. The present analysis is thus conducted bearing in mind the different
national and historical contexts from which the texts under examination
originate and the timing of their subsequent translation.
Despite his deep and enduring influence on twentieth century European
political thought Schmitt only emerged as a subject of Anglophone scholar-
ship in recent decades. Interest in his work took off in the 1980s with the
translation of key texts such as The Concept of the Political (1976), Political
Theology (1985), Political Romanticism (1986) and The Crisis of Parliamentary
Democracy (1988), the appearance of the first biography of Schmitt in Eng-
lish, Joseph Bendersky’s Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (1983), and the
1989 re-issue of the first English-language book addressing his work, George
Schwab’s The Challenge of the Exception (originally published in 1970).2
Schmitt’s emergence as the subject of scholarly debate was sealed with the
release of two special issues devoted to Schmitt in the New York based journal
Telos in 1987, a periodical that is so closely tied to his reception in English and
that has so consistently championed his work that it might almost be considered
a de facto home for Schmitt’s spirit in the English language today.3
Nonetheless, throughout the 1980s Schmitt remained a rather marginal
figure in the English speaking academy, his work subject only to the largely
apologetic welcome it received from Bendersky, Schwab and the former edi-
tors of Telos. Since the 1990s, however, Schmitt’s reception has not only
become more nuanced but has also been expanding, becoming the object of a
sprawling critical commentary, particularly over the last decade when interest
 The return of Carl Schmitt 43
in his work has been consolidated across a number of disciplines. Indeed, this
body of literature is still rapidly growing; in the last five years alone eleven
monographs dedicated to Schmitt have appeared (Croce and Salvatore, 2012;
de Benoist, 2013; Hooker, 2009; Kahn, 2012; Kalyvas, 2009; Marder, 2010;
Salter, 2012; Shapiro, 2010; Slomp, 2009; Taubes, 2013; Tralau, 2010), in
addition to two edited collections of critical essays (Legg, 2011a; Wilson,
2012), a newly translated biography by Reinhardt Mehring (2014), a number
of his own works previously unavailable in English translation (Schmitt, 2009,
2011a–2011e, 2014), and a plethora of academic papers across a number of
disciplines.4
Although this startling growth of interest in Schmitt’s work within the
Anglophone social sciences and humanities in recent years has often been
referred to as a ‘revival’, this is something of a misnomer given that Schmitt’s
work was relatively little known to Anglophone audiences before. Hence, in
the context of English-language scholarship, the distinction between Schmitt’s
initial reception and a more recent ‘revival’ rests on rather slender ground.
The idea of a ‘revival’ is, rather, invoked by more hostile critics for rhetorical effect,
indicating an intellectual and moral distaste for what they consider the res-
urrection of a corpus better left buried in Nazi disgrace (see for example
Caldwell, 1997; Chandler, 2008; Minca and Rowan, 2014). Nonetheless, the
scope and intensity of the attention that his work has received during the last
two decades does mark a dramatic shift in his status in Anglophone academic
debates, having become a standard reference in a number of disciplines and
commonly regarded as ‘classic’ in the canon of modern political thought.
This is not to suggest that his thought has passed smoothly into the realm of
academic respectability since it indeed remains subject to persistent controversy
and is the object of vigorously contested debate, frequently if somewhat
ironically over the very utility of engaging it.5
How then can we account for the growing reputation Schmitt has enjoyed
over the last two decades despite the fact that his work is dogged by con-
troversy? The answer lies, we argue, in the apparent topicality of his concerns
to historical developments during this period (see for example: Agamben,
2004; Jameson, 2005; Mouffe, 2005a). His writings have in fact frequently
been heralded as offering prescient insights into the present condition of
global politics by a wide array of commentators from different perspectives,
and indeed this supposed relevance has driven the increasing number of
translations of his work over the last decade, publications which, in turn,
prompted new commentaries and engagements (see particularly: Ulmen,
2003, 2007a). Broadly speaking, Schmitt’s Anglophone reception over the last
twenty years can be best understood if split into two broad decade-long
phases, each defined by a set of conceptual concerns loosely corresponding to
the political context of the two periods. During the 1990s, studies of his work
largely focused on the critique of liberalism found in his Weimar-era writings,
reflecting issues that arose in the initial post-Cold War period: the fate of
democracy in an increasingly consensual political context and the unresolved
44 The return of Carl Schmitt
tensions in liberal constitutional thought. In the decade that followed,
Schmitt’s work on global order from the 1930s to the 1960s increasingly became
the focus of critical analyses. This shift of emphasis reflected the growing
concerns around the nature of world ordering, terrorist violence and huma-
nitarian intervention that came to prominence in the wake of the September
11, 2001 attacks and the US-led ‘war on terror’ that followed.
While to some degree the concerns of each phase overlapped with the other,
we believe the arc of Schmitt’s Anglophone revival to broadly conform to this
shift of focus. That said, we do not assume a conception of historical devel-
opment defined by clean breaks as opposed to the conflictual interaction of
multiple processes, and hence in no way suppose that the 1990s were entirely
determined by the end of the Cold War, nor the last decade by the implica-
tions of 9/11. However, we highlight these events because they decisively
shaped the political and intellectual preoccupations of the subsequent periods
and the dominant discursive frameworks into which Schmitt’s thought was
received and the political debates in which it was considered relevant.

A spectre is haunting liberalism

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991 represented a dramatic opening for the last decade of the twentieth
century. For many commentators in the West these momentous events
marked not only the end of the Cold War, but signalled the historic triumph
of liberal capitalism and the dawn of a new world order. The American poli-
tical scientist Francis Fukuyama (1992) famously trumpeted the ‘end of history’,
arguing that liberal capitalist democracy had shown itself as the answer to the
fundamental questions of human society. The disintegration of the Soviet system
was regarded in such analyses to have proven capitalism to be the superior path to
economic prosperity, and liberal democracy to be the political system able to
satisfy the human desire for self-determination. Fukuyama’s claims may have
been blatantly hyperbolic but the early post-Cold War years seemed to be
vindicating Margaret Thatcher’s famous assertion that there was ‘no alternative’
to capitalism. By the early 1990s, liberal democratic systems were replicated
across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states, and the so-called
‘Washington Consensus’ embedded market-orientated economic policy in the
heart of a newly ‘globalized’ world. Consensus in the economic sphere was to
be coupled with a new vision of international order based upon a muscular,
global humanitarianism.6 With the eclipse of the Cold War scenarios, the
defining political conflicts of the twentieth century could be dispensed with
and a putatively ‘new world order’ founded. Peaceful co-existence would be
guided by the rational principles and humanitarian ethics enshrined in inter-
national institutions and guaranteed by the globe-spanning military might of
the United States. Any remaining conflict in the world would now be merely
the result of atavistic irrationality or moral failures that could be policed by
international forces.
 The return of Carl Schmitt 45
It might appear counter-intuitive that at the moment of liberalism’s appar-
ent triumph, one of its fiercest opponents would gain such prominence.
However, Schmitt’s work arguably gained traction in Anglophone debates in
the 1990s precisely because of liberalism’s assuredness rather than despite of
it, being considered by some to provide a clear diagnosis of the dangers that
accompanied a self-satisfied hegemonic liberalism.7 Thus, two major strands
of engagement emerged in the 1990s, both of which drew on Schmitt pri-
marily as a critic of liberalism. On the one hand, those who feared that lib-
eralism would bask in apparent victory, assuming its fundamental questions
had been answered, drew on Schmitt as a ferocious anti-liberal opponent, in
order to shake liberal thought out of complacency. On the other hand, those
who sensed danger in an increasingly narrow consensus based on liberal
hegemony in domestic and international politics drew on Schmitt as a bat-
tering ram to escape its restrictions and reaffirm the possibility of an alter-
native politics beyond its banks. In both instances Schmitt was approached as
a perceptive analyst of liberalism’s ailments, whose solutions were, at best,
inadequate and, at worst, catastrophic. Hence, he was to be read against the
grain, or as Chantal Mouffe put it, Schmitt read ‘with and against Schmitt’
(Mouffe, 1996: 6).8 But the degree to which these engagements were conducted
‘with’ and ‘against’ differed considerably.

Schmitt as ‘diagnostician’ of liberalism: legal positivism in the United States

During the course of the 1990s the trenchant critique of liberal constitutionalism
found in Schmitt’s Weimar-era work became a key reference point for a
number of thinkers in the United States attempting to strengthen liberal
political theory.9 Schmitt had developed his critique of the Weimar Republic’s
liberal Constitution with the view to replacing it, believing that an author-
itarian presidential regime could provide a decisive source of political stability
to cope with the volatile political context of early twentieth century Germany.
Despite Schmitt’s authoritarian anti-liberalism eventually leading him to dis-
astrously identify the National Socialist regime as a potential source of legit-
imate order, liberal critics such as David Dyzenhaus, John P. McCormick and
William Scheuerman nonetheless suggested that, if selectively engaged,
Schmitt’s bracing critique of liberalism could be used to strengthen it. Schmitt,
it was argued, had posed a series of challenging questions to persistent problems
in the liberal rule of law that it would be foolish to disregard on the basis of
his complicity with Nazism. Indeed, it was claimed that rather than pose a
threat to liberalism, Schmitt, as one its most intellectually agile opponents,
could provide insights needed to protect its values and institutions. Regarded
by some as ‘an adversary of remarkable intellectual quality’, Schmitt was
granted the status of an intellectually respected, if morally loathed, devil’s
advocate against which liberalism could test itself (Mouffe, 1999: 1).10 In a rather
perverse twist, his renowned fierce anti-liberalism was presented as an almost
indispensable foil for honing liberal thought.11 As William Scheuerman wrote,
46 The return of Carl Schmitt
‘if we are to preserve and strengthen the rule of law, we are intellectually and
politically obliged to provide an answer to Schmitt’s attack on it’ (1999: 2).
Arguably, even from beyond the grave, Schmitt maintained his remarkable
talent for making intellectual champions of his political enemies.
Although Schmitt had developed his critique of liberalism in a very differ-
ent political and historical context, his work has been considered by these
readers as capable of speaking ‘directly to some of the great dilemmas of our
times’ (ibid.: 254). The problems Schmitt identified in liberal con-
stitutionalism in the Weimar era therefore found an important echo in the
1990s, in part because they raised fundamental structural questions concern-
ing liberalism’s ‘first principles’. Furthermore, a triumphant liberalism reluc-
tant to recognize its own antinomies intensified such historical reverberations.
As the American critic Ronald Beiner argued, it does not ‘seem that the
foundations of liberal politics are so secure, theoretically or politically, that
reflection at the level of first principles has been rendered pointless’, regardless
of whether the crises facing liberalism in the United States in the 1990s were
not as intense as those of the Weimar Republic (1998: vii). According to
Beiner, liberal thinkers such as Dyzenhaus turned to Schmitt because they
knew that ‘philosophically, liberal principles have not (yet) established an
unchallenged claim to normative authority’ (ibid.: ix).
As a consequence of this renewed interest, two of the most vexing questions
that had occupied Schmitt during the Weimar years returned to the heart of
debates within liberal legal and political thought in the 1990s. William
Scheuerman for example has argued that many of the initial analyses of
Schmitt’s work in English had missed the vital question of the role that legal
indeterminacy played in his thought (1999: 254). This was an issue that was
central, Scheuerman noted, to debates in liberal legal thought between legal
positivists and their critics in the 1980s and 1990s, and gave Schmitt a sense
of prescience. On the one hand, for Scheuerman, Schmitt represented the
most consistently challenging voice against the belief that a formal system of
norms could provide an adequate basis for legal determination. If the pro-
blem of legal indeterminacy or, more specifically, the role that personal decision-
making played in a liberal Constitution, remained, then Schmitt’s work
continued to illustrate unsolved problems inherent to contemporary liberal-
ism, and indeed, his arguments about the personal nature of sovereign power
continued to profoundly trouble the rigid formalism of the legal positivism
then dominant in constitutional law in the United States.12 On the other
hand, Schmitt’s example clearly indicated that anti-formalist critiques of the
liberal rule of law from within liberal thought and ‘critical legal studies’
needed to take into full consideration the possibility that a greater degree of
indeterminacy could also play into more authoritarian, and not only more
progressive, solutions to persistent legal problems – the question of ‘who
decides’ remaining a thorn in the field of a progressive jurisprudence that
sought to welcome contingency and pluralism into the analysis of legal
systems.
 The return of Carl Schmitt 47
The second question, which David Dyzenhaus’ work seized upon, was the
problem of neutrality within the liberal rule of law. Schmitt had claimed in
the 1920s and early 1930s that the Weimar Constitution and the parliamen-
tary system failed to address the fundamental question of political legitimacy
and instead retreated into the security of a presumed ‘neutral’ legality.
Schmitt, as Dyzenhaus noted, had wanted to highlight ‘the tension …
between a neutrality so neutral that anything goes and a neutrality which is a
shame because in effect it privileges a partial liberal understanding of the
good’ (1998a: 15). Such neutrality left liberalism unable to defend itself
against internal or external threats, as it could not define the substantial basis
of its own legitimacy; at the same time, it provided a legal disguise for the
pursuit of particular interests that undermined democratic rule. Hence, for
Dyzenhaus, Schmitt’s critique of legalistic neutrality still represented an ana-
lytical tool for unpacking the political deficit at the heart of legal positivism
and, in particular, the ‘political liberalism’ proposed by John Rawls, so popular
in political and legal studies in the US during the 1990s.
Both questions concern the political outside of law, or rather the political
foundations of the juridical system, the analysis of which Schmitt had placed
at the centre of his work. By taking the political foundations of law as the
starting point for his analysis, Schmitt, according to Dyzenhaus, ‘accurately
identified some difficulties liberalism encounters in dealing with important
aspects of contemporary society’ (ibid.: 17). But if some advocates of liberal-
ism believed that ‘seeing what our liberal world looks like from an illiberal
point of view’ might ‘do liberal politics some good’, this was not because
Schmitt offered answers to the problems he identified (Beiner, 1998: ix).
Dyzenhaus argued that Schmitt’s ‘inability to provide alternatives, testifies to
the paucity of his own positive thought, even … to its inherent dangers’.13
Scheuerman likewise agreed that although ‘Schmitt diagnosed serious pro-
blems within existing liberal democracy … at each juncture his own theore-
tical responses exacerbated the problems at hand’ (1999: 25). Thus, whilst
these liberal thinkers sought to ‘honestly [acknowledge] the diagnostic merits
of [Schmitt’s] political and legal theory’, he remained an intellectual opponent
liberalism had to prove able to think ‘against’ rather than ‘with’ (ibid.: 254).

Driving out the devil with Beelzebub: Left Schmittians in the post-political age14
The first post-Cold War decade was a difficult time for the Left in Europe and
North America. It had in fact lost some of its political bearings in the wake
of ‘really existing socialism’, the steady rise of neoliberal hegemony since the
late 1970s and the gradual erosion of traditional class identities and their
industrial basis (for example, see Anderson, 2009; Harvey, 2007). To some
belonging to this intellectually disorientated and politically defeated Left,
Schmitt’s thought appeared as a potential source of conceptual reinvigora-
tion. It may have been a case of desperate times calling for desperate mea-
sures, but his popularity on the Left is one of the most intriguing aspects of
48 The return of Carl Schmitt
his Anglophone reception.15 This surge of interest was arguably a product of
both an internal intellectual crisis of the ‘New Left’ and the broader (global)
crisis of Left politics in a context in which the horizons of political possibility
appeared to have been thoroughly occupied by liberalism.
The British political theorist Mark Neocleous suggested in 1996 that,
‘underlying the rehabilitation of Schmitt’ were ‘the tensions within Marxist
political thought’ (1996a: 13). Marxism – Neocleous argued – was allegedly
failing to take ‘the political’ seriously and had hence fallen into an unprece-
dented crisis. In the context of this presumed political deficit in Marxist
theory, Schmitt was presented ‘as one way of thinking ourselves out of the
theoretical crisis’ (ibid.). ‘The crisis’, Neocleous bitterly remarked, had
‘reached a point where Fascists are being used as the basis for a revitalized
and rejuvenated socialist political theory’ (ibid.).16 Arguably then the appeal
to Schmitt as a source of intellectual renewal always carried with it a hint of
despair directly associated to the declining political fortunes of the Left.17
Müller noted that the appeal to Schmitt ‘showed to what extent the Left had
run out of conceptual resources to rally against an apparently triumphant
liberalism’ (2003: 223). The Left, Müller argued, ‘simply lacked the theore-
tical language for an alternative model of social reality’ and retreated to a
position of anti-liberal critique.
Despite the criticism of those who believed that the Left should pick its
friends more wisely, Schmitt’s popularity rose rapidly over the course of the
decade. He became a ‘strange substitute for a discredited Marxism of old’, a
thinker who could provide a point of specifically political orientation in the
wake of economic defeat and offer a framework for imagining new forms of
Leftist political identity in lieu of class antagonisms (Hooker, 2009: 211).
Hence, during the 1990s Schmitt’s thought became strongly identified with so-
called ‘post-Marxist’ thinkers, such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and
the early work of Slavoj Žižek, who sought to rethink radical Left politics in a
world that no longer corresponded to the supposed binaries of Marxist class
antagonisms, but was characterized by an ever greater pluralization of
identities and new social movements (see Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Žižek,
1999). Schmitt was thus cast as a thinker who could help the Left maintain
political struggle after its foundation in class identities had dissolved. In a
sense, Schmitt’s conceptualization of ‘the political’, understood as an antag-
onistic dynamic, quasi-autonomous from other social spheres, paradoxically
provided the ‘post-Marxist’ Left with a useful tool to rethink the possibilities
for political struggle beyond the determinations of the economic sphere.18
Perhaps more than anything else Schmitt’s work seemed to establish that
there was the possibility of an alternative. As argued by the American critic
William Rasch the Left identified in Schmitt a way of ‘establishing the logical
possibility of legitimate political opposition’ (Rasch, 2004: 13). By absorbing
a theory of inherently conflictual social relations from his work, the Left
confirmed that politics could neither be stably hegemonized nor overcome
altogether. He provided a firm rebuttal to liberalism’s most utopian advocates
 The return of Carl Schmitt 49
and a sense of comfort to a Left on the back foot in the wake of the Cold
War. Indeed, the Leftist critic Gopal Balakrishnan tellingly closed his bio-
graphy with the claim that ‘lurking behind the contemporary interest in Carl
Schmitt is the sense that this present cannot last forever’ (Balakrishnan, 2000:
268).19
For liberal thinkers such as Fukuyama, the melting of the Cold War ice
caps had revealed a promised land of liberal utopianism. It was to be a
peaceful land of economic plenty run on the basis of rational consensus where
the aspirations of every individual could be recognized and old conflicts
assigned to history. To thinkers on the Left, such as Chantal Mouffe and
Slavoj Žižek, the belief in this liberal idyll was laying the foundations for what
they referred to as an ‘age of post-politics’ (see Mouffe, 2005a; Žižek, 1999).20
According to these thinkers, a hegemonic liberalism had radically repressed
the antagonistic dimension of social relations in order to establish a universal
consensus on an increasingly narrow set of terms. The concept of ‘the poli-
tical’ was understood, by Mouffe, Rasch, Žižek and other Left thinkers, as an
ontological category that concerned the fundamental structure of politics (see,
for example, Mouffe, 2005a; Rasch, 2004; Žižek, 2000).21 As such, political
antagonism was taken to be a constitutive element of social relations and
could neither be eliminated nor overcome. Schmitt’s ‘post-Marxist’ readers
argued that by claiming to represent the final, most rational and ethical form
of social organization, liberalism sought to deny the constitutive antagonism
of all social relations. In this reading, the specificity of liberal hegemony lay in
its denial of politics as such, or rather, following Schmitt’s critique, in the
displacement of politics into the spheres of economics and ethics. Any genu-
inely political difference was thus excluded in principle and opponents of the
universal liberal consensus could be branded as irrational or immoral, or at
least bad for business, and de facto marginalized from the sphere of politics.
By examining the post-Cold War world through the lens of the political, it was
possible, Mouffe suggested, to see ‘how much the process of neutralization
and depoliticization, already noted by Schmitt, has progressed’ (1999: 2).
Hence, for these post-Marxist interpreters of Schmitt, the liberal hegemony
of the 1990s enforced a repressive ‘post-political’ consensus that fundamen-
tally denied political difference and dispensed altogether with the debate over
alternative visions of society. In this context, Žižek argued, ‘reference to
Schmitt is crucial in detecting the deadlocks of post-political liberal tolerance’
(1999: 3). The critics of ‘post-politics’ thus followed Schmitt’s lead in locating
the source of liberalism’s problems in the repression of the political. Yet, as a
constitutive feature of social relations, political difference would not vanish
simply because it was denied: ‘To deny antagonisms in theory … does not
make them disappear’ as Mouffe warned (1999: 3). The political would
therefore return to haunt liberalism in the form of, potentially very illiberal,
antagonisms. It was suggested that by denying legitimate channels for the
expression of political differences inside the political system, antagonism was
allowed to grow more extreme at the margins. By excluding ‘the political
50 The return of Carl Schmitt
proper’, ‘post-politics’ in fact prompted the return of a violent ‘ultra-politics’
based upon absolute categories of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, with the friend–enemy
relations inherent to the political returning in more intense and destabilizing
forms (Žižek, 1999: 29–31).
Again, for Mouffe and Žižek, this dialectic of exclusion and intensification
explained a number of political phenomena that disturbed the supposed lib-
eral utopia of the 1990s. Mouffe, for example, claimed that the rise of Right
wing populist movements in Europe and the United States, and the emer-
gence of the global terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda, were, at least in
part, the product of the depoliticization of a liberal consensus that denied the
existence of legitimate political difference (see Mouffe, 2005a: Chapter 4;
Rasch, 2003; Žižek, 2002). Directly echoing Schmitt’s critiques of interna-
tional law from the 1930s, Mouffe mantained that political differences would
‘continue to manifest themselves but with the proviso that now they can be
perceived only as eruptions of the “irrational” by those liberals who have
denied their existence’ (1999: 3). Likewise, Žižek proclaimed that ‘excessive’ ethnic
or religious fundamentalist violence was the necessary flip side of the by now
widespread ‘depoliticized “humanitarian” operations’, each resulting from the
denial of political difference (1999: 31).

Different differences: the post-foundational Left and the New Right

Although both Mouffe and Žižek subscribed to the Schmittian line that the
dangerous flip side of liberal depoliticization was the escalation of conflict, it
is precisely this concern with an ontological reading of the relationship
between politics and difference that allows their writings to be identified with
the broader trajectory of Schmitt’s reception in ‘post-foundational’ political
thought in Europe.22 The manner in which Schmitt’s work has been taken up
by post-foundational political thinkers has had a profound impact on his recent
Anglophone academic reception, an influence that has been exercised not only
through direct engagements with Schmitt’s thought in a number of post-
foundational debates, but also indirectly through the role that his concept of
the political has played in shaping post-foundational political thought more
widely. The project underlying this book does not allow for a full genealogical
engagement with post-foundational thought, nor with Schmitt’s influence
within it, although this would certainly make a welcome study. It is nonetheless
helpful to briefly delineate the basic contours of this relationship, given the
influence this area of thought has had on the recent reception of his work.23
Post-foundational political thought as it has developed largely in France
since the 1960s has been shaped by the convergence of two factors. On the
one hand, the attempt to rethink the possibilities for emancipatory politics in
the wake of the radical Left’s defeat in 1968; on the other, French philoso-
phy’s ongoing struggle with the legacy of Heideggerian phenomenology. Post-
foundational work is understood by some as having extended Heidegger’s
critique of metaphysics to the field of political thought in order to rethink the
 The return of Carl Schmitt 51
ontological presuppositions of traditional political concepts (see Marchart,
2007: particularly Chapter 1). The reception of Schmitt among the French
‘Left Heideggerians’, or at least those on the Left working in the shadow of
Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, should be understood against the
backdrop of this intellectual and political context (ibid.).
The key concept that post-foundational thought has drawn from Schmitt’s
work is the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. This distinction
was introduced to the French Left intellectual context as early as 1957 by
Paul Ricoeur in his article ‘The Political Paradox’ (1992), but was later
developed by Claude Lefort in his influential 1988 book Democracy and
Political Theory. The key move was to render this distinction between politics
and the political in ontological terms, mapping it against Heidegger’s so-
called ‘ontological difference’. ‘The political’ was understood to refer to the
ontological conditions of possibility for politics, while politics referred to the
specific contingent instantiations of the political, the distinction mapped
against the difference between beings and Being.24 This distinction has been
crucial to Schmitt’s recent Anglophone reception on the Left, in particular,
again, in the work of Mouffe (2005a) and Žižek (2000) (see also Arditi, 2008;
Marder, 2010).25 The concept of the political has held appeal as it pointed to
the contingent nature of political order, and thus the possibility for new, albeit
contingent, articulations of political formations on these unstable foundations.
Hence, the political provided a framework within which the post-’68 liberal
order could be understood as not only historically, but also ontologically
contingent and a Left alternative possible. Perversely then, Schmitt might be
considered something of a founding father of post-foundational thought.
It is also important here to acknowledge the influence of the engagement
with Schmitt in a number of works by the late French philosopher Jacques
Derrida. There is no need to recount the deep impact this towering figure of
late twentieth century “theory” has had on the Anglophone social sciences
and humanities since the 1970s. His engagement with Schmitt was thus a
significant step in the reappraisal of the latter’s work in the Anglophone
academy, particularly in the United States. Derrida’s later writings, from the
1990s until his death in 2004, were characterized by a much remarked-upon
‘turn’ to ethical and political themes (see Mitchell and Davidson, 2007), and
direct and indirect reference to Schmitt’s concepts of the political and sover-
eignty became central to this last phase of his work. The most explicit
engagement came in The Force of Law (1990) and The Politics of Friendship
(1995), two texts that significantly shaped the reception of Schmitt’s work over
the last two decades.26 Derrida rather respectfully depicted Schmitt as a
‘besieged watchman … more attuned than many others to the fragility and
“deconstructible” precariousness of structures, borders, axioms that he wished
to protect, restore and “conserve” at all costs’ (Derrida, 1997: 107 n4). This
fearful sensitivity to the tenuous nature of political order made Schmitt, in
Derrida’s eyes, a uniquely lucid critic of political foundations. This identifi-
cation of Schmitt as something like a post-foundational thinker avant la lettre
52 The return of Carl Schmitt
is not unique to Derrida, but the intellectual high regard and the relatively
wide readership Derrida enjoyed in many European languages, and of course
French and English, arguably helped win Schmitt a new audience, if not quite
a newfound respectability.27
If rendering Schmitt’s distinction between politics and the political in
ontological terms has made him a key reference point for post-foundational
thinkers of the French New Left, a very different reading of the relationship
between difference and politics in his thought has made him an intellectual
hero of the European New Right. This chain of influence has been less
remarked upon within English language debates, likely because thinkers of
the European New Right tend to have less impact on the Anglophone academy
than those affiliated to the European New Left. Whilst writers such as Jac-
ques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek have enjoyed public pro-
minence in Anglophone intellectual circles, the names of Schmitt-inspired
scholars of the European New Right, such as the late Italian political philo-
sopher Gianfranco Miglio and Alain de Benoist remain relatively obscure to
many. Schmitt’s thought has mostly been of interest to the New Right as an
intellectual resource for asserting the importance of particular cultural iden-
tities in underpinning political order, in contrast to a supposedly ‘weak’ lib-
eral multicultural pluralism. This has taken different forms in the different
national and historical contexts, from the Italian federalism of Miglio to the
assertion of European cultural superiority by de Benoist, the don of the
French Nouvelle Droit.28 For example, Miglio was not only instrumental in
re-introducing Schmitt’s thought to Italian audiences in the 1970s, but he was
also elected to the Italian Senate as an independent for Umberto Bossi’s anti-
immigrant Northern League, a party whose radical federalist ideology he
helped to shape. At the same time, de Benoist has been an influential figure in
French public life for several decades, publishing widely and running a think
tank that supports an ‘ethnopluralism’ where discrete ethnic cultures develop
distinct from each other, arguing that Europe must connect with its Pagan
roots and critical of Islamic immigration to France. Although de Benoist has
distanced himself from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racist party politics, by claiming
a ‘metapolitical’ stance, he holds sway with many on France’s far Right
despite the fact that his thought is shot through with Fascist elements. In 2013
he published the e-book Carl Schmitt Today: Terrorism, Just War and the
State of Emergency with Arktos Media, an English publishing house with
links to the European extreme Right.
This appropriation of Schmitt’s work seems to be markedly at odds with his
recent reception on the Left, but there have nonetheless been some unex-
pected convergences. As noted above, the New York-based journal and pub-
lishing house Telos has been instrumental in crafting Schmitt’s Anglophone
reception since the 1980s, and although originally established as a vehicle for
New Left thought in the United States, it has made a virtue of introducing
taboo figures from the European Right to its pages, not only Schmitt and
Ernst Jünger (whose work they have begun to translate at pace), but also
 The return of Carl Schmitt 53
those associated with the contemporary European New Right, including de
Benoist and Miglio.29 This has been reflected in the change of orientation of
the editorial board. The late chief editor Paul Piccone, a major proponent of
Schmitt’s thought, has for example moved towards a strange ideological
position characterized by a mix of populism, communitarianism and feder-
alism pitting self-determined communities against a supposedly ‘technocratic’
and ‘managerial’ liberal state.30 More recently de Benoist has appeared in an
edited volume of articles dedicated to Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth
alongside thinkers associated with Left-leaning International Relations and
political theory scholars, including Chantal Mouffe and Danilo Zolo (see de
Benoist, 2007). Indeed, the similarity of the many Schmitt-inspired positions
held by figures from opposite ends of the political spectrum, such as de
Benoist and Mouffe, should be a cause of some concern for those seeking to
make use of Schmitt’s work in a radical Left politics (see Rowan, 2011). Both
fundamentally appeal to the powerful constitutive conception of political dif-
ference in Schmitt’s work, even if Mouffe’s understanding is ‘anti-essentialist’
in contrast to that of de Benoist. Jan-Werner Müller has argued that the
peculiar intellectual bedfellows that have been made through a shared interest
in Carl Schmitt’s work is one of the striking aspects of his reception in post-
war Europe, and this has been no less the case in Anglophone academia since
the early 1990s, something that bears witness to the scope and importance of
Schmitt’s work, but also suggests the need for cautious critical assessment of
the secondary literature and the fundamental questions raised, questions that
perhaps test the binary between Left and Right.

A new ‘spatial’ Schmitt

The exception as norm: Carl Schmitt in the post-9/11 world

If the initial phase of Schmitt’s Anglophone reception in the 1990s focused, as
noted above, on the critique of liberal constitutionalism found in his Weimar
writings, a whole new crop of concerns drawn from a different group of texts
became central in the subsequent decade. During the 2000s a set of debates
emerged around Schmitt largely inspired by his later work on international
law, geopolitical order and the changing nature of warfare and imperialism in
a globalizing twentieth century world dominated by liberalism. This shift of
focus breathed new life into Schmitt’s Anglophone reception and signalled a
second, and much-expanded, phase of his ‘renaissance’. A new image of
Schmitt as a powerful critic of the hypocrisies of liberal international law and
humanitarian warfare appeared; one that appealed to critics of US foreign
policy and the ‘liberal way of war’ from across the political spectrum. Pre-
viously, these aspects of his work had received relatively little attention in
Anglophone debates, although isolated examples had appeared (see for
example Carty, 2001; Kervégan, 1999; Palaver, 1996). This is perhaps sur-
prising given the widespread discussions on military interventionism during
54 The return of Carl Schmitt
the 1990s, for example around the US intervention in Somalia in 1993, or the
NATO campaigns in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the mid-1990s and Kosovo
in 1998–1999.31 However, by the late 2000s it had become de rigueur to
approach Schmitt as a thinker who could offer insights into the nature of
warfare and international law at the start of the new century. A second factor
to note about this second phase of Schmitt’s ‘revival’ was the massive, expo-
nential growth of interest in his work in an increasing number of disciplines. If
the 1990s witnessed a ‘revival’ of interest in Schmitt, the following decade
experienced a veritable boom in ‘Schmitt studies’. Indeed, as the American
legal scholar Adam Sitze recently remarked, it appeared in the middle years
of the last decade that Schmitt was ‘well on the way to being the theorist du
jour’ (2010: lxii). Thus, in the 2000s, Schmitt’s work was not only considered
to have a new previously obscured relevance, but also won a considerably
wider audience.
This rapid growth of interest in Schmitt’s work and the shift in the focus of
his reception can be accounted for by the interaction of three principal fac-
tors. The first is the political context of his Anglophone reception: if the first
phase of Schmitt’s ‘revival’ had been shaped by the concerns of the first post-
Cold War decade, the second was forged in the wake of the attacks of Sep-
tember 11, 2001 and the US led ‘war on terror’ that followed. The post-9/11
moment raised a series of issues around sovereignty, warfare and geopolitical
ordering to which Schmitt’s work on international order was considered ger-
mane by many. However, the manner in which his work was read in relation
to the context was shaped by two concurrent developments in the literature
around Schmitt: the growing prominence in international academia of Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the translation of previously unavailable
texts of Schmitt’s into English.
Agamben’s work has indeed exercised an enormous influence on the
Anglophone reception of Schmitt during the last decade. Not only did the
Italian thinker introduce Schmitt’s concepts of sovereignty and the state of
exception to new, and perhaps wider, audiences, but he set them in productive
dialogue with the concept of biopolitics drawn from the work of Michel
Foucault. Reading Schmitt in relation to biopolitics has become one of the
dominant approaches to Agamben’s work, and has done much to influence
the sense of topicality Schmitt has been considered to have in the ‘post-9/11’
world (see, for example, Barder and Debrix, 2012; Legg and Vasudevan,
2011; Minca, 2006; Prozovov, 2012). In addition, the translation of key
Schmitt texts dealing with international law and geopolitical order in the
same period has opened works previously unavailable to Anglophone audi-
ences for the first time. The most significant book to appear has been
Schmitt’s 1950 masterwork, The Nomos of the Earth, published in English by
Telos Press in 2003. This was followed in 2007 by Schmitt’s short 1962 text
The Theory of the Partisan, by the same publisher.32 These texts have stirred
debate in a number of disciplines including, most recently, Geography, but
their deepest impact thus far has perhaps been felt in International Relations.
 The return of Carl Schmitt 55
In the section to follow we thus turn to examine how the interaction of these
factors contributed to the massive surge of interest in Schmitt as an ‘interna-
tional’ and indeed spatial thinker that has defined the second phase of his
‘revival’ during the 2000s.

New world (dis)order

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington
seemed to puncture the utopian dreams of liberalism in the 1990s. If the end
of the Cold War had for some signalled the imminent ‘end of history’, then
these horrific attacks appeared to signal its dramatic return. The attacks were
squarely aimed at the symbolic military and financial hearts of US power and
since they were carried out by al-Qaeda, a non-state group, who few in the
West had previously heard of, they appeared to scramble the co-ordinates of
world order and question the self-evidence of America’s global supremacy.
The collective shock was felt far beyond the United States and an initial sense
of shared resolve in the ‘international community’ to face the threat of global
terrorism smoothed the way for the US led NATO war in Afghanistan in
October 2001. However, by March 2003, when US and UK forces invaded
Iraq, this sense of common purpose had dissolved in a series of diplomatic
polarizations and accusations that the UK and US governments were produ-
cing trumped up cases to legitimate neo-colonial projects. Indeed, the
response of President George W. Bush’s administration to the September 11
attacks led to a highly partisan politicized context, both within the United States
and globally. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were to be just the first strikes in a
so-called global ‘war on terror’ characterized by an ongoing campaign to
eradicate any ‘terrorist’ threat to US interests anywhere in the world; a war
unlimited in spatial or temporal scope that encompassed the entire population
of the earth.33 President Bush highlighted the significance of these operations
in an address to a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001 when he
famously warned that, ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’.34
This highly provocative and divisive response to the tragic events of September
11 was replicated on the domestic front, the exceptional threat of future terror
attacks used to justify the introduction of controversial legislation curbing
civil liberties and permitting widespread surveillance, such as the USA
PATRIOT Act first passed by the US Congress a month after the attacks.
While exceptional legal measures were rolled out to respond to domestic
terror threats, military operations aimed at policing global terror networks
were launched in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the line between domestic and
international was blurred by the emergence of new subjects and new spaces
with a liminal relationship to both domestic US Law and International Law.
As part of the global ‘war on terror’, a programme of ‘extraordinary rendi-
tions’ was introduced whereby the United States Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) abducted those suspected of having links to terrorist organizations and
transported them to secret prisons for internment and interrogation without
56 The return of Carl Schmitt
charge. Likewise, those detained during combat operations in Afghanistan,
including US citizens, were deemed ‘illegal enemy combatants’ or ‘unlawful
combatants’ and transported to detention camps, including the now infamous
Camp Delta at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. These
groups were never formally charged with any specific crime faced indefinite
detention without trial and were deemed to be outside the jurisdiction of
United States courts, and denied the protection of International Law. Many
were subject to the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ introduced to CIA
and Department of Defence (DoD) operations as part of the effort to combat
‘terror’, which, many critics claimed, amounted to torture. These measures
were widely criticized for ignoring the legal protections afforded to suspects in
legal cases, the rights granted to prisoners under both US and International
Law and disrespecting the sovereignty of states from whose jurisdiction suspects
were abducted.
Whilst some of the neoconservatives occupying powerful positions in the
Bush administration saw the post-9/11 moment as a chance to shape a ‘New
World Order’ around American interests, it appeared that the ‘war on terror’ was
contributing rather to the rapid spread of a dangerous global disorder.35
Whatever degree of stability and accountability existing institutions of inter-
national law had been providing appeared to be crumbling under the force of
an American administration committed to a seemingly limitless conflict against
an amorphous and ill-defined global enemy – a process that had already led to
the invasion and occupation of two countries and the dismantling of the
domestic and international statute books. It was precisely within this context
that Carl Schmitt’s work on international law and geopolitical order emerged
as a source of what were perceived as apt insights into the changing nature of
international law, global ordering and modern warfare.
Schmitt had largely crafted this work on international law between the early
1930s and the early 1950s as a series of polemics against the crisis of state
sovereignty he identified in the creeping moralization of warfare following the
Versailles Treaty, the expanding global reach of US interventionism, and later
attempts to theorize new foundations for international law grounded upon
continental-scale political units, including a Europe dominated by the Nazi
Reich. His aim had been to hail the great success of the European state
system in limiting war and assert the sovereign power of Germany at a time
when the reigns of global power were shifting across the Atlantic. Despite
these differences in historical and political context, many found in Schmitt’s
work a conceptual framework within which to read post-9/11 global politics.
In part, this was arguably because the collapse of international order in the
early decades of the last century continued to cast a shadow at the dawn of
the new century. Jan-Werner Müller has suggested that, in this respect,
Schmitt was ‘a thinker during a time of transition – and a thinker of the
transition’ (2003: 245), a transition in which, according to International
Relations scholars Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito, ‘we are still, arguably,
living’ (Odysseos and Petito, 2008: 475).36 Nevertheless, the burgeoning
 The return of Carl Schmitt 57
literature that employed insights from Schmitt’s work to understand the
extension of US power under the rubric of the ‘war on terror’ related princi-
pally to two specific elements of his critique: the global interventionism of US
imperialism and the (related) duplicities and risks of humanitarian warfare.
At the centre of Schmitt’s work on international law and geopolitical order
lay a powerful critique of US interventionism. In a series of articles penned in
the late 1930s and early 1940s, much of the material from which later found
its way into The Nomos of the Earth, he argued that the specific strategies of
US imperialism were based on intervention rather than direct occupation.
The United States, for Schmitt, intervened in other countries to protect its
interests when it felt it necessary, but did not take these countries under direct
administration, nor disturb their territorial integrity. Rather than establish
direct control over another state’s territory, the US maintained an ambiguous
status of ‘absent-presence’, legitimizing its intervention in some states, but
banning other states from intervening where its interests might be threatened.
Whilst this interventionism was at first limited to the ‘Western Hemisphere’,
in line with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, Schmitt traced how it was expan-
ded into a global ‘pan-interventionism’ over the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. In Schmitt’s view, this ‘pan-interventionism’ effectually
established a hierarchy of sovereign power between states.37 The United States
reserved for itself a greater degree of sovereignty, unilaterally legitimizing
its own interventions and banning those of other states. For many authors,
this interventionist model of imperialism outlined by Schmitt perfectly
described the exercise of US power in the ‘war on terror’ (see for example:
Axtmann, 2007; Mauffe, 2005; Rasch, 2003). Not only had the United States
unilaterally invaded Iraq without the endorsement of the United Nations,
hence showing that the US followed its own prerogatives, but it had maintained
the territorial integrity of both Iraq and Afghanistan whilst propping up new
governments with their military presence specifically not defined as ‘occupation’.
Further, the programme of ‘extraordinary rendition’ saw this ‘pan-interventionism’
extended to the abduction of individual terror suspects from different jurisdictions
across the globe.
An analysis of the antinomies of ‘humanitarian war’ was the second major
aspect of Schmitt’s work on international law seized upon by critics of the
‘war on terror’. Schmitt closed The Concept of the Political, his best-known
book in English, with a scathing attack on the hypocrisies and dangers of
framing war within a humanitarian discourse.38 For Schmitt, the introduction
of universal categories such as ‘humanity’ into the narratives used to justify
war allowed one side to occupy the position of ‘humanity’, and hence define
their opponent as the ‘enemy of humanity’. This displaced war into a moral
framework that, on the one hand, radically depoliticized enemies, rendering
them mere criminals ‘to be policed’ whilst, on the other, it intensified the
degree of enmity precisely by making the enemy an inhuman outcast of
humanity. This had two profound effects in Schmitt’s view. First, war was
rhetorically radicalized, since an ‘inhuman’ enemy did not deserve respect and
58 The return of Carl Schmitt
could thus be exposed to the most extreme forms of violence. Second, the
distinction between war and peace was dissolved, as war became indis-
tinguishable from policing criminals and peace could never be established with
an ‘inhuman’ criminal outcast. Humanitarian war, in Schmitt’s eyes, was thus
especially barbaric and knew no limits in its intensity or duration: a perma-
nent, total war. By conducting war in the name of a universal moral cause,
the boundaries between war and peace, enemy and criminal, combatant and
civilian, inside and outside, on which international order had rested until then,
were eroded, and a horrific indeterminacy had entered all political categories.
For many authors, Schmitt’s critique perfectly described the tenets of the
‘war on terror’ launched by the Bush administration after 9/11 (Kenny and
Rowan, 2008; Rasch, 2005b; Ulmen, 2007b). The United States indeed had
declared itself to be engaged in an endless global war against the enemies of
humanity. The enemy, ‘terror’, on the one hand, was so ill-defined and flexible that
it could never be definitively beaten; on the other, it had no place in the legal
norms governing the rules of warfare and could thus be legitimately exposed
to the most terrible violence beyond the protection of the law. Through a
Schmittian lens the inhumane conditions faced by the prisoners at Guantanamo
Bay was the perverse underside of a war fought in the name of ‘humanity’
(see for example: Minca, 2005; Rasch 2003; also, Ek, 2006; Gregory, 2004).
Insofar as the ‘war on terror’ saw the extension of US power beyond the
norms of international law in a series of military interventions, it had pro-
vided a fertile ground for a second phase of Schmitt’s Anglophone ‘renais-
sance’ that drew precisely on his critiques of US imperialism and
humanitarian war. However, to fully grasp the nature of Schmitt’s reception
during the ‘post-9/11’ years, it is necessary to assess the impact that Giorgio
Agamben’s work and the emergence of new Schmitt translations had on his
‘revival’ during the 2000s. In a sense two new ‘Schmitts’ emerged for Anglo-
phone audiences in the last decade: the ‘late’ Schmitt whose writings focused
on international law and global order and the ‘biopolitical’ Schmitt that
emerged from Agamben’s work.

The post-Agamben Schmitt

It is hard to overstate the influence that Giorgio Agamben’s works, particu-
larly Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and State of
Exception (2005), have had on the reception of Schmitt’s thought in the 2000s
(see Legg and Vasudevan, 2011; also Minca, 2006, 2007). These books intro-
duced Schmitt to new audiences, specifically in the context of the ‘war on
terror’. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the ‘post-Agamben’ Schmitt
has been the one most frequently encountered in Anglophone discussions in
recent years.
As noted above, the key innovation of Agamben’s Homo Sacer was to read
Schmitt’s account of sovereignty in relation to the critique of biopolitics
found in the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault conceived biopolitics as the
 The return of Carl Schmitt 59
forms of power that emerge alongside the development of the population as
the object of state regulation through modern technologies of discipline and
control that he described as ‘governmentality’.39 This understanding of bio-
politics has been frequently contrasted to a centralized model of political
power focused on state sovereignty. As Foucault famously stated, ‘we need to
cut off the king’s head: in political theory that has still to be done’ (Foucault,
1977: 121). Agamben sought to examine sovereignty and biopolitics as com-
plementary, rather than contrasting, models of power. In Agamben’s reading,
modern state sovereignty produces the population as an object of its rule. In
Homo Sacer he argued that one of the keys to understanding the nature of
contemporary politics was to align the theory of sovereignty found in
Schmitt’s work with the critique of governmental control drawn from
Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics.40
Agamben’s reading of Schmitt was a novel addition to Anglophone debates
but drew on a broader tradition of engagement that the German thinker’s
work had with the Italian Left. From the early 1970s, thinkers associated with
the Italian radical Left have been drawn to Schmitt’s work, earning the label
‘Marxisti Schmittiani’.41 In the early 1970s, thinkers associated with the
Autonomia Operaia movement engaged with Schmitt’s work as a way to
rethink class struggle by asserting the radical autonomy of the factory work-
ers from the institutional structures of the traditional Left, at a time when the
Italian Communist Party (PCI) had accepted the consensus of parliamentary
politics.42 As early as 1972 Mario Tronti, one the initiators of the journal
Quaderni Rossi, appealed to Schmitt’s concept of the ‘autonomy of the poli-
tical’ in formulating a theoretical basis for the workers’ movement beyond the
strictures of the PCI and parliamentary politics (Müller, 2003: 178). The
legacy of this engagement with Schmitt’s thought runs through the Italian
radical Left and his work remains a major point of reference in the work of
thinkers such as Massimo Cacciari, Roberto Esposito, Antonio Negri and
Paolo Virno, amongst others (see for example: Cacciari, 2009; Esposito, 1988;
Hardt and Negri, 2000; Virno, 2008). A major feature of this trajectory of
Italian political thought has been the use of Schmittian categories within a
broader conceptual framework defined by the critique of biopolitics.
Although substantial differences exist in how Agamben, Esposito, Negri and
Virno conceive of biopolitics, and in the role that Schmittian concepts play in
their philosophical edifice, all broadly share an approach that fuses critiques
of sovereign power and biopolitical governmentality.43 Whilst the reception of
Schmitt’s thought on the Italian Left can therefore not be reduced to Agam-
ben’s reading of the relationship between Schmittian sovereignty and Fou-
cauldian biopolitics, Homo Sacer and State of Exception introduced an
important element of the Italian debate around Schmitt’s work into the
second phase of his Anglophone ‘revival’.
Two conceptual components of Agamben’s Homo Sacer shaped the second
phase of Schmitt’s Anglophone reception, each of which was taken to have
particular bearing in the context of post-9/11 global politics. The first was the
60 The return of Carl Schmitt
claim, advanced in Homo Sacer, that sovereign power was necessarily bound
up with the biopolitical production of what Agamben called ‘bare life’. ‘Bare
life’ in Agamben’s view is ‘human life … included in the juridical order solely
in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)’ (1998: 99).
Agamben argued that the law exercised its power over the population by
operating a separation between qualified political life (bios) and biological life
(zoe). The result of this operation was that those who were ‘banned’ from the
political life of citizens and considered as ‘bare life’ were at once excluded
from the law’s protections but exposed to its force. This paradoxical position
of ‘bare life’ both inside and outside the law was, Agamben argued, the
mirror image of Schmitt’s Sovereign. The Sovereign, for Schmitt, was famously
defined by the ability to decide on the state of exception and suspend the law
in order to protect it in moments of exceptional crisis. It was precisely in this
suspension of the law that, Agamben suggested, ‘bare life’ was produced.
Sovereign power fundamentally relied therefore, for Agamben, on the state of
exception whereby ‘bare life’ could be encompassed in the law through its
very suspension.
For many readers, the production of ‘bare life’, paradoxically included in
the law through its exclusion, described precisely the new categories of extra-
legal subjects generated by the ‘war on terror’ such as the inmates of Guan-
tanamo Bay (see, for example, Minca, 2005; Rauff, 2004). Agamben himself
pointed to this reading in his 2004 book State of Exception. There he argued
that ‘the immediately biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the
original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own
suspension emerges clearly’ in the ‘military order’ issued by President Bush in
November 2001 which allowed non-citizens to be held ‘indefinitely’ and tried
in ‘military commissions’ (2004: 3; see also Rauff, 2004). Legislation such as
the USA PATRIOT Act seemed to indicate the growing normalization of the
state of exception that Agamben had warned against in Homo Sacer, a point
he made directly in State of Exception (ibid.). Many of the key features of the
‘war on terror’ seemed to be illustrating Agamben’s thesis that sovereign
power operated precisely through the state of exception and that the US
seemed to be placing itself in the position of a global sovereign police pro-
ducing a new form of biopolitical order. It was in this highly charged political
context that Agamben’s biopolitical reading of Schmitt’s concept of sover-
eignty became widespread (see, for example, Huysmans, 2008; Norris, 2005).
As the rule of exception appeared to take an ever greater role in the opera-
tions of global power, so too Schmitt became an increasingly frequent refer-
ence point, even if that reference was often limited to pointing to the
relationship between sovereignty and exception in his thought.
The second element of Agamben’s analysis in Homo Sacer that had a pro-
found impact on the reception of Schmitt’s work in the 2000s was his intro-
duction of the concept of nomos. For Schmitt, nomos indicated the spatial
nature of every political and legal order; the foundational relationship between
‘ordering’ and ‘localization’.44 Although this was a key concept in his
 The return of Carl Schmitt 61
thought, it appeared only in later works that were not available in English
until 2003, and had therefore not received significant attention before Agam-
ben made use of it other than in the most sustained engagements. The pub-
lication of Homo Sacer thus marked an important step towards understanding
Schmitt as an eminently spatial thinker in Anglophone debates, and for this
reason Agamben’s work is particularly significant for our book as well.
Agamben’s key move was to relate the concept of the ‘nomos of the earth’, or
global spatial order found in Schmitt’s late work, to his concept of the state of
exception (see Minca, 2007: 38). Schmitt’s work showed, Agamben argued,
‘how the link between localization and ordering constitutive of the nomos of
the earth always implies a zone that is excluded from law and that takes the
shapes of a “free and juridically empty space”’ (Agamben, 1998: 36). In
Agamben’s reading, the state of exception always operates within and through
a certain space of exception. Importantly, however, the ‘juridically empty
space’ of the state of exception ‘is not external to the nomos but rather, even
in its clear delimitation, included in the nomos as a moment that is in every
sense fundamental’ (ibid.: 36–37). Thus, according to Agamben, for Schmitt
the space of exception was structurally foundational to the nomos of the earth
(see Minca, 2006: 387–403), but the fact that the state of exception relied on a
specific constitution of sovereign power, and ‘bare life’ being paradoxically
both inside and outside the law, meant that it was ‘essentially unlocalizable’, a
nomos always requiring a ‘juridically empty space’ around which to establish
itself. However, Agamben noted that when ‘our age tried to grant the unlo-
calizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentra-
tion camp’ (Agamben, 1995: 20). The camp was, Agamben declared, the
‘nomos of the modern’. Although Homo Sacer’s publication pre-dated the
‘war on terror’ by several years, a number of thinkers drew on this concept of
the camp as the definitive localization of the exception to describe the deten-
tion camps at Guantanamo Bay (see, for example: Ek, 2006; Gregory, 2004;
Hussain, 2007; Minca, 2005). Those detained were declared to be in a space
literally ‘beyond the law’, excluded from its protections but exposed to its
force, that is translated into homines sacri (Minca, 2007, also 2015).
Although the US detention centres at Guantanamo Bay seemed to illus-
trate Agamben’s thesis that the space of the camp was the ‘nomos of the
modern’, Homo Sacer had in fact presented a more general argument for the
emergence of a new nomos of the earth by arguing that the state of exception
was becoming ‘more and more to the foreground as the fundamental political
structure [of the age] and ultimately becomes the rule’ (Agamben, 1998: 20).
This marked the beginnings of a new nomos that was not characterized by
clear lines of distinction between order and disorder, inside and outside, as
Schmitt’s old nomos of the earth had been, but rather by ‘zones of indistinc-
tion’. The ‘constitutive link between localization and ordering of the old
nomos was broken’ and ‘the “juridically empty” space of the state of excep-
tion … has transgressed its boundaries and now, overflowing outside them, is
starting to coincide with the normal order’ (ibid.: 38). This new nomos,
62 The return of Carl Schmitt
Agamben argued, ‘no longer orders forms of life and juridical rules in a
determinate place, but instead, contains at its very centre … a “dislocating
localization”’ into which any form of life can be virtually absorbed (ibid.:
175). Agamben’s work suggested that the new nomos of the earth was a
‘nomos of exception’, as Francois Debrix has noted, a ‘virtual nomos’ where
everyone becomes a potential homo sacer.45 In such a ‘virtual nomos’, every-
one is potentially exposed to the state of exception at any moment. Rather
than rely upon clearly delineated spaces of order and disorder, norm and
exception, this new nomos could at once suspend everyone in a virtual state of
exception and, in an instant, localize it in the bodies of those declared outside
the law by the sovereign ban.46 This global state of exception seemed to
represent a dangerous fusion of geopolitics and biopolitics, a ‘biopolitical
nomos’ that left everyone potentially exposed to the force of an unbounded
law (Minca, 2006: 387). This new (dis)order did not establish a stable order,
but rather kept ‘open the possibility of playing at the threshold of indistinction
between a norm and its (dis)application’ (ibid.: 401). It was a situation, as
Agamben warned, ‘in which everything again becomes possible’ (1995: 24–29).
Agamben’s theoretical innovations seemed to find brutal reflection in the
emerging geopolitical realities of the ‘post-9/11’ era. From the US’s ‘extra-
ordinary rendition’ programme to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in
the London Underground by anti-terror officers in 2005 and the increasing
use of biometric controls in border controls, the concept of a virtual biopoli-
tical nomos of exception seemed to be taking concrete shape in the ‘war on
terror’.47 In the terms of Agamben’s analysis it could be argued that the ‘war
on terror’ indicated that an old nomos was collapsing and a new nomos was
emerging, but had not yet fully developed. On the one hand, the United
States was attempting to produce a localization of the exception in sites such
as the detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, where enemies could be literally
removed from the law. On the other hand, the very possibility of marking a
distinction between inside and outside, order and disorder, norm and excep-
tion, was rapidly dissolving, rendering the entire globe the site for the poten-
tial ‘dislocating localization’ of a virtual biopolitical state of exception. It was
into this intellectual and political context – where Agamben’s ideas on the
state of exception were being applied to the analysis of the ‘war on terror’ –
that The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt’s key work of international thought,
emerged in English translation for the first time in 2003.

The ‘missing classic’ of international political thought

The publication of Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth in English in 2003
(hereafter The Nomos) opened an entirely new area of Schmitt’s corpus to
Anglophone debates. Frederic Jameson quickly declared The Nomos to be a
work of ‘astonishing contemporaneity’ and it soon received a wave of critical
attention in a series of special issues and essay collections in the first years
after its publication.48 The surge of interest in Schmitt’s late work sparked by
 The return of Carl Schmitt 63
the publication of The Nomos was fuelled further by the translation of his
short 1962 book The Theory of the Partisan in 2007 (hereafter The Parti-
san).49 These new translations made it possible for Anglophone readers to
directly engage with Schmitt’s work on international law and geopolitical
order for the first time, signalling a major shift in his reception.50
It is perhaps no surprise that the popularity of Schmitt’s work grew rapidly
in International Relations (hereafter IR), where The Nomos was heralded by
Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito as a ‘missing classic’ of the discipline
(Odysseos and Petito, 2007: 2). Schmitt’s whole oeuvre, Odysseos and Petito
argued, deserved reconsideration ‘not as marginal to International Relations,
but as central to its key concerns’ (ibid.). Likewise William Hooker, the
author of the most extensive work on Schmitt within IR thus far, noted in
2009 that Schmitt’s ‘arrival as a serious object of debate in international
political theory is overdue’ (Hooker, 2009: 3). Indeed, a number of authors
have read The Nomos as offering an alternative history of the rise and fall of
the modern European state system opposed to the standard accounts of
‘Westphalia’ within the discipline.51 Further, some argued that it was precisely
by following Schmitt’s account of the collapsing ‘Westphalian’ state system
that the nature of the contemporary international crisis signalled by the ‘war
on terror’ could better be grasped. Gary Ulmen, the translator of The Nomos
and The Partisan, claimed that the ‘war on terror’ was a symptom of the
breakdown of normative order in IR, and that global terrorism marked the
emergence of the ‘global civil war’ Schmitt had feared (Ulmen, 2007b). Sev-
eral thinkers followed Schmitt in locating the emergence of this global (dis)
order in the failure of liberal cosmopolitanism to address the antagonistic
dimensions of political relations, and the need for a restraining power capable
of limiting war, on the one side, and the unchecked hegemony of the United
States, on the other (see Behnke and Bishai, 2007; de Benoist, 2007, 2013).
Hence, it was suggested that from within the longue durée perspective affor-
ded by The Nomos, the ‘war on terror’ could be seen not so much as an anomaly
of ‘current affairs’ but the culmination of several longer term tendencies in
modern European and world history.
Perhaps the most important and certainly the most curious, if not disturb-
ing, aspect of Schmitt’s recent ‘renaissance’ has been the way in which a
number of thinkers have turned to his thought in the search for a model for
alternative world order. Schmitt’s notion of a global order based around a
number of continental Großräume (greater spaces) – to which we return in
later chapters – has found enthusiastic support from some quarters. Schmitt’s
proposal for a new nomos based upon a division of the earth into a number of
Großräume is found in the third of the three ‘corollaries’ that accompany The
Nomos. However, the version that appears there is ideologically ‘cleansed’ of
the work Schmitt carried out in the late 1930s and early 1940s during the
expansion of the Nazi Reich. The context in which Schmitt developed his
theory of Großraum is often entirely (and disturbingly) ignored by those call-
ing for a new, multipolar world order based on Schmitt’s concept of
64 The return of Carl Schmitt
Großraum (see Burgess, 2009; Mouffe, 2005b; Petito, 2007; Rasch, 2005a;
Zolo, 2007; see also Rowan, 2011). In their appeal to a Schmittian model of
multipolarity, thinkers on the Left, such as Chantal Mouffe, Fabio Petito,
William Rasch and Danilo Zolo, have manifested unusual proximity to Eur-
opean New Right intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist and Russian ‘neo-
Fascist’ proponents of a ‘Eurasian’ great space such as Alexander Dugin (see
de Benoist, 2007; Ingram, 2001). They argue that a multipolar world order
would protect political pluralism and defend against the dangers of unipolar
US domination, actually producing a greater degree of stability within a fra-
mework capable of giving expression to the antagonistic fractures of the
‘international community’. For some of these ‘multipolar Schmittians’, the
emergence of global terror networks is symptomatic of the exclusion of gen-
uine political pluralism under the conditions of unipolar US domination (see
de Benoist, 2007; Mouffe, 2005a). Likewise the US-led ‘war on terror’ illus-
trates that a single hegemonic world power can neither bring stability nor
limit conflict.52 The only solution, it is argued, is a multipolar world order
organized around distinct geographic power blocks.53 We have previously
underlined the dangers in such appeals insofar as they abstract Schmitt’s
conception of multipolarity from the political context in which these claims were
advanced and cut loose from their philosophical underpinnings in his
thought, uncritically accepting geopolitical frames that imply a fixed and
specific understanding of the relationship between space, subjectivity and
power that may well lie in tension with the democratic intent of these authors
on the Left, if not of those on the Right who mobilize similar arguments (see
Rowan, 2011; Teschke, 2011).
The surge of interest in Schmitt’s work in IR nonetheless spawned some
vigorous critique from major figures in the field, notably David Chandler and
Benno Teschke. Teschke, a Marxist scholar of International Relations, first
voiced his critique of the conceptual and historical validity of Schmitt’s post-
war work on international politics and its recent reception in a dispute with
Gopal Balakrishnan spread across several consecutive issues of The New Left
Review in 2011 (Balakrishnan, 2011; Teschke, 2011a, 2011b). His arguments,
clearly benefitting from Balakrishnan’s spirited challenges, were galvanized
into a devastating article later the same year in International Theory (Teschke,
2011c). Teschke’s central charge was that Schmitt’s reception in IR has ‘been
largely dissociated from his political commitments and intellectual liabilities’
(ibid.: 180), something he claims is not only questionable given the ‘specific
political context and ideological purpose’ (ibid.: 182) of Schmitt’s interna-
tional political thought, but replicates the methodological and political pro-
blems inherent to it. Working from the perspective of ‘international historical
sociology’ (see Teschke, 2003) Teschke argues that Schmitt’s methods are ‘self-
consciously anti-sociological’ (ibid.: 215), and result in an account of inter-
national politics that is ‘sociologically disembodied and inter-nationally
evacuated’ (ibid.: 207). Indeed, for Teschke, Schmitt’s work on the history
of international relations aimed to insulate ‘the (geo-)political from the
 The return of Carl Schmitt 65
social – in fact, privileged the (geo-)political over and against the social’
(ibid.: 215), in effect writing ‘the social’ out of the dynamics of spatial ordering in
order to reify a ‘geopolitics without social process’ (ibid.: 194). At the heart of
Schmitt’s concrete-order-thinking lay ‘a void … the absence of a sociology of
property and power’ (ibid.: 195–196), which his readers in critical IR studies
replicated in their rush to employ ideas Schmitt developed in the context of
legitimizing Nazi Germany’s objections to the influence of US capital to critique
US interventionism in a very different historical and geopolitical context.
Teschke’s critique of Schmitt’s recent reception in IR was prefigured by
David Chandler’s earlier acerbic assessment, tellingly entitled The Revival of
Carl Schmitt: The Last Refuge of Critical Theorists (Chandler, 2008).
Chandler’s polemic did not so much focus on the content of Schmitt’s work
but on the ways in which it had been received by two groups of IR scholars:
critical cosmopolitan theorists and post-structuralists. His article set out to
‘demonstrate that the revival of Schmitt’s work, especially by critical theorists
working in the discipline of IR, has less to do with an appreciation of Schmitt
than it has with the weakness and defensiveness of critical theoretical posi-
tions themselves’ (ibid.: 28). Chandler argued that in their critiques of huma-
nitarian intervention, US foreign policy and particularly the Bush
administration’s ‘war on terror’, both critical cosmopolitan and post-structuralist
IR thinkers had rhetorically appealed to a highly ‘idealized’ and ‘superficial’
(ibid.: 27) reading of Schmitt’s thought in order to shore up their own posi-
tions as ‘critical’, rather than in an attempt to engage ‘the more fundamental
level of his geopolitical grounding of the limits of international law and its
relation to sovereign power’ (ibid.: 28). Whilst Chandler was certainly correct
in highlighting the ‘need to restate and clarify Schmitt’s fundamental ontolo-
gical and political concerns’ in the field of IR (ibid.: 30–31), he did not pro-
vide any such account himself but rather attacked critical cosmopolitan and
post-structuralist theorists for not doing so, ironically repeating what he
faulted them for: validating his own position as critical in relation to others
whilst failing to make any substantive engagement with the fundamentals of
Schmitt’s ontological framework. Debate on international politics here risked
descended into a bitter office politics. Just as Teschke’s critique of neo-
Schmittian IR later elicited an angry reply from Balakrishnan, Chandler’s
account was squarely rebutted in a curt editorial response from Odysseos and
Petito in the next issue of Millennium, the journal where Chandler’s original
work had appeared. What Chandler’s and Teschke’s attacks on Schmitt’s
recent IR reception, and the vehement responses they have engendered from
his critical advocates, have above all proven is that the nature and relevance of
his later work on international politics remains hotly contested. Indeed, these
antagonisms show that the way in which Schmitt’s concept of the political
is read in relation to world politics is not a fringe concern but has bearing
on some of the key debates that define the current state of IR, even as the
limitations of the field might require insight from other domains.
66 The return of Carl Schmitt
Schmitt in Geography
As noted in the Introduction, a comprehensive critical overview of the role of
space in Schmitt’s thought, relating his work to his biographical trajectory and
the historical context in which he developed his work, has thus far been
missing from the literature on his work.54 While Schmitt’s work has already been
discussed in detail using such diachronic methods, none of these previous inter-
ventions focused on the spatial dimension of his work, even as they addressed
it in part. Indeed, where Schmitt’s spatial theories have been engaged they
have been identified almost exclusively with The Nomos, which although
undoubtedly the most mature expression of his spatial thought is not adequate
to it as a whole. The fact that critical attention has focused largely on this text,
in relative isolation from the concerns of his overall intellectual trajectory, has
led many critics to scrutinize spatial concepts only in relation to his late work.
This has caused, in our opinion, a problematic degree of disjuncture between
the incorporation of Schmitt’s insights to the critique of contemporary geo-
political conditions, on the one hand, and an analysis of the role of space
within his entire oeuvre, on the other.
Schmitt always proclaimed himself to be just a jurist, dismissing the label
of philosopher or political thinker, and he would surely have rejected that
of geographer. Nonetheless, despite his rather superficial engagement with
geography as a discipline, we believe that important aspects of his work were
geographical in nature and that his spatial approach to the constitution of
‘the political’ and to international politics may be better appreciated and
contextualized if a geographical perspective is brought to bear on the discus-
sion. Geography, geographical concepts, geographical projections, even a sort
of implicit geographical ontology (see Minca, 2011a; Rowan, 2011), influence
his work in decisive ways, and understanding these dimensions of his thought
is crucial in order to critically engage with the grand narratives about global
order that made him so popular in many European circles after the war, and
again today in Anglophone theory. In this book, we do not try to co-opt
Schmitt as a geographer in disguise,55 or to dress all his work in geographical
clothes, but rather, attempt to identify and reflect on the key structural role
that spatial concerns have within his oeuvre, as a whole, and especially in his
speculations on the political.
As noted in the Introduction, the reception of Schmitt’s work within
Anglophone geography has expanded rapidly in recent years, after having
been negligible for many years, and a growing literature is emerging around
his work (Meyer et al., 2012; Minca, 2013; Minca and Rowan, 2014, 2015).
The most extensive intervention to date has been Stephen Legg’s 2011 edited
volume Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt. This collection, composed
of longer historical and theoretical essays, shorter thematic responses and two
fresh translations of previously unavailable works by Schmitt by Matthew
Hannah (Legg, 2011a), marked something of a milestone. These engagements
mostly focus on Schmitt’s later work, and particularly The Nomos, although a
 The return of Carl Schmitt 67
small number of contributors discuss other post-war writings such as ‘The
Großraum Order of International Law’ (Elden, 2011), Land and Sea (Men-
dieta, 2011) and The Theory of the Partisan (Clayton, 2011; Hussain, 2011).
In addition to this temporal and textual focus on The Nomos, typical of
Schmitt’s recent reception more broadly, his work has been approached in
Geography in a rather piecemeal fashion, with specific aspects of his thought
being discussed in relative isolation from the rest; such as his theorization of
borders (Minca and Vaughan-Williams, 2012: Vaughan-Williams, 2011),
colonialism (Coleman, 2011; Legg, 2011b; Lossau, 2011), the role of ontology
(Minca, 2011a; Rowan, 2011) and theology (Meyer et al., 2012), or its bearing
on post-9/11 US foreign policy (Kearns, 2011). Indeed, crucial elements of his
spatial theory have gone almost without comment in existing debates. These
include: his controversial but fascinating ‘spatial histories’ of modernity; the
influence that his conceptualization of the relation between space and the poli-
tical has exerted on both post-war European political thought and on con-
temporary readings of world politics in the fields such as political theory, critical
legal studies and international relations; and the disturbing but significant links
between his notion of Großraum and Nazi spatial theory, a controversial area that
most geographers have strangely avoided (with the exceptions of Atkinson, 2011;
Barnes and Minca, 2013; Elden, 2010; Minca and Rowan, 2015).
Hence, although the recent geographic literature on Schmitt’s work has
included many timely and insightful interventions, it does not provide a full
account of his spatial thought, including its development and relation to his
political involvement or broader historical context. Indeed, despite recent
interventions, the discipline of Geography remains overall reluctant to engage
with Schmitt’s work. No doubt the principal reason he remains a con-
troversial, indeed divisive figure in the discipline is his complicity with the
Nazi regime (see Minca and Rowan, 2015). Although authors such as David
Atkinson (2011), Mark Bassin (1987) and David Murphy (1997) have carried
out work displaying critical sensitivity to the historical complexity of the
relationship between Nazi spatial thought and the intellectual trajectories that
passed through it, and Stuart Elden’s work (2002, 2006) clearly shows the
willingness of geographers to critically engage with similarly compromised
thinkers such as Heidegger, this remains an issue that has often prevented rather
than provoked investigation by geographers (on this see Giaccaria and Minca,
2015a). Indeed, we consider this an important area of investigation, not least
because it was during his ‘Nazi years’ that Schmitt began to advance a more
explicitly spatial theory, and theorized the colonial expansion of the Nazi
Reich into Eastern Europe as laying the foundations for a new form of global
spatial order. A better understanding of the relationship between Schmitt’s
spatial thought and his complicity with Nazism is in our view crucial in cri-
tically assessing the recent appropriation of his work in various disciplines,
especially since this appropriation often takes place with little critical atten-
tion to the long tradition of grand spatial theories (and their critical engage-
ment in the last thirty years of geographic scholarship), a tradition in which
68 The return of Carl Schmitt
Schmitt found an important place, albeit one largely unrelated to the German
Geography of the time, as British geographer Mike Heffernan has clearly
shown (Heffernan, 2011).
The resistance that studies of Schmitt face in the field most likely reflects
the discipline’s relative historical unease with the relationship between Nazism
and German geopolitics, and German Geography in general; a relationship
almost entirely neglected by disciplinary debates in post-war Anglophone
Geography despite the fact, or rather perversely because of it, that this rela-
tionship is frequently considered the nadir of the discipline. Indeed, geo-
graphers have paid very little attention to this topic, especially if compared to
other topics of great historiographical relevance, such as various dimensions
of European colonialism and US imperialism, although there has recently
been some move towards addressing this lacuna in the disciplinary litera-
ture.56 Further, we would argue that it is important to track the trajectories of
Schmitt’s work precisely because of his Nazism. Indeed, in our view his work
can act as a unique lens for geographers to reflect on the relationship between
Nazi spatial theory and the wider field of modern political though. It is in the
spirit of Galli’s ‘Schmittology’ that we consider it possible to approach
Schmitt’s spatial thought as critical geographers who trust that an investiga-
tion, sensitive to both the biographical and historical context of his work and
its recent academic reception, may be valuable in further understanding the
relationship between Nazi spatial ideologies and the wider field of modern
political thought and indeed its subterranean resonances with contemporary
thought. For example, Barnes and Minca (2013) have analysed Carl Schmitt’s
work alongside that of the influential German geographer Walter Christaller,
who also joined the Nazi Party, reading them in relation to what they define
as Nazi ‘dark geographies’. Indeed, we develop our own work in the under-
standing that geography is arguably uniquely well placed to cast a more cri-
tical light on the current appropriation of Schmitt’s grand spatial theories,
and the entanglement of the spatial and the political with both the geopoli-
tical and the biopolitical. It is with this context in mind that we turn to
examine Schmitt’s thought and begin charting the development of spatial
concepts in his early work during the Weimar years.

Notes
1 Schmitt’s work has been central to crucial debates in German, Italian and French
political thought for decades and the Anglophone literature has benefited from a
translation of some of these debates although substantial gaps remain, many of
which are unlikely ever to be filled, for example, Carlo Galli’s monumental thousand-
page study of his work Genealogia della Politica (2010a). Further, we highlight
France, Germany and Italy because these are the contexts from which critical
works have been translated into English, hence influencing debates in that lan-
guage. His work has had considerable impact in a wider European context
although the subsequent influence of this reception on Anglophone debates has
been lesser. Jan-Werner Müller has provided a useful overview of the deep
 The return of Carl Schmitt 69
influence Schmitt exerted on Spain and Portugal after the Second World War (see
Müller, 2003: 133–144). During the years of the Iberian dictatorships Schmitt’s
work did not fall into disgrace as it did in Germany and France, and was indeed
the subject of open debate. British geographer Alan Ingram has shown how Rus-
sian geopolitical thinkers, such as Alexander Dugin, in developing arguments for
a Russian-centred Eurasian power block have appropriated geopolitical ideas
from Schmitt’s work (see Ingram, 2001). However, a study comparable to Müller’s
tracing Schmitt’s influence beyond Europe and North America remains to be
written and would be extremely valuable.
2 It should be noted however that the first of Schmitt’s books to appear in English
translation was The Necessity of Politics: An Essay on the Representative Idea of the
Church in Modern Europe, published in 1931 as part of a series of books on
Catholic thought, Essays in Order, published by Sheed and Ward of London. This was
a translation of his 1923 book on political form in the Roman Catholic Church,
published in a new translation as Roman Catholicism and Political Form in 1996.
3 Arguably Schmitt was as shadowy presence in Anglophone scholarship before his
1980s ‘arrival’. William Scheuerman has suggested that Schmitt exercised a ‘sub-
terranean influence’ on post-war American political thought long before his work
was first addressed openly (Scheuerman, 1999: 1). This influence was carried, it is noted,
through a series of ‘hidden dialogues’ with émigré intellectuals such as Fredric
Hayek, Hans Morgenthau and Joseph Schumpeter. Scheuerman claims that
through these thinkers Schmitt’s work ‘helped determine the contours of political
thinking’ in the United States after the war, albeit indirectly (ibid.: 12). Similarly,
German critic Heinrich Meier has argued that Leo Strauss, another German
émigré intellectual, who became an influential professor of politics at the Uni-
versity of Chicago in the post-war years, conducted his work in a ‘hidden dialo-
gue’ with Schmitt (Meier, 1995). Meier contends that beyond the points where
Schmitt and Strauss openly acknowledged the influence of the other’s work or cri-
tique, their thought was characterized by a ‘subterranean’ dance of influence and
antagonism. Whilst Meier clearly makes the case for the relationship between
these two giants of twentieth century political thought, the concept of the ‘hidden
dialogue’ has provided a template for what occasionally amounts to a paranoic
hypothesis that exaggerates Schmitt’s influence. For example, some have presented
Schmitt as the dark magus from which American neoconservatism emerged by way
of Leo Strauss and his American student Alan Bloom, an analysis based on a sort of
a genealogical hyperbole (see for example Critchley, 2005; Norton, 2004). However,
we believe Schmitt’s open and transparent influence to be already broad and deep
enough to be reckoned with, without giving credence to the myth of his arcane
hidden influence, an image Schmitt peddled himself long enough (see Müller, 2003).
4 In her recent book War Time, Mary L. Dudziak offers a useful chart depicting the
increase of references to Schmitt’s work in American legal scholarship between
1995 and 2010 using Google Scholar search, noting an increase from twenty-four
citations in 2001 to eighty-six in 2009 (see Dudziak, 2012: 116).
5 See for example the heated exchanges between David Chandler and Louiza Odys-
seos and Fabio Petito in the pages of Millennium, and more recently between
Gopal Balakrishnan and Benno Tescke across the pages of a number of journals.
See also Minca and Rowan, 2014, 2015.
6 For a more detailed analysis of how the co-ordinates of the post-Cold War era have
shaped Schmitt’s reception in Anglophone debate see Müller, 2003; Rasch, 2005b.
7 This was a point forcefully made by Reinhard Mehring in relation to the German
context in the 1990s, but it arguably stands true more broadly, as will be discussed
in the following pages (see Mehring, 1998).
8 Thinking ‘with and against Schmitt; or pitting ‘Schmitt against Schmitt’ has been a
common rhetorical strategy used by liberals and Leftist thinkers working with
70 The return of Carl Schmitt
Schmitt in order to mark a distance from him even as they draw on his insights
(Arditi, 2008).
9 See Mouffe, 1993, 1999. For a much more critical reading see Caldwell, 1997.
10 Mouffe warned that, ‘ignoring his views would deprive us of many insights that
can be used to rethink liberal democracy with a view to strengthening its institu-
tions’ (1991: 1).
11 Indeed, Schmitt’s work had a noted impact on the formulation of the German
Federal Republic’s Basic Law, the Constitution shaped to eliminate the very pos-
sibility of another parliamentary takeover by anti-democratic forces (see Kennedy,
2004; Scheuerman, 1999).
12 The Introduction of Scheuerman’s book provides an illustrative overview of the
debates between the dominant strands of legal positivism and its critics from
within the normative tradition, including Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls, and
those from the ‘critical legal studies’ school.
13 In Legality and Legitimacy (1999) Dyzenhaus argues that other Weimar jur-
isprudence theorists such as Herman Heller and Hans Kelsen may provide better
solutions to Schmittian problems at the core of contemporary legal debates when
read alongside him.
14 In the 1980s the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas memorably suggested
that the Left’s appropriation of Schmitt’s critique of liberalism aimed to ‘drive out
the devil with Beelzebub’ (in Sitze, 2010: xxi). Although this comment was
made in the context of Habermas’ conflict with the conservative revisionist his-
torian Ernst Nolte in the 1980s ‘historians’ debate’, it still arguably has some bite
with regard to Left Schmittians.
15 William Hooker rightly suggests that the Left’s appropriation of Schmitt’s work is
‘both the highest profile and the most counter-intuitive use’ of his thought today.
See Hooker, 2009: 209.
16 Neocleous’ understandable complaint was that those on the Left turning to
Schmitt were forgetting his fascism, and indeed often actively repressing it. He also
added that those such as Mouffe ‘who suggest that Schmitt’s approach is useful but
his solutions unacceptable fail to realize that Schmitt’s solutions follow logically,
theoretically, politically from his premises’ (Neocleous, 1996a). Whilst Neocleous’
wariness is certainly justified, we find his claim partially debatable. We will return
to the question of the relationship between Schmitt’s Nazism and his thought in
Chapters 5 and 6.
17 This is especially true since other thinkers more readily associated with the Left
who explicitly formulated theories of political action, such as Hannah Arendt and
Antonio Gramsci, did not become such frequent reference points. Although a
certain reading of Gramsci lay at the centre of Laclau and Mouffe’s collaborative
work in the 1980s, his influence has been eclipsed almost entirely by Schmitt’s in
Mouffe’s writings since the early 1990s. One suspects that the specific appeal of
Schmitt’s concept of the political lay partly in the affective charge of his friend–
enemy distinction and, perhaps, even in the transgressive thrill of association with
the ‘Crown Jurist’. The powerful ‘aesthetics of anti-liberalism’ that Müller attri-
butes to Schmitt’s wide appeal is just as much a feature of the Left as it is of the
Right. See Müller, 2003: 249.
18 Unmoored from the strictures of class identification, the political could be con-
ceived of as a more dynamic force that could draw on any area of social conflict.
This was precisely the appeal for Chantal Mouffe as she tried to reconfigure a theory
of hegemonic politics for the new conditions of pluralist liberal democracies. See
for example Mouffe, 2005a.
19 However, in the world of ‘diminished expectations, cancelled alternatives, and
closed political horizons’ that Balakrishnan depicted, this ‘sense’ seemed as much
the product of wishful thinking as of political analysis (2000: 268).
 The return of Carl Schmitt 71
20 The concept of post-politics is deeply indebted to the work of French philosopher
Jacques Rancière in his Disagreement, which originally appeared in French in
1995. In his article on Schmitt, and in many other instances since, Žižek has
acknowledged the influence of Rancière, but this latter receives only fleeting mention
in Mouffe’s work.
21 This ontological reading of the political is typical of the influence of post-foundational
thought on the reception of Schmitt in recent Anglophone debates. The significance
of this influence will be discussed later in this chapter.
22 The term ‘post-foundational’ is taken from Oliver Marchart’s Post-Foundational
Political Thought (2007), which he distinguishes from the more common term
‘post-structuralist’ as the latter remains tethered too closely to its opposition to the
structuralist tradition. As Marchart argues, the common basis shared by post-
foundational thinkers is a critical focus on the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the
foundations of political agency rather than the foundations themselves, although
this analysis remains grounded in the Heideggarian line of thought running
through the French tradition of onto-politics and pays little attention to those that
adopt a different ontopolitical framework, notably that emanating from Deleuze.
23 Both ventures would make useful additions to the assessment of Schmitt’s impact on
post-war French political thought, and specifically the New Left after 1968, but
this work is still awaited. However, whilst Oliver Marchart provides some helpful
remarks concerning the relationship between Schmitt’s work and post-foundationalism,
these are not developed extensively.
24 For a good introduction to political reading of Heidegger’s ontological difference.
See Marchart, 2007.
25 Numerous prominent thinkers working in the tradition of post-foundational
thought have engaged seriously with Schmitt’s thought, including Etienne Balibar
(2004), Judith Butler (2004), Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy
(1997), amongst others.
26 The Politics of Friendship contains Derrida’s deepest engagement with Schmitt,
where he probes Schmitt’s famous definition of the political as the relations
between friend and enemy, speculating on a politics whose horizon would be
friendship rather than enmity.
27 Mouffe also claims that Schmitt’s thought displays a character that will later be
associated with ‘post-structuralism’. See Mouffe, 2005a: 14.
28 For more on Miglio’s and de Benoist’s relationship to Schmitt see Müller, 2003:
207–219; also Miglio’s introduction to the Italian translation of The Concept of the
Political (1998).
29 Telos have been constant champions of de Benoist, frequently including articles on
his thought, reviews of his writings and original contributions as recently as 2011.
See for example: de Benoist, 2011. Its pages have also played host to Miglio’s
work. See Miglio, 1997.
30 This was an agenda also reflected in the work of other contributors such as Paul
Gottfried and the Schmitt translator Gary Ulmen. See for example: Gottfried, 1999.
31 There were some exceptions although most came after the fact. See for example
Ananiadis, 2002; Zolo, 2002.
32 During the same period a number of other key works have been translated for the
first time, including Legality and Legitimacy (2004), On The Three Types of Jur-
istic Thought (2004), Constitutional Theory (2008), The Leviathan in the State
Theory of Thomas Hobbes (2008), Political Theology II (2008), as well as new,
updated editions of previously available writings, like Political Theology (2006) and
The Concept of the Political (2007), the expanded edition of which includes the key
text ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’.
33 See for example ‘President Bush Releases National Strategy for Combating Ter-
rorism’, 14 February 2003: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/relea
72 The return of Carl Schmitt
ses/2003/02/20030214-7.html. ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, the official name for
the Afghanistan mission, also provided an umbrella for military operations in the
Philippines, the Horn of Africa and the Sahara/Sahel regions of Africa.
34 See President George W. Bush, ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the
American People’, 20 September 2001: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.
gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.
35 There has been an abundance of commentary on the neoconservative influence on
the presidency of George W. Bush, a vast and well established popular and aca-
demic literature that we cannot discuss here in detail. However, several critics have
linked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration to Carl Schmitt’s work,
usually through rather spurious and unsubstantiated associations to Leo Strauss’s
students, but often through mere innuendo. For a recent example, lacking in our
view any supporting evidence, see for example, Benno Teschke’s claim that the
foreign policy of the Bush presidency ‘actualized’ Schmitt’s thought. See
Teschke, 2011a. Chantal Mouffe has rightly corrected this view by pointing out
that the Bush presidency’s foreign policy was typical of the universalistic dis-
solution of international order that Schmitt critiqued in US foreign policy since
Woodrow Wilson. See Mouffe, 2005b.
36 This paper was a response to David Chandler’s polemical attack on the Schmitt
‘revival’ in International Relations. See Chandler, 2008.
37 The ways in which the concept of an ‘unequal sovereignty’ has been employed in
order to legitimate military intervention in so-called ‘failed’ states, at the same time
ensuring that their territorial integrity was maintained, has been discussed by British
geographer Stuart Elden in his 2009 book Terror and Territory. See Elden, 2009.
38 This vitriolic attack on humanitarian warfare was replicated in a 1930 essay. See
Schmitt, 1999a.
39 For more on Foucault and biopolitics see Foucault, 1976, 2007, 2010.
40 There have been a significant number of studies aimed at elaborating the potential
connection between Schmitt and Foucault during the last decade. Many bear the
stamp of Agamben’s influence. See for example Butler, 2004; Neal, 2010. Many
others, however, have attempted to push the relationship between the two thinkers
further in novel ways. See for example Coleman and Grove, 2009; Hannah, 2011;
Prozorov, 2007b.
41 For an introductory account of the reception of Schmitt on the radical Italian Left since
the 1970s see Müller, 2003: 177–180; Chiesa and Toscano, 2009; Minca, 2012b.
42 For more on the ‘autonomous’ movement see the collection of articles edited by
Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi originally published in 1980. See Lotrin-
ger and Marazzi, 2007.
43 See again Minca (2012b); and Esposito’s most recently translated work, Living
Thought (2012).
44 See Chapter 8 for a detail analysis of this concept in Schmitt.
45 Francois Debrix, unpublished paper quoted in Legg and Vasudevan, 2011: 14. See
also Debrix, 2010; Vaughan-Williams, 2010.
46 On the concept of the ban and its spatialities in Agamben see Minca, 2005, 2007.
47 Of particular note were those authors who drew on Agamben’s work in the study
of immigration controls and the changing nature of bordering practices and border
paces in the ‘post-9/11’ era. See for example Amoore, 2006; Vaughan-Williams,
2009. In relation to Schmitt’s understanding of borders see Minca and Vaughan-
Williams, 2012.
48 See the special issues in Constellations 11:4 (2004) edited by Andreas Kalyvas and
William Scheuerman; South Atlantic Quarterly 104:2 (2005) edited by William
Rasch; The Leiden Journal of International Law 19:1 (2006) edited by Louiza
Odysseos and Fabio Petito. There have also been two edited volumes dedicated to
the book: The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt (2007), edited by
 The return of Carl Schmitt 73
Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito, which included perspectives from International
Relations; and, more recently, Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geo-
graphies of the Nomos (2011), edited by Stephen Legg, which collected essays lar-
gely penned by geographers.
49 The Theory of the Partisan had already received considerable critical attention in a
special edition of the journal CR: The New Centennial Review 4:3 (2004) edited by
Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson that included a translation of Schmitt’s text.
50 Also significant to note here is the new edition of George Schwab’s translation of
The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt’s important 1938
book. See Schmitt, 2008b. It had originally been published in 1996 by Greenwood
Press but alongside The Nomos of the Earth (2003) and The Theory of the Partisan
(2007) it took on much greater significance insofar as it showed the trajectory of
Schmitt’s thinking around the historical development of the modern European
state and its collapse.
51 The European state system is commonly referred to as ‘Westphalia’ in Interna-
tional Relations after the Treaty of Westphalia signed in 1648, that putatively
brought the European wars of religion to a close.
52 This is an argument made most extensively by Chantal Mouffe. See Mouffe,
2005a.
53 For a critique of this multipolar argument that draws on the internal tensions of
Schmitt’s thought see Rowan, 2011.
54 For a succinct critical review of his spatial thought see Minca and Rowan, 2015.
55 International Relations scholar William Hooker recently suggested (2009: 196) that
Schmitt be considered a geographer, a notion dismissed as fanciful by Stuart Elden
(2010: 18).
56 The academic literature on the Third Reich and the Holocaust is vast and well
established. However, there have been few books written in English by a geo-
grapher on the spatial theories and practices of the Third Reich, although recently
there seems to be an entirely new interest on the topic. One manifestation of this
interest is Geographies of the Holocaust (2013), a volume edited by Tim Cole, Anne
Knowles and Alberto Giordano and the result of a research project partly focused
on the relationship between GIS and the spaces of the Holocaust. A second recent
example is Building Nazi Germany: Place, Space, Architecture and Ideology
(forthcoming), by historical geographers Joshua Hagen and Robert C. Ostergren,
mainly focused on a historical geographical approach. Also in Holocaust Studies,
the engagement with spatial and geographical themes has been gathering attention.
For an overview of the research done by geographers on the Holocaust and the
Third Reich see the forthcoming collection Hitler’s Geographies (Giaccaria and
Minca, 2015b), in particular Chapter 1.
3 Spatializing the political

There are neither spaceless political ideas nor, reciprocally, spaces without
ideas or principles of space without ideas.
Carl Schmitt, 1939

All political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning. They are
focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation.
Carl Schmitt, 1927

With these typically terse statements above Schmitt seemed to point to the
particularly challenging interpretive problems that face any reader attempting
to study his work. In Schmitt’s view the field of political thought made no
clear distinction could be made between the polemical and the merely theo-
retical, the textual and the contextual.1 Indeed, it appears as particularly apt,
given Schmitt’s controversial political involvement, that his theoretical work be
understood in relation to the political context in which it was formed and to
which it was targeted. As argued in earlier chapters, this does not mean that
Schmitt’s thought may be reduced to the context of its emergence, but rather that,
within the interpretative key that he himself proposed, the polemical nature of
his work must be appreciated. It is thus crucial to read Schmitt in relation to
the ‘concrete situation’ of twentieth century Germany in order to grasp not
only the polemical bite but also the philosophical stakes of his work.
Schmitt’s work indeed bore the imprint of his times. His thought was both
forged in and reflected upon the cauldron of political and social ferment that
defined the troubled birth and stunted development of the Weimar Republic,
a compromised institution that Schmitt considered inadequate to dampen the
seething political forces surging beneath its surface. Whilst German defeat in
the First World War, and the explosion of revolutionary passion that marked
its wake, had signalled the definitive collapse of the old order, the brittle
constitutional scaffold that emerged rested upon unstable corporatist com-
promises and the violent suppression of civil war. Schmitt, like many others,
feared that this new Republic was not equipped with the institutional powers
needed to stabilize this profound political crisis and allowed only a semblance
of the old state to live on in a zombie Parliament. The turmoil of the early
 Spatializing the political 75
Weimar years had not merely been the birth pangs of a new order but symp-
tomatic of a deeper political crisis in modern Europe to which the liberal state
of the nineteenth century could no longer present adequate response. The
failure to address the loss of established authority and the erosion of tradi-
tional sources of legitimacy only served to ensure, in Schmitt’s view, that the
threat of renewed civil war was ever present and increasingly violent political
chaos lurked on the historical horizon.
As noted in Chapter 1, Schmitt’s own politicization had indeed been born
of the period of political turmoil that engulfed Germany in the aftermath of
the war. He had spent the war years serving as an intelligence officer in
Munich, censoring books, including Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, but
had little investment in nationalist sentiment and was critical of the war
effort. His first interest in politics, in fact, came relatively late when in 1918 a
group of revolutionary socialists involved in the take over of the city broke
into his military office, shooting the officer at the desk next to Schmitt, an
event that seemed to indelibly mark his understanding of the political as a
realm of violence and indeed death. His first book, published in 1919, Poli-
tical Romanticism, a scathing attack on Germany’s romantic tradition and its
erosion of the ‘seriousness’ needed for real political decisions, can in some
sense be read as an exorcism of his own former life amidst Munich’s anti-war
literati and as an emblem of his quick and dramatic embrace of reactionary
politics.2
Schmitt emerged in Political Romanticism as a thinker preoccupied with
order and haunted by the spectre of civil war. However, he did not simply
approach the crisis afflicting the Weimar Republic as a phenomenon con-
ceptually confined within the terms of the immediate crisis alone. Rather, the
crisis of the German state had opened up fundamental questions about the
nature and historical development of European state order, about political
legitimacy in the new conditions of the twentieth century and, indeed, about
the very nature of politics as such. For Schmitt, the crisis of the Weimar
Republic was a crisis of foundations, a crisis of the very terms under which
order, authority, legitimacy, even politics itself, could be conceived. Thus,
while his early works addressed particular political issues of the day, they
simultaneously attempted to tackle fundamental questions about the his-
tory and nature of political order, the latter all the while gaining their urgency
from the former. Yet, although his aims were polemical and philosophical
at once, we will, for the sake of clarity, approach the historical and phi-
losophical dimensions of his early work in turn. Accordingly, in what follows,
we first outline the historical analysis that supports Schmitt’s conceptualiza-
tions and, second, closely examine the key philosophical tenets that he estab-
lished here and carried on throughout his body of work. Taken together
we hope this will help provide a framework in which to understand the crucial
role of spatial concepts in Schmitt’s early work and the subsequent development
of his spatial thought.
76 Spatializing the political
Secularization and political form
Schmitt fundamentally interpreted the crisis of the Weimar Republic as a
symptom of a deeper crisis in legitimacy that defined European modernity as
a whole. In his work from the early 1920s he thus looked back to the origins
of the modern European state to find the roots of its crisis in the twentieth
century, arguing that those origins were to be found in the collapse of the
Medieval Catholic Empire that preceded it. In 1922, whilst teaching at the
University of Bonn, then at the height of a Catholic cultural revival, Schmitt
wrote two books simultaneously, Political Theology (1922) and Roman Cath-
olicism and Political Form (1923). Central to both was the claim that the
history of the modern European state’s development and subsequent dissolu-
tion in the twentieth century was closely related to the process of seculariza-
tion, which he understood to have been one of the major factors that defined
European modernity. Indeed, Schmitt, in one of his most often quoted state-
ments in Political Theology, declared that ‘all significant concepts of the
modern theory of state are secularized theological concepts’ (Schmitt, 2005:
33).3 However, in our view, it is rather in Roman Catholicism and Political
Form – an essay long overlooked in Anglophone readings of Schmitt’s work
but central to his oeuvre – where his analysis of secularization and the origins
of the modern European state, and indeed, where its relationship to questions
of space is also most apparent. The core concept Schmitt introduced in that
short book is that of political form.4 Political form is the particular metaphor
that Schmitt adopted to explain how political order takes shape in the specific
historical conditions of modernity – a modernity that at this point in his work
he treats as a wholly European experience, although he will later consider it to
be global in nature, if still Eurocentric in emphasis. Although the concept of
political form receives scant attention in the secondary literature (with the
exception of Galli, 2010a), it is arguably one of the most important concepts
running throughout his thought as a whole and crucial to understanding the
structural role of space and spatial theory within it.
In Roman Catholicism and Political Form Schmitt set himself the task of
accounting for the nature of the political power of the Roman Catholic
Church in Medieval Europe. He presented the Medieval Roman Catholic
Church as a robust critical counterpoint to the failing political institutions of
Weimar Germany. In particular, he drew a contrast between the specifically
political form of thinking in Roman Catholicism to the depoliticizing ‘eco-
nomic thinking’ that he considered to be dominant across the political spec-
trum of early twentieth century Europe. It was precisely this ‘economic
thinking’ that he believed to be eroding the capacity of political institutions to
provide order in twentieth century Europe.5 Nevertheless this book was by no
means a call for a Catholic politics. Indeed, Schmitt fell out of favour with
Bonn’s Catholic literati and the Catholic Centre Party, who had been courting
him as a possible parliamentary candidate, for denying an active role for
Catholicism in the politics of the German State. ‘The alliance of throne and
 Spatializing the political 77
altar’ – he wrote – ‘will not be followed by an alliance of office and altar, also
not of factory and altar’ (Schmitt, 1996: 24). Rather, his analysis of the
Medieval Roman Catholic Church should be read in line with the theory of
secularization outlined in Political Theology, whereby modern concepts of
state are secularized renderings of former theological concepts. Hence, Schmitt
provided a political reading of the Roman Catholic Church that emphasized
its success as an institution of political order in Medieval Europe. His aim
was explicitly not to argue that the Catholic Church should, or even could,
play such an ordering role in early twentieth century Europe, but rather to
examine the formal structure of Medieval Roman Catholicism as a model of
ordering institution.
Hence for Schmitt, the Roman Catholic Church was above all a powerful
political institution that successfully brought order to Medieval Europe. It
was able to do so, in his view, because it represented a unique ‘political
form’ – what he referred to as ‘a complex of opposites, a complexico opposi-
torum’ (ibid.: 7).6 This complexico oppositorum was, for Schmitt, able to
embrace all antitheses within an ordered unity where they would continue to
exist but would be neutralized politically. The central strength of the Roman
Catholic Church was therefore its ability to mediate between unity and dif-
ference, not by appealing to a ‘higher third’ that would provide a dialectical
synthesis, but rather by providing an umbrella structure in which differences
could co-exist without conflict (ibid.: 9).7 As a complexico oppositorum, the
Roman Church rested upon a uniquely powerful political universalism that
did not seek to flatten differences but rather embrace them within a wider
overarching structure. In this ability Schmitt saw ‘a specific formal superiority
over the matter of human life such as no other imperium has ever known’
(ibid.: 8). In his view, Roman Catholicism drew the power that had sustained
it across centuries precisely from its ‘formal character’ or, in other words,
from the fact that it provided a framework that stood formally above other
differences and was able to embrace them (ibid.).8
The ‘essence’ of this political form lay, in Schmitt’s view, in ‘the political
idea of Catholicism’ (ibid.).9 The operative ‘political idea’ was that the
Church represented the power of Christ on earth through ‘an unbroken chain’
linking the Pope to the ‘concrete person of Christ’ (ibid.: 14). ‘The formal
character of Roman Catholicism’ – he argued – ‘is based on a strict realiza-
tion of the principle of representation’ (ibid.: 8). By representing the idea of
Christ’s power on earth the Catholic Church was able to legitimize its
authority and bring unity to Christian Europe. Hence, he understood the
power of the Roman Catholic Church to rest upon a conceptual matrix that
fused authority, community and idea through the means of representation (in
the sense of the political unity of a people, something we will discuss in the
next Chapters). Although he dropped the concept of the complexico opposi-
torum from his conceptual vocabulary after this book, we argue that Schmitt
carried the concept of political form and the conceptual matrix on which it
rested into his future work.
78 Spatializing the political
The collapse of the Roman Catholic complexico was, in Schmitt’s account,
one of the founding events of European modernity and one that profoundly
reshaped the development of political order in modern Europe. The fallout
was characterized above all by a crisis of political form, as the ordering fra-
mework of Medieval Europe was dissolved along with the universal authority of
the Catholic Church. In his work between the early 1920s and the early 1950s
Schmitt built up an account of modern European, and subsequently world,
history book-ended by two crises of political form: the first produced by the
collapse of the Catholic complexico in the sixteenth century and the second by
the dissolution of the modern state in the twentieth. The period between these
crises was characterized, in his account, by the emergence of the state as the
defining political form of modernity. In order to understand how Schmitt
interpreted this in his work it is therefore important to return to his analysis
of the historical shift between the collapse of the Medieval Catholic order and
the modern state.
Schmitt’s account of the political effects of secularization on modern Eur-
opean history that Schmitt presents provides a crucial analytical backbone
running through his corpus. Although he did not dwell long upon it in the
pages of Roman Catholicism and Political Form, the process of secularization
was for Schmitt both a symptom and a cause of the collapse of the Roman
Catholic complexico, and hence of the political form on which Medieval
European political order had rested. The Protestant Reformation had dis-
puted the legitimacy of the Papacy’s claim to represent Christ’s eminent power
and, its authority undermined, the Church could not longer bind Europe together.
Unable to claim indisputable authority to represent Christ on earth, the
Roman Catholic Church was no longer able to stand above political differences
in order to embrace them as it had hitherto done, and instead became
embroiled in those very differences as one among other competing authorities.
In the wake of the Reformation, Christian theology no longer represented a uni-
fying power within Europe, but rather a divisive influence. In Schmitt’s view, the
resulting collapse of political form saw the unifying authority of the Roman
Catholic complexico crumble and the binds of political association unfurl,
unleashing a century of widespread religious civil war across Europe. These
conflicts became all the more vicious because they involved competing claims
to absolute legitimacy grounded in opposed theological doctrines. At many points
in his work, Schmitt emphasized the importance of this period of bloody
religious war for the birth of modern European political order. Yet, this brutal
creedal strife was also indicative of what it meant to exist without ‘political form’,
something he found echoes of in the twentieth century, when Europe was
once again to become a battlefield in the shadow of a politics without form.10
From within this great period of turmoil in European history emerged the
problem of how to produce a new political form that could restore order and,
as a consequence, limit conflict. Given that the disputed conceptions of
theology were one of the key axes of antagonism it was clear that these claims
could no longer provide the conceptual glue binding authority and community
 Spatializing the political 79
together in a stable political form. A new ground for legitimating the political
form was needed in order to quash the religious civil wars that had torn
Europe asunder in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From this caul-
dron of sectarian ferment came the defining question of modern politics, the
central question that lurks unspoken behind much of Schmitt’s work: how can
political order be produced without theological grounds? According to Schmitt,
the answer to this epochal question appeared in the seventeenth century in the
form of the modern secular state. This paradigmatic modern institution pro-
vided a neutral, secular frame within which to conduct politics as an alter-
native to the controversial disputed field of theology. By marking a distinction
between private religious belief and public political association the new secular
European state was able to remove politics from the conflicted sphere of reli-
gion. In so doing it was able to neutralize conflict based on claims to absolute
justice grounded in theology and establish politics as a secular realm grounded
in the mutual recognition between the newly formed European states.
The flood of religious civil war was thus dammed by the emergence of a
new political form capable of providing a neutral framework for the conduct
of politics: the modern secular state. The state acted as an ordering institution
precisely to the extent that it removed politics from the realm of theology; yet
without theology, a new source of legitimacy was needed. The core challenge
faced by the modern state was thus to provide political form without appealing
to absolute theological foundations. Schmitt’s work can arguably be read as a
series of attempts to answer this fundamental quandary. Indeed, in our view, his
efforts to theorize the foundations of modern political order were crucially
bound up with his understanding of the relationship between space and politics.
However, before discussing the relation of space to political form it is important to
examine the philosophical dimension of his reformulation of political thought.

The political: the groundless grounds of order

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be
reduced is that between friends and enemy.
(Schmitt, 2007b: 26)

If any one statement had to be singled out as the most important in Schmitt’s
oeuvre it would doubtless be this famous definition of the political. The con-
cept of the political lies at the core of his thought and is the key idea in
understanding it. All other concepts and structures in his conceptual edifice
relate in some way to the political, including, crucially for our purposes, his
theorizations of space. So what then is the political for Schmitt? In The Concept
of the Political, first published in 1927 but appearing in an amended edition
in 1932, Schmitt set out to define the foundations of those phenomena we
characterise as ‘political’. The political in this sense must be understood as a
more fundamental concept than the category of politics, the latter displaying
the character of the former, that is, the distinction between friend and enemy.
80 Spatializing the political
In Schmitt’s view, the political refers to a sphere of human relations that
can be distinguished from all others. He developed this concept on the basis
that ‘various relatively independent endeavours of human thought and action’
each have their ‘own criteria which express themselves in a characteristic way’
(2007b: 26). The political is ‘independent’ of other spheres of human relations
such as the moral, the aesthetic and the economic ‘in the sense that it can
neither be based on any one antithesis or any combination of other antitheses,
nor can it be traced to these’ (ibid.). Just as the moral, the aesthetic and the
economic have their own defining distinction, between good and evil, beauti-
ful and ugly, profitable and non-profitable respectively, so too the political is
defined by the distinction between friend and enemy: ‘All action with a spe-
cifically political meaning can be traced’ to this distinction (ibid.). Two ques-
tions immediately arise here: what is the relationship of the political to other
spheres of social relations? Why is a defining role granted to enmity in the
political and what is its nature?
In the first instance, the ‘autonomy of the political becomes evident’ –
Schmitt argued – ‘by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and com-
prehend the friend–enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses’ (ibid.:
27). Nonetheless, the political is not a pure sphere. It can indeed draw on and
emerge from antitheses found in other spheres of human relations such as the
moral, the economic, and so on. What makes an antithesis political is the
degree of intensity with which it is drawn: ‘The distinction of friend and
enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an
association or dissociation’ (ibid.: 26).11 ‘The political’, Schmitt contended, ‘is
the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism
becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme
point, that of the friend enemy grouping’ (ibid.: 29). Hence, the political
enemy:

need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an

economic competitor … but he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger;
and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specifically intense way,
existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case
conflicts with him are possible.
(ibid.: 27)

It is important to note that Schmitt did not conceive of the political as a

concept ‘indicative of substantial content’ (ibid.: 26). Hence, although it may
happen that the enemy ‘intends to negate his opponent’s way of life’, this fact
cannot be determined by pre-existing substantive categories (ibid.: 27),12 since
although the political ‘can contain and comprehend different contents’, it
always designates the most intense form of distinction (Schmitt, 1999a:
203).13 Because it had ‘no substance of its own … the political can be reached
from any terrain’, and can emerge within any social sphere where an antithesis
grows intense enough to produce existential conflict (ibid.).14
 Spatializing the political 81
Second, the most striking aspect of Schmitt’s conceptualization of the
political is that he defined politics through enmity. For Schmitt, ‘the very
essence of political existence’ resides within the friend–enemy distinction
(Schmitt, 2007b: 49).15 Further, given that ‘war follows from enmity’, war
becomes a central category in the sphere of the political (ibid.: 33). Yet, he
cautioned that war is:

neither the aim nor the purpose nor even the content of politics. Never-
theless, as an ever present possibility it is the leading presupposition
which determines in a characteristic way human action and thinking and
thereby creates a specifically political behaviour.
(ibid.: 34)

The political so conceived ‘does not reside in the battle itself … but in the mode
of behaviour which is determined by its possibility’ (ibid.: 37).16 War was thus,
for Schmitt, not the aim of politics, but its horizon, the ‘most extreme possibility
[from which] human life derives its specifically political tension’ (ibid.: 35). The
possibility of war is inscribed in the very foundations of the political, in the form
of enmity, and as such it acts as a point to which all politics must be orientated.
However, the fact that Schmitt defined the political through enmity should
not be understood as a celebration of war.17 He did not, as some suggest,
conceive of the political as a ‘realm of permanent war’ (Neocleous, 1996a:
18).18 The friend–enemy distinction, he argues, ‘neither favours militarism,
neither imperialism nor pacifism’, but is rather a sober recognition of the
‘possibility’ of war (Schmitt, 2007b: 33). War does not have to be ‘common,
normal, something ideal, or desirable’, but it cannot be excluded from possi-
bility (ibid.). Indeed, according to Schmitt, only by recognizing the inherently
conflictual nature of politics can the worst excesses of war be managed and
avoided. Thus, even if war cannot be eradicated or ever finally overcome, it
can nevertheless be limited and contained if acknowledged as an ‘ever present
possibility’. At the core of Schmitt’s concept of the political thus lies a pecu-
liar double movement that makes antagonism the foundation of politics, and
makes politics the art of managing this very antagonism. Hence, the political
itself contains a moment of ‘depoliticization’, an inherent self-limitation of
enmity. By providing clearly defined distinctions between friend and enemy,
the political structures, and therefore controls, conflict.
It is one of a number of paradoxes at the heart of Schmitt’s concept of the
political, that politics is defined as a realm of antagonism in order to provide
a framework in which to limit warfare. This paradoxical structure turns on
the concept of the enemy. The enemy for Schmitt was ‘something existentially
different and alien’ that threatens one’s ‘way of life and therefore must be
repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence’ (ibid.: 27).
This definition at first seems to propose an understanding of the friend–enemy
distinction based upon war between groups conceived as essentialized entities.
However, when examined more closely it reveals something quite different.
82 Spatializing the political
Schmitt in fact qualified his concept of enmity in two ways. He distinguished
between two different sets of enemies: public and private enemies and ‘real’
and ‘absolute’ enemies. He introduced these distinctions to ensure that the
limited conflict ‘proper’ to the political can be clearly understood. First, he
stated that the political enemy is ‘solely the public enemy’ – ‘hostis, not inimicus’
(ibid.: 28).19 Thus, the political enemy is distinguished from the private enemy
and need not be hated personally: ‘An enemy exists only when, at least potentially,
one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity’ (ibid.). Indeed,
conversely, ‘everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men …
becomes public by virtue of such a relationship’ (ibid.: 28). Thus, the political as
the relation between friend and enemy is, properly conceived, limited to the
public sphere.20
Second, the political enemy was for Schmitt a ‘real’ enemy that emerges in a
‘concrete situation’. The enemy, like all political concepts, Schmitt argued, is
‘focused on a specific conflict and [is] bound to a concrete situation’ (ibid.:
30). The political resides in ‘clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby
being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy’ (ibid.: 37). In
The Concept of the Political, he opposed this ‘real’ enemy bound to a ‘concrete
situation’ to concepts of enmity that appeal to universal, moral terms such as
‘humanity’. Although, as Schmitt noted, it was increasingly common in the twen-
tieth century for war to be discussed in humanitarian terms, ‘the concept of
humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to
be a human being … Humanity as such cannot wage a war because it has no
enemy’ (ibid.: 54). Or rather enmity takes on ‘an especially intensive political
meaning’ as one group claiming to fight in the name of all humanity turns
their opponent into the enemy of humanity, the ‘inhuman’ (ibid.). A war
waged against the enemy of humanity is then considered ‘the absolute last
war of humanity’:

Such a war is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by

transcending the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously
degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to
make him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly
destroyed. In other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be
compelled to retreat to his borders only.
(ibid.: 36)

Schmitt thus distinguished between a ‘real’ enmity tied to a ‘concrete situation’,

where the warring parties recognize each other as legitimate political adversaries,
and an ‘absolute’ enmity that respects no limitation and leads towards a
horizon of annihilation.21 Thus, the political enemy considered as both public
and ‘real’, presupposes limits on the nature and scope of political conflict.22
For Schmitt the enemy plays the paradoxical role of being both the source of
conflict and the means of its regulation. However, it is only the public and
‘real’ enemy that can play this role, not the private or ‘absolute’ enemy.
 Spatializing the political 83
One important implication of this is that any political entity ‘presupposes
the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political
entity’ (ibid.: 53). An entity without an enemy is not, for Schmitt, a political
entity. He argued that, ‘the political entity is by its very nature the decisive entity’
(ibid.: 44), either it identifies the enemy or ‘the political entity is non-existent’
(ibid.: 39).23

In the orientation towards the possible extreme case of an actual battle

against a real enemy, the political entity is essential, and it is the decisive
entity for the friend-or-enemy grouping.
(ibid.)

Political identities so conceived are thus relational and situational, determined

by specific conflicts with ‘real’ enemies in ‘concrete’ situations rather than by
absolute concepts or essentialist categories. Indeed, it is precisely because the
political lacks its own substance that these conflicts can arise in any sphere of
human relations: the economic, the moral, the religious, and so on. As noted
above, it is the degree of intensity of an antithesis that produces a political
relation and not the substance of the difference itself.

The friend–enemy grouping is existentially so strong and decisive that the

non-political antithesis, at precisely the moment at which it becomes
political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely religious,
purely economic, purely cultural criteria and motives to the conditions and
conclusions of the political situation at hand.
(ibid.: 38)

Other forms of identity could therefore become political if they grow intense
enough that their defining antithesis could lead to warfare. However, whilst
these relations may be of the utmost intensity, warfare is nonetheless limited
as it takes place between ‘real’ public enemies tied to a ‘concrete’ situation.
Although Schmitt argued that political identities were grounded in situa-
tional relations as opposed to essentialist substances, he nonetheless con-
sidered them to take shape in relation to the possibility of existential conflict.
It is from this existential conflict that political existence, indeed even human
life as such, receives its ultimate meaning in his view. Existential conflict
should be understood here to indicate ‘concrete’ life and death struggles
involving the potential loss of human life and not as a metaphor for some
generalized concept of social conflict. Schmitt explicitly stated that, ‘the
friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely
because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing’ (ibid.: 33, italics
ours). Indeed, ‘by virtue of [its] power over the physical life of men, the poli-
tical community transcends all other associations or societies’ (ibid.: 47).
Although he noted that a world without politics ‘might contain many very
interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind’,
84 Spatializing the political
Schmitt noted that ‘there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men
could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other
human beings’ (ibid.: 35).24 Thus, the political is a source of meaning more
fundamental than that found in other spheres of human life, since it concerns
the very question of existence as such: war, ‘the physical killing of human
beings who belong to the side of the enemy … has no normative meaning but
an existential meaning only’ (ibid.: 49).25
Schmitt understood the political as the engine of existential meaning, to
stand against what he saw as the increasing loss of meaning in a modern age,
an age characterized by the growing influence of nihilistic tendencies.26 In
Schmitt’s view the ‘specifically political tension’ that arises from the friend–
enemy distinction – the possibility of existential conflict – is thus the very
locus for the production of a historical meaning, otherwise lacking in social
life. Indeed, given that he considered the friend–enemy relation to be ‘the
dialectic tension animating the movement of world history’ he consistently
insisted throughout his work on the primacy of the political not only in rela-
tion to other social domains but to world history and human existence as
such (in Gross, 2007: 196).27
Because of the primacy Schmitt afforded the political it is important to
appreciate the work it does in his thought: it defines the essence of politics as
antagonism, but limits political conflict to the war between ‘real’ public ene-
mies who assume each other as equals, and constitutes political identities
through mutual enmity whilst grounding the meaning of human history in the
possibility of existential conflict between them. However, if the political is a
foundational concept in Schmitt’s thought, what are its conceptual founda-
tions? To what category of thought does the political belong? Schmitt does
not systematically categorize the foundations of the political but his under-
standing can nonetheless be pieced together. Arguably the political draws on
three principal conceptual registers: the ontological, the anthropological and
the historical. To put it schematically: for Schmitt, the existential fact of dif-
ference (the ontological) creates the conditions for conflict in human societies
(the anthropological) and hence the need to establish political order to
manage conflict (the historical). If these ontological and anthropological
conditions make the political an inescapable part of human existence, the
political order that arises in response is always determined by specific histor-
ical conditions. We will thus briefly examine the ontological and anthro-
pological conditions of the political in the next section, before turning to the
more complex question of the relationship between the political and the pos-
sibilities for political order in the historical conditions of modernity as delineated in
Schmitt’s thought.

Dishevelled humanity: the political pluriverse

In The Concept of the Political Schmitt declared that, ‘the political world is a
pluriverse, not a universe’ (Schmitt, 2007b: 53). Before anything else, his
 Spatializing the political 85
definition of the political as friend–enemy relations presupposes the existence
of multiple political entities. Difference is thus the most primary and founda-
tional fact of the political. He does not elaborate a theory of the grounds of
political difference but rather takes it as the guiding assumption of his argu-
ments: difference, in Schmitt’s terms, is simply what there is. In a 1930 article
he wrote that the ‘world of objective spirit is a pluralistic world; pluralism of
races and peoples, of religions and cultures; of languages and of legal sys-
tems … even the political world is in its nature pluralistic’ (Schmitt, 1999a:
204). Hence, political difference follows from the difference inherent in
human existence as such. Humanity, as far as it was a unity, is defined by
difference: it is, Schmitt claimed, ‘dishevelled’ (in Heller-Roazen, 2009).28
Hence, the concept of the political reflects the constitutively differential nature
of the human condition.
Although Schmitt rarely used the words ‘ontology’ or ‘ontological’ and did
not describe his concept of the political in these terms he clearly sought to
claim some degree of ontological validity for the concept.29 Indeed, the fact
that he spoke of political differences in ‘existential’ terms indicates that he
understood them to have some basis in the most fundamental level of exis-
tence as such. It is tempting, in light of Schmitt’s Nazi involvement and his
anti-Semitism, to read his conception of the political as being grounded in an
understanding of fixed essentialized differences.30 However, at numerous
points in his work he emphasized the historical fluidity of political differences
and their essentially contingent co-ordinates in ‘concrete’ situations. Indeed,
as highlighted above, the political is, for Schmitt, defined by the intensity – as
opposed to substance – of political differences. Arguably then, rather than
being concerned with the nature of specific differences, Schmitt’s concept of
the political seeks to tarry with the ‘existential’ fact of difference itself.
Indeed, it is precisely because differences are ever-changing that the possibility
of conflict cannot ever be overcome. In other words, the fact that differences
are not fixed implies that the political is shaped by ‘concrete’ situations and
can arise from any social sphere. This ontological indeterminacy at the heart
of human existence is the essential crux of Schmitt’s conception of the poli-
tical. It is precisely because humanity is ‘dishevelled’ that conflict always
remains possible and, in Schmitt’s view, order is needed.

A dangerous and dynamic being: the need for order

The problem of order emerged directly out of the fact that human existence is
defined by ontological difference in Schmitt’s view: conflict is born of difference.
Out of ontological difference arises the political significance of human nature:

One could test all theories of state and political ideas according to their
anthropology and thereby classify these as to whether they consciously or
unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or by nature good.
(Schmitt, 2007b: 58)31
86 Spatializing the political
Hence, in the assessment of the German jurist, all political concepts turn on
the question of ‘whether man is a dangerous being or not, a risky or a
harmless creature’ and ultimately ‘the anthropological distinction of good and
evil’ (ibid.). In The Concept of the Political he argued that, ‘all genuine poli-
tical theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic
but a dangerous and dynamic being’ (ibid.: 61).32 As such political order is
required to tame a ‘problematic’ human nature. Man, as Schmitt wrote else-
where, is ‘a cowardly rebel in need of a master’ (Schmitt, 1996: 33). To deny
the ‘dangerous and dynamic’ element of human nature is therefore to deny
the need for such a master. Hence, anarchistic political theories rely on a
political anthropology where man is ‘by nature good’: ‘The natural goodness
of man is closely tied to the radical denial of state and government. One follows
from the other and both foment each other’ (Schmitt, 2007b: 60).
It would be easy, given Schmitt’s Catholicism and his avowed interest in
political theology, to read his political anthropology as simply an extension of
the doctrine of ‘original sin’.33 Although he did appeal to the concept of ‘ori-
ginal sin’, his main point of orientation nonetheless remained the real possi-
bility of friend–enemy antagonisms. ‘Because the sphere of the political is in
the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political con-
ceptions and ideas’ could not, he argued, ‘very well start with an anthro-
pological optimism’. Such a view would dissolve enmity, and thereby, ‘every
specific political consequence’ (ibid., 2007b: 64). Those political thinkers who
start by presuming human nature is evil ‘are always aware of the concrete
possibility of an enmity’ (ibid.: 65). From this perspective, the very possibility
of a concrete enmity means that human nature must be considered politically
volatile and in need of restraint. Any form of political thought that pre-
supposes man to be good or supposes that political organization can do
without ordering authority, in Schmitt’s view, fails to acknowledge the ‘ever
present possibility’ of the friend–enemy grouping. At best this amounts to a
dangerous utopianism. A sober understanding of the political necessitates an
understanding of politics based on order: where there is difference there is the
possibility of conflict, and where there is the possibility of conflict there is
need for active ordering. Order is therefore inherent neither in the ontological
conditions of human existence nor the anthropological state of human nature.
Rather, it has to be produced through political action and institutions, and is
thus historically determined.

Janus-faced grounds: the paradox of the political

Here then a question necessarily arises. How is order to be produced if onto-
logical difference and the ‘dangerous and dynamic’ nature of humanity
cannot be overcome? Schmitt’s answer is that the political itself provides the
foundation of politics. One of the most radical aspects of his work lies pre-
cisely in the claim that the very cleavage of antagonistic difference dividing
human society should be the grounds for order. Although order is necessary
 Spatializing the political 87
precisely because of the possibility of conflict implicit in difference, it can
nonetheless only be constituted on the basis of the very same difference.
Political difference at once threatens order and provides its inescapable foun-
dation. Schmitt’s concept of the political circulates around this tension
between difference and order: difference requires order and order requires
difference. As difference is embedded in the ontological and anthropological
conditions of human existence political order cannot hope to overcome it.
Rather, order must both base itself upon difference and struggle against it.
Hence, whilst order is grounded upon difference, difference exceeds all order.
The concept of the political contains both understandings of difference
simultaneously: as a force that both grounds and exceeds order.
Carlo Galli argues that the concept of the political is Schmitt’s attempt to
define this ‘double-sided origin’ of politics.34 Understood from this perspec-
tive grounding order and ungrounding difference are not opposed concepts
for Schmitt, but are rather locked in an embrace within the political. Like-
wise, and as Finnish political theorist Mikas Ojakangas has pointed out,
foundation and rupture are not opposed terms for Schmitt but rather coter-
minous. For Ojakangas, the core of Schmitt’s thought lies in the paradox of a
‘founding rupture’ – whereby all foundations are laid in moments of rupture
and all foundations are necessarily ruptured (Ojakangas, 2006: 38).35 On the
one hand, order must always rely on an act of founding, which must be an act
that confirms or indeed produces difference. Yet, on the other hand, order
must always seek to limit difference, to manage it through acts of ordering,
Schmitt’s thought is therefore defined by a deep structural tension between
foundational indeterminacy and the demand for order (see Rowan, 2011).36
This tension however does not represent a logical flaw in his argument but
rather – as Galli and others point out – provides the generative force of his
work. His concept of the political is thus characterized by a tension that refuses
the moment of dialectical synthesis – caught in a movement without resolution.
Encapsulated in Schmitt’s concept of the political is therefore a complex
understanding of difference as both an ordering principle and a restive ele-
ment of disruption. To use somewhat worn Derridian terminology, Schmitt
locates in the political both the conditions of possibility and impossibility of
political order. Further, locating the foundations of political order in differ-
ence – both in the sense that difference is an ontological condition and con-
flict is inherent to human nature – implies that any given order is necessarily
contingent.37 This foundational difference makes any definitive or final form
of order impossible even as it generates the conditions of possibility for any
particular order. Hence, any particular order the result of a contingent
ordering of a deeper instability. The ontological and anthropological condi-
tions of the political ensure for Schmitt that all forms of political order/
ordering are determined by their specific historical conditions. Hence, he set
his thought in opposition to forms of political thought that presume to locate
stable foundations for order in supposedly universal principles, such as
reason, humanity or economic exchange, or assume politics to be necessarily
88 Spatializing the political
determined by grand meta-historical processes such as economic exchange or
the unfolding spirit of History.38 Galli argues that the necessary contingency
of political order makes politics a tragic affair for Schmitt (Galli, 2000,
2010a). Politics remains caught in the process of attempting to establish order
in the knowledge that it will ultimately fail. Indeed, Schmitt’s consistent focus
on the need for strong political authority ought to be understood against the
backdrop of his acute conceptual sensitivity to the ultimately fragile and
mutable nature of political order.
A further paradox remains to be drawn out here. As stated above, insofar
as the political provides the foundations of political order, it operates
according to a logic of depoliticization. Hence, internal to the political is a
moment of politicization, that recognizes conflict and renders it explicit, and a
moment of depoliticization, that consists in the control and the containment
of the destructive force of this same conflict. Whilst the possibility of conflict
cannot be totally eliminated, given that it emerges from irreparable ontologi-
cal and anthropological conditions, it can nonetheless be limited. It is precisely
the friend–enemy distinction that offers a minimal structure within which
conflict can be limited. The very principle of enmity contains the germ of the
depoliticization needed for this task. Enmity is, as William Rasch has noted, a
‘structuring principle’ for Schmitt (2005a: 253): the binary structure of
antagonistic difference itself providing a sort of minimal ground on which to
frame political order. However, this ‘structuring principle’ inherent to enmity
does not produce a determinate form of political order. Political order is, rather,
in Schmitt’s analysis, always determined by specific historical conditions. Thus,
although the political emerges from specific ontological and anthropological
conditions, the way in which it takes shape ‘as order’ is determined by a his-
torically specific context. Indeed, it is in relation to the historically specific
conditions in which the political takes shape that the importance of spatiality
in Schmitt’s conception of the political becomes apparent.

Spatializing the political: the concrete situation

A vital if frequently overlooked aspect of Schmitt’s concept of the political is
its situational nature. In The Concept of the Political he repeatedly stressed the
fact that the political is always tied to a specific ‘concrete situation’, to a
particular ‘concrete’ instance of enmity. Although he does not elaborate on
the conditions for situatedness, nor state explicitly that situatedness is neces-
sarily spatial, it is clear from many passages of his work that Schmitt con-
sidered the ‘concrete situation’ to refer, at least in part, to the spatial location
in which a struggle takes place. Further, insofar as the political ought to be
considered relational, that is, constituted through antagonistic difference, the
spatiality of the ‘concrete situation’ does not simply refer to the site of strug-
gle but further that the political itself produces a specific spatiality through its
very ‘taking place’: a spatiality divided along the antagonistic lines of political
difference. In other words, the political is inherently spatial, determined by
 Spatializing the political 89
specific spatial conditions, but also the source of an equally specific produc-
tion of space. Implied in this concept of the political therefore is the idea that
political struggle necessarily takes place in space and, conversely, that political
struggle produces a specific kind of space, a divided space. Taken together
these interrelated processes are what we refer to as the spatialization of the
political, something that, we argue, lies at the core of Schmitt’s thought, even
as it remains largely implicit in his early work.
In Schmitt’s later writings, however, this spatialization of the political
becomes explicitly theorized in the concept of nomos. Although we examine the
development of his mature spatial theory in the following chapters it is useful
here to note that, in his post-war spatial theory, Schmitt defined his central
concept of nomos as a unity of Ordnung and Ortung, normally translated into
English as ‘order and orientation’.39 However, as Italian political theorist Thalin
Zarmanian notes, ‘order and localisation’ gives a more accurate sense of
Schmitt’s meaning (Zarmanian, 2011: 291). Zarmanian uses the term ‘locali-
sation’ rather than ‘orientation’ to underline not only the concrete spatial particu-
larities implied in Schmitt’s understanding of nomos but also the dynamic and
active nature of Ortung.40 In our interpretation, this active spatialization of the
political is already implicit in his concept of the political albeit in nascent form.
As noted above, Schmitt repeatedly emphasized that the ‘concrete situation’
of enmity concerned the ‘existential’, the most fundamental aspects of human
existence as such. Indeed, he argued that the political does not concern abstrac-
tions but rather ‘the real possibility of physical killing’ (Schmitt, 2007b: 33),
which is presented by an ‘existential threat’ faced in a ‘concrete situation’
(ibid.: 27). Therefore, the political involves not only the situational but also
the ontological, indeed the brute facticity of material physicality. It seems that
if the political is concrete, situational and existential, his theorization also
presumes the implicit spatiality of the political, and indeed an inherent rela-
tion between the spatial and the ontological. Certainly in his late work
Schmitt would depict the relationship between space and the political in
ontological terms, but arguably a deep relationship between these terms was
implied even in his early work on the ‘philosophy of concrete life’ (Schmitt,
2005: 15; see also Minca, 2011a; Ojakangas, 2006; Rowan, 2011).
For Schmitt, the relationship between friend and enemy is always spatia-
lized, both ‘taking place’ somewhere, but also producing an original and
decisive division of space. Political order, in fact, rests on associating political
difference to a determinate spatial division, thus formalizing the spatialization
of the political. It is precisely because the political difference between friend
and enemy could be mapped against the spatial difference between inside
and outside, that concrete measures could be established for the regulation and
limitation of conflict. Arguably, political form, in the sense outlined in Roman
Catholicism and Political Form, is nothing other than the spatialization of the
political within a formal institutional structure. Political order is therefore
founded on the division of space within the stable institutional framework
provided by the governing political form or, rather, political form is the
90 Spatializing the political
name given to such a spatialized order in Schmitt’s work. Hence, the question
of how to found modern political order without theological foundations could
be answered, for Schmitt, by dividing space into distinct political entities,
each taking the form of the specifically modern form of authority identified
with the state. Hence, in the absence of theological foundations for order,
Schmitt conceived the modern state as grounded within a spatio-political
ontology of sorts.41 While this foundational spatial division clearly plays an
explicit role in his late work, we would argue that a fundamental conceptual
matrix between space, political order and the management of conflict occu-
pies a structural position within his early work as well, even if it remains impli-
cit. Indeed, we believe it not only lay at the heart of his conceptualization of
the state, but also of his attempts to understand and address the historical
crisis of the German state in the Weimar Republic.
In Schmitt’s account, lacking theological grounds on which to claim uni-
versal authority, the modern secular state had to recognize the structural role
that the ineradicable nature of difference had in founding order. In other
words, the spatialization of the political was the state’s response to the fun-
damental question of modern politics – that is, how to produce order in the
absence of theological foundations. In this perspective, political order was
produced by the formalization of this principle of political difference in the
spatial differentiation between states. Further, in Schmitt’s account, this spa-
tialization of the political in the state emerged within the specific historical
conditions of the Eurocentric world order that marked the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Hence, the distinction between inside and outside was
not simply a topographical abstraction but took shape within the ‘concrete’
historical situation of European state formation during this period. Indeed,
the state form was, in Schmitt’s view, founded upon two sets of fundamental
inter-related inside-outside distinctions: between the new states within Europe,
and between Europe and the colonial New World.42
In the first instance, the relationship between new European states was
managed by defining the power of each sovereign over a specific limited space.
The border between states marked the limits of sovereign power but also
constituted the spatial framework within which each sovereign could ensure
unity, order and peace. Beyond the border was the realm of the Other, of
potential disorder and war. Hence, in Schmitt’s conception of the state, the
spatialization of the political along the lines of a distinction between inside
and outside produced a framework in which conflict could be limited both
within and between states. On the one hand, the threat of external enemies
produced unity within the state, ensuring that the internal differences were
politically neutralized. On the other, conflict among states could be for-
malized and ‘contained’, since the spatial distinction between states allowed it
to be clearly localized. States of war and peace could clearly be distinguished,
and warring and neutral parties identified. Hence, whilst the possibility of war
could never be escaped, it could be conceived ‘in form’, made subject to
 Spatializing the political 91
‘bracketing’, as a result of a specific and historically determined division of
space (see Schmitt, 2003a: Part III).
The second key structural inside–outside distinction was between Europe as
a collective of sovereign states and the ‘free space’ of the New World colo-
nies.43 Although Schmitt argued that the ‘spatial revolution’ signalled by the
emergence of modern geometric sciences and the parallel European conquest
of the ‘New World’ had contributed to the collapse of the Medieval Catholic
complexico, European colonialism in the ‘New World’ nonetheless created the
conditions for the emergence of the modern secular state within Europe.44 Fully
endorsing the history of European colonialism and imperialism, Schmitt sug-
gested that by making a clear distinction between the space of Europe and the
space of the New World in international law, Europe could be designated as a
space of relative order. On the one hand, the sense of collective superiority of the
European powers in relation to the New World allowed a system of interna-
tional law to emerge based on mutual respect and legal equality of European
sovereign states. Hence, war between these parties took place and could be
contained within the limits and the rules provided by these legal and geopo-
litical condition. Each state regarded the other as a ‘just enemy’ that could be
fought and defeated but not vanquished. On the other hand, these limits could
exist within Europe to the extent that war was unlimited in the ‘free space’ of the
colonial New World, where competition between European powers was given
free reign. Hence, conflict could be contained within Europe as long as the
New World provided an exterior realm where conflict could take place without
limits. These inside–outside distinctions between Europe and the New World
spatialized the political insofar as Europe became a realm where differences
were relatively depoliticized and the New World domain where politicization
could freely take place with neither limits nor constraints (ibid.: Parts II and III).
However, in this account of political form, the modern state rested pre-
cariously on a complex conceptual architecture fundamentally embedded in a
specific, historically determined, spatialization of the political. It was thus always at
risk of dissolving and collapsing into a potentially violent crisis. If the crisis of
the state in the early twentieth century revealed, in Schmitt’s view, a deeper crisis
of political form, this could in turn be understood as the product of a failure
to spatialize the political. Put in other words, the crisis of the state was the
result of a perverse ‘despatialization of the political’; that is, a fundamental (and
destructive) unbinding of spatial difference and political difference, which
meant that the political was no longer contained within the political form of the
state and the system of mutual recognition that it had allowed, at least
between European states, could no longer be maintaned. Such a crisis called for
new political forms capable of respatializing the political in order to contain con-
flict. Schmitt’s work can indeed be read also as a series of attempts to realize this, at
first within the horizon of the state and, then, from the mid 1930s, beyond it.
However, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, Schmitt’s writings
should not be discussed in isolation from the political context in which they
took shape. The conceptual matrix between space, political order and the
92 Spatializing the political
management of conflict found in his early work emerged not simply as a
theoretical abstraction but through his attempt to develop conceptual resour-
ces to address the crisis of the Weimar state. It is in this context that the
spatialization of the political and the crisis brought about by its despatializa-
tion must be understood. The next Chapter will thus focus precisely on
Schmitt’s response to the specific crisis of the Weimar state and on how his
critique of liberalism might be read in relation to the question of the spatia-
lization of the political. We will thus examine the implications of Schmitt’s
spatial understanding of order for his consideration of the modern European
state and how his famous critique of liberalism relates to its despatializing
effects on the political in subsequent chapters.

Notes
1 At least thought that could rightfully be considered political given that he sug-
gested any thought that was not polemical was not in fact political (Schmitt,
2007b: 30).
2 Many of the themes and methods that would come to characterize Schmitt’s later
work are already present in this first book: an understanding of politics as a realm of
human activity governed by decision; a trenchant critique of liberalism and indi-
vidualism; an erudite mastery of texts from across a number of historical periods.
3 This statement bore the clear influence of the then late Max Weber, whose lectures
Schmitt had attended in Munich. Indeed, the first versions of what would become
Political Theology appeared in a collection of essays commemorating Weber after
his death.
4 As Gopal Balakrishnan notes, the book was conceived and mostly written in 1922
at the same time as Schmitt was penning the better known Political Theology.
Balakrishnan argues that the fact the two books were composed simultaneously
attests to the astonishing protean nature of Schmitt’s writing as in his reading they
have dramatically opposed positions: whilst Roman Catholicism and Political Form
is focused on understanding the role of both universality and Catholicism in poli-
tics, Political Theology emphasizes difference and a thoroughly secular under-
standing of politics (see Balakrishnan, 2000: 51). We believe this interpretation to
involve a potentially substantive misreading of the book on the Roman Catholic
Church. Whilst Schmitt discussed the specifically powerful form of political universality
represented by the Roman Catholic Church in Medieval Europe, he was explicit
in arguing that the conditions of modernity no longer allowed for such a uni-
versal concept of politics – indeed quite the opposite – and that the role of Catholi-
cism in politics could no longer be leading. In fact, his reading of the Roman
Catholic Church is largely undertaken in the spirit of ‘conceptual analogy’, as
outlined in his theory of secularization in Political Theology, and is part of the same
attempt to come to terms politically with the historical process of secularization.
5 This denunciation of the ‘economic thinking’ that provided a common denomi-
nator to socialist and capitalist thought alike reflected his wider distrust of the
ideologies focused merely on economic and technological preoccupations that
dominated twentieth century thought. This is a theme that he developed further in
his 1929 screed ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’, which we dis-
cuss in the following chapter, and, more importantly, his much later reflections on
nomos, where he criticized both Marxism and capitalism for their focus on pro-
duction – at the expense of the ‘appropriation of the land’ – in order to ground
their respective political and legal systems. We return to this in Chapter 7.
 Spatializing the political 93
6 Schmitt drew this idea from the fifteenth century German philosopher and Cardi-
nal Nicolas of Cusa without attributing it, presumably expecting a Catholic
readership to recognize its origins. See Sitze, 2010: xxxiii. For more on the
complexico see Marder, 2010: 149–168; also, in Italian, Galli 2010a.
7 Although Schmitt does not explicitly mention Hegel he clearly conceived the
Catholic complexico in direct opposition to Hegelian dialectics. Indeed, for him
Catholicism ‘is categorically something other than the “higher third” of German
philosophy of nature and history. To it belong neither the despair of antithesis nor
the illusory optimism of their synthesis’ (1996: 11). Schmitt depicted the need for a
‘higher third’ as a weakness common to Romantic and Marxist thought, some-
thing that prevents them from understanding the representative power of Roman
Catholicism and hence, crucially for him, the power of representation in politics.
8 Both Balakrishnan and Gross have seen in Schmitt’s emphasis on the formal
power of Roman Catholicism the influence of Charles Maurras, the founder of
Action Française. Maurras had laid emphasis on the ‘classical’ form of politics,
which he saw being dissolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the
rise of the socialist masses. Maurras was an avowed agnostic, but appealed to
Catholicism as a state religion in France because he believed it had the power to
bring about social cohesion necessary for national unity. There are obvious simi-
larities between the two thinkers’ views on the unifying formal properties of
Catholic institutions but, as noted above, Schmitt stood against any formal role for
Catholicism in political life. See Balakrishnan, 2000: 55–57; Gross, 2007: 89–100.
9 Schmitt assigned great importance to the notion of the political idea, a notion that
returns in his work again and again in a variety of guises. It is crucial, for example, to
his discussion of the importance of myth in unifying the masses in The Critique of
Parliamentary Democracy, but it also plays a central role in his theorization of
Großraum and his relationship to the nature of Nazi expansionism. We will return to
examine how Schmitt employed the concept of the political idea later in the book.
10 The comparison between the twentieth century and the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries runs throughout Schmitt’s work. Both periods were for him defined by
the collapse of a powerful and lasting political form and the emergence of civil
wars that exceeded the borders of one state or political entity, or rather dissolved
the very possibility of making such distinctions. We will argue below that it is the
very collapse of these distinctions that signalled for Schmitt a fundamental crisis of
political form. Further, and not incidentally, Schmitt located in both periods a
profound ‘spatial revolution’ that reconfigured the relationship between politics
and spatial order in ways that dissolved the divisions of categories of older political
forms. Another period that Schmitt understood to share a world-historical ‘elective
affinity’ with the twentieth century was the age of early Christianity in Europe.
This period became an increasingly important reference point for Schmitt’s later
work, when he particularly emphasized Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessa-
lonians, from where he took the key figure of the Katechon, or restrainer of history.
A true Christian, Schmitt argued, could not help but notice the ‘great parallel’
between the middle years of the twentieth century and the early days of Christianity
defined by the Roman civil wars. See Schmitt, 2003a: 63, 2009b: 168.
11 It should be noted here that Schmitt made conceptual changes on precisely this
point between the first two German editions of The Concept of the Political pub-
lished in 1927 and 1932 respectively. In the first edition the political is defined
simply by the degree of intensity of a distinction between two antagonistic parties.
Hence, the more intense a distinction the more political it becomes. However, in
the 1932 edition Schmitt introduced a limit to politicization, a point where the
intensity of a distinction crosses the bounds of the political proper and becomes
‘absolute’. When a form of antagonism reaches a degree of intensity giving life to
absolute enmity, it is destructive to the political distinction itself as it leads toward
94 Spatializing the political
the annihilation of the enemy. This points to the tension in the concept of the
political, between the intensification and limitation of conflict. Indeed, there is
speculation that Schmitt in fact altered his analysis in light of criticism he received
from Hans Morgenthau (see Scheuerman, 1999: 225–226, 231–237). For a more
detailed account of these concepts see Chapter 8 of Balakrishnan’s The Enemy
(2000). George Schwab’s English translation is based upon the 1932 edition and
therefore includes the second reading of the intensity thesis, whereby the degree of
intensity of an antithesis structures the political but an absolute enmity crosses the
bounds of the political.
12 This is an important corrective to those that see Schmitt as an essentialist. His
concept of ‘the enemy’ is situational and hence socially constituted rather than
relying on predetermined categories or characteristics of the parties in conflict.
Notably, although Raphael Gross (2007) makes a strong case that the enemy
Schmitt has in mind here is actually the ‘concrete’ case of the Jews in Germany, he
nonetheless concedes that this can only be deduced from structural affinities
between his description of the enemy in The Concept of the Political and his later
overt anti-Semitism.
13 Schmitt echoed this in the 1932 edition of The Concept of the Political: ‘Every
religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political
one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend
and enemy’ (2007b: 37).
14 As Schmitt added: ‘It infuses with its content and values the political unity which
lives off the different areas of human life and thought, and draws its energies from
science, culture, religion, law and language. … The mythical eagle of Zeus which
nourished itself from Prometheus’ entrails’ (ibid.).
15 A type of thinking that denies the possibility of antagonism is not therefore poli-
tical in Schmitt’s eyes: ‘it is irrelevant here whether one rejects, accepts or perhaps
finds it an atavistic remnant of barbaric times that nations continue to group
themselves according to friend and enemy, or hopes that this antithesis will one
day vanish from the world. … The concern here is neither with abstractions nor
with normative ideals, but with inherent reality and the real possibility of such a
distinction’ (ibid.: 28).
16 Hence, for Schmitt, war is an exceptional extreme threat and certainly not a ‘con-
tinuation of politics by other means’ as Clausewitz had argued (ibid.: 34).
17 Indeed, Schmitt stands at a considerable distance from his friend and fellow con-
servative, Ernst Jünger on precisely this point, which runs against the argument
made by Jeffrey Herf in his Reactionary Modernism. In texts such as Storm of Steel
(1920), Total Mobilization (1933) and On Pain (1934), Jünger celebrated the spiri-
tually invigorating power of modern warfare as an antidote to the deadening
effects of liberal democracy. Herf argues that Schmitt and Jünger both sought to
celebrate a vision of military action that would fuse reactionary politics with tech-
nological prowess (See Chapter 5 of Herf, 1986). However, we consider this con-
flation of Schmitt and Jünger questionable, since Schmitt’s entire understanding of
politics is based around the attempt to recognize the structural importance of war
in order to limit and manage it rather than celebrate it.
18 In 1932 Schmitt quite clearly qualified his conception of the political to avoid such
a misreading, already made by Hermann Heller. ‘It is by no means as though the
political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military
action, by no means as though every nation would be uninterruptedly faced with
the friend–enemy alternative vis-à-vis every other nation. And, after all, could not
the politically reasonable course reside in avoiding war?’ (Schmitt, 2007b: 33).
19 This draws on the distinction between public and private enemies in Plato’s
Republic (ibid.: 28 n9).
 Spatializing the political 95
20 The political does not therefore concern conflicts between individuals. Likewise it
does not concern conflicts between groups internal to the political entity unless
they grow intense enough to take on a political character, that is, bringing fighting
collectives together. In this case, the political entity has collapsed into a state of
civil war.
21 For more on the nature of the ‘absolute enemy’ see Schmitt, 2007c: 89–95.
22 Schmitt clearly had in mind here the inter-state order of modern European inter-
national law he identified in later works as the jus publicum Europaeum. In his
description of the jus publicum Europaeum Schmitt highlighted the central impor-
tance of the mutual respect that warring parties within Europe awarded each other
since they were considered as sovereign equals, and thus approached as ‘just ene-
mies’ who did not have to be annihilated in defeat. Hence conflict was ‘bracketed’
to the conflict between states and limited by the consideration of opponents as
equal, purely political, opponents (we return on this in detail in Chapter 8).
23 As Schmitt wrote, ‘In any event, that grouping is always politics which orients
itself toward this most extreme possibility [war with the enemy]. This grouping is
therefore always the decisive human grouping, the political entity. If such an entity
exists at all, it is always the decisive entity, and it is sovereign in the sense that the
decision about the critical situation, even if it is the exception, must always reside
there’ (ibid.: 38).
24 The political tension between friend and enemy gives life an ‘especially decisive
meaning’ for Schmitt: ‘War is still today the most extreme possibility. One can say
that the exceptional case has an especially decisive meaning that exposes the core
of the matter. For only in real combat is revealed the most extreme consequences
of the political grouping of friend and enemy.’
25 Schmitt argued that there can be no justification for war other than the real ‘con-
crete’ threat of the enemy. Any other justification would lead human lives to
destruction for a purpose that lacked any existential meaning. He wrote: ‘There
exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter
how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality
which could justify men in killing each other for this reason. If such physical
destruction of human life is not motivated by an existential threat to one’s own
way of life, then it cannot be justified. Just as little can war be justified by ethical
and juristic norms. If there really are enemies in the existential sense as meant here,
then it is justified, but only politically, to repel and fight them physically’ (ibid.:
49). Obviously this is at odds with Schmitt’s claim that it is physical combat itself
rather than its justifications from which existential meaning arises. In Schmitt’s
logic the moment of conflict itself would produce an existential meaning and any
antithesis would become political in this moment of heightened intensity. However,
Schmitt contorted his arguments in this way in order to insist on the limited scope
of the friend–enemy distinction.
26 Schmitt understood European historical consciousness to be increasingly governed
by concepts of mechanistic reason from which no meaning could be derived. The
spirit of the time was characterized by a focus on material needs incapable of
incorporating any higher meaning in human existence. As he wrote in 1923 a
‘mechanism of production serving arbitrary material needs is called “rational”
without bringing into question what is most important – the rationality of the
purpose of this supremely rational mechanism’ (Schmitt, 1996: 15). That Schmitt
conceived of the political as something standing against nihilism stands counter to
the accusation that his thought amounted to a ‘nihilistic opportunism’ made by
Karl Löwith in 1935 (see Löwith, 1998). Schmitt in fact posited his concept of the
political against nihilism, precisely as an answer to the loss of meaning in history
(see Chapter 7 for more on this).
96 Spatializing the political
27 The manner in which Schmitt qualified war as a source of historical meaning here
should be contrasted with the critique of Romanticism he mounted in Political
Romanticism. There Schmitt lambasts ‘political romantics’ for lacking the ‘moral
seriousness’ needed for real political decision making. For Schmitt, the ultimate
source of ‘seriousness’ seems to be the actual possibility of ‘existential conflict’ with
the ‘real’ enemy. Political romantics, for him, are those who above all want to
avoid thinking about war. This echoes strongly with the claim Schmitt advanced in
The Concept of the Political where he denounced the liberals for seeking above all
to avoid decisive violent confrontations that might put their life at risk (see
Schmitt, 2007b: 71)
28 In a 1937 article on piracy Schmitt argued that for liberal international law ‘all
humanity – which is otherwise so dishevelled – suddenly appears as if united on a
single front’ (in Heller-Roazen, 2009).
29 As indicated in Chapter 2, many readers have interpreted Schmitt’s concept of the
political in relation to Heidegger’s distinction between the ontological and the ontic
levels of existence, or rather mapped the distinction between the political and pol-
itics against that between Being and beings (see for example Arditi, 2008; March-
art, 2007; Mouffe, 2005a). However, Schmitt himself made only minor references
to Heidegger in his writings. Schmitt was certainly aware of Heidegger’s work and
indeed his decision to join the Nazi Party may have been influenced to some
degree by the letter of prompt he received from him.
30 Gross provides what is beyond doubt the most subtly articulated and rigorously
defended version of this argument in Carl Schmitt and the Jews. We return to this
issue again in Chapters 5 and 6.
31 Indeed, this has become one of the textbook distinctions of modern political
thought with Hobbes and Rousseau representing the evil and good readings of
human nature respectively. See also Cavalletti, 2005.
32 He cited a list that includes Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bossuet, Fichte, de Maistre,
Donoso Cortés, H. Taine and Hegel.
33 For recent examples of this argument see Critchley, 2011; Hooker, 2009. Doubtless
this reading has some validity and indeed Schmitt made prominent mention of
original sin in several works. However, he was at the same time always very careful
in distinguishing the official Catholic doctrine from a more radical Protestant
understanding of humanity’s fallen state and point to the political significance. As
he declared in Roman Catholicism and Political Form, ‘the antithesis of man “by
nature evil” and “by nature good” – this decisive question for political theory – is
in no sense answered by a simple yes or no in the Tridentine Creed. In contrast to
the Protestant doctrine of the total depravity of natural man, this Creed speaks of
human nature as only wounded, weakened, and troubled, thus permitting of some
gradations and adaptations’ (Schmitt, 1996: 7–8). This is a point he also made in
Political Theology when discussing the work of the Spanish counter-revolutionary
philosopher of the nineteenth Century Donoso Cortés (Schmitt, 1996: 57). Thus,
Schmitt’s objection against a theological reading of political anthropology should
be taken seriously at least with reference to the time The Concept of the Political
was written, in 1928. He then clearly stated that, ‘theological interference generally
confuses political concepts because it shifts the distinction usually into moral
theology. Political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and often Fichte pre-
suppose with their pessimism only the reality or possibility of the distinction friend
and enemy’ (Schmitt, 2007b: 65). Thus, it remains the ever-present possibility of
real conflict, that means political order is required in Schmitt’s view, rather than a
theological presupposition of humanity’s fallen state.
34 This is Adam Sitze’s paraphrasing of Galli’s conception rather than a direct quo-
tation. Sitze shows at length how Galli’s work focuses on a critical appraisal of
Schmitt’s analysis of the ‘Janus-faced’ origins of politics in the concept of the
 Spatializing the political 97
political. See Sitze, 2010: xiv and xxvi; also, in Italian, Galli’s 2008 Lo sguardo di
Giano. Saggi su Carl Schmitt.
35 Ojakangas argues that each of Schmitt’s key concepts is defined by such a ‘found-
ing rupture’, not only the political but the sovereign exception, the people’s ‘exis-
tential total decision’ on the Constitution, the act of land appropriation, nomos,
and so on.
36 Rowan (2011) argues that this structural tension is the constitutive backbone run-
ning through Schmitt’s work, operating in all of his key concepts: the political, the
sovereign decision, the existential total decision of the people, land appropriation.
He notes that this tension-ridden core of Schmitt’s thought gives his work a struc-
tural ambiguity that makes his concepts strangely resistant to deconstruction and
leaves them hard to locate in the field of traditional conservative forms of thought.
37 Indeed, it is this necessary contingency of all order implicit in Schmitt’s concept of
the political that puts his work in close proximity to some post-foundational thin-
kers and accounts for some of his recent appeal within Continental political
thought on the Left (see Chapter 2).
38 Schmitt’s conceptual edifice established a difficult relationship to historical neces-
sity, especially since his later work was increasingly determined by a Christian
eschatological conception of history based upon the belief in the second coming of
Christ. By framing his political thought on this basis, Schmitt ultimately risked
grounding politics in a form of transcendental determination.
39 The first chapter of The Nomos of the Earth carries the title ‘Law as a Unity of
Order and Orientation’. In the original Schmitt rendered order and orientation
with the rhyming couplet of Ordung und Ordnung (see Schmitt, 2003a: 42).
40 Hence, Zarmanian stresses the active nature of nomic ordering in Schmitt’s con-
ception of the relationship between order and orientation, avoiding any crude
geographically determinist reading of his thought. We return to the question of
active spatialization and geographic determinism in Schmitt in later chapters.
41 In line with Schmitt’s argument in Political Theology that ‘all significant concepts
of the modern theory of state are secularized theological concepts’ (Schmitt, 2005:
36) it could be argued that the spatial theory underlying Schmitt’s concept of
political order had its roots within theological thought. Such a reading is power-
fully evidenced in the centrality Schmitt allotted to the biblical figure of the Kate-
chon in his late work. For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Schmitt’s
spatial thought and his political theology see Meyer et al., 2012; Ojakangas, 2006;
Palaver, 1996. We return to this connection and the importance of the Katechon in
Chapters 7 and 8.
42 In a series of works written during the late 1930s and 1940s, such as The Leviathan
(1938), Land and Sea (1943) and The Nomos (1950), Schmitt expanded the number
and the complexity of the intertwined inside–outside relations on which the
modern Eurocentric world order rested. To the relationship between states inside
Europe and that between Europe and the rest of the world were added the dis-
tinction between the ‘inner’ private space of the individual subject and the ‘outer’
public space of the state, and the relationship between ‘land’ and ‘sea’. These dis-
tinctions, according to Schmitt, at first helped to cement the spatialization of the
political in the state form, although they grew to become destabilizing agents that
contributed eventually to its despatialization and ultimately to the collapse of the
state form. We return on these distinctions in later chapters.
43 From the late 1930s Schmitt increasingly turned his attention to the analysis of
longer term historical developments in the state form and of their emergence
within a wider global context of international law and European colonialism. We
reflect on this in detail in the coming chapters.
44 Schmitt thus identified the conditions of possibility for the modern European state
to thrive with the spread and the consolidation of colonialism in the New World.
98 Spatializing the political
To a degree, Schmitt’s depiction of European modernity as fundamentally pre-
dicated on colonialism perversely makes his thought something like a post-
colonialism of the Right. From a self-consciously Eurocentric position he offered an
analysis of the fundamental constitutive role colonialism played in creating the
conditions necessary for the emergence of the modern European nation state that
resonates with some of the arguments made by canonical thinkers of post-
colonialism such as Frantz Fanon (1963), Edward Said (1978) and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (1999).
4 Liberal Leviathan
Despatializing the political

The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the
exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks
through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.
Carl Schmitt, 1922

Many norms of contemporary parliamentary law [are] as superfluous decora-

tion, useless and even embarrassing, as though someone had painted the
radiator of modern central heating system with red flames in order to give the
appearance of a blazing fire.
Carl Schmitt, 1926

‘The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’ (Schmitt,
2007b: 19). Schmitt opened The Concept of the Political with this typically
bold single-sentence paragraph, starkly staking out his stance against the
fundamental assumptions of established thinking about the state and politics.
Although he presented the political as a concept with a deeper, more pro-
found philosophical purchase than the state, it was nonetheless clear that
Schmitt considered the relationship among states to be the key reference point
in its formulation. Throughout his early work, from the 1920s to the mid
1930s, the European state is discussed as the paradigmatic ordering institution
of the modern age and as the horizon within which the political is conceived.
Yet, whilst the really-existing European states of the early twentieth century
certainly shaped Schmitt’s understanding of political order, his conception of
the state remained something of an ideal type, frequently lacking sociological
depth and shifting easily between concrete cases and historical periods, on the
one hand, and formalistic abstraction, on the other.1
As noted in the last chapter, if Schmitt’s concept of the political implied a
conceptual matrix between order, space and the management of conflict, then
he considered the political form of the modern European state the model for
its successful operation. Crucial, from a geographic perspective, was the
inscription of the friend–enemy distinction, that defined political relations as
such, along the inside–outside borderline between states. In other words, the
modern state operated by fixing political difference to spatial difference – the
100 Liberal Leviathan
friend/enemy distinction to the inside/outside distinction. On the basis of this
fundamental spatial division rested a series of other distinctions through
which state order was guaranteed according to Schmitt: difference and unity;
state and society; domestic and international; war and peace; political and
non-political; historical meaning and nihilism. In the European ‘ideal form’,
sovereign states produced order by holding a monopoly over the decisive
power to generate and maintain this founding spatial division. These ideal
states thus neutralized internal political differences, but recognized each other
as equals, hence laying the ground for mutual respect and the management of
conflict as each state recognized others as just enemies with the same status as
itself. Paradoxically then, the potential for existential struggle between states
generated historical meaning, but their equality allowed conflict to be con-
tained. As the guarantor of this relative peace and stability, the state was the
most important institutional form, standing above society, and justly demanded
obedience in return.
Despite the historical persistence of the modern European state and indeed
its increasing power over the lives of populations, the twentieth century was,
according to Schmitt, defined by a deep and growing crisis of the state form.
From this perspective the early decades of the twentieth century were a twi-
light period marked by the unravelling of the state form and the international
order it had established across Europe for nearly four centuries. Hence, this
early twentieth century crisis of state was for Schmitt an epochal crisis that
threatened the very possibility of political order in Europe, and indeed
globally. Just as the state had emerged in the seventeenth century from the
crisis of political form sparked by the collapse of the medieval Catholic com-
plexico, its dissolution at the beginning of the twentieth century signalled a
re-emergence of the fundamental question of political form.
The crisis of state form also represented a crisis of the relationship between
politics and spatiality, or rather the spatialization of the political. By the early
years of the twentieth century the state had, in Schmitt’s view, started to lose
its monopoly on the political and hence the ability to guarantee its spatiali-
zation along the inside–outside axis of the border. He therefore understood
the crisis of the modern state to be both the result and the cause of a despa-
tialization of the political. Schmitt located various forces that were under-
mining the state’s ability to spatialize the political and provide political
form – the growing influence of universalist ideas in law and politics; the
spread of global market forces and economic thinking; the expanding scope of
US imperial interventionism – meaning that it could no longer effectively
map the political (friend–enemy) along the borderline between states (inside–
outside). The erosion of the state’s capacity to produce this distinction threatened
the entire precarious edifice of differentiations, mediations and limitations on
which the domestic and international political order of modern Europe had
rested. Unless the state was able to reassert control over the spatialization of
the political, Schmitt feared that Europe – and indeed, the world – would
slide into a catastrophic state of generalized civil war and formless nihilism,
 Liberal Leviathan 101
characterized by the total breakdown of all legal distinctions and all form-
giving institutions. The withering of the state thus threatened to spawn an
apocalyptic anti-utopia of boundless war.
In order to grasp how Schmitt understood the nature of this crisis it is
necessary to return to his conception of political form. As argued in the pre-
ceding chapter, Schmitt had sought to identify in the concept of political form
not simply the historically specific nature of Roman Catholic complexico, but
the essential task of an ordering institution as such. The new political form of
the secular state that emerged from the wreckage of religious war had to carry
out the work of the medieval complexico, but within the radically transformed
conditions of a modern Europe shaped by secularization. To comply with the
model of the complexico and guarantee political form, the modern state had
two major tasks: to mediate between unity and difference; and provide a
structure for the coincidence of authority, community and idea.
As discussed previously, the political form of the Roman Catholic com-
plexico during the Medieval period was fundamentally based upon the
Church’s ability to mediate between unity and difference. It had done so by
representing a powerful political idea that legitimated a form of authority
which stood above other antithetical powers in order to draw them together
into a unified institutional framework. In this way, the authority of the
Church mediated between the universal idea of Christ’s power and the differ-
ent political powers operating within Europe, its various monarchies, city-states
and principalities. This mediation neutralized conflict without eradicating
difference. The modern state had to likewise guarantee a mediation between
unity and difference, but rather than produce a universal unity that could
embrace all differences, it provided only a partial or relative unity that
embraced differences within the state, whilst remaining constitutively founded
upon the difference between states. This mediation took place along the bor-
derline between states whereby unity was guaranteed inside the state and dif-
ference located outside. Thus, the mediation between unity and difference
was not located in a single authority standing above all other powers, but
rather was based upon the spatial division between them. The ordering unity
that emerged was thus immanent to the field of difference, embedded in the
latticed borderwork of the distinction between the newly emerged states.
The second role Schmitt had identified for the political form of the Med-
ieval Catholic complexico was to provide an institutional framework for
binding political community around a governing idea. However, deprived of
theological grounds, the political order to emerge around the state form in
Europe had to bind authority, community and idea to the spatial division
between these states. This required three things. First, a form of authority
capable of maintaining and enforcing the distinction between inside and out-
side of the state borders. Second, all the members of a specific political com-
munity had to recognize the state’s authority in order for unity to be
guaranteed. Third, a powerful political idea was needed in order to weld this
relationship between authority and community together. Given the lack of a
102 Liberal Leviathan
theoretical grounding or any universal category, the political idea that pro-
vided the conceptual glue of this new order had to recognize the difference
between states as a fundamental one. Hence, by inscribing political difference
in the division of space, the state was able to give form to a political idea that
could fuse authority and community.
The modern European state therefore relied on a precarious balance of
elements that always threatened to come undone. On the one hand, the
matrix of authority, community and idea always threatened to unwind and
dissolve the ability to maintain a strict inside–outside distinction. On the
other, new ideas and political forces that blurred the distinction between
inside and outside threatened the fusion of authority, community and idea. It
was precisely these two processes that Schmitt diagnosed as central to the
crisis of the state in the early twentieth century and which he identified above
all with liberalism.

Liberalism and the metaphysical image of the age

Schmitt identified various processes that he believed to be undermining the
state’s capacity for spatializing the political. On the one hand, the state was
being undermined from within: the politicization of social differences within
the state and constraints placed on sovereign power by parliamentarianism and
a positivistic conception of constitutional law were jeopardizing the state’s
ability to constitute its own identity against that of its enemies, that is, other
states. On the other hand, it was being undermined from without: the emer-
gence and consolidation of the United States as an imperial power and the influ-
ence of universal moral categories into the international laws of war had created
asymmetric sovereignties, effectively denying weaker states the power to define
their own boundaries whilst legitimizing interventions, whether by the United
States or under the auspices of the League of Nations. Thus, in Schmitt’s eyes,
a confluence of internal and external factors had produced a dangerous political
chiasmus subverting the spatial foundations of the modern state form.
To grasp more fully how Schmitt understood these tendencies to operate it
is important to examine his peculiar conception of history. Throughout his
work he consistently advanced an understanding of historical development as
fundamentally determined by shifts in dominant conceptual frameworks.2 In
his view the political form of any specific historical period found its condi-
tions of possibility in governing philosophical concepts, hence, his diagnosis
of the crisis of the state in the twentieth century followed from his account of
the leading conceptual paradigms of the day. He first laid out his under-
standing of how governing conceptual frameworks shaped the historical
development of modern European political form in his 1922 book, Political
Theology.3 Here he argued that each epoch of modern European history is
governed by a ‘metaphysical image’ that provides a unique form of histor-
ical consciousness and sets the terms of its political possibilities (Schmitt,
2005: 46).
 Liberal Leviathan 103
The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the
same structure as what the world immediately understands to be the
appropriate form of its political organization.
(ibid.)4

‘Metaphysics’, he insisted, quoting Scottish philosopher Edward Caird, ‘is the

most intensive and the clearest expression of an epoch’ (ibid.). Hence, the
crisis of the state in the early twentieth century could be understood as a
political symptom of the ‘metaphysical image’ of the age.
In examining the historical development of European metaphysics, Schmitt
claimed that ‘everything in the nineteenth century [and thereafter] was
increasingly governed by conceptions of immanence’ (ibid.: 49). Concepts of
immanence fundamentally undercut the state form by opposing the ideas of
transcendence and differentiation on which sovereign power rested. Indeed,
Schmitt argued that, until the nineteenth century, all established conceptions
of political legitimacy had fundamentally rested on some concept of trans-
cendence modelled on theology.5 Hence, the modern concept of sovereignty
was also a secularized version of religious authority. However, by attempting
to ground political order in concepts of immanence, political thought in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries increasingly unmoored the state from the
traditional sources of legitimacy for sovereign power which appealed to
transcendence. The ‘metaphysical image’ of the age, based upon immanence,
provided no space, in his view, for the possibility of a radical ‘outside’, an excep-
tional and unpredictable threat to which the ‘ordering’ authority would need to
respond in order to guarantee order. By ignoring the foundational role of
difference in political order, concepts of immanence were inimical to the very
possibility of grounding order through a spatialization of the political.
Schmitt expanded the historical scope of this ‘conceptual history’ in a 1929
text, ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’, first delivered as a
lecture in Spain at the invitation of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.
This was his first attempt to develop a formal philosophy of history, although
he acknowledged that it was a Eurocentric rather than a global account of
‘world history’.6 Cast in the style of Oswald Spengler’s contemporary best-
seller The Decline of the West (1918–1923), this short article traces a geneal-
ogy of the governing philosophical frameworks and their political significance
across four centuries of modern European history.7 The concept of the
‘metaphysical image’ of the age found in Political Theology is replaced
here with the concept of ‘successive stages of changing central domains’ that
governed philosophical thought and conceptions of politics alike (Schmitt,
2007a: 81). Schmitt claimed that, ‘since the sixteenth century Europeans
moved in several stages from one central domain to another’ (ibid.: 82),
during which time:

the intellectual vanguard changed, its convictions and arguments [chan-

ged], as did the content of its intellectual interests, the basis of its actions,
104 Liberal Leviathan
the secret of its political success, and the willingness of the great masses
to be impressed by certain suggestions.
(ibid.: 83)

In Schmitt’s meta-narrative each of these successive historical stages corre-

sponded more or less to a century and each was governed by a ‘central
domain’ or governing conceptual paradigm: the seventeenth century by the
metaphysical; the eighteenth century by the humanitarian-moral; the nineteenth
century by the economic; and, finally, the twentieth century by the
technological.
The key to understanding the nature of political thought in any period of
modern European history, for Schmitt, therefore lay in identifying the ‘central
domain’ from which it emerged. From the domain of metaphysics in the
seventeenth century arose Hobbes, Leibniz and Spinoza; from the humanistic-
moral domain of the eighteenth arose Kant and Rousseau; from the economic
domain of the nineteenth arose Marx, and so on. However, for Schmitt not
all of these shifts were equally significant: ‘The strongest and most con-
sequential of all intellectual shifts in European history’ was the move made
from Christian theology to ‘natural science’ in the seventeenth century (ibid.: 89).
‘Until now’, Schmitt claimed, ‘this shift has determined the direction of all
further development’ (ibid.). ‘All generalizing “laws” of human history’, he insisted,
‘stand in the shadow of this great process’ (ibid.). As noted in the previous
chapter, it is in this shift from a theological to a secular domain that Schmitt
located the emergence of the modern state as the paradigmatic political form of
European modernity. Indeed, the secular domain of natural science emerged
directly as a response to religious wars in Europe in Schmitt’s account:

Following the hopeless theological disputes and struggles of the sixteenth

century, Europeans sought a neutral domain in which there would be no
conflict and they could reach common agreement.
(ibid.)

Thus, the central political institution of modern European history was the
product of the most profound shift in the ‘central domains’ of European
intellectual life.
The true significance of this shift did nonetheless not lie in the emergence
of the state, but in revealing ‘an elemental impulse’ that Schmitt argued was
key to the subsequent course of modern European history: ‘the striving for a
neutral domain’ (ibid.). Central to ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoli-
ticizations’ was the claim that, since the sixteenth century, European thought
had fundamentally ‘moved in the direction of neutralization’ (ibid.). The
peoples of Europe had, in this view, collectively shifted from one ‘central
domain’ to another, ‘hoping to find minimum agreement and common pre-
mises allowing for the possibility of security, clarity, prudence, and peace’
(ibid.). In Schmitt’s narrative, this search for neutrality provided a powerful
 Liberal Leviathan 105
dialectic that drove the movement of modern European history from one
‘central domain’ to another. Europe had for four centuries:

wandered from a conflictual domain to a neutral domain, and always the

newly won neutral domain [had] become immediately another arena of
struggle, once again necessitating the search for a new neutral domain.
(ibid.: 90)

However, according to Schmitt, the antitheses that characterized each histor-

ical period became even sharper and more intense with each successive phase
of neutralization. This progressive pattern of historical exacerbation culmi-
nated in the twentieth century, when a deluded belief in the neutrality of
technology was hollowing out the state and plotting the path to ever more
destructive forms of warfare.
‘Above all’, Schmitt argued, ‘the state derives its reality and power from the
respective central domain, because the decisive disputes of friend–enemy
groupings are also determined by it’ (ibid.: 87). However, the search for neu-
trality that characterized these successive ‘central domains’ increasingly
leaned towards a state of ‘absolute depoliticization’ (ibid.: 95). Rather than
providing a conceptual basis for the formalization of the friend–enemy dis-
tinction in the state, the ‘central domains’ of European thought were
increasingly undermining the political as such, in the attempt to neutralize all
potential conflict. Depoliticization was not inherently inimical to the state.
Indeed, insofar as the state aimed to provide order by limiting conflict, a
degree of neutralization and depoliticization was essential to its fundamental
operation. As discussed above, the modern secular state had in fact emerged
in the seventeenth century as a way to neutralize and depoliticize religious
conflict. However, the more absolute became the governing concepts of neu-
trality the more they tended towards an absolute depoliticization. Thus, for
Schmitt, the dialectical movement between successive ‘central domains’ had
led to an intensification of neutralizations and, as a consequence, to deeper
and deeper contradictions between the state form and the governing concepts
of European thought, which paradoxically led to the growing inability of the
state to carry out its core function: limiting conflict.
Schmitt ultimately located the roots of the crisis of the twentieth century
state in this growing tendency towards depoliticization in European thought.
The particularly acute drive towards depoliticization reflected the nature of a
period dominated by technological forms of thought. Indeed, Schmitt argued
that, ‘the twentieth century began not only as an age of technology but of the
religious belief in technology’ (ibid.: 85). ‘Technological thinking’, for him,
was thus the common horizon of all forms of politics in the twentieth century,
including the communism of the Soviet Union:

The Russians have taken the European nineteenth century at its word,
understood its core ideas and drawn the ultimate conclusions from its
106 Liberal Leviathan
cultural premises. We always live in the eye of the more radical brother,
who compels us to draw the practical conclusion and pursue it to the end.
(ibid.: 81)8

However, it was in the liberal states of Europe, and specifically in the Weimar
Republic, that Schmitt located the historical breaking point of the state
form.9 Liberalism, in his view, was the most serious manifestation of techno-
logical thinking – and hence of depoliticization – in the domain of politics,
and was presenting a profound challenge to the Weimar state by system-
atically undermining the matrix of authority, community and idea and the
spatialization of the political upon which the state form rested.
Although he claimed in his 1923 book The Crisis of Parliamentary
Democracy that it was ‘essential liberalism be understood as a consistent,
comprehensive metaphysical system’ (1988: 35), Schmitt never provided such
a systematic analysis himself. Rather, following the protean trajectory of his
polemical method he attacked distinct aspects of liberal thought in different
texts, although depoliticization always remained the common denominator of
his acrimony. Indeed, Schmitt’s theorization of the state during the 1920s and
early 1930s was fundamentally orientated around his polemical engagement
with liberalism, and it was in battle with liberalism that he developed his
conceptual armoury. Hence, in order to grasp why the relationship between
space and political order is so central to Schmitt’s work, it is important to
understand his analysis of the role liberalism played in undermining the state
form in the twentieth century. In the following pages we thus reflect on each
of three elements crucial to the integrity of the state form – authority, com-
munity and idea, examining each in connection to a key concept in Schmitt’s
critique of liberalism: sovereignty, homogeneity and myth respectively.

Sovereignty
‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt, 2005: 5). The open-
ing sentence of Political Theology is by now well know, having become a
common reference point in discussions of sovereignty since Giorgio Agamben
popularized it over a decade ago in his widely read Homo Sacer (1998) and
State of Exception (2004). Often overlooked however is the fact that this was
a concept intimately bound up with the spatialization of the political. Indeed,
Schmitt defined sovereignty as a ‘borderline concept’ (Schmitt, 2005: 5). A
borderline concept, in Schmitt’s definition, is not a ‘vague concept, but one
pertaining to the outermost sphere’ (ibid.). Sovereignty is thus a concept that
he tied immediately to spatial divisions and specifically to the relations
between inside and outside that characterized the borderline between states. If
the political form of the state rests on a spatialization of the political it
requires a political act of spatial division. Hence, for Schmitt the distinction
between inside and outside is produced through political action rather than
resting upon any pre-given order implicit in the morphological features of the
 Liberal Leviathan 107
earth. For Schmitt, these are eminently political spaces rather than natural spaces.
This action of dividing space therefore requires an agent, a subject capable of
spatializing the political, capable of producing a cut between the inside and
outside of the body politic. Schmitt identified this subject with the sovereign – the
form-giving power capable of marking the distinction between inside and
outside, the subject entitled to the division of space that made the state possible.
By identifying the enemy and deciding on the exception, the sovereign is
granted the fundamental role of defining the limits of the political community.
The decision on the exception is thus a fundamental decision on who is to be
included in the political community and who is the enemy to be excluded.
Hence, the sovereign holds the power to decide on the spatialization of the
political. The sovereign is itself located, for Schmitt, at the limits of the poli-
tical community, at the very borderline between inside and outside. Agamben
has argued that this is the ‘paradox of sovereignty’, that the sovereign is both
inside and outside order at once. As Schmitt noted:

Although [the sovereign] stands outside the normally valid legal system,
he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the
Constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety.
(ibid.: 7)

The nature of this paradoxical figure – both included within the legal system
but standing outside it in order to guarantee its Constitution – is defined
precisely by the fact that it is located at the threshold between inside and out-
side, the borderline in-between. This paradoxical spatial logic is coupled with
the further paradox that the sovereign produces (and reproduces) itself in the
very act of deciding on the exception.10
Schmitt’s characterization of the sovereign decision on the exception reveals
how he understood the distinctions between inside and outside and between
state and society to be tightly woven together. For Schmitt, the sovereign’s
capacity to produce a foundational spatial division between inside and out-
side set it above other social institutions, or rather its monopoly over decisions
made it a political rather than a merely social institution. Conversely, by
standing above society, the sovereign power decides on the fundamental spa-
tialization of the political and hence holds a monopoly on politics within the
state. Further, the crucial relationship between protection and obedience that
Schmitt, following Hobbes, described as key in regulating the relationship
between state and society, rests on the sovereign’s ability to identify enemy
threats and provide protection from them. In this classic Hobbesian formula,
the people are obedient to the sovereign in return for protection from
enemies, both external and internal. The state form, in Schmitt’s view, there-
fore required a solid and consolidated form of sovereign authority in order to
ensure that the spatialization of the political be maintained. If the sover-
eign was indecisive order could not be secured and the political could not be
spatialized effectively.
108 Liberal Leviathan
If the sovereign is defined by the decision on the exception the core faculty
of sovereign power is therefore that of decision making. Schmitt countered
Max Weber’s well known claim that state sovereignty lies in its monopoly
over the legitimate use of violence by insisting that it is instead located in the
‘monopoly to decide’ (Schmitt, 2005: 13). It necessarily resides in a person or
body capable of actively deciding on whether or not an exception existed
within a specific situation. However, Schmitt argued that the dominant mode
of constitutional thought since the late nineteenth century – liberal positi-
vism – understood the state to be constituted by a seamless system of legal
norms that left no room for the element of personal decision making with
which he identified sovereign power. This liberal conception of a sovereignless
state lay, in Schmitt’s view, at the core of the processes undermining the
political power of the Weimar state.
Legal positivism, as Schmitt depicted it, understood the constitutional
order to be an uninterrupted, self-enclosed system of legal norms. Legal
positivists held, in Schmitt’s view, that the ‘state, meaning the legal order, is a
system of ascription to a last point of ascription and to a last basic norm’
(ibid.: 19). In such a view, the legal order was subject to rational perfection
and could operate as a self-enclosed system: every situation could be ascribed
for with a norm and every ruling could emerge immanent to this system of
norms. For Schmitt, legal positivism was symptomatic of the broader dom-
inance of the metaphysics of immanence since the eighteenth century, and the
strong influence of models imported from the natural sciences was evidence in
a juridical thought that treated the state and constitutional law as if they were
self-regulating systems.11 Although Schmitt vehemently rejected legal positi-
vism, its impact on the interpretation of the Weimar Constitution was unde-
niably powerful, with Hugo Preuss and Max Weber, two towering figures in
early twentieth century German liberalism, having helped craft the Constitu-
tion along broadly positivist lines. Legal positivism was indeed one of the
most consistent targets of Schmitt’s polemic during the 1920s and 1930s and
Hans Kelsen, its most prominent proponent during the Weimar years, became
something of an intellectual nemesis during these decades.12
The crux of Schmitt’s critique of legal positivism and its vision of the state
was that it left the state vulnerable to disorder by de facto eliminating the
sovereign. ‘All tendencies of modern constitutional development’, by which
he principally meant legal positivism, ‘point towards eliminating the sover-
eign’ (ibid.: 7). Schmitt argued that Kelsen ‘solved the problem of sovereignty
by negating it’, quoting as evidence the great positivist’s claim that ‘the con-
cept of sovereignty must be radically repressed’ (ibid.: 21). This conception of
a legal order from which sovereignty had been expunged was fundamentally
flawed for Schmitt because it failed to provide an answer to the defining
question of state: who decides? From the perspective of legal positivists such
as Kelsen, the subjectivism of this ‘decisionist’ question left the door open to a
degree of personal discretion that could only lead to the abuse of power, and
even dictatorship. As Schmitt noted, for legal positivists ‘all conceptions of
 Liberal Leviathan 109
personality were aftereffects of absolute monarchy’ (ibid.: 30). But in Schmitt’s
view, the depersonalized conception of legal order the legal positivists pro-
moted left the state without any mechanism to deal with the ‘case of extreme
peril’ when the very existence of order as such was threatened (ibid.: 6). Such
an exceptional and extreme situation could not be decided in advance and
hence legal norms for addressing it could likewise not be established in
advance. A state of exception in fact required a decisive sovereign subject,
first capable of identifying it and then of enacting measures to restore order:
‘It is precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty,
that is, the whole question of sovereignty’ (ibid., italics ours). Hence, for
Schmitt, the subjective element of the juridical order could never be totally
removed, since in the last instance the stability of the state relied upon the
subjective capacity of the sovereign to decide on the exception.
In Schmitt’s view the claim, advanced by legal positivism, that the personal
element of sovereignty could be entirely eliminated rested upon a faulty
metaphysics. ‘Whether the extreme exception can be banished from the world
is not a juristic question’, but rather, it relied on ‘philosophical-historical or
metaphysical’ convictions (ibid.: 7). Thus, according to his criticism, legal
positivism was a form of state theory based on immanence, that is, the
‘metaphysical image’ of the age, and a theory that failed to consider the state
within the unpredictable realities of the concrete political situation (ibid.).
The positivist ‘law state’ (Gesetzesstaat) simply supplied a system of norms
abstracted from all relation to the concrete situations where the question of
‘who decides’ needed to be faced. It was a state theory designed for a vacuum,
but as Schmitt reminded his readers ‘no norm is valid in a vacuum’ (Schmitt,
1999a: 199).13 ‘All law is “situational law”’ (Schmitt, 2005: 13).
Indeed, the situation in which these debates took place was far from
‘normal’. The seething political tensions rending the Weimar Republic were
putting serious pressure on its brittle Constitution and the state’s ability to
maintain order. In this context the interpretation of the Constitution became
a highly politicized issue. The debate turned on what powers the Constitution
afforded the President to maintain order in times of emergency. A liberal
positivist interpretation tried to minimize the personal influence of the Pre-
sident within the state arguing that the Constitution provided Parliament with
the necessary tools to rule effectively during times of emergency. In Schmitt’s
view this undercut the capacity of the state to act precisely in order to main-
tain order at a time when its integrity was being sorely tested. This was evi-
dence, for Schmitt, that liberal thought was inadequate to face the concrete
realities of political turmoil in the age of mass politics as it was leaving the
state exposed to internal and external threats for which it lacked the con-
stitutional mechanisms to respond. We will return to this issue later in this
Chapter to examine how the debate about the President’s position within the
Constitution during an emergency led Schmitt out of the scholarly debat-
ing circle and into the constitutional court and a morally disastrous moment
in the political limelight.
110 Liberal Leviathan
Homogeneity
As noted already, Schmitt always insisted that ‘the political world is a pluriverse,
not a universe’ (Schmitt, 2007b: 53). In this sense, he argued, ‘every theory of
state is pluralistic’ (ibid.). The question of the unity of the state was therefore
not one of denying pluralism but rather of its ‘correct placing’ (Schmitt,
1999a: 204). Put simply, Schmitt’s conception of the modern European state
presupposed that political differences existed between states but not within
states. He was a thinker of pluralism, but this pluralism was necessarily lim-
ited, that is, bounded by and indeed structured upon the boundaries between
political entities. There was a place where it was correct to locate pluralism
and a place where it was correct to locate unity. The spatialization of the
political in the state form above all marked a division between pluralism and
unity, the border marking the locus of mediation not only between different
states but between difference and unity as such. This is not to say that the
social body internal to the state was not characterized by plurality, but simply
that these internal differences were social and not political. The state form
thus turned precisely on the ‘correct placing’ of political difference or, in other
words, the correct spatialization of the difference between unity and
pluralism.
In order to make the ‘cut’ between inside and outside into the body politic,
the sovereign had to have the power to identify the enemy, which in turn
guaranteed the unity of the state and, conversely, had to be able to guarantee
the unity of the state in order to identify the enemy.14 Thus, as the bearer of
sovereign power, the state had to stand above the differences of society as a
uniquely political force invested with the capacity to both represent and pro-
duce the unity of the political community. Without this sense of unity, political
difference could not be limited to the outside of the state and could be mis-
placed within the state, ultimately undermining its unity. It was precisely this
relationship between unity and difference, and its spatialization that liberal
pluralism unravelled in Schmitt’s view.
For Schmitt, a strong state was characterized by internal unity and a weak
state by (misplaced) pluralism. Although it takes shape in different contexts
and has a different cadence, the quest for political homogeneity can be found
throughout Schmitt’s oeuvre, from early works in the 1920s such as The Crisis
of Parliamentary Democracy to later writings in the 1930s and 1940s, such as
his work on a Großraum order in international law and his critique of the
United States as a ‘melting pot’.15 Homogeneity was not necessarily under-
stood as a racial category in his early work, but rather as a specifically poli-
tical unity. Schmitt insisted on homogeneity, to ensure that the political
community was unified under a single sovereign authority, as only then could
the state maintain a monopoly over the decision on the enemy and hence
contain conflict within the bounds of order. Whilst it was certainly possible
that homogeneity could also be defined in racial terms, it was not by defini-
tion a racial unity. The essential point for him was that political difference
 Liberal Leviathan 111
should remain outside the state rather than within it. Hence, the question of
unity turned on the ‘correct placing’ of pluralism and the division between
inside and outside. We will analyse in depth this question in relation to biopolitics
and the shaping of a new, purified German community under Nazi rule in
the next chapter, but it is important here to detail how Schmitt understood
liberalism to frustrate political homogeneity.
Liberalism, in Schmitt’s view, undermined the unity of the state precisely
because it misplaced pluralism and allowed it to develop within the state. This
in turn allowed the politicization of internal social relations and hence
undercut the spatialization of the political in a strict inside–outside relation.
Thus, insofar as liberalism misplaced pluralism it misplaced the political.
Schmitt argued that the institutions of liberal parliamentarianism facilitated
this misplacement by providing a mechanism for particular interest groups to
pursue their own ends through the state and at the expense of the state. In
Schmitt’s view, liberal thinkers sought to defend the pursuit of particular
interests in the form of a ‘pluralist’ theory of state that was ‘polemically
directed against’ and sought to ‘relativize the established unity of the state’
(Schmitt, 1999a: 200).16
This had accordingly two effects detrimental to the integrity of the state
form. First, the growth of pluralism undermined the unity of the state as the
citizen’s loyalties were divided. The state became only one of a number of
associations that citizens were attached to. Schmitt found the clearest expres-
sion of this ‘plurality of loyalties’ in the work of the ‘Anglo-Saxon pluralists’,
G. D. H. Cole and Harold I. Laski.17 In their vision, Schmitt argued, ‘the
state … becomes a social group or association which at most stands next to,
but never above, the other associations’ (ibid.: 196). Hence, this collapsed the
hierarchy between state and society, which in turn troubled the spatialization
of the political along an inside–outside axis as associations built under the
umbrella of the state did not necessarily take precedence over other group
associations, even those that might cross state borders. For Schmitt, the indi-
vidual imagined by such pluralist theorists lived ‘in a multiplicity of unor-
dered, equally valid social obligations and loyalty relationships’ from religious
communities, unions, political parties, clubs, families, and so on (ibid.). In this
‘complex of duties, in the “plurality of loyalties,” there is’ – Schmitt argued –
‘no “hierarchy of duties”, no unconditional prescriptive principle of super-
and subordination’ (ibid.). Hence, the bonds of association on which the unity
of the ‘public’ relied were loosened, citizens becoming little more than ‘cus-
tomers purchasing gas from the same utility company, or passengers travelling
on the same bus’, as Schmitt noted acerbically some years later (Schmitt,
2007b: 59). Rather than the primary bearer of the ‘public’, the state became
‘an object of compromise among the powerful social and economic groups,
an agglomeration of heterogeneous factors, political parties, combines,
unions, churches, and so on, which come to understandings with each other’
(Schmitt, 1999a: 198). Such a state no longer held a monopoly over politics
but was ‘at most a pouvoir neuter, an intermediary, a neutral mediator, a
112 Liberal Leviathan
moment of equilibrium between the conflicting groups, a kind of clearing
office, a peacemaker’ (ibid.). This meant that the decisive friend–enemy rela-
tion shifted from inter-state relations to intra-state relations and that the state
was no longer able to effectively identify the enemy and constitute its own
identity. The political was thus displaced by liberalism, becoming a fissure
within the state – a fissure that threatened the integrity of the state as formed
by its boundaries.
Second, liberal pluralism created the conditions for the collapse of the dis-
tinction between state and society. Rather than stand above political differ-
ences in order to neutralize them, Schmitt argued that the state became
embroiled within them. On the one hand, the state was reduced to the object
of competition between social groups and the political parties that represented
them. On the other, it had become the instrument by which each different social
group sought to control their competitors. The state was thus indecisive,
undergoing a process Schmitt referred to elsewhere as Hamletization (Schmitt,
2009a: 21).18 A state rendered indecisive by pluralist dissolution would not be
able to manage the growth of internal enmities: ‘political unity is the highest
unity because it decides, and has the potential to prevent all other opposing
groups from dissociating into a state of extreme enmity – that is, into civil
war’ (Schmitt, 1999a: 198, our emphasis). Hence, for Schmitt, behind the
polite debating chambers of Parliament lurked the spectre of civil war.
The perverse underside of liberalism’s ‘misplaced’ pluralism was its reliance
on universalist concepts. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt claimed that
liberalism typically operated by displacing the political into the spheres of
economics and ethics. By displacing politics into these supposedly ‘neutral
and universal’ domains, liberalism was, in Schmitt’s account, attempting to
bring about an ‘absolute depoliticization’ that would eradicate the grounds for
difference. In Schmitt’s view this appeal to universal categories presented two
dangers. First, at the most obvious level, by claiming a universal basis for
politics in the domains of economics and ethics, liberalism sought to deny the
constitutive role of difference in the political, thus undermining the spatiali-
zation of the political upon which the state form rested. Second, the liberal
appeal to universal categories did not bring about a genuine depoliticization
but rather produced an escalation of political conflict by rendering political
difference absolute. In this perspective, the escalation of the political and
depoliticization were paradoxically different sides of the same coin (just as for
Schmitt the political proper always contained its moment of depoliticization).
This paradox arose, in Schmitt’s view, from the fact the political was an
ontological and anthropological condition that could not be escaped, as
examined in the previous chapter. Whilst liberalism was able to displace the
political into other spheres and reframe it in new vocabularies, it could not be
overcome: ‘the world will not become depoliticized with the aid of definitions
and constructions … which circle the polarity of ethics and economics’
(Schmitt, 2007b: 78). Instead, the political would persist, despite liberalism’s
attempts to erase it. Indeed, it would merely adopt the universal terminology
 Liberal Leviathan 113
of economics and ethics and the friend–enemy distinction would find expres-
sion in these terms, where its persistence could be concealed or denied
(ibid.).19 Hence, liberalism in truth did not incorporate the universalist cate-
gories of economics and ethics to overcome politics but precisely to hide and
legitimate their own political aims.20
Schmitt paid close critical attention to the manner in which the term
‘humanity’ was evoked in liberal politics and paraphrased Proudhon’s famous
dictum on property: ‘whoever says humanity wants to cheat’ (ibid.: 54).
Hence, ‘humanity’ was not a term used to deny politics through a category see-
mingly beyond difference, but, as Schmitt argued, ‘quite on the contrary, [had]
an especially intensive political meaning’ (ibid.). ‘To invoke and monopolize
such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the
enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of
humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity’ he
wrote (ibid.). Thus, when adopted as a political category, the supposedly uni-
versal category of humanity had its own inverse, its own enemy: the inhuman.
Hence, in Schmitt’s view, the nature of the friend–enemy distinction became
particularly intense when cast in the absolute terms of ethical universalism.
Thus, in the guise of a depoliticizing rhetoric of universalism, liberalism
ushered in an intensification of the political, opening ever deeper rifts of dif-
ference whilst trumpeting the emergence of a supposedly global plane of
immanence. The crucial problem with liberal universalism, in Schmitt’s view,
was that it removed all limitations on warfare. By claiming to wage war in the
name of the universal principle of justice, liberal states produced an unjust
enemy that did not require the respect afforded enemies within the modern
European order of states. Cast in opposition to humanity, ‘the adversary is
thus no longer called the enemy but the disturber of the peace and is thereby
designated to be an outlaw of humanity’ (ibid.). Further, when conducted on
the basis of universal categories such as humanity, warfare was removed from
the spatial constraints that the state form had placed upon it, creating the
‘potential for a most awful expansion and a murderous imperialism’ (Schmitt,
1999a: 205). Absolute enmities were untethered from any concrete spatial
situation and could become globalized: ‘With the help of … a universal con-
cept’ like humanity, Schmitt noted, ‘every distinction may be negated and
every concrete community ruptured’ (ibid.). The horizon of liberal humanitar-
ian war was, in this view, a formless worldwide liberal imperium, a spaceless
chaos of absolute enmity indistinguishable from a state of global civil war.
Neither a global pluralism nor a global homogeneity were possible in
Schmitt’s account, at least politically, as both sought to escape the mediation
between unity and difference that founded the political form of the state. The
borderline between states was precisely the site where this mediation occurred,
the ‘cut’ between political entities not only marking the difference between
them, but also that between (a necessarily limited) pluralism and (a necessarily
limited) homogeneity. Hence, the mediation between unity and difference that
grounded the state form – and which liberalism fatally undermined – was in
114 Liberal Leviathan
Schmitt’s work implicitly but necessarily spatialized along an inside–outside
dividing line. Global pluralism and universal homogeneity were ‘spaceless’ con-
cepts that denied the fact that political order relied upon political differences
being fixed to spatial differences. If there was to be a chance of saving the state
form from liberal dissolution, this required new ideas capable of confirming
the essential relationship between the state and the spatialization of the political.

Myth
In Schmitt’s view, if authority and community – sovereignty and homo-
geneity – were to be bound together they required the conceptual glue of a
political idea. Just as the political form of the Medieval Roman Catholic
Church had brought about unity in Christian Europe on the basis of a pow-
erful political idea – that is, the Church’s representation of Christ’s power on
earth – the modern state form required an idea that could gather an obedient
homogenous people under the rule of sovereign authority. As noted above, in
Schmitt’s account, the political idea operative in the Catholic complexico had
drawn its power from the transcendental theological power of Christ. How-
ever, lacking theological or universal grounds the modern state’s claim to
legitimacy had to be located in political difference itself. Hence, the state form
required an idea of political difference on which to forge the union of
authority and association. It was this that led Schmitt to emphasize the
importance of myth in twentieth century politics.
In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy Schmitt argued that two pow-
erful political myths had emerged in Europe in the mid nineteenth century,
both of which were based upon concepts of stark political difference: class
conflict and nationalism. Both provided a powerful motivating force to draw
association and authority into an effective political unity, although the dif-
ferences between them were crucial. In Schmitt’s rather crude terms, nation-
alism provided a political idea that could ground the state form, whilst class
conflict tended to dissolve its foundations. The concepts of the proletariat and
the bourgeoisie were not specific to any one state, so the myth of class conflict
could not be spatialized easily within the terms of the inside–outside distinc-
tion that characterized the state form. The myth of the nation was by contrast
grounded in the particular situation of differing communities and could easily
be mapped against the spatialization of the political differences represented by
the European state system. Hence, the myth of the nation had superior ‘form-
giving’ properties. Schmitt looked to Mussolini’s Italy as an example of the
superior power of the nationalist myth to the socialist myth in the struggle
between them that racked Europe at the beginning of the new century.21
Indeed, Schmitt even argued that the success of Bolshevism in Russia could
be put down to the Marxist theory of communist dictatorship being aligned
to the long-standing tradition of Russian nationalism rather than to its
inherent ideological power or social conditions in Russia at the time of the
revolution.
 Liberal Leviathan 115
In Schmitt’s view the need for a myth of political difference to provide a
political idea was particularly pressing in the twentieth century for two rea-
sons. First, because the modern European state was born of a process of
neutralization and depoliticization that had seen a growing contradiction
between the principle of political difference – inscribed in the spatial division
between inside and outside – and the governing ideas of European modernity,
such as reason, humanity, economics, technology, and so on, that tended
toward immanence and universality. Hence, the political ideas on which the
European state had attempted to found itself had run counter to the very
principle of political difference that provided its most fundamental grounds.
This situation was particularly acute in the twentieth century when technolo-
gical thinking had rendered the concept of the state into a giant self-regulating
mechanism. Second, Schmitt argued that since 1848 Europe had entered
irrevocably into an age of mass politics. In an era when politics was deter-
mined by mass mobilization powerful myths were needed to create unity.
Whilst the example of Italy – and even that of Soviet Russia – showed that
the masses might respond to the power of the nationalist myth and cohere
around a sovereign authority, the intensity of their attachments risked drag-
ging Europe into a state of civil war based upon a plurality of myths.22
However, despite his caution regarding the affective excesses that competing
political myths might provoke in an age of mass politics, Schmitt stuck to the
idea that myth was an inescapable dimension of the political that needed to
be considered.
As noted above, in Political Theology Schmitt argued that legal positivism
was a product of the growing tendency for concepts of immanence to govern
all aspects of thought from the nineteenth century onwards. However, in The
Leviathan from 1938 and in the article ‘The State as Mechanism in Hobbes
and Descartes’, from the previous year, he identified deeper historical roots
for the positivist conception of state. The vision of a fully rationalized state
system that would run itself without the need for personalized sovereign
power had its origins, Schmitt suggested, in the seventeenth century. This
barren mechanistic conception of the state had in fact emerged first in the
work of his great intellectual mentor Thomas Hobbes.

The positive law state [Gesetzesstaat] began as a historical type in the

nineteenth century. But the idea of the state as a technically completed,
manmade magnum-artificium, a machine … was first grasped by Hobbes
and systematically constructed by him into a clear concept.
(Schmitt, 2008b: 45)

Thus, the legal positivism that emerged in the nineteenth century not only
mirrored the intellectual vogue for immanence, but reflected a ‘four-hundred-
year-long process of mechanization’ sparked by Hobbes. As Schmitt bluntly
stated in 1937, ‘because of Hobbes, the state becomes a “huge machine”’
(ibid.: 98). This book thus marks a serious rupture in Schmitt’s relation to
116 Liberal Leviathan
Hobbes and the recognition that the state was no longer adequate as a political
form in the twentieth century.
This ‘general technologization’ of the European state was problematic for
Schmitt in two ways (ibid.: 42). Intended merely as a rational mechanism, the
state was paradoxically too weak and too strong. First, the state conceived as
a rationally functioning system of legal norms lacked a political idea and was
left politically weakened. By conceiving it as a machine ‘Western liberal
democrats agree with Bolshevik Marxists that the state is an apparatus that
the most varied political constellations can use as a technically neutral
instrument.’23 This mechanistic neutrality meant that the state could be har-
nessed by diverse political ideas, but that it tended towards the eradication of
the political idea as such. As a machine, the state kept the semblance of
political form but was hollowed out and lacked the glory associated with the
highest political concepts of an earlier age and, hence, the ability to organize
unity under its authority. Without the centrifugal force of the political idea
binding the political form together, the relationship between authority and
community on which the state was founded unravelled. The rational state
machine could treat all the citizens alike, but the citizens would treat it only as
an inert instrument to be used for their own diverse ends: this was precisely
the state rendered into a ‘sorting house’ for plural interests. The mighty Hobbe-
sian Leviathan had become a ‘stato agnostico’, unable to produce unity and
subject to a divisive plurality of interests (Schmitt, 1999a: 198).24 The twen-
tieth century state was perhaps rationally perfect but lacked the political idea
that could unify the people under sovereign authority.
Second, in this situation, medieval legal notions such as the right to
resistance become merely ‘disturbances that needed to be put aside’ (Schmitt,
2008b: 99). ‘The endeavour to resist the Leviathan, the all-powerful resistance-
destroying, and technically perfect mechanism of command, is’ – Schmitt noted –
‘practically impossible’ (ibid.: 46). The machinery of the state can break
down, for example, in the case of civil war, but this has nothing to do with
any notion of ‘right to resistance’.

There are no points of departure for a right to resist … It has no place

whatsoever in the space governed by the irresistible and overpowering
huge machine of the state. It has no starting point, location, or viewpoint:
it is ‘utopian’ in the true sense of that word.
(ibid.)

Schmitt therefore presented an image of a technological state that has lost

its relation to space – a state without order or orientation. Further, it was this
very loss of spatial grounding that ensured there was no longer any possibi-
lity, no locus for resistance, as the state itself was no longer either locatable or
escapable, but rather took the form of a logic of mechanistic management
smothering all opposition.25
 Liberal Leviathan 117
Against such a mechanistic state, a new form of state was needed, one
grounded in myth that could unite the people around a decisive authority to
whom they would be obedient. In Political Theology Schmitt had drawn on
the French and Spanish counter-revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth
century, such as Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortés, to emphasize the
exertion of sovereign power against the revolutionary masses; however, by
the time he came to write The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, a year
later, he had already recognized that mass politics was not necessarily inim-
ical to state sovereignty. There he took the position that the masses could in
fact be the source of renewal for state sovereignty and a means of strength-
ening political form. Schmitt acknowledged that the democratic unity of ruler
and ruled had become an unquestioned conceptual presupposition for the
political thought of the time, but it was not necessarily an idea undermining
state form. Indeed, he argued that, if shorn of its liberal trappings democracy
could in fact provide a powerful basis for state unity. If suitably yoked to
authority and a powerful political idea, democratic homogeneity could
prompt a reinvigoration of the state form in the conditions of mass politics.
This was precisely what Schmitt suggested the Fascist state had done in
Italy – to produce a radically anti-liberal form of democratic state built upon
a strong central authority and a powerful myth of national unity.
The core claim advanced in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy is that
the fundamental principle of democracy – the identification of ruler and
ruled, that is, homogeneity – did not need to be accompanied by liberal
pluralism, and was in deep contradiction with it.26 Rather, Schmitt argued
that democracy was in fact compatible with dictatorship. The crucial aspect
of democracy, in Schmitt’s reading, was that the will of the people funda-
mentally dictates the terms of the state. There was no contradiction, in
Schmitt’s mind, between a declaration of the people’s will and its representa-
tion in a strong form of authority, since both presupposed a fundamental
homogeneity of the people, a concept on which we will reflect further in the
next chapter. As Schmitt wrote in the Preface to the 1926 re-issue of The
Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, ‘dictatorial and Caesaristic methods not
only can produce the acclamation of the people but can also be a direct
expression of democratic substance and power’ (1988: 17). His vision of
democracy joined the revolutionary masses with Caesarist authority, the
former somehow being given expression in the form of the latter without the
need of parliamentary institutions, and indeed defined against them.
Schmitt further elaborated the relationship between representative author-
ity and the democratic will of the people in his 1928 book Constitutional
Theory. Although the conception of constituent power advanced here is at
times surprisingly radical for a thinker clearly located on the far Right of the
political spectrum, his formulations nonetheless betray the influence of Mus-
solini’s Italy. Indeed, the ‘radicality’ of Schmitt’s conceptions of a Caesarist
democratic dictatorship linking a strong centralized authority to the public
declaration of a homogenous people’s will, was clearly designed to side-step
118 Liberal Leviathan
the pluralist formalities of liberal democracy and introduce into the latter a
conceptual rift. The homogenous will of the people and the strong central
authority represented for Schmitt the possibility of a powerful unity to stand
against the liberal pluralist dissolution of the state.
Where this line of reasoning led Schmitt intellectually and politically is
discussed later in the chapter. What is important to note here however is the
centrality of the relationship between political myth and the homogeneity of
the people to his understanding of how the state form was grounded. The
central role of myth would return in his later work in a variety of guises: first,
during the late 1930s as the political idea that motivated the formation of a
European Großraum under Nazi rule, and later in the form of the mythical,
geo-elemental ontology underpinning his work in the 1940s and 1950s, such
as Land and Sea and The Nomos. However, before moving on to examine
how these ideas related to the development of Schmitt’s spatial thought under
the Nazi regime, it is crucial to note how this critique of the liberal state
emerged in relation to, and was shaped by, the Weimar Republic’s final years
of crisis. In many respects, it was the collapse of the Weimar state system that
fuelled Schmitt’s vitriolic attacks on liberalism and legal positivism and
arguably what drove him to join the Nazi regime; but it was also the failure of
the liberal state to spatialize the political that led him to push his thought in a
more explicitly spatial direction.

Article 48
During the short life of the Weimar Republic Schmitt’s thought was orien-
tated towards the question of how the state might renew its authority and
legitimacy in the face of the forces of liberal thought and the practice of
parliamentarianism, and avoid a slide into civil war. One constant running
through his work during this period was the assertion of presidential power in
the Weimar Constitution. As noted previously, since the publication of Political
Theology in 1922, Schmitt had been a forceful advocate for the expansion of
presidential power under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Article 48
laid out the scope of the President’s powers in a state of emergency and the
legal hermeneutics surrounding the article became a crucial battleground in
the struggles over the nature and direction of the fragile Republic.
The stakes of the debates around the role of the President in the Constitu-
tion, and specifically the nature of the powers granted under Article 48, grew
ever sharper in the tumultuous wake of the Great Depression. The weakness
of the Weimar state, which Schmitt had long diagnosed, had created the
opportunity for partisan forces of both Left and Right to test its integrity.
The National Socialists and the Communists, two revolutionary parties each
backed by substantial paramilitary forces and opposed ideologies, were not
only set against one another but both against the precarious compromises
upon which the order of the Weimar state rested. In the fallout of the finan-
cial crisis and hyper inflation the Weimar state was losing its ‘monopoly on
 Liberal Leviathan 119
violence’ on the streets of Berlin and elsewhere and the threat of civil war was very
real if the centre ground could not be shored to guarantee stability. It was this
instability that made the role of presidential power, and particularly the nature
of the emergency powers granted under Article 48, such a controversial
question, with burning political relevance well beyond jurisprudence circles.
The conservative circles supporting President Hindenburg were aware of
Schmitt’s view on the provision of Article 48, and his writing had already
inspired Hindenburg’s Chief of Staff Otto Meissner’s attempts to expand the
President’s emergency power since 1926. As the crisis of the Weimar Republic
entered what would turn into its final stages, Schmitt’s proximity with Popitz
and others in the conservative Papen government placed him in very core of
the constitutional fray. When a conflict erupted between the Reich govern-
ment and the Federal State of Prussia – after the former had placed the latter
under martial law and installed a commissar in July 1932 – Schmitt was cat-
apulted into constitutional affairs to provide legal defence for the extension of
presidential power. The Prussian government, dominated by the Centre-Left
Social Democratic Party, was struggling with the financial measures required
to address the fallout of the Wall Street crash. This provided an opportunity
for the Reich government to exert its power over a restive Prussia by
appointing a commissar to oversee fiscal readjustment that conservatives in
the Papen government argued was necessary to prevent financial collapse.
When Prussia sought an injunction against commissarial rule in the Con-
stitutional Court in Leipzig claiming that it was unconstitutional, Schmitt
was chosen to defend the Reich in the high-profile and high-stakes trial.27
The verdict was ambiguous, the court ruling that the Prussian government
was unlawfully suspended but the Reich had the right to appoint a commis-
sar. Schmitt felt the trial to be a failure given that the court had not validated
his interpretation of Article 48 and a heavy sense of foreboding shadowed
over his last major Weimar text, Legality and Legitimacy, published in late
1932. Behind Schmitt’s jurisprudence arguments regarding the difference
between legality and legitimacy lay a last ditch attempt to appeal to deeper
grounds for the legitimacy of presidential rule as opposed to liberal legality.
He warned that liberal parliamentarianism and legal positivism had left the
state too weak and divided to face down the challenge of paramilitary groups
on the streets of the capital. If the President did not act now, Schmitt warned,
history would judge those responsible.28 The last line of the book carried with
it an air of impending menace: without firm presidential action the Constitu-
tion, he warned, ‘will meet a quick end along with the fictions of neutral
majority functionalism that is pitted against every value and truth. Then, the
truth will have its revenge’ (Schmitt, 2004a: 90).

Towards the total state

Schmitt argued that parliamentarianism led not only to the state becoming an
object that different social groups vyed for control over, but also to society
120 Liberal Leviathan
increasingly becoming the object of state intervention. Where once the state’s
power was defined by its ability to stand above society in order to control it,
the emergence of liberal pluralism meant that power was increasingly defined
by its capacity to exert control within society, to shape it in the image of the
dominant parliamentary group’s interests. In Schmitt’s reckoning, the early
years of the twentieth century were thus paradoxically defined by the simul-
taneous collapse and totalization of the state. As the Weimar Republic stum-
bled through its final phase of crisis, Schmitt argued that a new form of state
had emerged that held the key to understanding the political crisis of the day:
the total state. Schmitt claimed that his concept of the total state was not the
product of speculative theorizing but reflected ‘the concrete constitutional
conditions’ of the moment (Schmitt, 1999e: 18). ‘One may already talk’ – he
wrote tentatively in 1931 – ‘of a transition to the total state’ (Schmitt, 1999b:
20).29 However, by February 1933, immediately after Hitler’s appointment as
Chancellor, he felt confident enough to declare: ‘there is a total state’ (ibid.).
Indeed, Schmitt argued that by 1933 the totalization of all politics was com-
plete: ‘every political power is forced to take hold of the new weapons’ that
defined the total state (ibid.).
However, Schmitt identified two different types of total state at play in the
turmoil of the early 1930s and believed that the fate of the state form turned
on the difference between them: a liberal ‘quantitative total state’ and a Fas-
cist ‘qualitative total state’.30 They were to be sharply distinguished: the lib-
eral ‘quantitative total state’ was identified as the origin of state crisis, the
Fascist ‘qualitative total state’ as a potential source of renewal. Put in differ-
ent terms, the former was dissolving the state’s ability to spatialize the
political, while the latter potentially provided the conditions for its respatia-
lization. The manner in which Schmitt articulated the difference between
these two forms of total state does much to illuminate the theoretical shifts
behind his decision to support the Nazi regime in 1933 and his subsequent
turn away from the category of the state in search of new bearer of political
form in the late 1930s. The total state was in a sense Schmitt’s last attempt to
find a source of renewal for the state, before moving on to seek out new
political forms capable of spatializing the political in ways adequate to the
transformed historical conditions of the twentieth century.
The ‘quantitative total state’ was for Schmitt the paradoxical end product
of liberal depoliticization. It perfectly described, in his view, the ‘mess’ of the
final Weimar years (ibid.: 22). The ‘quantitative total state’ was marked above
all by the collapse of the distinction between state and society that had been
the pillar of the nineteenth century liberal state. This growing interpenetration
of society and state, for Schmitt, resulted principally from the democratic
thesis of the identity between ruler and ruled. He had already noted in The
Concept of the Political that democracy ‘blurs the boundaries between state
and society’ and ‘must do away with all the typical … nineteenth century
antithesis and divisions pertaining to state-society’ (Schmitt, 2007b: 23). This
process had brought about a fusion of state and society in which each came
 Liberal Leviathan 121
more and more to resemble the other. ‘Society organized itself in the image of
the state’, he wrote, leaving ‘social and economic problems [to] automatically
become state problems’ (Schmitt, 1999e: 9). It was no longer possible to dis-
tinguish ‘between the state-political and the societal-unpolitical spheres’
(ibid.). In such a situation, the state ‘seizes all the social, that is to say,
everything that has to do with the common life of human beings’ (ibid.). Such
a state, ‘indiscriminately gets into all spheres of human existence … because
generally it cannot make any distinctions any longer’ (ibid.). Unable to dis-
tinguish itself from the social realm, the state expanded, becoming totalized
as it percolated down into every area of the social body.
Crucially, however, the liberal state was for Schmitt, ‘total in a purely
quantitative sense, of mere volume, and not of intensity and political energy’
(ibid.).31 ‘Today’s German state’ – he wrote in 1933 – is ‘total out of weakness
and absence of resistance, by its inability to hold out against the assault of the
parties and of organized interests’ (ibid.: 23). It was by answering the
demands of interest groups organized into parties that the liberal state had
become a total state in his view. Hence, the pluralist state had been rendered
total. The pluralist state ‘must bow to everybody’s wishes, please everyone,
subsidize everyone and be at the beck and call of conflicting interests at one
and the same time’ (ibid.). Thus, according to this interpretation, the ‘quan-
titative total state’ was a state that had ‘neither the ability nor the willingness
to form a responsible government, capable of action’ (ibid.: 27). It was a state
fundamentally unable to clearly identify its enemies and unable to stabilize
the state around a spatialization of the political.
Neither was the quantitative total state able to forge a unified political will.
Rather, the ‘quantitative total state’ was characterized by a ‘pluralistic disper-
sion’ of loyalties (ibid.: 17).32 In the parliamentary system, the political will
was ‘diverted at source into five channels and in five different directions so that
it may never flow together in one stream’ (Schmitt, 1999b: 26). Thus, the expansion
of the ‘quantitative total state’ into society was undermining the state’s ability
to take decisions and to provide unity. ‘Its foundations’ became ‘an uncertain
terrain contested from several sides’ (Schmitt, 1999e: 17). As such, the ‘quanti-
tative total state’ threatened to bring about a dangerous despatialization of
the political, that would see the decisive friend–enemy distinction shift from
the boundaries between states to the relations between interest groups, within the
state. Thus, behind the ‘quantitative total state’ Schmitt detected the ever
present spectre of civil war. Indeed, he noted that chaos would probably
already have reigned in Germany, ‘were it not for one of the last pillars of
constitutional order, the President of the Reich’ (Schmitt, 1999b: 27).
If the ‘quantitative total state’ had, in Schmitt’s view, expanded in quantity
and volume, the ‘qualitative total state’ by contrast grew in quality and
intensity. The liberal state was a totality born of weakness but the ‘qualitative
total state’ was a totality born of increased power. It was ‘by far the stronger
state … total with regard to quality and energy’ (ibid.: 21). The ‘quantitative
total state’ came about through a collapse of the categories of state and
122 Liberal Leviathan
society, a pluralist dissolution of the people’s will accompanying the spread of
state power into every area of social life. By contrast, the ‘qualitative total state’
maintained the status of the state above society but did so by producing and
representing the unified will of the people. ‘Behind the formula of the [quali-
tative] total state’ was the acknowledgement that ‘the present day state has
got new means and possibilities of tremendous power’ (ibid.). It was by
drawing on these that the ‘qualitative total state’ grew in power. Particularly
important for Schmitt were the new means of mass persuasion – cinema and
radio – as they allowed ‘the creation of a “public” … a collective opinion’
(ibid.: 21).33 The ‘qualitative total state’ ensured that these new means of
power ‘belong exclusively to the state and serve to increase its power’ (ibid.),
having ‘no intention’ of handing them ‘to its own enemies and destroyers’
(ibid.: 22). Thus, these new powers allowed the state to harness the demo-
cratic masses behind (and under) it, rather than see the state dissolve into
society: they provided the state with the qualitative strength to prevent its
quantitative dissolution.
The new technical means of control and persuasion were not, however, the
true source of the ‘qualitative total state’s’ distinction from the ‘quantitative
total state’. The real difference lay in the intensity of the political association
created by the ‘qualitative total state’. In stark contrast to the pluralism of the
‘quantitative total state’, it did not ‘allow the development of any sort of
forces hostile to the state, that obstruct the state and disrupt its internal life’
(ibid.: 23). ‘Such a state’ – Schmitt wrote – ‘can discriminate between friend
and enemy’ (ibid.: 22), provide unity internally and identify the enemy exter-
nally. Indeed, Schmitt noted, ‘in this sense … every genuine state is a total state’
(ibid.), given that it is defined by the correct articulation of the political in the
state form. State theorists had ‘long known that the political is total, and new
are only the technical means, the political efficiency of which must become
clear to anyone’ (ibid.). Thus, in Schmitt’s eyes the ‘qualitative total state’ carried
out the work of the ‘classical’ state of modern Europe in providing political
form, but harnessed the new technological means needed to produce unity in
an age of mass politics. In contrast to the liberal state, this new ‘qualitative total
state’ understood the importance of identifying the enemy and hence of effectively
spatializing the political: it was a state capable of making the distinction
between state and society and between inside and outside.
Although The Further Development of the Total State in Germany was
published in February 1933, Schmitt did not yet explicitly take National
Socialist Germany as the model for the ‘qualitative total state’, but rather
looked to the example of Italian Fascism. He noted that the ‘qualitative total
state’ is total with ‘regard to quality and energy, in the way the Fascist state
calls itself a “stato totalitario”’ (ibid.: 21). Indeed, despite the fact that the
term ‘qualitative total state’ only appears in Schmitt’s work in the early 1930s,
his depiction builds on ideas he had developed during the 1920s with Mus-
solini’s Italy firmly in mind. As previously noted, he had lauded the success of
Italian Fascism in developing a muscular reactionary state capable of holding
 Liberal Leviathan 123
the forces ranged against it at bay and mobilizing the masses as early as 1923,
in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Indeed, there were striking simi-
larities between the authoritarian theory of democracy Schmitt developed
during the 1920s and the concept of the ‘qualitative total state’ he introduced
at the beginning of the 1930s, the latter clearly finding its seed in the former.
But if the concept of the ‘qualitative total state’ builds on ideas Schmitt had
earlier developed, it arguably provides the frame within which he moved,
from supporting a transformation of the Weimar Republic into an authoritar-
ian presidential system, to an accommodation with National Socialism – a
movement he had only months earlier identified as one of the principle
threats to the state. Indeed in State, Movement, People, also published in
1933, he attempted to formulate a theoretical conception of the new Nazi
state, and explicitly identified the nascent Nazi order in Germany as an
example of a ‘qualitative total state’ alongside the ‘totalitarian’ states of Italy
and the Soviet Union. By May 1933, Schmitt had decided that Nazism repre-
sented the best chance for the renewal of the state form and hence the spa-
tialization of the political. But if he had been quick to herald the rebirth of
the state in the Nazi movement, he soon considered it to have decisively killed
off his most revered historical institution. Even the ‘qualitative total state’,
which Schmitt hoped would prevent the collapse of the European order of states,
was not strong enough to resist the new powers and the new spatializations
of the political that were emerging along with the ferment of totalitarian
reaction.
Schmitt’s work during the Weimar years can be understood as a polemical
battle against liberal depoliticization and despatialization. The concepts of
sovereign decisionism, Caesarist democracy, presidential state of exception
and qualitative total state, were all attempts to theorize means by which the
state could ensure it stood above society, and was capable of respatializing the
political, by making the cut between a clearly identified enemy and a unified
people. It is in the context of the German state’s failure to assert itself against
liberal ‘hamletization’ that we should understand Schmitt’s decision to align
himself with the National Socialist regime, but also his subsequent search for
alternate political forms and new spatializations of the political beyond the
horizon of the state. Indeed, it is in the wreckage left by the exhaustion of the
state form during the Nazi years that we can locate not only Schmitt’s turn
towards conceptualizing political forms beyond the state, but also towards an
explicit theorization of spatial order, something we will explore in the
remainder of the book.

Notes
1 This is a point forcefully made by Benno Teschke in his recent scathing critique of
Schmitt in the New Left Review (2011a, 2011b). A similar point is made by Wil-
liam Hooker throughout his 2009 book Carl Schmitt’s International Thought.
Crucial to Schmitt’s discussion of the state was in fact an appeal to the ‘concrete’
124 Liberal Leviathan
situation of state relations, but this appeal itself was premised to a large extent on
a profound abstraction from concrete circumstances to an idealized understanding
of ‘the state’. To some extent Schmitt operated on the basis of a foundational
abstraction that bore the legacy of Hegelian state-thinking despite his supposed
realism. The rather uneasy shift Schmitt’s analysis often makes between the case of
the Weimar Republic, liberal states and the European state as such, is perhaps the
inevitable result of a thought driven by the tension between philosophical rumi-
nation and polemical engagement, as much as a form of thought that strategically
employed abstraction as a conceptual weapon in making arguments aimed at the
‘concrete’ situation of Weimar politics.
2 There are several texts dotted across Schmitt’s corpus where he explicitly focuses
on his conceptual history: Political Theology (1922); ‘The Age of Neutralizations
and Depoliticizations’ (1929); Land and Sea (1944); and ‘Three Possibilities for a
Christian Concept of History’ (1950), with elements of this analysis present in his
work on Groβraum (1938–1941) and in The Nomos (1950). There are subtle but
significant shifts in the way Schmitt formulates his ‘conceptual history’ between
these texts which we examine in greater detail in Chapters 7 and 8. Whilst avow-
edly positioned against any form of historical-materialism it is not clear how
Schmitt understood the relationship between these determining philosophical con-
cepts and the major social processes of his time. It appears, in the latter two texts
here cited, that governing philosophical concepts are shaped, at least in part, by
social processes, including the development of new technologies of industrial pro-
duction, warfare or transport and patterns of colonization. Schmitt never explicitly
theorized this relationship or built a general picture of the influence social pro-
cesses have exerted on historical consciousness, but did highlight them with regard
to the specific cases of technologies of war and transport and the spread of Eur-
opean colonization. Schmitt’s understanding of the role of concepts in historical
development exerted a strong influence on the practice of ‘conceptual history’
developed by the late German historian and philosopher Reinhart Koselleck. For
an insightful analysis of the relationship between these two thinkers see Müller,
2003: 104–116. See also Koselleck, 1987.
3 Political Theology was conceived as a work of historical sociology and bore an
obvious debt to Marx and Weber, although Schmitt here defined his own method
of inquiry as a ‘sociology of concepts’ (ibid.: 45). Indeed, elements of the book
appeared first as part of a Festschrift honouring Weber on his death. For more on
the relationship between Schmitt and Weber see Catherine Colliot-Thélène, 1999.
4 Liberalism, he argued a year later, ‘should be understood as a consistent, compre-
hensive metaphysical system’ emanating from the ‘rationalist spirit’ (Schmitt, 1988: 35).
5 Importantly, Schmitt did not posit a radical break in the nineteenth century
whereby political legitimacy suddenly shifts ground from conceptions of transcen-
dence to those of immanence. Rather, Chapter 3 of Political Theology traces the
growing influence of metaphysical concepts of immanence on theories of political
legitimacy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The change is gradual
but it is in the nineteenth century that immanence becomes the fundamental meta-
physical conception. He noted that the ‘philosophy of state’ of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries was still committed to ‘the transcendence of the sovereign
vis-à-vis the state’ (Schmitt, 2005: 49).
6 Schmitt acknowledged that his history was explicitly Eurocentric and did not make
universal claims (see Schmitt, 2007a: 80–81). In contrast, Land and Sea and
The Nomos, both written during the war years, contain a philosophy of history
that is global in scope, although Europe remains the origin from where the
‘global’ perspective can be understood philosophically in Schmitt’s view.
7 Unlike Spengler, Schmitt did not characterize his narrative as essentially one of
decline. Indeed, he claimed to leave the question open as to whether the succession
 Liberal Leviathan 125
of stages he identified in modern European history should be interpreted as a move
‘upwards or downwards, as an ascent or a decline’ (Schmitt, 2007a: 82). Although
the text clearly wears the imprint of Spengler’s influence, Schmitt described the
latter’s vision as being common to ‘the previous German generation … under the
spell of a cultural decline’ but out of sync with the emergence of a new generation
who saw in technology the hope of a new future (ibid.: 92).
8 As early as 1922 Schmitt had located a common root for European liberal and Rus-
sian Bolshevik thought in ‘economic thinking’ – noting that Lenin and Rathaneau
shared in the dream of an ‘electrified earth’ in Roman Catholicism and Political
Form (Schmitt, 1996: 13). In ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’
he thus argued that the Soviet state was in certain respects ahead of its European
neighbours in embracing the technological spirit of the age.
9 Indeed, it seems likely that Schmitt did not consider the Soviet state to be suffering
from the same crisis as the liberal states of Europe. He remarked that in Soviet
Russia ‘a state arose which is more intensely statist than any ruled by an absolute
prince’ (ibid.: 81). In his view, this intensified statehood came precisely through the
embrace of technology. Hence, he did not consider technological thought and
the state form to be necessarily opposed. As we discuss later in this chapter, in the
early 1930s he attempted to outline a theory of a ‘qualitative total state’ that
would precisely use technology to shore up the foundations of state power (see
Schmitt, 1999b, 1999e). However, Schmitt’s views on technology were always
rather ambivalent. Even if he was frequently perceptive with regard to the changes
technological developments made to the conditions of political thought and
practice, especially in so far as they effected the conduct of warfare and hence its
management – the principle aim of politics – Schmitt repeatedly emphasized the
dangers that accompanied them. There may be moments in his discussion of the
total state where Schmitt suggested that order can be restored by yoking a reactionary
vision of the state to technological power, but for the most part he approaches tech-
nology as a domain whose effects on politics must be reckoned with rather than
celebrated. Hence, Jeffery Herf ’s depiction of Schmitt as a ‘reactionary modernist’ in
awe of the reactionary potentiality of technology is based upon a questionable
reading of Schmitt’s oeuvre. Herf correctly notes that Schmitt rejects the ante-
diluvian cultural pessimism of those who looked back towards a pre-technological
state of authenticity as a product of a political romanticism, but goes too far in
locating a sort of technological machismo in his work (see Herf, 1986: Chapter 5).
10 The semblance between the logical structure of the sovereign exception in Schmitt’s
work and Derrida’s concept of the ‘supplement’ – the element that stands outside
the system to constitute it – has been commented on by a number of authors
including Giorgio Agamben but also Marder, 2010; Ojakangas, 2006; Prozorov,
2007. Indeed, Derrida’s own rather sympathetic reading of Schmitt in The Politics
of Friendship no doubt in part arises from the close structural similarities in their
conceptual logic, even if there exist an enormous gulf separating their ethical and
political orientations (Derrida, 1997).
11 See Chapter 3 of Political Theology (Schmitt, 2005) and Chapter 4 of The Leviathan
(Schmitt, 2008b), respectively. The latter draws on conceptions of self-regulating
systems from natural-scientific thinking that emerged in the seventeenth century
according to Schmitt’s 1937 article ‘The State as Mechanism in Hobbes and
Descartes’, included as an appendix in The Leviathan. Here the state is depicted as a
mechanism blindly following laws that arise immanent to a pre-established system of
legal norms, with no role for the consideration of decisions coming from outside
the legal system, in order to found it.
12 Schmitt’s attacks on legal positivism, and on Kelsen in particular, brought him
recognition from senior conservative figures in the Reich government, something
which was to become extremely important for his subsequent involvement in the
126 Liberal Leviathan
politics of the Republic in its final tragic months, as will be discussed later in this
chapter. For detailed accounts of the role of legal positivism in Weimar jurisprudence
and the conflict between Kelsen and Schmitt see Caldwell, 1997; Kennedy, 2004;
Scheuerman, 1999; and the texts collected in Jacobson and Schlink, 2000.
13 Schmitt would later argue that liberal legal thought not only lacked connection to
a concrete situation but to any concrete space. It was ‘spaceless’, as he repeatedly
claimed in his late works such as The Nomos. The abstract norms of legal positi-
vism presumed – he maintained – a ‘spaceless’ world reminiscent of the ‘void’
typical of mathematics and were thus not only incapable of recognizing a concrete
exception, but also of thinking about the fundamental, grounding relationship
between space and the political. We discuss his critique of ‘spaceless’ liberalism in
more detail in Chapters 7 and 8.
14 The obviously tautological nature of this relationship between sovereign power and
unity lay at the heart of Schmitt’s conception of the state. However, it would be an
error to see this simply as a logical weakness on his part. In fact, he problematized
this relation throughout his work in a variety of ways. One of the key questions
driving his work was indeed where to locate sovereignty in an age of mass politics,
or rather how to address the inevitable fracture between ‘the will of the people’
and their sovereign representative (see more on this issue in the next chapter). This
is evidently one of the animating questions driving his 1928 treatise on constitu-
tional law, Constitutional Theory, a work that lies at the heart of Schmitt’s recep-
tion in Germany, but that has been long overlooked by English language readers,
something that has continued even though it appeared in translation in 2008.
15 It must to be noted here that, in the former case, homogeneity was developed in
relation to the democratic Constitution and, in the latter, in relation to the geo-
political order of an expanding German Reich based upon a ‘law of nations’ (see
Schmitt, 2011a: 107).
16 But the pluralist theory of state was not simply an intellectual current propagated
in learned writings. Rather, Schmitt noted in 1930, ‘the pluralistic worldview cor-
responds with the actual empirical situation which one can observe today in most
industrial states’ (ibid.: 198).
17 Throughout his work Schmitt used the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to indicate the kind of
spaceless, pluralist thought he associated with liberalism and often interchangeably
with several other terms related to all that he understood to be inimical to order,
such as ‘Jewish’ thought. Indeed, Schmitt was well aware that Laski was of Jewish
origins (see Gross, 2007: 181–183).
18 As he wrote in Hamlet or Hecuba: ‘The hero of the revenge play, the avenger and
perpetrator himself as form and dramatic figure, suffers an internal distortion of
his character and motivation. We can call this the Hamletization of the avenger’
(ibid.). This late work, originally delivered as a series of lectures presented to a
group of industrialists in 1955 in Düsseldorf, may be seen to further Schmitt’s
withering critique of liberal indecision and the fate of a sovereignty in a post-war
world, when the state had been hollowed out of all political meaning, but can also
perhaps be read as an implicit critique of his own earlier decisionistic account of
sovereign power.
19 Schmitt offered a corrective to the former German Foreign Minister Walter
Rathenau’s famous declaration that economics had become the destiny of the
political by noting that ‘it would be more exact to say that politics continues to
remain the destiny, but what has occurred is that economics has become political
and thereby the destiny’ (ibid.: 78). Schmitt’s work was often cut through by a
strong vein of anti-capitalist critique; not one based on any sense of injustice suf-
fered by workers, but rather on the belief that capitalism undermined stable forms
of authority by unwinding the relationship between political order and space as it
supported forms of power that were independent of fixed relations to place. In a
 Liberal Leviathan 127
sense, therefore, Schmitt’s work contains an early critique of capitalism’s globaliz-
ing tendencies and its capacity to uproot forms of social order. It would be unwise
to make too much of Schmitt’s anti-capitalism, however, as he was certainly more
opposed to socialism and was close to many industrialists during the 1940s, pro-
viding, for example, legal council for Friedrich Flick who was charged with war
crimes at Nuremburg (see ‘The International Crime of War of Aggression and the
Principle “Nullum crimen, nula poema sine lege”’ of 1945, Schmitt, 2011d) and
receiving a pension from others when he was refused re-entry to the German
academy after the war. For more on Schmitt’s relationship to capital see in parti-
cular Renato Cristi’s Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism: Strong State, Free
Economy (1998).
20 Indeed, for Schmitt, liberalism was a world of subterfuge, dissemblance and dis-
guise that pursued a profoundly dishonest form of politics. In his view, power
needed to be visible so that the relationship between obedience and authority could
be maintained; but liberalism was a largely invisible politics hiding behind a veneer
of supposedly neutral economism and moralism. In his late work, such forms of
invisible power are not only associated with the United States’ universalist inter-
ventionism, the market’s ‘invisible hand’, but also the Jews who, lacking an
‘authentic’ rootedness to land, were depicted as shape shifters. Indeed, in his read-
ing of Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessolonians, the Antichrist is depicted as
an invisible power that acts through other agents and hides its true nature. As we
will examine in Chapters 7 and 8, the figure of the Antichrist is conflated with a
metonymic chain of Schmitt’s mortal enemies, but its capricious capacity for changing
forms is exactly one of the characters that marks it out as politically dangerous.
21 He made a similar argument with regard to Patrick Pearse and James Connolly,
the leaders of Irish Nationalism and Irish Socialism respectively at the time of the
failed 1916 uprising against British rule. Schmitt noted the appeal of Pearse’s
nationalist sentiment above the class consciousness of the Irish working class
(Schmitt, 1988: 75). Interestingly, Schmitt had read and taken seriously the
arguments in György Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, making positive
reference to him in The Concept of the Political (Schmitt, 2007b: 63). See also
Balakrishnan, 2000: 73.
22 During the 1920s Schmitt did not foresee a power capable of producing a myth
strong enough to overcome its internal antagonisms and unify Europe as a poli-
tical community. However, during the Nazi era he came to consider the idea of a
Europe unified under German domination. Although he explicitly framed this
notion in terms of the real geopolitical distribution of global power and interna-
tional law, the grounding role of myth began to play a powerful role in his work
again, albeit in a new way, when he began to develop his concept of Großraum in
the late 1930s and early 1940s, notably in response to the expansion of Nazi power
into Eastern Europe. By the time he came to write books such as Land and Sea
and The Nomos his work was steeped in myth with a mythical geo-elemental spa-
tial ontology emerging as a dominant strand in his late conceptual trajectory. It is
nonetheless possible to see the development of these themes in The Leviathan
(1938), a book indeed centred around the peculiar claim that the failure of the
liberal state lay in its incapacity to generate a consistent mythical symbolism in the
figure of the Leviathan. We will return to examine the role of myth in Schmitt’s
late thought in Chapters 7 and 8.
23 It is noticeable of course that Schmitt did not mention fascist states here. The text
was written at the height of Nazi power, but after Schmitt’s denunciation by the
SS. It is likely that his reserve was due to fear that any open association of the
Third Reich with capitalist liberalism and Bolshevism would not be well received
by those in the regime ill disposed to him. Although Schmitt himself later sug-
gested that it was a veiled ‘act of resistance’ against the Nazi state, this should be
128 Liberal Leviathan
accepted only with caution, given that Schmitt began that year to develop his new
theory of international law built around continental Reichs in which he envisaged a
German-led Europe and the fact that the book is laced with some of the most
paranoid and vicious anti-Semitism in any of his major works. See also Schwab,
2008; Strong, 2008.
24 In The Leviathan Schmitt depicted the division of state power between plural
interest in relation to the Cabbalist myth of Leviathan, the mighty beast of the sea,
being feasted upon after its death in battle by the Jewish people in their exodus.
Schmitt employed this story to cast the liberal dissolution of the state as the result
of the rootless Jews exploiting the resources of the state to satisfy their own ends
hence establishing an anti-Semitic mythology of twentieth century state crisis (see
in particular Schmitt, 2008b: Chapter 1).
25 Written and published in 1938 at the height of Nazi power, Schmitt’s critique of
the technical state is ambivalent. It is not clear, however, whether it indeed amounted
to a veiled critique of the Nazi state, as George Schwab has suggested (see
Schwab, 2008: xxxix–xliv). Schmitt, in typically enigmatic and self-aggrandizing
fashion, noted in the Introduction to be ‘aware of the danger implicit in the
subject’, but was not explicit about the nature of this ‘danger’ (Schmitt, 2008b: 2).
What is stated in no uncertain terms, however, is that Schmitt associated the
horrific image of a mechanical state grinding down all resistance from a population
ruled by pure command with liberal positivism. It remains in any case questionable
whether he associated it with the Nazi state, especially given his theorization of
the ‘qualitative total state’ discussed later in this chapter.
26 This was an argument that built on Schmitt’s work on the legal history of dicta-
torship in his Dictatorship, published first in 1920. With an English translation
recently published it is likely that this relatively overlooked volume may receive a
greater degree of attention within Schmitt’s Anglophone reception.
27 Schmitt worked alongside the Jewish legal scholar Edwin Jacobi and stood against
a team led by Herman Heller, a former critic of legal positivism but now a bitter
personal rival of Schmitt’s.
28 Indeed, Schmitt employed the warnings made against the threat of Nazi power in
Legality and Legitimacy to excuse his later complicity with that regime in a passive-
aggressive mea culpa of sorts published in the form of a commentary in 1958
(included as the Afterword in the English edition, see Schmitt, 2004a: 95–101).
29 Schmitt published this article in February 1933. It was two months before he
joined the Nazi Party and a note of ambivalence towards the new regime was still
detectable: ‘One may dismiss the “total state” with any kind of shouts or outrage
and indignation as barbaric, servile, un-German or unchristian, but the thing
remains that one does not get rid of it in that way’ (ibid.: 20).
30 That Schmitt included the Soviet Union alongside Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
indicates how far he would go to oppose the liberal democratic quantitative total
state.
31 The theme of quantitative volume and qualitative intensity is taken up again in
Schmitt’s later work on the Großraum order, where he argued that Groß does not
refer to quantitative increase but qualitative intensification. A merely quantitative
understanding of totality or Großraum worked only along the lines of the calcula-
tion and mathematical measurement that placed such ideas in the realm of tech-
nological thinking and the spaceless space of the void (see Schmitt 2011b). We will
return to this in Chapter 6.
32 The ‘political monopoly’ of the political parties saw ‘the political will itself …
parcelled out among some five party lists’ (Schmitt, 1999b: 25).
33 Schmitt had earlier pointed to the importance of these new media of social power
in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy in his discussion of the contending
myths of nationalism and socialism and their relative strengths (see Schmitt, 1988).
5 Nazi Behemoth
The body politic

The Leader’s deputy utters the following sentence: ‘All the power comes from
the people.’
Carl Schmitt, 1933

The profoundest and ultimate meaning of this battle [against Judaism and
Bolshevism] and thus also of our work today, lies expressed in the Führer’s
sentence: ‘In fending off the Jew, I fight for the work of the Lord.’
Carl Schmitt, 19361

Howling with the wolves

‘At least a decision’, Schmitt noted in his diary on hearing the news of Hitler’s
nomination as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 (in Diner, 2000: 24). Although
initially reluctant to accommodate to the Nazi state, this decision for deci-
sion’s sake seemed to convince Schmitt to align himself with the new regime.
He joined the Party on 1 May – the same day as Heidegger – and soon threw
his intellectual support and public reputation behind the cause of Hitler’s rule
and began to enthusiastically ‘howl with the wolves’ (in Balakrishnan, 2000:
168).2 In the following months Schmitt accepted a number of prestigious
appointments within the Nazi legal establishment, including the Presidency of
the Union of National-Socialist Jurists, the foremost association of Nazi
lawyers, and a Professorship of Jurisprudence at the University of Berlin, a
position made available by the forced retirement of his rival Herman Heller
(whose Jewish heritage now made holding such a position impossible).
Johannes Popitz, Schmitt’s friend at the Interior Ministry, also awarded him
the honorary title of State Councillor for Prussia (Preußischer Staatsrat) and
appointed him to a seat on a newly minted advisory body, the Staatsrat. This
was a largely powerless institution – set up by Hermann Göring ‘to affect a
fake marriage of Prussian tradition and Nazi Revolution’ (Müller, 2003: 37) –
for which Hitler showed clear disregard but which Schmitt, even in later life,
considered a great honour. He returned the favour to his new masters by
voicing his support for the Enabling Laws, an amendment to the Weimar
130 Nazi Behemoth
Constitution granting the executive arm of government (meaning Hitler
and the Party) the power to enact laws without the involvement of the
Reichstag. This move effectively dissolved the division of power between
executive and legislative branches of government that lay at the basis of the
German Republic’s constitutional arrangements, making room for the direct
implementation of Nazi policy measures with the force of law, while the
Constitution remained as an empty husk. The Enabling Act de facto ‘enabled’
Hitler with unlimited power and gave him uncontestable leadership over the
German state. Schmitt also openly embraced the virulent anti-Semitic dis-
course of the new regime, something that had been absent from previous
published work, peppering his speeches with racist quotations from Hitler
and even referring to Albert Einstein as a ‘poison-filled German hater’ (in
Balakrishnan, 2000: 183; see also, Gross, 2007; Zarka, 2005).
Although largely symbolic, these new roles wound Schmitt into the appa-
ratus of the Nazi state and placed him in a powerful position in Germany’s
most prestigious academic institution; however, his motivation for joining the
Party and entering these institutional entanglements remains a matter of
considerable critical debate. From the very beginning, in fact, he faced accu-
sations of opportunism from some in the Party who were suspicious of his
commitment, recalling his opposition to the National Socialists before
Hitler took the chancellorship. Indeed, discussion of his alleged opportu-
nism has been a constant presence in attempts to understand Schmitt’s
complicity with the regime, whether from critics or defenders. Carlo Galli
(2010a: 834), suggests that understanding Schmitt’s deeper motivations for
supporting the Nazis is crucially important in order to appreciate his oeuvre
in relation to the historical and political context of the day, an argument that
Schmitt himself made in the post-war years. Certainly any interpretation of
Schmitt’s Nazism must inevitably involve developing an understanding of his
entire intellectual trajectory. Thus reading the production of this period either
as an expression of continuity or of discontinuity with his previous and post-
war writings is key not only to assessing Schmitt as a scholar, but also
Schmitt as an individual.
Galli (2010a: 844) identifies three major lines of interpretation of ‘the Nazi
choice’ in the literature on Schmitt. The first claims the existance of a clear
continuity in his thought between the Weimar period and the Nazi period,
linking his work on the state of exception and the sovereign decision to the
concept of Führung, which Schmitt argued ‘should be understood as political
leadership in the essentially German sense of the word. This concept of lea-
dership comes wholly from the concrete, substantive thinking of the National-
Socialist Movement’ (Schmitt, 2001: 47). This position might indeed lead
some scholars to reject Schmitt’s work altogether, viewing it as at least
potentially Nazi to the core. The second line of interpretation is largely asso-
ciated with the ‘occasionalist’ thesis advanced by Karl Löwith; that is, the
belief that the fundamental lack of universal foundations in Schmitt’s
thought ‘opened’ his work to temptations of all kinds, including those
 Nazi Behemoth 131
produced by the historical momentum associated with Hitler’s rise to power.
Löwith, a German-Jewish philosopher of history, famously argued in 1935
that Schmitt’s work was characterized by ‘nihilistic opportunism’ (Löwith,
1998). George Schwab has likewise claimed Schmitt’s complicity with Nazism
to be the result of a ‘moral failure’ that led him to see the quick ascent of
Nazi power as an opportunity to advance his career and gain political influ-
ence. The third line comprises a series of other interpretations, including
the influence of very concrete living circumstances, cowardice, a search for
personal safety, and bourgeois complacency.
Even if opportunism did play a role – and it certainly cannot be discounted
given the extent to which Schmitt benefitted from the academic purge the
Nazi’s perpetrated against some of his professional rivals – it nonetheless
seems clear that Schmitt actually saw in the new National Socialist state a
decisive solution to the protracted crisis that had beset the Weimar Republic.
Indeed, during his interrogation at Nuremburg, he argued that he had
mistakenly believed he could exercise a moderating influence on the
regime, giving meaning to ‘catchwords’ and steering the ‘Behemoth’ toward
the type of ‘qualitative total state’ he had envisaged as a remedy to the fail-
ures of the liberal law-state (Schmitt, 1987b). Schmitt was of course using this
argument to defend himself against the charge that his Großraum work
had contributed to Nazi policy (something we discuss extensively in the
next chapter), but we consider this explanation to be somewhat plausible
given his previous work, his intellectual vanity and even in light of the pro-
fessed naiveté of other leading intellectuals who joined the Party, notably of
course, Heidegger. Nonetheless, although the work produced during the early
years of the Nazi state clearly marked a departure from his Weimar output, it
was in many respects characterized by strong continuities, as Gary Ulmen has
persuasively argued (Ulmen, 2001). Indeed, it seems likely that Schmitt may
well have considered the Nazi state to resemble the type of authoritarian
state – based upon a strong central authority and a homogenous political
community – that he had advocated during the years before Hitler’s rise to
the chancellorship, possibly as a sort of antidote to the Nazis, even as it
destroyed aspects of constitutional law that he had earlier identified as
central to the functioning of the political machinery. However, his silence
on the war of annihilation perpetrated by the Nazis on the eastern front, and
even on the Holocaust, speaks volumes about how he, even in the aftermath
of Hitler’s defeat, showed no sign of regret for having aligned himself with
those responsible.
In order to assess what relation his Nazi work has to his wider body of
thought it is thus crucial to investigate in detail the content of his writings
during this period. Hence, in what follows, we engage with some of his key
texts from the Nazi years and discuss the shifts and continuities between these
works and other elements of his oeuvre.
132 Nazi Behemoth
The Nazi writings

State, Movement, People

Whatever mix of opportunism and political belief drew Schmitt to embrace
Nazi rule he soon began to employ his considerable intellectual talents to
theorize the nascent state form that was emerging under the new regime. At a
conference of legal scholars in Weimar of March of 1933, Schmitt had
already declared the Enabling Act to have killed off the Weimar Constitution
and laid the basis for a new German state form: ‘Either substantially, by its
contents, or formally, by its legal constitutional force, the Weimar Constitu-
tion cannot be the foundation of a National-Socialist State. The Weimar
Constitution is no longer in force’ (Schmitt, 2001: 3).
In October 1933, the man now dubbed the ‘Crown Jurist of the Third
Reich’ by some of his detractors,3 produced State, Movement, People, a short
text where he attempted to provide a juridical theory to describe the new
Third Reich. Here Schmitt provocatively claimed that the day Hitler was
elected Chancellor was ‘the day Hegel died’, the latter acting as a stand-in for
the traditions of nineteenth century state theory and liberal constitutionalism
(ibid.: 35). In its place Schmitt heralded the emergence of a radically new
state form that appeared with National Socialist rule, based upon the quasi-
organic unity of three elements: the administrative apparatus of the State; the
collective will of a unified People (Volk); and the Movement (the Nazi Party/
Führer) that acted in their name.

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, as carrier of the idea of

the State, is equally and indissolubly linked to the State. But neither the
Party organization as a whole, nor a certain authority as such, have the
character of an unmediated ‘State organ’ today, 1 December 1933. It goes
without saying that the National-Socialist Party is in no way a ‘Party’ in
the sense of the now superseded pluralistic-Party system. It is the leading
body that carries the State and the People.
(ibid.: 21)

This formulation involves two important conceptual shifts from Schmitt’s

analysis of the state during the Weimar years. First, Schmitt argued that the
distinction between state and society upon which liberal state theory, and
indeed his analysis of the ‘qualitative total state’ was founded, had been
replaced by a triadic structure that brought people, state and movement
together. Second, the concept of the ‘people’ took on a new meaning and
significance, on which we reflect extensively in the second part of this chapter.
Although the people had been a central concept in works such as The Crisis
of Parliamentary Democracy and Constitutional Theory, where Schmitt had
suggested that tarrying with the democratic will of the people and guaran-
teeing a homogenous political community were the central challenges of the
 Nazi Behemoth 133
twentieth century state, the people were treated as a purely political category
concerning the ‘public’ domain of the state. By contrast, the definition of the
people in State, Movement, People echoes the racial categories in which Nazi
political thought was framed, marking a shift from a ‘public’ to a biological
rendering of the people.
These two conceptual shifts revolved around the question of the relation-
ship between the (now racialized) ‘people’ and the Nazi ‘movement’, the
crucial new term that came to connect the German people (Volk) and the
state apparatus. In 1928, in Constitutional Theory, Schmitt had argued that
the people’s democratic will was represented in the state that stood above it –
the relationship between society and state being structured around a gap
between them – whereas now there was no gap left between the Volk and the
movement, both finding expression in, and actually corresponding to, the
figure of the Führer, the leader literally and figuratively embodying their will
and historical destiny. The ‘movement’ was thus to be understood as imma-
nent to the Volk, rather that standing above it across a gap, even as it guided
that same Volk. The very same gesture that racialized the people as Volk
posited the Nazi Party and the Führer to lead on their behalf. We will return
to the examine these important shifts with regard to the emerging biopolitical
dimensions of Schmitt’s work and its entanglements with his spatialization of
the political later in the chapter.
In Galli’s account (2010a: 849), the emergence of Hitler as Chancellor,
forced Schmitt into a devastating ideological surplus, into intellectual contortions,
that often betrayed his previous commitments. Paradoxically, Schmitt would
have to witness the fact that the Nazi movement did not represent the factual
interpretation of his ideas of the political beyond the state form, but rather,
with its technocratic dissolution of the state, in many ways it accentuated pre-
cisely the problems that were obsessing him during the Weimar period: that is,
among others, the triumph of arbitrary use of positivistic legal approaches,
together with a sudden acceleration of history as expressed by the Nazi millennial
propaganda: ‘A Leviathan turned upside down into a Behemoth … the
tragedy of the modern derailed into barbarism’ (ibid.).

On the Three Types of Juristic Thought

The sharp turn away from the tradition of German constitutionalism and
state theory Schmitt had made in State, Movement, People continued in his
1934 book On the Three Types of Juristic Thought. This is in many ways a
more ‘conventional’ essay of academic jurisprudence that picks up some of
the core themes of his Weimar work, forsaking pro-Nazi polemic for more
sober analysis. The text should nevertheless be read, together with State,
Movement, People, as part of Schmitt’s broader attempt to theorize the
mutation of the state form under National Socialism. Indeed, this short text,
frequently overlooked in Anglophone scholarship, marks a little-recognized
conceptual pivot in the development in Schmitt’s spatial thinking, laying as it
134 Nazi Behemoth
does the foundations for his later attempts to conceive of new political forms
beyond the spatial bounds of the modern state.
The book considered three basic forms of juristic thought, each of which
implied a different understanding of the operation of the state. Here Schmitt
restated the opposition between normativism and decisionism that framed his
anti-liberal polemics of the 1920s, but added a third form of legal thinking
that he called ‘concrete order thinking’ (2004b: 47). The distinction between
decisionism and the normativism of legal positivism had lain at the core of
Schmitt’s Weimar work and indeed he had grounded his understanding of
legal power and state sovereignty in the act of decision. However, here
Schmitt claimed that decisionism was no longer adequate to face the chal-
lenges of grounding order. Indeed, Joseph Bendersky, one of Schmitt’s more
sympathetic critics, has argued that Schmitt had begun to ‘recognize the limits
of decisionist legal theory’ over the course of the previous years but that it
was ‘the reality of Germany under control of the Nazis … that finally
prompted [him] to turn to institutional thinking to rectify the deficiencies his
critics had long pointed out regarding decisionism’ (Bendersky, 2004: 14):

It was one thing to advocate sovereign decisionism within the Weimar

constitutional framework or even entrust Paul von Hindenburg [who was
still technically the President], a political figure of proven responsibility
deeply devoted to German traditions and Western civilization generally,
with broad exceptional powers in an Ausnahmezustand. It was quite another
when such decisions would be made by the leader of a dynamic revolu-
tionary movement unrestrained by the values, traditions and institutions
that conservatives such as Schmitt cherished.
(ibid.)

Whether Bendersky is correct in depicting Schmitt’s turn away from deci-

sionism, the position he had advocated with such vehemence during the
Weimar years, was born of a desire to provide a conservative counter-balance
to the decisionistic excesses of Nazi rule, is not wholly clear. Nevertheless,
Schmitt now advocated rejecting both normativism and decisionism in favour
of ‘concrete order thinking’, which was alone capable of guaranteeing order
in the changed conditions of the twentieth century. Influenced by French legal
scholar Maurice Hauriou’s theories of institutionalism, ‘concrete order
thinking’ was a perspective that emphasized the deep historical, cultural and
social roots of the institutional framework in which legal decisions took
shape.4 Hence, the importance of the decision was not erased from the poli-
tical sphere, but took its place within a ‘concrete situation’ defined by the
historical development of cultural institutions, rather than simply being
subject to the whim of sovereign power. Likewise these norms were not to be
ignored but rather understood as concretely embedded in deep institutional
bedrock, in contrast to the norms of legal positivism that were ‘free-floating
abstractions’.
 Nazi Behemoth 135
Crucial here is the shift in meaning of the word ‘concrete’ in Schmitt’s
work. Whereas the ‘concrete’ was linked to the situational nature of politics in
The Concept of the Political, indicating the contingency of the political, it
took on an expanded significance in On the Three Types of Juristic
Thought, thereafter indicating the institutional grounds and cultural tradi-
tions of order. Hence, the new use of the concrete saw a deepening of the
implicitly spatial foundations of political order. Whilst normativistic form of
juristic thought understood law to operate on a purely legalistic basis, as did all
forms of pure decisionism paradoxically, ‘concrete order thinking’ framed law
in relation to deeper forms of legitimacy, rooted in culture, geography and
history.
Schmitt did not frame ‘concrete order’ here in relation to the racialized
discourse of the day, and the text is largely free of the Nazi jargon that ran
through State, Movement, People and some of his other writings of this
period. Nonetheless, the emphasis on the embedded institutional nature of
cultural forms and their fundamental role in legal order should be understood
to take shape within the broader orientation of Schmitt’s thought towards a
project of theorizing the Nazi state. Despite the need to contextualize the
concept of ‘concrete order’ in this critical stage of his academic biography, it
is also important that its wider significance within the development of
Schmitt’s thought not escape attention. ‘Concrete order’ would become a key
term in Schmitt’s later spatial thought, from the late 1930s and into the post-
war period. Indeed, the prominent role the concept of ‘concrete order’ is
given in this 1934 text, written at the height of Schmitt’s attempt to align his
work with the Nazi state, may be considered a turning point in the develop-
ment of his spatial thought in two ways. First, his appeal to an historically
and culturally embedded institutional basis for juridical order, beyond a con-
stitutional framework, set Schmitt on the path to locating sources of political
legitimacy beyond the state form. In a sense, then, the reference to extra-
constitutional sources of legitimacy laid the conceptual foundations for his
later appeals to the idea of juridical order grounding in ‘land appropiation’.5
Second, although ‘concrete order’ was not yet identified only with the spatial
dimensions of institutional forms – since cultural and historical frames
remain dominant in On the Three Types of Juristic Thought – it nonetheless
indicated the beginning of a shift from an implicit to an explicit under-
standing of the spatial foundations of law. Hence, the roots of Schmitt’s later
theorization of the spatial basis of juridical order in works such as Land and
Sea and The Nomos of the Earth should be located precisely in the concept of
‘concrete order’ introduced in this short but very significant intervention
made during the first flush of his relationship with the Nazi state.

The Führer Protects the Law

During these first years of Nazi rule Schmitt used his public prestige and
intellectual clout to help provide a scaffold of legitimacy for the rule of law
136 Nazi Behemoth
becoming a tool of political expediency. He attempted to legitimate the law
becoming, in other words, whatever the Party saw fit: ‘Today’, Schmitt
remarkably stated, ‘there are only indeterminate legal concepts’ (in Balak-
rishnan, 2000: 191) In his infamous intervention known as ‘The Führer Pro-
tects the Law’, published in Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung in August 1934, he also
claimed that the Führer had a legal task that could be accomplished by no
other, adding that this reflected of the fact that there was only one carrier of
the political will in Germany, the National Socialist Party, as Hitler had
stated before the Parliament (in Schmitt, 2013).
Yet, Schmitt shamelessly went even further than most of his colleagues in
the Nazi legal establishment by writing a defence of the ‘Night of the Long
Knives’ (30 June 1934), Hitler’s murderous extra-judicial purge of his oppo-
nents in Rohmer’s SA, when at least eighty-five people, including former
Chancellor and Schmitt’s advisee General Kurt von Schleicher, were brutally
murdered. Schmitt here was adamant in expressing his deep commitment to
the regime, even suggesting that despite the fierce opposition to Hitler
emerging from Germany’ enemies, these very enemies would soon have to
realize that the new German state had the strength and the resolve to clearly
‘distinguish friends from enemies’ (ibid.).
‘The Führer Protects the Law’ doubtless marks one of darkest moments in
Schmitt’s attempt to legitimate the development of Nazi lawlessness. Indeed,
his defence of Hitler’s extra-legal decisionism ran counter to the conceptual
framework based on ‘concrete order’ he had introduced only months before,
but it represented one of several disparate attempts to theorize the emerging
chaos of the Nazi state. It is no surprise then that, in order to describe the
fundamental source of the new juridical order, he ended up referring directly
to Hitler’s words, in particular to the famous statement in which the Führer
claimed to be ‘responsible for the destiny of the German nation, and therefore
the supreme judge of the German people’ (ibid.). Schmitt was thus playing
catch up with a regime that lacked any coherent relation to the law other
than as a useful expendable mechanism for the ruthless pursuit of political
power, legitimizing the idea that the content and the extension of the emer-
ging juridical order were to be determined by the persona of the Führer
himself.
Schmitt’s efforts to provide a legitimating theoretical gloss for the regime’s
actions, as he scrambled to keep pace with the brutal extension of its
reach, would soon be carried from the domestic realm and into the realm
of imperial expansion, something on which we will reflect in the next chap-
ters. Nevertheless, it is important to dwell here on the transformations in
Schmitt’s conception of the people and the changing relation he charted
between population, space and sovereignty, because it is here that he
explicitly linked the legitimacy of the Nazi state to the, literal, ‘life of the
people’ (ibid.: 24).
 Nazi Behemoth 137
Towards the biopolitical state
During this controversial phase Schmitt argued that from the moment a
community was articulated in the triad state–movement–people, it belonged
to a ‘vital’ communitarian order based upon its fundamental loyalty to the
Führer; indeed, the destiny of the German people was dependent on this vital
link (ibid.: 28). However, we would like to argue that, although it was only in
the Nazi writings that the question of ‘the people’ was presented with such
‘vitalistic’ overtones, such conceptualizations of ‘the people’ had been key to
Schmitt’s earlier theory of sovereign exception and his reading of modern
political form. We thus turn to the shifting role that ‘the people’, as a political
notion, played in Schmitt’s work as we believe an implicitly biopolitical
dimension of his thought emerged with clarity in his ‘Nazi years’; one which
deserves to be interrogated in relation to his whole intellectual trajectory.
When discussing questions of democracy and sovereignty, Schmitt’s political
anthropology reflected an implicitly biopolitical understanding of the concept
of people. Although this aspect has been largely overlooked by much of key
English speaking secondary literature, we believe that Schmitt’s concept of the
political, and in particular his ideas around the unity of a political commu-
nity, contained a crucial biopolitical element. We also argue that this element
importantly affected his theorization of space and the ways in which the
concept of Großraum, of ‘greater space’, was formulated and put in relation
(albeit rather indirectly, but nonetheless importantly) to that of Lebensraum,
of ‘living/vital space’, a concept influential among prominent Nazi ideologues
that played a fundamental role in justifying their expansionist campaigns –
something that we analyse in detail in the next chapter. To discuss the ques-
tion of the ‘people’ in Schmitt’s work, and how this has been formulated in
relation to the Nazis and the Führer in particular, we must return to State,
Movement, People, perhaps his most explicitly biopolitical text. In doing so,
we also critically engage the work of some key contemporary Italian political
thinkers, in particular Carlo Galli, Giorgio Agamben and Andrea Cavalletti,
all of whom are particularly attentive to these aspects of Schmitt’s work,
although in rather different ways.
Schmitt’s definition of the people as sovereign subject depended upon the
idea of a unified community. Indeed, the idea of a unified community played an
important role in his earlier work on the concept of ‘the political’, the relation-
ship between ‘friend and enemy’ being dependent upon and necessitating uni-
fied political communities (see, for example, Minca and Vaughan-Williams,
2012). As noted in previous chapters, Schmitt understood modern political
order, and its fundamental unit, the secularized state, to lack any deep,
metaphysical foundation. However, if in the formation of the modern state the
people were supposed to be the subject of sovereignty, then an entirely new
conceptualization of the ‘people’ was required – a ‘people’ who, at certain
moments and in specific circumstances, could act as a unified political
community.
138 Nazi Behemoth
In State, Movement, People, in particular, the people, while still described as the
sovereign subject, are conceptualized as the ‘apolitical element’ of the triadic
matrix that Schmitt theorized to try to understand and legitimate Hitler’s regime.
For Schmitt, the new German community in the making under Nazi rule should
consist of three key elements: the state, as administrative apparatus; the ‘move-
ment’, as the political leadership acting in the name of the people; and, finally, the
people, literally consisting of a multitude ‘living in the shadow and under the pro-
tection of decisions reached in the higher regions of the political order’: ‘the
organizational basic lines are set by the State, Movement, People triad, con-
sistently in agreement with the logic that State, Movement, People are distinct
but not divided, linked but not fused’ (Schmitt, 2001: 22). However:

The new State structure is marked by the fact that the political enmity of
the people, and thereby, all the regulation of its public life appear to
be ordered into three distinct series. The three series do not run parallel
one to the other, but one of them, the Movement, which carries the State
and the People, penetrates and leads the other two.
(ibid.: 11)

Political unity is thus to be based on the configuration and coordination of

these three elements: the state, the movement and the people. The relationship
among them must not be understood simply as a division of power, since
although they ‘run’ indeed ‘parallel one to the other’, one of them, the
movement (read the Party), the one that sustains the state and the people,
provides the constitutive element of the whole.

Each one of the three words: State, Movement, People, may be used
alone to denote the whole of the political unity … The phrase ‘Party that
carries State and People’ already conveys that the political leadership
must rest on this series sequel, whence the other two orders come second to
it, whose position is in the middle of our outline, and are penetrated,
molded and led by it in an authoritative way. As organization of the
‘Movement’, the politically leading Party carries both the State ‘apparatus’
and the social and economic order as also the whole of the political unity.
(ibid.: 10, 14)

According to Agamben (2005a) it would be hard to find a more pertinent

definition of what Foucault will later describe as biopolitics (an expression of
the transition from the ‘sovereign state’ to the ‘population state’). The move-
ment thus has the prerogative of the political decisions and finds specific form
in the Party; its primacy is complementary to the becoming apolitical of the
people, that is, of the definitive decline of the democratic Constitution.

Both the ‘objectivity’ of the civil service, and particularly the ‘indepen-
dence’ of the judges, as well as the apolitical character of the traditional
 Nazi Behemoth 139
sphere of popular auto-administration are possible, with all the advan-
tages and the security of the apolitical, only if both submit to the political
leadership and the political decisions of the Movement, carrying State and
People. Consequently and in a specific sense, that is the political element
of the community, the dynamic engine opposite to the static element of
the administrative machine directed by regulations and the political
decisions that lie in it, and also the political guarantor of the depoliticized
communal or professional auto-administration.
(Schmitt, 2001: 18)

The apolitical people were indeed defined by Schmitt as a true biopolitical

body, a body on which the very demarcation of what is and what is not poli-
tical is made operational. We would like to suggest that the ‘biopoliticized’
German people, so explicitly delineated by Schmitt during this initial phase of
his embrace of Nazism, are a key pillar around which his overall understanding
of unity, community and sovereign power are constructed. More specifically,
in order to appreciate the centrality of his concept of ‘people’s sovereignty’
it is necessary to take into full consideration how he elaborated his specific
approach to democracy in relation to the question of exception and revolution
during the Nazi years.
Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 2004) widely cited considerations on the state of
exception take as their starting point what he defines as Schmitt’s paradox of
sovereignty and its implicit topology. Likewise, according to Galli, one of the
major contributions of Schmitt’s work to contemporary political thought is
not only his lucid description of the secularized state, but his conceptualiza-
tion of the sovereign exception as the only possible source of legitimacy for
the modern state. As noted in previous chapters, for Schmitt, it is the sover-
eign ‘who decides on the exception’ locating himself at the same time both
outside and inside the juridical order. The exception, in fact, not only con-
stantly questions the relationship between the inside and the outside of the
state (and the related juridical order), but becomes a principle of transgression
that Schmitt presented as a ‘cut’ into the disorder of society produced pre-
cisely by lack of foundations, a cut essential to re-establishing a reactionary,
temporary but concrete order. This ‘cut’, as Agamben would put it, is also
fundamental in the production of the body of the nation, since it allows for
the realization of the endless caesura operated by modern sovereign power
between nascita (birth) – and life – of an individual and nazione (nation) (see
Minca, 2007: 88); a ‘cut’ into the body politic that translates the people into
population, and each individual into a part of a greater, biological-territorial
body: exhaustive, totalizing, yet always in the making, in need of constant
redefinition and reproduction.
What is most important for the sake of our argument is that in Agamben’s
State of Exception the Schmittian exception is treated as the original dis-
positive ‘through which law relates to life and includes it via its own suspen-
sion’ (2004: 52). The structure of the sovereign exception, as formulated by
140 Nazi Behemoth
Schmitt, is therefore where the people, as a ‘de-politicized political body’, are
conceptualized in biopolitical terms and therefore located in the zone of
indistinction in which the political meets the juridical, and dictatorship meets
democracy (see also Minca, 2007 on this). For Agamben, indeed, the funda-
mental point in Schmitt’s argument is that the state of exception represents a
juridical void, which implies a putative return to an original state of nature of
sorts, a state in which the separation between the different forms of institutional
power has not been produced as yet (2004: 111). The emergence of the people as
sovereign subject reveals an essential void at the heart of modern politics and
of its forms, as discussed in previous chapters. The modern, for Schmitt, was
indeed the empty time of waiting, since the absence of God as an objective
theological foundation had created a modern rational political space based on
an original lacuna, a deficit of transcendental presence (Galli, 2010a: 353–357).
This was the result, in Schmitt’s philosophy of history, of an epochal cata-
strophe that marked the birth of modernity as a transition to a new secularized
form of political theology, to a new and different global set of spatio-temporal
arrangements – something that will be discussed further in Chapters 7 and 8.
However, in Schmitt’s view, expressed already in Constitutional Theory (1928)
and other early writings, the time in which politics must be determined by
revolutionary parties had come in Germany, and democracy had to find
expressions in the emergence, at the centre of its political life, of the ‘con-
flicting will of the people’, in order to impose a new order, a superior order
capable of realizing the unity of the German nation (Galli, 2010a: 537).

People and the Führer

What is nonetheless surprising, in our view, is the relatively little attention
given to State, Movement, People in the secondary literature on Schmitt and
to its complex and disturbing dialogue with previous work. In formulating his
concept of the people in this particular text, produced in a moment in which
he was still hoping to become even more relevant for the new order, Schmitt
was also responding to his longstanding concern with producing a unified
‘political’ community. This condition of unity, however, must not be under-
stood as a sort of return to some imagined origin, a view very popular among
German conservatives and nationalists of the time. Secularization and the
disappearance of ‘the transcendental’ in politics had, for Schmitt, eliminated
any possibility of relying on a foundational source of legitimacy capable of
recreating a supposedly lost political community. Unity and the related pro-
cesses of ‘concrete ordering’ were instead to be understood as political stra-
tegies to be implemented so as to delineate, with the necessary clarity and
certainty, the relationship between friend and enemy and the foundational
grounds of the political.6
The exclusion of those elements who do not belong to ‘the people’, the
decision about those who are not deemed to be part of that unity, as envi-
saged by Schmitt in State, Movement, People and other writings of this
 Nazi Behemoth 141
period, reveals the operation of this fundamental cut, the caesura that
penetrates the community and produces, in the very act of identifying those
who are the people, the friend, and those who are the alien/enemy. It is the
operation of this cut, that constituted, and endlessly and selectively reproduced,
the body politic of the German people:

An alien wants to behave critically and also to apply himself shrewdly,

wants to read books and to write books, he thinks and understands dif-
ferently because he is differently disposed, and remains, in every crucial
train of thought, in the existential condition of his own kind.
(Schmitt, 2001: 51)

In his Genealogia della Politica, Galli reflects at length on the key role that
this implicit biopolitics plays in characterizing Schmitt’s thought, although
without ever being named as such. For Galli, the exceptional aspect of
democracy, in Schmitt’s understanding, is that it consists in the ‘presence’ of
the people, in the ‘identity’ of all citizens and their leaders, of law and popu-
lar will, in its fullest immanence. Democratic faith in the omnipotence of the
people is, in this perspective, the secularized equivalent of the theological
argument according to which all authority derives from God (Galli, 2010a:
539). This immediate immanence culminates in the acclamation of the people,
where acclamation is conceived as the true expression of the public will, of
the democratic voluntas that triumphs over liberal rationality (ibid.). In this
sense, according to Galli’s reading, modernity witnessed also a form of
rationalism capable of confronting the absolute contingency of the people, the
non-rational critical point of its very origin, that is, the abyss of revolution.
The task of democracy in this interpretation, we suggest, is thus to include all
the ‘right’ people, and to create internal homogeneity and enforce the related
elimination of heterogeneous elements, of the alien, the non-equal, those who
‘objectively’ threaten homogeneity. As Schmitt argued:

The ethnic identity of the German people, united in itself, is thus the most
unavoidable [unumgänglichste] premise and foundation of the political
leadership of the German People. That was no mere abstract postulate at
the Congress of the National-Socialist German Jurists at Leipzig in 1933.
The idea of race was time and again highlighted in the Leader’s forceful
closing speech, in the riveting addresses of the Leader of the German
Legal Front, Dr. Hans Frank, and in the distinguished specialized
reports, as for instance, that of H. Nicolai.
(Schmitt, 2001: 48)

This explains why in State, Movement, People Schmitt ended up theorizing

the substantial identity between the Führer and his followers; a Führer defined
by his fundamental ‘sameness’ with the people.
142 Nazi Behemoth
Our concept is neither necessarily nor appropriately an intermediary
image or a representative simile. … It is a concept of the immediately
present and of a real presence. For that reason and as a positive require-
ment, it also implies an absolute ethnic identity between leader and fol-
lowing. Both the continuous and infallible contact between leader and
following, and their mutual loyalty, are based upon ethnic identity. Only
ethnic identity can prevent the power of the leader from becoming tyr-
annical and arbitrary. It alone justifies the difference from any rule of an
alien-transmitted will, however intelligent and advantageous it might be.
When looked at with the criteria of jurisprudence, the elections were in
fact a popular referendum, a plebiscite by which the German people has
acknowledged Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National-Socialist Move-
ment, as the political leader of the German people. The local elections of
12 March confirmed once more the same will of the people. The Reich-
stag and the Reichsrat would act from then on exclusively as the executive
bodies of the people’s will.
(ibid.: 5; italics added)

The authority of the leader was thus never derivative, but always and
necessarily original. It emanated from his very persona; it was based on free
consensus and acclamation, and on the recognition of his superior value,
his charismatic and authoritarian power being almost magically incorporated
by the very person of the Führer. According to Agamben (2005a: 107), the
pretence of having realized the punctual and total coincidence of the jur-
idical order with life could not be affirmed with more clarity and strength by
Schmitt in these Nazi-era writings. And this is why it is perhaps correct to
associate the ‘Nazi choice’ with Schmitt’s understanding of the abyssal
nature of the people’s constitutive power, and his belief in the need of a
sovereign dictatorship able to give form to this power (see also Galli, 2010a:
541, 547).

People, movement, state

Schmitt’s direct implication in the Nazi regime reveals, in our opinion, what
happened when his conceptualization of the people was taken to its most
extreme consequences, with ‘the biopolitical’ rendered explicit in his writing of
this period. If the people in the democratic tradition were the sovereign sub-
ject and the carrier of political legitimacy, here they become, as noted above,
an apolitical element: no longer a body politic, but a truly biological body,
that is, a ‘population’ living under the custody of the leader and the Party.
Agamben (2005a: 19–20) goes as far as suggesting that, in this book, Schmitt
delineates the constitutional principles of the post-democratic societies of the
twentieth century, the legacy of which remains very much with us today. If
Agamben’s interpretation is correct, this text in many ways may contain the
esoteric centre, the Arcanum of Schmitt’s theory of the political. The normally
 Nazi Behemoth 143
implicit biopolitical dimension emerges with all its strength and clarity in this
text. Indeed, Agamben claims that there must have been good reasons for
Schmitt not to have republished this text after the war, unlike many other of
his books, perhaps because ‘the truth that it announces is far too unpleasant
to be listened to, from both the Right and from the Left’ (ibid.: 20; authors’
translation).
The movement embodied by the persona of the leader thus has the pre-
rogative of the political decisions and finds specific form in the Party; its pri-
macy is complementary to the becoming apolitical of the people, that is, to
the definitive decline of the democratic Constitution. It is here, we believe,
that extra-legal violence and the biopolitical machinery are revealed as the
ultimate ground of the ‘normal’ juridical-political order of the Third Reich,
something that puts Schmitt’s attempt to set the constitutional principles of
the new regime7 disturbingly, although indirectly, in tune with their thana-
political practices (Agamben, 2002; also Mbembe, 2003). This is not to say
that Schmitt was in any way directly responsible for the violence perpetrated
by the Nazis, but rather to suggest that the (bio)political, so clearly delineated
in this text, is the ground where these very practices and Schmitt’s work
intersected. Interrogating the biopolitical in Schmitt may indeed provide an
alternative reading of his adherence to Hitlerism; allowing a line of continuity
between his previous conceptualizations of the political and his Nazi writings
precisely insofar as ‘the people’ are treated as the sovereign body of the
modern state, a fundamentally depoliticized one.

‘The Party that carries State and People’ already conveys that the poli-
tical leadership must rest on this series sequel, whence the other two
orders come second to it, whose position is in the middle of our outline,
and are penetrated, moulded and led by it in an authoritative way. As
organization of the ‘Movement’, the politically leading Party carries both
the State ‘apparatus’ and the social and economic order as also the whole
of the political unity.
(Schmitt, 2001: 14)

For Galli (2010a: 850), in his obsessive appeal to the actual people of
Germany as ‘substance’, Schmitt ended up describing every single act of the
Führer as the only unifying element of the endless series of institutional
bodies composing the Nazi regime – including the police, the tribunals, the
SS – that made the post-state pluralism of concrete Nazi structure of power
what it was. The movement here was thus not only a movement ‘of the
people’, but of the substance that carried, penetrated and led them; the sub-
stance that constantly decided, protected and governed their very apolitical
character. The movement was what made this necessary and constitutive
connection between the leader and its people real and possible, since they
belonged to the same ‘substance’.
144 Nazi Behemoth
Thus, the ‘political’, under the Nazi umbrella, was conceived by Schmitt as pure
intensity, a total ‘way of life’, a national and racial project (Kennedy, 2004: 22).
Schmitt’s Nazified political theory most immediately stemmed, according to
Balakrishnan (2000: 179), from ‘the wave of enthusiasm that swept over large parts
of the [German] population’ following Hitler’s rise to power. It ‘was beginning to
look [to Schmitt] like that formless, mass acclamation of a sovereign nation …
could turn any usurpation into an authentic revolution’ (ibid.). It was precisely the
lack of distinction between the State and ‘the People’, a ‘People’ conceived as a
multitude living in the shadow and under the protection of the Führer’s political
order (ibid.: 185), that made this new regime revolutionary – and fully German:

One needs always to remember that the concept of ‘State’, as well as that
of ‘People’, has been transformed by this triad, and that the traditional way
of representation, derived from the historical conditions of the nineteenth
century, can no longer grasp the new reality.
(Schmitt, 2001: 15)

Without the principle of ethnic identity, the German National-Socialist

State cannot exist, and its legal life would be unimaginable.
(ibid.: 48)

In Germany, in that historical moment, there was only one carrier of the
political will of the people and of their unity in Schmitt’s eyes: the Führer.
Hitler was thus the supreme judge, who, with his decisions, defended the
substantial justice of the German people; and who, with his decisions, sanc-
tioned both friend and enemy. However, Galli (2010a: 858) notes that the Nazis
were opposed to conceptualizations of decisionism attached to the regime,
and to the leader in particular, since their understanding of the political and
of a future Nazified German society was founded on the idea of the ‘nor-
mality’ of the Volk, the German Volk with its inherent ‘natural’ racial qualities.
Therefore, in many ways, in State, Movement, People, Schmitt refuted some
of his previous claims in order to reassure the regime and provide a con-
stitutional framework for the Nazi state that would allow him to take centre
stage in the political arena of the new regime (ibid.: 858).

As statal civil service and officialdom, the State loses the monopoly of the
Political which it acquired in the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth.
Instead, it has come to be recognized as just a part of the political unity,
and precisely a part that depends on the organization which carries the State.
Therefore, the essence of the State officialdom and public administration no
longer identifies itself alone with the political whole, nor with a self-sufficient
‘authority’. Nowadays the political cannot any longer be determined by
the State, rather the State must be determined by the political.
(Schmitt, 2001: 15)
 Nazi Behemoth 145
Whilst in his previous writings Schmitt had presented an account of politics
defined by the relationship between the state and the people, he now adop-
ted a triadic account where the leadership of the Party and its Führer intro-
duced a third element into the production of a specifically National Socialist
political form.

In the triadic organization of the political unity, the notions of ‘State’ and
‘People’ assume another position, a meaning altogether different from
that within the binary system of the liberal democracy … Here the binary
way of thinking works with antithetical divisions such as the State against
the people, and people against the State, government against people, and
people against government. In the National-Socialist State, leading poli-
tical body, carrying State and People, have the task to prevent and over-
come all the antitheses of this kind. For that reason, the People is no
longer simply a sum total of non-governing voters.
(Schmitt, 2001: 17)

Schmitt here accentuated the passive condition of the people, in order to

emphasize their totality and organic nature as the fundamental source of
political legitimacy (see Galli 2010a: 859). The endless activity of interpreting
the substantial will of the people on the part of the Führer was thus naturally
orientated towards the protection and the reproduction of a biopolitical
‘substance’ that was directly incorporated by his very persona. For Schmitt,
during his early Nazi years, political unity was therefore constituted/realized
by the active totality of the state, centred around the figure of the Führer, as
the natural interpreter of the ‘Movement’.
The Movement is thus what allows for the ceaseless rendition of the apolitical
(the people) into the political (the Party/leader), but also, the transformation
of the latter into the ‘care’ and the custody of the ‘apolitical’ people (see
Cavalletti, 2005: 214). In Galli’s analysis (2010a: 853), Schmitt deviated from
his previous trajectory and seemed to strategically forget some conceptual pil-
lars of his theory of the political during this period. This is a notoriously con-
tentious terrain, as noted at the start of this chapter. However, let us follow Galli’s
argument that the juridical order Schmitt presented in State, Movement, People
was significantly adapted to match the conditions of the Nazi regime and to read
Hitler’s arbitrary power as a genuine manifestation of an emerging ‘concrete order’,
a position at a significant distance from his Weimar work. Indeed, Galli
argues that in State, Movement, People and other writings of the same period,
Schmitt appeared to make a relatively positive assessment of romanticism in deep
contrast to the denunciation expounded in Political Romanticism, and repeatedly
appealed to the concept of substance, something profoundly at odds with the
‘anti-essentialist’ concept of the political elaborated in the previous decade.
Hence, for the ‘Nazi Schmitt’, of this brief but revealing phase, ‘the origin of
the political was not the void of any modern order and ordering, but rather
the normality of the concrete orders’ (Galli, 2010a: 856).
146 Nazi Behemoth
Galli is right in highlighting that Schmitt here even became a de facto
‘organicist’, and ended up taking for granted the very existence of the
Gemeinschaft,8 that is, the traditional communal (German) society, as realized
by the presence of his racialized concept of Artgleichheit, the ‘sameness of
species’. What is perhaps most striking is the fact that Schmitt also seemed to
abandon notions of exception, decision and even representation, while he was
not shy in supporting the Führer in his most violent actions such as the Night
of the Long Knives. However, regardless of how Schmitt’s personal motiva-
tions are assessed, and what role opportunism is granted within them, in the
context of rising Nazi violence and a lawless state run on the basis of a
racialized ideology, State, Movement, People represented a true celebration of
the supremacy of the German race and its supposed leader.
Schmitt insisted in fact, at length, on the substantial sameness of the spe-
cies (Artgleichheit), a sameness that the Führer embodied and within which he
was embedded. For Agamben (2005a: 22), Schmitt did so precisely in order to
incorporate the Nazi doctrine on race into his constitutional project, defining
the concept of Artgleichheit as its most ‘fundamental principle’. Artgleichheit
has often been rendered in English as ‘ethnic identity’, for example by Simona
Draghici, the translator of State, Movement, People, although several authors
argue that ‘sameness of species’, or ‘species identity’, or even ‘racial homo-
geneity’ provide a more accurate translation (see, among others, Scheuerman,
1999: 127). In either case it was clearly one way of saying ‘race’, especially if
one considers how the concept is used across the text and in the context of its
publication. The legitimacy provided by the racial Volk seemed to open the
door to any form of political behaviour, as long as there was complete iden-
tification of the people with the leader, because they were of ‘the same sub-
stance’. As Jan-Werner Müller has suggested, ‘species sameness’ here becomes
a substitute for the categories of identity and representation (2003: 39), in
perfect line with the Nazi doctrine.

The political unity of the German people does not rest upon the German
lands or the German tribes, but upon the self-contained unity of the
German People and of the National-Socialist Movement, carrier of State
and People.
(Schmitt, 2001: 20)

All justice is the law of a certain people. It is an epistemological truth

that only whoever is capable of seeing the facts accurately, of listening to
statements intently, of understanding words correctly, and of weighing
impressions about people and things properly joins in the law-creating
community of kith and kin in his own modest way and belongs to its
existentiality.
(ibid.: 51)
 Nazi Behemoth 147
According to Schmitt, racial homogeneity ‘made judicial decision determi-
nate’, as both judges and the people were part of an overall ‘concrete order’
preserved by the Führer. This fundamental statement implied a new formula-
tion of the political. However, contra Galli, this was not merely a deviation
from past theorizations; rather, with the rise of National Socialism, the friend/
enemy opposition announced in 1927 was translated into the caesura between
the ‘right’ people and the alien, those who did not belong to the people. For
Agamben (2005a: 24), this caesura is not simply an arbitrary act of a sover-
eign subject, but something similar to ‘the edge of the wave’ produced by the
movement, something that never stops marking the life of a particular people
and their transformation into a biopolitical substance:

Down, inside, to the deepest and most instinctive stirrings of his emotions,
and likewise in the tiniest fiber of his brain, man stands in the reality of
this belongingness of people and race.
(Schmitt, 2001: 51; italics added)

At the same time, the decision over the political was one and the same with
that over the apolitical, that is, the definition of the substance of the ‘right
people’. In Agamben’s rather radical reading, movement and people, political
body and apolitical body were, in this sense, two sides of a ‘tip’ on which the
Janus head of the Führer was positioned. The Führer was thus not a subject,
continues Agamben, but something closer to the pure expression of the
movement, that is, the endless possibility of deciding about the political and
the apolitical.

It is one of the fundamental notions of the politically up-to-date German

generation that to determine whether a matter or a field are apolitical is
precisely a political decision in a specific way.
(ibid.: 18; italics added)

The biopolitical machine at the root of Schmitt’s thought, for Agamben,

could not be better expressed: ‘the political is nothing but the decision over
bare life; the production of an apolitical body is therefore not the shade (to
recall a metaphor used by Schmitt), but rather the very substance of the
political decision’ (Agamben, 2005a: 22).
Agamben insisted that already in 1976 Foucault, while commenting on the
question of race in his course at the Collège de France (later published as
Society Must Be Defended), famously showed how racism is the dispositive
that allows for the new biopower(s) of the modern, normally presented as
forms of ‘care’ for life, to be linked to older – pre-modern – sovereign powers
over life and death. In Schmitt’s work of the Nazi period, this nexus is all the
more essential. Species identity as expressed by Schmitt was what, according
to Agamben’s reading, intensified and substantiated the democratic principle
of identity, and made this very articulation of state, movement, people and
148 Nazi Behemoth
Führer possible and totalizing (ibid.: 2005a). The movement thus could lead
the people, and the Führer could guide the movement only because there was,
among all these parts, an unconditioned and absolute identity of species.
For this very reason Schmitt’s concept of leadership implied an ontological
sameness of species between the leader and its followers; only this sameness
could ensure the power of the leader did not become purely arbitrary, a tyr-
anny – the Führer thus guided the movement not from the outside, but
through his species identity, ‘from within’. Species identity is thus here the
dispositive that allows Schmitt to inscribe the depoliticized body of the people
in the caesura friend/enemy, in the form of a threshold via which the apoli-
tical constantly transits into the political and, at the same time, gets separated
from it (ibid.: 2005a). However, this process inevitably produces a remnant,
an un-assumable part, in the form of those who are alien to the species:

as it happens in our post democratic societies today, the political is

nothing but the decision over the apolitical, which means that the part
that is excluded becomes increasingly larger and out of control. The
thesis of the primacy of the movement and of the Party is something that
National Socialism shares with Marxism and to some extent social
democracy, since they are all founded on a bracketing of the people as
political body and on their transformation in a biopolitical entity.
(ibid.: 24; authors’ translation)

We may conclude that the principle of identity, typical of modern mass

democracies, implied, for Schmitt, a principle of exclusion, something that
according to Agamben shows the actuality of Schmitt’s political anthropology
and related political theory. All in all, we believe that what emerges as parti-
cularly important for us from this critical engagement with Galli’s and
Agamben’s interpretation of State, Movement, People is the centrality of a
specifically biopolitical understanding of the people. To speak with Galli
(2010a: 581), the immediacy of any constitutive power cannot simply be
delegated, but requires a ‘mise en forme’, something exceeding the origin of
any institution. This brings to the fore a crucial question, for Schmitt and for
anybody seriously engaged with his line of thought: who is the true carrier of
the constitutive power, the people or the sovereign who decides and represents
them in this very decision?
If Schmitt discussed democracy mainly in its direct forms of expression, the
plebiscite and the acclamation, he also recognized that democracy might be
understood as the immediate presence of the people in their own specific
homogeneity, people here conceived as a fundamentally non-organized, non-
structured and non-representable entity. This perhaps explains why, when the
Nazi regime emerged with its Volkish rhetoric (and set of practices), Schmitt
seemed to find it relatively easy to move a step further and delineate the
principle of democratic identity as a principle based on ‘sameness’ of species
and homogeneity, the conditions that defined the very substance of a people
 Nazi Behemoth 149
(see Galli, 2010a: 585, 589). In Schmitt’s earlier work, the people were not to
be conceived as a community, but its very negation, not a fact but an idea, a
potentiality – something that allowed him to explain the genealogy of modern
politics as based on the presence of the people, a presence given form and
order via a revolutionary gesture. However, in this controversial period the
people became something more in line with the cultural and political atmo-
sphere of the moment, whilst maintaining nonetheless a disturbing degree of
continuity with his previous theorizations (ibid.: 600). The people in fact
remained for him indispensable for the realization of any political form.
However, their political role was not only manifest via plebiscitary acclama-
tion: to be recognized and deployed in all its strength it required that another
power take up the task of representing it. The people as political presence
were thus capable of ‘taking form’ only by responding to ‘a question’ for-
mulated by someone else. We would agree with Galli (ibid.: 594, 597) that it is
precisely this passage of Schmitt’s argument that made it easier to justify and
to present, as part of his political theory, the relationship between the Führer
and the German people. Hitler asked questions and the people, via acclamation
and plebiscite, responded and were, as a consequence, represented. Again: the
people, the German Volk, incorporated the original power that made their
representative institution ‘concrete’ – during Weimar it was the President, and
now it was the Führer – who allowed them to actually exist politically. The
German people, under the Third Reich, could thus exist politically only via
the Führer and his eminent presence (ibid.: 597).

Schmitt and the (bio)political

There was always an element of the physical fight to the death in Schmitt’s
concept of the political, as clearly outlined already in previous chapters. Given
that the political entity became racialized in this Volkish phase, the political had
now to be understood, in line with some of his Italian interpreters, in bio-
political terms, even marked by reference to biologically defined groups. How-
ever, while there is little trace of biological racism in Schmitt’s post-war texts or
even in those that followed in the 1930s and were explicitly anti-Semitic, such
as The Leviathan, The Großraum, the question remains if the biopolitical, so
explicit in the writings discussed in this chapter, is indeed an element present
in his most fundamental conceptualizations of the spatialities of the political.
For example, whilst the anti-Semitism in The Leviathan is clearly defined in
relation to eschatological accounts of history and the Jewish ‘way of life’, it is
not entirely clear how this stance relates to the racial categories that he
adopted in his early work from the Nazi years. Even in the main The
Großraum text, where the relationship between anti-Semitism and geographic
exclusion is explicitly addressed, Schmitt took a degree of (ambivalent) dis-
tance from the positions he expounded during his early years working with
Hitler’s regime. We will return to these questions in detail in the coming
chapter.
150 Nazi Behemoth
However, although this remains an open question that certainly deserves
further investigation, it appears clear that in some of Schmitt’s writings of
the Nazi period, and especially in State, Movement, People, the biopolitical
came to the fore in rather dramatic form, intersecting directly with his atti-
tude towards the Jews and, although less explicitly, with his spatial specula-
tions on the political of those troubling years. For Galli (2010a: 796), with the
advent of the Nazis, Schmitt stopped describing the entropic dynamics of
modern politics in objective terms, as general laws, but directly linked them to
the responsibility of specific political forces and of a specific group: the Jews.
Schmitt identified the Jews, in this period of his work, as the origin of the
disaggregation and the dissolution of the German state and the weakening of
the German people. The Jews and their culture were for him the source of the
lack of transparency that crossed all society and that revealed all the weak-
ness of modern reason. The political here became explicitly biopolitical: the
production of ‘concrete order’ requiring the elimination of the alien element
incorporated into the German body politic.
While in Carl Schmitt and the Jews (2007) Gross identifies three phases in
Schmitt’s anti-Semitism, undoubtedly the most explicit phase is when he
openly collaborated with the Nazis, although according to some commenta-
tors the anti-Semitism of those years remained ingrained in his post-war
writing despite his denials (see, Scheuerman, 1999; Zarka, 2005). Ever-new
material has been published showing clearly how anti-Semitic Schmitt’s
understandings of society and of history were. In fact, although his long and
complex intellectual biography reveals moments of genuine engagement with
Jewish intellectuals, numerous expressions of anti-Jewish feeling appear
throughout his career. We will return to this in the next chapter where we
discuss his Großraum work. It is evident here that he considered the Jewish
diasporic presence in Europe and in Germany to be undermining the very
possibility of the German nation surviving in new global geopolitical conditions.
It is also clear that during the early years of Hitler’s rule Schmitt’s con-
ceptualization of the state form and its relation to the people had significantly
changed, since he attempted to theorize the development of Nazi power by
fundamentally giving up on his previous decisionism in favour of a theory of
‘concrete order’, often accompanied by organicist substantiations, and by a
biopolitical and, at times, virulent racist readings of the question of the Jews
in relation to the political form to be acquired by the future Nazi Germany. If
Schmitt had been quick to herald the rebirth of the state in the Nazi move-
ment, he soon considered it to have decisively killed off his most revered his-
torical institution. Even the ‘qualitative total state’ Schmitt had hoped would
prevent the collapse of the European order was not strong enough to resist
the new powers and the new spatializations of the political that were emer-
ging. However, he had glimpsed the way to rethinking a new foundation in
the concept of ‘concrete order’, and the emerging path to thinking legal order
and political form beyond the limits of the state that the Nazi movement had
finally undermined from within. The next phase of Schmitt’s theoretical
 Nazi Behemoth 151
development and political entanglement would be defined by how he sought
to bring the spatial dimension of ‘concrete order’ into communication with
the biopolitical dimension of his new Volkish understanding of the German
people. Here, we have examined how the logic of the spatialization of the poli-
tical introduced in Chapter 3 may indeed be read against a more biopolitical
understanding of people, leadership and community in Schmitt’s early Nazi
years, something that has rendered his overall spatio-political logic a form of
inherently bio-geopolitics. In the next chapter we will examine how this
developed in his Großraum work and what it reveals about the relationship
between his spatial thought and anti-Semitism.

Notes
1 In Meier, 1998: 154. The quote from Hitler appears in Mein Kampf; the passage
preceding reads: ‘if the Jew with the help of his Marxist concepts triumphs over
the peoples of this world, then his prize will be the death-dance of mankind, then
this planet will once again traverse the aether devoid of human beings as it had
done for millions of years’ (in Strong, 2008: xxiii).
2 Heidegger, then Rector of the Freiberg University, wrote to Schmitt on 22 August
1933, thanking him for the copy of The Concept of the Political Schmitt had sent
him. Heidegger commended Schmitt’s book, particularly his reading of Heraclitus,
and signed the letter off with ‘Heil Hitler’. (See Heidegger, 1987. See also Stuart
Elden’s commentary posted on http://progressivegeographies.com/2012/08/11/hei
degger-and-schmitt-correspondence-again, and Elden, 2006: 84–85.) The recent
publication of History, Nature, State, a collection of seminars Heidegger developed
in relation to political themes during his rectorship, and his so-called ‘Black Note-
books’ from the same period shed new light on long running debate around the
relation of Heidegger’s thought to Nazism.
3 Waldemar Gurian, Schmitt’s former friend exiled in Switzerland, began to mock
Schmitt as the ‘Crown Jurist’ and devoted an article to Schmitt after his SS con-
demnation from Swiss exile entitled ‘On the Path to Emigration or the Concentra-
tion Camp’ (see Gross, 2007; Strong, 2008). Hannah Arendt wrote about Gurian in
her Men in Dark Times (1968).
4 For more on Hauriou’s enduring influence on Schmitt see Balakrishnan, 2000:
197–199; Croce and Salvatore, 2012. In one of Schmitt’s last texts, entitled ‘On the
Legal World Revolution’, published in 1979, Schmitt noted that ‘in all decisive
points with respect to developments of industrial and economic spheres, I rely on
Hauriou’ (Schmitt, 1986: 79 n13).
5 Of course, in depicting the people as a racial, as opposed to a purely political,
category in State, Movement, People Schmitt was already locating legitimacy
beyond the confines of the state form, but the idea of ‘concrete order’ is perhaps
more significant in relation to the subsequent development of Schmitt’s spatial
thought in the post-war years, at least in his published work, as the racial categories
in which he framed his Nazi-era work are replaced with the more institutional
frame of ‘concrete order’ and the implication of deeply embedded forms of order.
6 Galli notes (2010a: 538–539) that for this reason, democracy implies a condition
that never corresponds to people’s empirical existence in Schmitt’s work. Mass
democracy, according to Schmitt in his 1928 Constitutional Theory and in other
writings of the same period, is in fact constitutively penetrated/pervaded by conflict,
and this is why it is necessary that, in moments of emergency, a form of dictatorship
takes on the task of representing the people, and suspends democracy in order to
152 Nazi Behemoth
make it possible. For Schmitt, Galli insists, dictatorship was not the opposite of
democracy, but rather its radical consequence.
7 The book was published in Italian in 1935 with the telling title Principi politici del
Nazionalsocialismo (The Political Principles of National Socialism).
8 This term, famously inaugurated by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in his
1887 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, indicated an ideal type of social organization,
fundamentally inspired by the modes of life in the rural, peasant societies, where
personal relationships were defined and regulated by well established traditional
social rules. This notion became commonly used in many conservative and natio-
nalistic discourses populating the German political scene in the first decades of the
twentieth century, and was incorporated by Nazi propaganda and mainstream
ideologues.
6 Großraum

The indispensible elements of a spatial order have until now been found primarily
in the concept of state, which, more than a personally determined area of
rule means first of all a territorially limited and territorially closed unity …
[Today], I find it necessary to go beyond the abstract thoughts of territory
lying within the universal concept of ‘state’ and to introduce the concept of
Großraum and its related concept of Großraum order to international jur-
isprudence. The change in the dimensions of the earth and in the way space
has been conceived – a change that dominates current global political
developments – is articulated in the word ‘Großraum’.
Carl Schmitt, 1939

The new concept of the order of a new international law is our concept of
Reich, which proceeds from a völkisch Großraum order upheld by a nation … It
is, further, a way of thinking about international law that is capable of doing
justice to the spatial conceptions of today, and the real political vital forces in the
world of today; a way of thinking that can be ‘planetary’ – that is, that thinks
of the world in terms of the globe – without annihilating nations and states as
does the imperialistic international law of the Western Democracies steering
the world out of the unavoidable overturning of the old concepts of state into a
universalistic-imperialistic world law.
Carl Schmitt, 1939

In 1936 Schmitt organized a conference of German jurists in Berlin to

denounce the ‘Jewish influence’ on German jurisprudence. The conference
claimed that ‘rootless’ Jews posed a political threat to German legal order – a
threat that was particularly pernicious because they infiltrated in any number
of disguises. Schmitt called for measures to be implemented that would clarify
‘who was a Jew and who was not’ so that Jewish scholars could be removed
and their work placed in a special section marked ‘Judaica’, with any refer-
ence to such authors being prefaced with an explanation of their origins
(Balakrishnan, 2000: 207).1 Although many of these measures were soon
adopted, meaning that Schmitt arguably played his part in drafting the per-
secution of Germany’s Jewish population, the event itself was ill attended and
did nothing to stop growing suspicion of the ‘Crown Jurist’ in the ranks of the
154 Großraum
Nazi Party and the SS. Despite his slavish attempt to follow in the footsteps
of National Socialism, legitimating its path towards barbarity, Schmitt’s
questionable loyalty to the Party and its racialist ideology left him exposed to
rivals. Indeed, Schmitt initially tried to prove his allegiance by escalating the
anti-Semitism now coursing through his work, as the conference bore witness,
but by the end of 1936 his fall from grace was nearly complete. The con-
solidation of Nazi power made Schmitt’s learned support less necessary, and
those who harboured doubts about his ideological commitment, and were
possibly envious of his positions, such as Otto Koelreuter, a rival professor,
Reinhard Höhn, another prominent Nazi lawyer, and Party ideologue Alfred
Rosenberg, the leading advocate of Lebensraum (on Lebensraum see, among
others, Abrahamsson 2013; Bassin, 1987; Diner, 2000; Murphy, 1997; also
Giaccaria and Minca, 2015b) seized this opportunity to topple Schmitt. The
SS newspaper Das Schwarzes Korps attacked the legal scholar in a series of
articles in which he was accused of being a Hegelian Catholic, who put the
state first before the Party and feigned anti-Semitism opportunistically.
These allegations severely damaged Schmitt, who was forced to resign his
official positions in the Nazi legal establishments by the end of 1936. The
favour of Herman Göring, an admirer of Schmitt since his appointment to
the Staatsrat, and Hans Frank, the head of National Socialist Jurists Asso-
ciation, protected his honorary title and his professorship at the University of
Berlin. It seems unlikely, as some of Schmitt’s more apologist readers suggest
(see, for example, Schwab, 2008), that his life was directly in danger due to his
denunciation by the SS, but the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, the violent purge
of rival factions within the Nazi ranks that Schmitt had publically defended,
no doubt lay fresh in his memory. Despite his best efforts to ingratiate himself
with the Nazi leadership, a gap clearly remained between Schmitt, as a still
somewhat free thinker, and the increasingly blinkered fanaticism of the most
accredited ideologues.
This sudden and potentially dangerous fall from favour prompted Schmitt
to retreat from public reflection on the constitutional mutations of the Nazi
state, where his pen was ‘scratching in vain’, as one party friend put it, and
focus on two less controversial areas of thought (in Müller, 2003: 39). First, in
The Leviathan he set his gaze once more on the work of his great intellectual
hero, Thomas Hobbes, in an attempt to identify the historical roots of the
crisis of the modern European state he had diagnosed in his Weimar work
(Schmitt, 2008b) (we will return to this text in Chapter 7). He later claimed
that this book contained a veiled critique of the Nazi state but the vulgar anti-
Semitism scattered throughout it makes this defence largely unconvincing.
Nonetheless, the book did mark a sort of final farewell to the state as the central
category of Schmitt’s political thought and as such signalled a coy distancing
from his recent attempts to theorize the National Socialist ‘movement-state’
as discussed in the previous chapter.
Second, he turned increasingly to issues of international law, and it is these
that we shall focus on in the remainder of this chapter. Since the mid 1920s,
 Großraum 155
Schmitt had been producing short, precisely targeted polemics critiquing the
perilous state of German sovereignty under the Versailles Treaty, the juridical
confusion of the League of Nations and the hypocrisies of US foreign policy,
although these writings took on a more politically activist and policy-
ambitious tone in the late 1930s after his marginalization from the Nazi
regime. Given the broad appeal of German nationalism, something which
was by no means limited to Nazi circles, these issues would have certainly
appeared a less treacherous terrain for Schmitt and hence provided a safer
route to curry favour with a regime that was gearing up to turn revanchist
sentiment into military action. These writings occupy a particularly important
place in the development of his thought for two reasons. In the first instance,
it was precisely these writings that drew Schmitt once more into the orbit of
Nazi power and ultimately led to his arrest and interrogation at Nuremburg
after the war. Second, it was in these writings that he first made the shift to an
explicitly spatial theorization of the political, laying the groundwork for the
development of his later spatial thought in the post-war period.

Liberalism, international law and war

‘The chaos of today is only the rotten fruit born of a seed planted in 1917’
(Schmitt, 2011e: 74). Schmitt wrote these words in 1937 and indeed his
engagements with international politics throughout the 1920s and 1930s
attempted to grasp the historic changes underway in the realm of interna-
tional law in the wake of the First World War, and particularly how these
developments impacted upon Germany’s position in world affairs. These
reflections appeared scattered across a number of short articles addressing a
set of loosely overlapping concerns rather than in more sustained essays
plotting a coherent argument, hence exacerbating the tendency of Schmitt’s
work as a whole to advance in a rather piecemeal fashion. Nonetheless, a
constant ran through these disparate polemics: a focus on the changes
undergoing the concept of war in international law after the First World War.
With regard to international law ‘the core of the matter lies in warfare’
(1999d: 31), Schmitt noted, repeatedly asserting in a number of works that,
‘the history of international law is a history of the concept of war’ (2011b:
31). Hence, any attempt to understand the changing nature of international
law needed to set its gaze squarely on the concept of war. Thus, although
Schmitt’s interwar work on international politics remained grounded in a
concern for the German state and was infused with nationalist sentiment, his
key concern, albeit one entangled with Germany’s fate, was the radical
transformation of the concept of war in international law inaugurated by
the First World War; a transformation that he argued was undermining the
capacity of the state to fulfil its central function, that is, to give form to the
political and contain conflict. This new age of international law promised not
a new dawn for world peace but a terrible new era of war, unlimited in scope
and intensity.
156 Großraum
The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, established Germany as an
‘aggressor’ responsible for leading the world into war, and set out a series of
legal sanctions, dictated by the allied victors, which it would face as a con-
sequence. These including: the payment of punishing reparations to compen-
sate the war’s victors; military restrictions (which placed limits on key areas
such as domestic industrial production, logistics and policing); a loss of ter-
ritory to the east and the west; having former colonies become mandates of
the allied powers; and the demilitarization of the Rhineland, which was to be
occupied by Allied troops for fifteen years to prevent further German
‘aggression’. The latter was particularly galling for Schmitt, a native Rhine-
lander, and the extent to which he was personally embittered by foreign
troops occupying his regional Heimat was evident in his 1925 text, ‘The
Status Quo and the Peace’. There he noted that, although the occupation and
demilitarization was ‘only one part of the great system of burdens and lim-
itations on the authority of the German state arising from the Versailles
Treaty’, it was an ‘especially burdened part of the German Reich’ given that
the occupation left it ‘distinguished in international law from the rest of
Germany’ (Schmitt, 2000; 291). What the occupation made clear was that
German sovereignty had effectively been qualified, if not yet obliterated, by
the post-war settlement. The core question of ‘who decides’, especially with
regard to the right to war, had been ceded to occupying forces. Indeed,
Schmitt highlighted that for all intents and purposes, the Treaty of Versailles
was a ‘treaty of intervention’, using ‘purposely vague terms’ to allow ‘the
political and military treaty opponent to intervene constantly’ in German
affairs (ibid.: 292). In such a situation the Rhineland, if not in fact Germany
as a whole, risked becoming a ‘mere object’ in the hands of the war’s victors,
used to counterbalance ‘England’s worldwide and France’s continental inter-
ests’ and satisfy the interests of the United States (ibid.).2
German nationalism played an important role in Schmitt’s interwar cri-
tiques of international politics, providing a, sometimes visceral and personal,
motivation for his work, evident in emotive phrases such as ‘the world war
against Germany’ (2011b: 31). Nonetheless, his perspective was never limited
to nationalism alone and indeed he approached the question of Germany’s
position vis-à-vis other states as a symptom of the wider transformation of
international law and concepts of war taking shape under the influence of
liberal internationalism. The United States and the League of Nations (foun-
ded in 1922) – which he referred to consistently as the ‘Geneva League of
Nations’ or simply the ‘Geneva League’, to underline its ‘foreign’ status –
were the two institutions he considered most responsible for imposing these
changes upon international law, and as such they became targets for his cri-
tique. The foreign policy of the United States, which he considered to have
played a particularly ominous role in transforming, or rather destroying,
international law, was subjected to a particularly sustained volley of scathing
attacks from the late 1920s onwards. He argued that the most fundamental
development of international politics since the First World War was that the
 Großraum 157
United States, despite all protestations to the contrary, emerged as an imper-
ial power of global significance. Indeed, in ‘Forms of Modern Imperialism in
International Law’, a short text from 1933, he claimed that the United States
was not only an imperialist power but also the subject of ‘the most modern
imperialism’ (Schmitt, 2011a: 29). Its novelty lay in the fact that it was prin-
cipally economic and thus appeared to ‘distinguish itself from other forms,
especially every military imperialism’ (ibid.). ‘American imperialism [has] from
the beginning,’ Schmitt noted, ‘worked with the antithesis of “economic versus
political”’, precisely in order ‘to deny the fact of imperialism at all’ (ibid.: 29).
This ‘inherited nineteenth-century antithesis’ between economics and politics,
which posited the economic as ‘something essentially non-political, [and] the
political as something essentially non-economic’ (ibid.), was hence employed
to depoliticize the United State’s pursuit of economic power. Yet, given that
for Schmitt any sphere of relations could take on the character of the political,
and hence become the site of a struggle between friend and enemy, there was
nothing that inherently set economics apart from the political. As Schmitt
pointed out, the fact that American imperialism was both based upon, and
aimed to amass, economic power did not mean it was ‘any less intensively
imperialistic’ (ibid.).3 Indeed, much of his work during this period was dedicated
to showing that the economic imperialism of the United States was, on the
contrary, particularly destructive and intensive, regardless of official disavowals
or its ideological frame, or rather, precisely because of its ideological framing.
That the United States would claim it was not imperialist but simply pur-
suing peacefully economic activity was consistent with the ideological conceit
of liberal thought Schmitt had critiqued in The Concept of the Political and
elsewhere. As noted in previous chapters Schmitt had argued that liberal
thought attempted to displace the political into the spheres of economics and
morality and hence deny its own status as political. It did not come as a sur-
prise then that the United States, as a leading liberal state, would frame the
pursuit of its political interests in relation to the supposedly non-political
realm of economics. In Schmitt’s analysis however, the ideological sleight of
hand by which the United States sought to displace the political into economics
had numerous profound consequences for international law and the distribu-
tion of power between states, most significantly with regard to the conception
and practice of war. In the final pages of The Concept of the Political he
highlighted the means by which this economic framing of American imperialism
operated.

An imperialism based on pure economic power will naturally attempt to

sustain a worldwide condition which enables it to apply and manage,
unmolested, its economic means, e.g., terminating credit, embargoing raw
materials, destroying the currency of others, and so on. Every attempt of
a people to withdraw itself from the effects of such ‘peaceful’ methods is
considered by this imperialism an extra-economic activity. Pure economic
imperialism will also apply a stronger, but still economic, and
158 Großraum
therefore … nonpolitical, essentially peaceful means of force. A 1921
League of Nations resolution enumerates as examples: economic sanc-
tions and severance of the food supply from the civilian population.
(2007b: 78–79)

Hence, in Schmitt’s eyes, the economic imperialism of the United States

developed its own vocabulary and its own (economic) means of waging war
on other states in the guise of peaceful activity or the economic sanction of its
enemies. The crux was the fact that the United States was capable of getting
other states, and crucially the League of Nations, to agree to its formulations,
effectively giving it sweeping powers beyond its own borders.
In fact, in ‘Forms of Modern Imperialism in International Law’, Schmitt
expressed his admiration for the great discursive power of the United States’
ideological formulations. ‘The great superiority, the astounding political accom-
plishment of the United States reveals itself ever anew in the fact that it makes use
of general, open concepts’ (2011a: 44), whose ‘elasticity and extensibility’
(ibid.: 35) gave the United States a tremendous ideological flexibility that it
could use to justify intervention in the affairs of other states whilst denying its
actions were political. In almost elegiac prose Schmitt declared that:

Such an elasticity, such an ability to operate with broad terms and to

force the peoples of the Earth to respect them, is a phenomenon of world-
historical significance … It is an expression of true political power if a
great people [can] determine on its own the forms of speech and even the
modes of thought of other peoples, the vocabulary, the terminology and
the concepts.
(ibid.: 44)

Yet Schmitt was not impressed with the language of American power for its
rhetorical qualities, but rather with the fact that the United States was concretely
shaping international politics around its interests by having its ideological
lexicon written into international law.

With [the] decisive political concepts the issue is who interprets, defines
and applies them: who says, by means of concrete decision, what is peace,
what is disarmament, what intervention, what public order and security.
It is one of the most important phenomena in the entire legal and intel-
lectual life of humanity that whoever has real power is also able to
appropriate and determine concepts and words. Caesar dominus et supra
grammaticam: the Emperor is ruler over grammar as well.
(ibid.)

In discussing the ideological power of the United States Schmitt noted that,
‘as a German I can only feel in these discussions of American imperialism
like a beggar in rags [might feel] speaking of the riches and treasures of
 Großraum 159
others’ (ibid.). The danger for Germany was that it would be conquered at
the conceptual level if it became beholden to the ideology of the United States
as inscribed in international jurisprudence. Chilling in light of his earlier
attempts to purge ‘Jewish influence’ from ‘German Law’ was the lesson
Schmitt argued Germany should learn in the face of the claim that:

A people is only conquered when it subordinates itself to the foreign

vocabulary, the foreign construction [Vorstellung] of what law, and espe-
cially international law, is. Then in addition to the surrender of weapons
there is the surrender of one’s own law.
(ibid.: 45)4

Yet, what was it specifically about the nature of the United States’ conceptual
constructs that gave them such great power within international law? The core
of the United States’ success lay, Schmitt argued, in the fact that it framed its
relation to other states in moral terms. Moral terms, as opposed to strictly
political terms, which were always tied to a specific concrete situation, were
universal and hence had the quality of being ‘general’, ‘open’, ‘elastic’ and
‘extensive’. Just as the United States had followed the pattern of liberal
thought by framing its pursuit of power in economic terms, so too it framed
its interests in relation to universal moral terms. Viewed through the lens of
Schmitt’s claim that liberalism displaced the political into economics and
morality, the moralization of politics was the necessary flip side of the United
States’ economic imperialism. Indeed, if a formula for American power might
be extracted from Schmitt’s interwar work it might read: economic imperialism
justified in moral terms.
As noted above, Schmitt did not consider the United States’ use of uni-
versal, moral categories in framing its economic imperialism to operate
simply as a superficial veil of ideology whose effects were purely symbolic.
Rather, he understood them to be producing constitutive transformations, in
both the conception and conduct of international law and, most importantly,
of war. For example, in The Concept of the Political Schmitt focused parti-
cular attention on how the term ‘humanity’ was mobilized politically. His
specific target here was the United States’ claim to have entered the First
World War in defence, not of its own interests, but of humanity. ‘Humanity,’
he noted, ‘cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least [not] on this
planet’ (Schmitt, 2007b: 54). Humanity was not a political term insofar as
humanity was not a subject of international law that could enter into friend–
enemy relations with some other political entity. Nonetheless, the fact that
‘humanity’ has no enemies with which to wage war did not mean that wars
could not be waged in its name, and indeed in such cases it took on a
‘particularly intensive political meaning’ (ibid.).

When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not
a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks
160 Großraum
to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. At the expense
of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as
one can misuse peace, justice, progress and civilization in order to claim
these as one’s own and to deny the same to the enemy … The concept of
humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist
expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of
economic imperialism.
(ibid.)

Schmitt advanced two important claims here. First, an appeal to ‘human-

ity’ was a purely ideological manoeuvre used to dress up particular interests,
in this case the economic interests of the United States, in universal names.
‘Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’ (ibid.), as he neatly put it, play-
ing on Proudhon’s famous dictum concerning property. Second, and more
significant from the perspective of international law, was that laying claim to
universal moral categories such as ‘humanity’ fundamentally changed the
nature of the political, and those ordering institutions established to contain
it. It did so by introducing a new figure of the enemy hitherto anathema to
the law of modern (European) war: the inhuman enemy. Given that Schmitt’s
understanding of the political was grounded in the relations between friend
and enemy, any change in the conception of the enemy would necessarily
produce profound changes to the concept of war, and have consequences for
the institutional and juridical forms through which it was managed.
The changes wrought by the ‘enemy of humanity’, the inhuman enemy, that
emerged as the correlate of a war waged in the name of ‘humanity’ were, in
Schmitt’s view, particularly troubling. This inhuman enemy was in fact ‘no
longer called an enemy but a disturber of the peace’ and was ‘thereby desig-
nated … an outlaw of humanity’ (ibid.: 79). A war waged against such an
outlaw of humanity must, Schmitt claimed, ‘turn into a crusade and into the
last war of humanity’ (ibid.). Such a war would be particularly destructive
and intense as an ‘outlaw of humanity’, undeserving of the parity and respect
afforded by the laws of modern European war, could be exposed to the most
extreme violence.

To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term

probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the
quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity;
and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.
(ibid.)

Hence, the appearance of the ‘enemy of humanity’ marked an intensifica-

tion of war, as the limits that defined the laws of modern (European) warfare, as
described by Hobbes and Claustwicz, did not apply to moral enemies but only
to other states that were granted legal parity in war. Displacing the political
into moral terms did not lead to a true depoliticization but in fact to an
 Großraum 161
intensification of the political. In an article published ten years after the first
edition of The Concept of the Political, Schmitt argued that introducing a con-
cept of an unjust enemy, an ‘outlaw of humanity’, serves only to produce a ‘deeper
and more intense distinction between friend and enemy’ (Schmitt, 2011e, 72).
Thus, the danger of evoking universal, moral categories in the political
domain was that they pushed the concept of war into absolute terms, tota-
lizing what remained a conflict over particular interests. Indeed, Schmitt had
taken note of the debate about the category of ‘total war’ that had emerged in
Britain, France and Germany in the shadow of the First World War. In ‘Total
Enemy, Total War and Total State’, a short text published in 1937, he discussed
his own contribution to this debate on the concept of the ‘total enemy’.
Although new weapons technologies had massively increased the destructive
capacity of twentieth century wars, Schmitt insisted that it was ‘the total
enemy that [gave] the total war its meaning’ (Schmitt, 1999d: 31) as it was the
introduction of this category that produced a qualitative change in the con-
cept of war. The idea of a total war was symptomatic of the ‘total world view’
of the ‘Anglo-Saxon states’ (ibid.: 33); the product of an ‘Anglo-Saxon con-
cept of the enemy’ which ‘in essence rejects the differentiation between com-
batants and non-combatants’ (ibid.: 34). The collapse of the distinction
between combatant and non-combatant was another way in which the moral
inflation of the concept of war was dissolving the limits of modern (European)
war. The category of ‘total enemy’ allowed for no distinction between the
armed forces and the general population of an enemy state, and hence in the
‘Anglo-Saxon conception of war’ (ibid.) the entire population became a
legitimate target in war, whether its means were military or economic. Schmitt
argued that the English tradition of maritime warfare had ‘generated the
kernel’ of total war, insofar as during the siege of a port or ship the enemy’s
economy, and hence the entire population, was targeted rather than simply its
military forces. We will return in later chapters to the wider significance of the
distinction between land and sea wars in Schmitt’s work and the key position
England occupied in his account of the history of international law, but the
key point to be emphasized here is that the totalization of the enemy allowed
a totalization of war that left entire populations exposed to the threat of war.
Although Britain bore some historic responsibility for their historic devel-
opment, it was nevertheless clear that Schmitt considered total wars waged against
‘outlaws of humanity’ to be an innovation of the United States. In his 1937 essay
‘The Turn to the Discriminating Concept of War’, Schmitt laid the blame for
the emergence of this ‘discriminating concept of war’ squarely on the shoulders
of the United States, and indeed gave a precise date for its emergence:

The problem of the discriminating concept of war entered the history of

modern international law with President [Woodrow] Wilson’s declaration
of war on April 2, 1917, under which he led his country into the world
war against Germany.
(2011e: 31)
162 Großraum
With the decision to enter the war President Wilson claimed to ‘inaugurate an
era in which [the United States] could determine the justice and injustice of
war-conducting parties outside their own territory’ (ibid.: 73). Wilson thereby
‘introduced a fundamentally new problematic into international law’ (ibid.),
not only establishing a precedent for the discriminating concept of war but
revealing its ‘state- and nation-destroying universal pretensions’ (ibid.: 69).
Indeed, insofar as it introduced a radical mutation into the core categories of
international law, the discriminating conception of war had, to Schmitt’s
mind, produced nothing short of a dangerous chaos:

The result to date has been nothing short of the total jolting of the old
concept of war, made worse by the complete lack of an illuminating new
concept of war. In practical terms, this means: war and yet not war at the
same time; anarchy; and chaos in international law.
(ibid.: 73)

In foregrounding the dangers of a discriminating concept of war and charging

the United States with responsibility for it, Schmitt clearly had in mind not
only the punitive terms Germany had been forced to accept under the ‘war
guilt’ clauses of the Versailles Treaty, but also the threat that war may be
waged against Germany by the League of Nations. This was, after all, a time
when other states were watching warily as revanchist nationalism took hold of
German foreign policy under Nazi leadership, and Schmitt made several
allusions to the sanctions the League had levelled against Italy in November
1935 in response to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. Yet, as before, whilst
his critique of discriminatory war was grounded in a concern for the concrete
relationship between Germany and other states, notably the United States,
Schmitt laid out several additional implications it had for international law
and the concept of war.
First, he contended in ‘The Turn to the Discriminating Concept of War’
that the introduction of a discriminating concept of war into international law
marked a dangerous return of the distinction between just and unjust wars
into twentieth century thought after several centuries of jurisprudence in
which justice had not been a relevant criterion to judge a war. The danger lay
in the fact that in declaring some wars just and others unjust the actions of
states could be ruled criminal and hence subject to legal sanction. This
implied of course that other states could advance their interests in the guise of
policing these criminal states, their actions not being considered war but the
administration of international justice. Schmitt had noted already in The
Concept of the Political that, ‘for the application of such means, a new and
essentially pacifist vocabulary has been created. War is condemned but
executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of trea-
ties, international police, and measures to assure peace remain’ (2007b: 79). In
such a case the party deemed ‘unjust’ was declared criminal, an outlaw, not
only from the perspective of international law but from humanity. For
 Großraum 163
Schmitt, such a formulation recalled the classical definition of the pirate,
something he noted had been made explicit in President Wilson’s speech on 2
April 1917 about the use of German U-boats in the First World War:

Wilson may not have used the expression ‘piracy,’ but he did call the
German U-boats agents of a war led ‘against humanity,’ one led ‘against
all nations.’ Germany was, therefore, described with a formulation
common to the pirate: hostis generis humanis. The legal-logical consequence
of all this is that war ceases to be war. For one does not conduct a war
against pirates; pirates are only the object of anti-criminal or maritime
police actions and arbitrary methods.
(Schmitt, 2011e: 218 n178)

Formulations such as ‘war guilt’, ‘war of aggression’ and ‘enemy of humanity’

made it possible ‘to treat entire states and nations as pirates’ (ibid.: 68), hence
setting the ‘guilty’ party outside the community of states but still subjecting it
to the force of international law as a criminal entity.5 Schmitt even went as far
as arguing that the return of the figure of the pirate – hostis generis humanis –
‘represents the breakthrough of a completely new type of international law
that explodes the concept of the state’ (ibid.: 36), although he did not here
speculate on what new political form, if any, might arise from the debris.
Second, and of particularly acute importance in Schmitt’s view, was how
the introduction of a discriminating concept of war impacted upon the pos-
sibility of neutrality in international law. The war of 1914–1917 had already
shown ‘the difficult and dangerous conditions the smaller neutral states find
themselves in when they want to remain truly neutral’ (1999c: 41). With regard
to the laws of war there was a ‘simple alternative between neutrality and non-
neutrality’ (ibid.: 41), it was not something that could come ‘in half measures
or portions’ (ibid.). However, the ‘universalistic claims and collective methods
of the League of Nations in Geneva’ (ibid.: 42) were undermining the ability of
states to decide on those conflicts in which they were involved and those in
which they were not according to their own interests, even when they involved
third parties. Schmitt warned that by ceding their capacity for neutrality to a
‘supra-national moral and legal authority’ (ibid.: 44), such as the League of
Nations, ‘the political existence of the states that opt for it’ was endangered
(ibid.: 41).6 This was especially so for weaker states that had less influence on
setting the terms of international legal agreements and less chance of convin-
cing other states in a federation that their political opponents or third parties
should or should not face sanction. Further, Schmitt argued that, ‘as soon
as … the possibility of a non-partisan “third state” is negated, a claim is
implicitly made to universal or regional authority’ (2011b: 65).7 This produced two
problems. First, the erosion of neutrality not only undermined state sovereignty,
but in so doing also helped to produce new forms of post-state authority,
creating a confusion between states who nominally remained the ‘subject’ of
international law and emerging post-state bodies that were the real bearers of
164 Großraum
sovereignty on matters of war but which had no formal juridical status.
Second, dissolving the capacity of states to declare their neutrality also
implied that one of the means for clearly identifying war and non-war, that is,
the distinction between warring and neutral states, and hence regulating conflict,
was muddied, exacerbating the chaos reigning in international law.
Third, and related to the last point, was that if a state’s sovereignty was
defined by the decision on war, then its status as a state was fundamentally
put into question, since the capacity to take this decision was denied. The
discriminatory concept of war could produce this effect in two ways: either an
outside party could declare a state’s war to be unjust, or alternatively it could
insist that a state was at war when it had not itself decided to go to war, as in
the case of collective sanctions under the League of Nations’ institutional
umbrella. A discriminating concept of war hence led to a ‘denationalization’
of war (ibid.: 67). The fundamental link between a state’s sovereignty and its
capacity to decide on war was broken by the intrusion of third parties judging
its activities to be just or unjust, legal or illegal. Further, Schmitt noted that
the ‘same logic that “denationalizes” war … does away with the war of states
in order to “internationalize” war’ (ibid.: 69), turning traditional ‘state war
into an international civil war’ (ibid.: 70). Whilst the discriminating concep-
tion of just and unjust wars may have fitted with the ‘ecumenical uni-
versalism’ (ibid.: 70) of the United States and the League of Nations, it was
leading to a ‘tremendous civil war’ (ibid.: 69) that in Schmitt’s view threatened
to unfix war from state borders, rendering inoperable one of the central
mechanisms by which conflict was contained.
From a spatial perspective the last point is particularly significant. These
reflections mark one of the first instances in which Schmitt critiqued the des-
patializing effects of the universal, moral categories of liberal thought and
United States’ foreign policy, something that would become a governing theme
of his later spatial thought. Not only were the ‘space-disregarding uni-
versalizations’ (ibid.: 46) of US foreign policy and the ‘Geneva League’ dis-
solving the traditional limits on the intensity of war by developing a
discriminating concept of ‘total enemy’, but they were also dissolving the
spatial limits that the modern state provided for containing it. In other words,
the discriminating concept of war was undermining the state’s ability to
effectively spatialize the political and hence limit conflict. The moralizing
language of discriminatory wars hence provided an ideological conceit by
which powerful states, notably of course the United States, could intervene in
the space of weaker states, even if by ‘indirect’ economic means, actions that
came at the price of fundamentally destabilizing the conceptual matrix, at the
heart of Schmitt’s understanding of the political, that tied space, war and
order together. In Schmitt’s view, liberal internationalism – expressed in the
Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations and American imperialism – was
unravelling the historically conditioned spatio-political fabric on which
modern international law had rested, and loosing new concepts of war into
the world: total wars fought against unjust enemies in the name of humanity.
 Großraum 165
It was the ‘explosion’ of the state due to the discriminating concept of war
that finally prompted Schmitt to shift his focus from the state in order to
explore alternative political forms capable of producing a new spatialization of the
political fit for international conditions that had radically altered since the First
World War, never mind since the age of Thomas Hobbes. His work on inter-
national politics from the 1920s and 1930s was in a sense transitory, decrying
the collapse of the cherished distinctions and institutions of modern European
international law but not yet advancing radical proposals for what might
emerge in its place to counter the ‘trans-national and ecumenical world order’
(2011b: 35) of liberal internationalism. Yet, in the conclusion of his 1937 article
on the discriminating concept of war he clearly began to orientate his think-
ing towards a new, as yet unmapped, horizon for international law. Despite
his evident disgust at how the terms of modern European international law
were being greased into obsolescence by American dollars and juridical
abstractions he noted that his critique did not strive to ‘maintain the concepts
of an earlier time, be they conservative or reactionary’ (2011e: 74). ‘We know,’
he wrote, ‘that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ concept of war cannot
remain unchanged, [and] that new organs and communities of international
law are both necessary and unavoidable’ (ibid.). His polemics were not level-
led ‘against the idea of fundamentally new orders’ but to ‘work towards this
goal’ (ibid.). This change of conceptual orientation led Schmitt, for the first
time, to directly theorize the spatial foundations of order that had played a
structural but implicit role in his early work, and hence marked an extremely
significant moment in the development of his spatial thought. However, his
most urgent task, especially in light of his desire to secure favour with the
Nazi regime after his dangerous reputational downgrade, was to find a new
political form to replace the state capable of providing a new basis for inter-
national order. Given that he had reserved so much acerbic critique for the
United States’ foreign policy, it is perhaps something of a surprise that it was
there that he turned to find a new model for the spatialization of the political.

Großraum order
Schmitt’s first attempt to imagine a new political form beyond the state cap-
able of respatializing the political came with the concept of Großraum.8 This
was not only one of the governing ideas in Schmitt’s late spatial thought but
perhaps the most controversial of his entire career due to its relationship to
Nazi foreign policy. He first introduced the concept in ‘The Großraum Order of
International Law with a Ban on Intervention for Spatially Foreign Powers: A
Contribution to the Concept of Reich in International Law’ (2011b) originally
delivered as a lecture to a conference of National Socialist jurists in Kiel on 1
April 1939 and published later the same month in the journal Deutsches Recht.
The text was then published as a stand-alone book, several editions of which
appearing between 1939 and 1941 as Schmitt made additions reflecting both
his expanding project and political developments. Although the text appeared
166 Großraum
to have little or no effect on Schmitt’s standing with the Nazi regime, it was
widely read both in Germany and in translation across Europe and in Japan.
Indeed, it seems likely that the book was designed to appeal both to the
domestic regime and to international legal opinion, making George Schwab’s
claim that Schmitt turned to international law because it was ‘a domain he
thought would leave him out of the limelight’ rather implausible (2008: xxxi).
‘The Großraum Order’ was both an attempt to formulate a new basis for
international law that reflected real changes in the distribution of global
power and an attempt to provide theoretical legitimacy for Nazi foreign
policy. As with Schmitt’s other important Nazi era writings such as On the
Three Types of Juristic Thought, ‘The Großraum Order’ can be taken neither
as simply a contribution to scholarly debate nor mere intellectual propaganda
for the Reich. It was both, and any reading must remain sensitive to this fact,
whilst noting the tensions between these two aims. We return below to the
question of the relationship between this text and the Nazi regime but first
like to provide a brief account of its major features.
Schmitt claimed that his fundamental aim in ‘The Großraum Order’ was to
‘introduce the concept of the concrete Großraum and its related concept of a
Großraum order to international jurisprudence’ (2011b: 77). Due to the eclipse
of the state form, it was ‘necessary to revise … existing international legal
theory through the concept of the nation but also to regard it from the point
of view of spatial order’ (ibid.). He noted that the idea of Großraum was not a
conceptual novelty, but in fact reflected real transformations already under-
way, a ‘concrete, historical-political concept of the present’: ‘the change in the
dimensions of the earth and in the way space is conceived – a change that
dominates current global political developments – is articulated in the word
Großraum’ (ibid.). However, in Schmitt’s view, political and legal thought,
mired in nineteenth century positivism, had been slow to come to terms with
these changes. Although the concept had already appeared, it was ‘char-
acteristically not in the domain of the state but rather in the domain of tech-
nics, industry, commerce, and organization’ (ibid.: 78). Schmitt noted that by
the early years of the twentieth century ‘Großraum economy’ was already a
‘beloved buzzword’ of economists and the spread of electricity and gas infra-
structures across Europe had made Großraum a reality in the ‘energy econ-
omy’ and the ‘technical-industrial-economic order’ (ibid.).9 Given the fact
that the economy had become the determining political factor, it was ‘of
course, no coincidence that the theoretical and practical realization of the
concept of the Großraum … lie first in the economic-organizational sphere’
(ibid.: 79). Hence, according to Schmitt, the world was already informally
constituted by a ‘technical-industrial-economic’ Großraum order, but political
and legal thought stubbornly refused to come to terms with these transfor-
mations (ibid.: 78). His aim was therefore to develop a concept adequate to
what he perceived to be the broader demands of addressing these economic
realities in the field of international jurisprudence and of providing global
politics with an equally new and convincing spatial theoretical framework.
 Großraum 167
The Monroe model
In attempting to find a model for a Großraum concept in international law,
Schmitt turned to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which he claimed was ‘the
first and until now, the most successful example of a Großraum principle in
the modern history of international law’ (ibid.: 83). It offered, he claimed, the
‘best approach and point of departure’ for considering the concept of a
Großraum in international law (ibid.). Although the Monroe Doctrine had a
complicated history, having experienced ‘periods of obfuscation and falsifica-
tion’, and having ultimately become an instrument of US imperial expansionism,
its ‘original meaning [was] marked with three key phrases: the independence
of all American states; non-colonization in this space; non-intervention of extra-
American powers in this space’ (ibid.). With the proclamation of the Monroe
Doctrine the United States unilaterally declared the American continent to be
a space of non-intervention, free of foreign, and specifically European, inter-
ference and colonization. It established, in Schmitt’s view, ‘the legal foundation
for a unique Continental-American international law’ (ibid.: 85).
In this original form, the Monroe Doctrine provided a ‘unique and impor-
tant precedent’ for thinking about continental large spaces in international
law (ibid.: 83). However, Schmitt suggested that the doctrine had a remark-
able ‘elasticity with respect to changing political situations’ and had morphed
in line with the changing conceptions of American interests and foreign policy
goals (ibid.: 86). Hence, it had become a ‘justification for a capitalistic
imperialism’ (ibid.: 89) in the hands of President Theodore Roosevelt:10 ‘An
originally defensive concept of space that defended against the intervention of
spatially foreign powers’ thus became ‘the foundation of a “dollar diplo-
macy”’ pursued in line with US interests (ibid.: 89). President Woodrow
Wilson oversaw a further mutation in the Monroe Doctrine from ‘a concrete
geographically and historically determined concept of Großraum into a gen-
eral, universally conceived principle for the world’ (ibid.). The United States
thus decisively left ‘behind its continental spatial principle and [bound] itself
with the universalism of the British world empire’ (ibid.). ‘The healthy core of the
Großraum principle of international law of non-intervention’ was thus trans-
formed ‘into a global ideology that interferes in everything, a pan-interventionist
ideology … under the cover of humanitarianism’ (ibid.: 90).11
At the time of its original proclamation in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine
nonetheless expressed, in Schmitt’s view, ‘a genuine principle of Großraum,
namely the connection between a politically awakened nation, political idea,
and a Großraum ruled by this idea, a Großraum excluding foreign interven-
tions’ (ibid.: 88). This fusion of a politically self-assertive nation, a political
idea and a continental large space lay at the ‘core of the great original
Monroe Doctrine’ (ibid.). The spatial aspect of the doctrine was crucial for
Schmitt since it conceived of ‘the planet in spatial terms, in a modern
sense, … something totally extraordinary and worthy of special attention in
international law’ (ibid.: 87). However, the core of Großraum was the
168 Großraum
relationship between this spatial dimension and the assertion of a political
idea: ‘A purely geographical conception may have great political-practical
meaning, but alone it does not represent a convincing legal principle’ (ibid.).
Referencing Karl Haushofer, who he described as ‘the master of geopolitical
scholarship’, Schmitt argued that ‘the meaning of space and political idea do
not allow themselves to be separated from one another’ (ibid.). For Schmitt
there were ‘neither spaceless political ideas nor, reciprocally, spaces without
ideas or principles of space without ideas’ (ibid.). Thus, a genuine Großraum
was grounded upon the mutually constitutive relationship between a parti-
cular space and a specific political idea. However, Schmitt qualified this fur-
ther, noting that, ‘it is an important part of a determinable political idea that
a certain nation carries it and that it has a certain opponent in mind, through
which this political idea gains the quality of the political’ (ibid.). The fusion
of a space and a political idea was thus crucially tied to a specific set of
friend–enemy relations, marking a specific spatialization of the political.
Indeed, this enmity governed relations between the ordering nation and the
‘spatially foreign’ forces banned from intervention within the Großraum.

European Großraum: Nazi Reich

For Schmitt, the core of the Monroe Doctrine, that is, the fusion of a politi-
cally awakened nation, a fundamental political idea and a continental greater
space ruled over by a principle of non-intervention, was ‘translatable to other
spaces, other historical situations, and other friend–enemy groupings’ (ibid.:
88). He stressed however that the aim of ‘The Großraum Order’ was not to
imagine a ‘German Monroe Doctrine’, but rather to identify its ‘core
thought’ in order to make it ‘fruitful for other living spaces and other histor-
ical situations’ (ibid.: 84; italics added). Indeed, for Schmitt, this core idea,
‘namely the thought of the impermissibility under international law of inter-
ventions of spatially foreign powers in a Großraum ruled by a principle of
order’, was ‘reasonably translatable [in Europe] given the state of political
reality’ (ibid.: 88).
Schmitt noted that, ‘the Großraum is of course not identical to the Reich’
but, as the dominant nation, Germany would provide the political idea on
which this European Großraum was to be based (ibid.: 101). What precisely
was this ‘National Socialist National idea’ in Schmitt’s terms (ibid.: 99)? It
contained three fundamental aspects that deserve mention here. First, the
National Socialist Reich was to establish a Großraum order standing ‘between
the old state order of the nineteenth century and the universalistic goal of a
global Reich’ (ibid.: 110). It would, Schmitt wrote, fulfil the ‘long due over-
coming of the concept of the state in international law’ (ibid.: 104) whilst
‘steering the world out of the … universalistic-imperialistic world law’ with
which the ‘Western democracies’ sought to replace it (ibid.: 111). Second, it
was to be ‘a concept of order based on national groups’ and the ‘principle of
mutual respect for every nationhood’ (ibid.: 100). Such a concept implied ‘the
 Großraum 169
rejection of all ideals of assimilation, absorption, and melting pots’ and aimed
to protect the ‘unique völkisch nature of every national group’ from these
‘Western ideas’ (ibid.: 99).12 The Großraum would be protected from the inter-
vention of external ‘spatially foreign’ powers and internally divided into differ-
ent national states, although of course all existing under the ultimate ‘spatial
sovereignty’ of the German Reich. Schmitt did not specify what exactly this
‘respect for national difference’ meant in practical terms, but the approving
references to the forced movement of populations in Poland and elsewhere
certainly struck a menacing note in light of the realities of Nazi policies.
The third element was what Schmitt referred to as ‘the thoroughly unique
Jewish problem’ (ibid.: 97). The ‘political idea for the Central and Eastern
European space’ was of a Großraum ‘in which there live many nations and
national groups, that are, however, not – apart from the Jews – racially alien
from one another’ (ibid.: 99). Thus, although Schmitt formally distinguished
his concept of Großraum from the biological theories of spatial order influ-
ential in the Nazi regime, in particular those developed around the popular
concept of Lebensraum – ‘living space’ or ‘vital space’ – his work still gave an
exceptional status to European Jews on the basis of race (Schmitt, 2011b:
81). ‘The Großraum Order’ mentions the Jews and their position within the
Nazi-dominated Großraum only briefly and provides no indication of how this
unique ‘problem’ should be addressed. The Jews did however play a significant role
in the opposition Schmitt drew between an empty neutral conception of space
and the concept of Großraum. According to Schmitt, the theory of Großraum
had superseded ‘the mathematical-neutral, empty concept of space … [with] a
qualitative-dynamic greatness’ (ibid.: 79).
Schmitt identified this ‘empty concept of space’, that had now been over-
come, with ‘the spirit of the Jew’ (ibid.: 122). Hence, he placed the Jews in
direct opposition to the theory of Großraum order as such. ‘The Jewish
people,’ Schmitt claimed, had not only historically been ‘an important fer-
menting agent in the dissolution of concrete spatially determined orders’
(ibid.), but their ‘misunderstanding … with respect to everything that con-
cerns soil, land, and territory, is grounded in [their] style of political existence’
(ibid.: 121). He thus implied that the Jews were existentially alien to the new
spatial order of the European Großraum. Schmitt quoted ‘the founder of a
new science of space’, Friedrich Ratzel, to the effect that ‘coming to terms
with space [is] the defining trait of all life’ (italics ours), an explicit hint at the
biopolitical dimension of this new conceptualization of space, which we will
return to in the coming section (ibid.: 122). Characterized, in Schmitt’s view,
by the failure to ‘come to terms with space’, the Jews were excluded from his
vision of a European greater space, culturally, politically, racially and even
existentially. He provided no indication of what this meant for the fate of the
Jews in the new European spatial order under the Nazi Reich – an omission
that can only be read as deeply ominous.
170 Großraum
Nazism, Geojurisprudence, Lebensraum
In light of these sinister comments about the position of the Jews in the
emerging European Großraum, and the fact that Schmitt was a thinker of
significant standing, publishing scholarly treatises to legitimate the spread of
German power at a time when the Nazis were pursuing a policy of imperial
expansion and ethnic cleansing across Eastern Europe, it is therefore impor-
tant to assess the nature of the relationship between Schmitt’s Großraum work
and Nazism. It seems sound to consider Schmitt’s work to be a sincere
attempt to legitimize the expansion of the National Socialist Reich, whilst
nonetheless acknowledging that the development of Nazi policy was not
directly influenced by his theoretical efforts to any significant extent. As
Timothy Nunan, the translator of ‘The Großraum Order’, notes, Schmitt’s
Großraum theory ‘was the most confident and articulate – if not the official –
[theorization] of the Nazi New Order in Europe’ (Nunan, 2011: 17). Accord-
ingly, in the late 1930s and early 1940s many in Europe outside Germany
took Schmitt’s Großraum work to offer something like an ‘official’ theory of
the regime’s expansionist policy.13 Nunan highlights, for example, how
Schmitt’s work was reported on in the British newspapers The Daily Mail and
The Times, the latter considered Schmitt to provide ‘a trustworthy guide’ and
a ‘precise definition’ of Hitler’s aims in Eastern Europe (2011: 10). But, as
Balakrishnan claims, this view was based upon an ‘immense overestimation
of [Schmitt’s] role and stature’ (2000: 203). Doubtless Schmitt’s Großraum
work was widely read abroad – he noted himself in the Preface to the 1941
edition that Bulgarian, French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish editions were
already published or in press – but this did not amount to evidence that it was
incorporated into Nazi policy (2011b: 76). In fact he appeared in many ways
to be chasing events, trying to provide legitimacy-after-the-fact, as opposed to
influencing, let alone driving, policy developments.
The claim that Schmitt’s article had an impact on Nazi policy rests to a
large degree on Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag of 28 April 1939. Hitler here
responded to Roosevelt’s earlier telegram warning Germany and Italy against
attacking or invading any ‘independent nation’ in Europe by claiming that the
US President was a hypocrite and calling for a German-led Monroe Doctrine
for Europe. ‘We Germans,’ Hitler declared, ‘support a similar doctrine for
Europe – and above all for the territory and the interests of the Greater
German Reich’ (in Nunan, 2011: 13). It is not clear if Hitler took this appeal
to the Monroe Doctrine from Schmitt’s work, and in fact the German For-
eign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had made reference to it in discussion
with American state officials before the publication of Schmitt’s work.14
However, Hans Frank, Schmitt’s protector within the Nazi legal establish-
ment, advised him to stay quiet about the origin of the idea as ‘the Führer
prided himself on his originality’ (in Nunan, 2011: 13).15 Nevertheless, there
seems little to indicate that Schmitt’s thought had any influence on shaping
the direction of Nazi policy: ‘little suggests that leading members of the Nazi
 Großraum 171
regime were interested in a formal theory of empire that might do anything to
limit the dynamism of expansion and genocide to the East’ (Nunan, 2011:
14). Further, Nazi policy was far from coherent but was rather developing in
tandem with German expansion, making it difficult for those trying to
construct theoretical frameworks around it. Indeed, in a note to the 1941
edition of the same text, Schmitt seemed to acknowledge his own lack of
traction on policy developments, suggesting that ‘we resemble navigators on
an unbroken voyage, and every book can be nothing more than a logbook’
(Schmitt, 2011b: 77). Nonetheless, the rather modest discourse of a ‘respect
for every nation’ in which Schmitt formulated his theory of an Eastern Eur-
opean Großraum appeared to be profoundly out of step with the realities of
genocidal slaughter that Nazi state was pursuing in the East.
Given the lack of evidence for any direct influence Schmitt’s ideas may have
exerted on Nazi policy a sounder approach is to locate Schmitt’s concept of
Großraum in relation to the wider intellectual debates in Nazi spatial theory.
Two concepts in circulation in the Nazi era to which Schmitt’s Großraum clearly
related were Geojurisprudence and Lebensraum, both of which tied to the wider
debate on geopolitics and spatial theory in both Weimar and Nazi Germany.

Geojurisprudence
Geojurisprudence was a school of thought that attempted to integrate the
insights of law and geopolitics, that briefly gained popularity amongst Right
wing intellectual circles during the late Weimar and Nazi years. Although
principally associated with the work of Manfred Langhans-Ratzeburg from
the 1920s, Germany’s most eminent geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer also
contributed an article to this debate in 1928.16 Indeed, as the American poli-
tical scientist Andrew Gyorgy claimed, this ‘surprising product of the artificial
crossbreeding between geopolitics and other sciences’ bore witness to the ‘all-
pervasive influence of Haushofer’s ‘portmanteau science’ [Geopolitik]’ in
German geo-sciences at the time (1944: 265, 261). Already in 1944 Gyorgy
had associated Schmitt with Geojurisprudence, claiming him to be its ‘fore-
most exponent’ (ibid.: 266). However, in a polemical rush to condemn Geo-
jurisprudence as ‘a National Socialist theory of international law based on the
idea of “spatial purity”’, Gyorgy conflated Schmitt’s Großraum theory with
the claim that ‘world powers have a natural right to their living space’ (ibid.:
265). Thus, whilst Gyorgy described Geojurisprudence as an attempt to
‘introduce the Lebensraum doctrine into international law’, this did not
accurately describe Schmitt’s conception of Großraum nor distinguish it from
the more explicitly biological and racial concept of Lebensraum (ibid.: 265).17
From the distance of a half-century, David T. Murphy offered a more sober
assessment, noting that, whilst Schmitt differentiated his concept of Großraum
from the geographically determined ideas fashionable in German geopolitics,
his ‘application of Raum concepts to international law and state relations had
been prefigured in the 1920s by geopolitical thinkers, including Haushofer
172 Großraum
and Manfred Langhans-Ratzeburg’ (Murphy, 1998: 29). Hence, if on the one
hand Schmitt employed insights from key thinkers of the German geopo-
litical tradition – such as Haushofer and Ratzel – on the other his work
stood at some distance from the more racially defined readings of other
Geojurisprudence thinkers of the 1930s.18
Both authors however argue that Schmitt’s theory of Großraum failed to
live up to its goals either conceptually or in terms of shaping policy, as did
Geojurisprudence thinking more broadly. In the first instance, as Murphy
rightly notes, Geojurisprudence ‘was never able to devise a convincing recon-
ciliation between its claims for geodeterministic development of law and the
realities it was attempting to explain’ (1998: 117). The appeal to geography
did not provide the groundings for law thinkers of Geojurisprudence had
hoped for, something likewise true of Schmitt’s later appeal to land as a
ground for political order in the 1940s.19 ‘The temptation to turn to geo-
graphy for the sources of law was,’ Murphy writes, ‘as much a chimera as was
the effort to derive the sources of politics from geography’ (1998: 117). It was,
as Gyorgy noted, conceptually too weak. ‘Neither law nor geography nor
politics,’ Geojurisprudence was simply ‘the projection of National Socialist
power dreams and wishful spatial thinking into the sphere of jurisprudence’
(1944: 269). Further, according to Gyorgy, ‘Nazi geojurists’ found it ‘impos-
sible to give a comprehensive description of international legal principles’
because they were in ‘a constant state of flux and subject to change in time and
space’, given the developing fronts of Nazi expansionist policy (ibid.: 266).

Lebensraum and the ‘Jewish question’

For Schmitt, as for many Nazis, the ‘Jewish question’ was also a spatial
question (see Aly, 1999; Giaccaria and Minca, 2011b, 2015b; Stone, 2015).
Schmitt’s formulation of the Großraum order differed from theories of
Lebensraum popular among Nazi ideologues, given that it was not based
principally upon racial categories (see Murphy, 1998: 28–29; also Giaccaria
and Minca, 2015b), but it nonetheless entertained an ambivalent, albeit sig-
nificant, relationship to the biopolitical element found in these ideas of ‘vital
space’. The notion of Lebensraum, initially born out of the Ratzel’s con-
ceptualization at the beginning of the twentieth century (Ratzel, 1901), gained
widespread traction in political debates during the Weimar years due to the
popularity of Geopolitik as proposed by geographer Karl Haushofer (1923;
see also Abrahamsson, 2013). This widespread recognition helped to make
Lebensraum a key concept in the völkisch geographical imaginations, shaping
German public opinion in the interwar years and making a key contribution
to Hitler’s geopolitical narratives of expansion in Eastern Europe (see, for
example, Bassin, 1987; Danielsson, 2009; Diner, 2000; Kallis, 2001; Kost,
1998; Natter, 2003, 2005; Wolkersdorfer, 1999). Lebensraum has con-
ventionally been rendered in English either as ‘living space’ or as ‘vital space’,
although much recent work has shown that this distinction may be
 Großraum 173
problematic (see, for example, Neumann, 2009), arguing that the Nazis
understood Lebensraum as both ‘living space’ and as ‘life-world’, that is, ‘vital
space’ (Giaccaria and Minca, 2015b).
As noted above, Schmitt’s concept of Großraum remained mainly grounded
in the centrality of a ‘political idea’ rather than explicitly relying on the bio-
logical and racial categories normally involved in the propagandistic use of a
pseudo-scientific reading of Lebensraum, formulated by writers like Haush-
ofer and adopted by the Nazi high ranks. Such deliberate distancing from
purely biological interpretation of the political publically set Schmitt at odds
with dominant forms of thinking in the Nazi leadership. For this reason he
was severely criticized by well known Lebensraum theorists such as Werner
Daitz and Alfred Rosenberg for underplaying the primacy of racial homo-
geneity, something he reported in his defence during his interrogation at
Nuremburg (Schmitt, 1987a). As noted earlier, George Schwab, one of
Schmitt’s translators and a key Anglophone apologist, recently noted that
in later years Schmitt privately expressed the view that the ‘unique’ situation
of the Jews had been transformed radically with the creation of the state of
Israel: ‘At least they [Jews] again have contact with a soil of their own’
(Schwab, 2008: li–lii). This perhaps suggests that for Schmitt the ‘Jewish pro-
blem’ was primarily to be approached as a question of space rather than race,
of soil rather than blood, although this distinction was conspicuously mute in
the context of Nazi rule.
However, despite the apparent conceptual distance separating Großraum
and Lebensraum the relationship between them is nonetheless tricky to dis-
entangle. Schmitt developed his ideas in support of the Nazis’ genocidal
imperial expansion and, even if he did not adopt the crude biological reduc-
tionism of the Party line, he was happy to single out the Jews as a separate
‘racially alien’ group who stood outside a new European order of ‘national
groups’. Although he offered no detail on how ‘the Jewish Problem’ (2011b:
97) was to be addressed, his celebration of the forced migration and resettle-
ment of the German population from the Baltic states might be understood to
provide some indication (ibid.). Indeed, while Schmitt showed no interest in
the concept of Lebensraum he nonetheless expressed support for a political
order based upon ‘the natural growth of living peoples’, in particular when it
was opposed to a ‘universalistic ideology that transforms the entire Earth into
a battlefield for its interventions’ (2011b: 52). Further, he was ready to employ
the biopolitical language of ‘achievement space’, ‘living space’ and Lebens-
recht [‘Right to Live’], particularly in his initial Großraum writings (ibid.: 79,
123, 91; Hannah, 2011: 48).
The distinction between the ‘political idea’ of Großraum and the racial and
biological categories of Lebensraum in fact appears to dissolve when viewed
in relation to the context in which Schmitt was writing and the bitter anti-
Semitism that came to light when his private post-war diaries were published
recently (see Gross, 2007; Schmitt, 1991). Having singled out the Jews as a
separate ‘racially alien’ group it is not hard to imagine that they represented
174 Großraum
the specific ‘spatially foreign enemy’ against which the European Großraum
was to be defined. Schmitt opposed a Europe of ‘national groups’ to the
‘melting pot’ of the United States but, as critics have noted, his conception of
America as a spaceless empire of assimilation shared much with his critique
of the Jewish position within Europe (see Scheuerman, 1999: 178; Gross,
2007: 203). It seems likely that Schmitt considered the United States to
represent the ‘spatially foreign enemy’ outside Europe, whilst the Jews were
the ‘spatially foreign enemy’ within. Although there were clear differences
between Schmitt’s conceptualization of Großraum and the popular theories of
Lebensraum – and there were indeed internal differences within Nazi spatial
thought – these theoretical differences counted little when faced with the brute
realities of Nazi policy, which Schmitt was willingly throwing his intellectual
support behind (see Barnes and Minca, 2013). Indeed, in his Nazi writings,
including ‘The Großraum Order’, these two concepts appear closely, although
only implicitly, interwoven in Schmitt’s attempts to rethink the political in line
with the ‘concrete order’ produced by the new historical and biopolitical
conditions of the Nazi Reich destined to dominate Europe.

People, life, space and the biopolitical

The Italian political philosopher Andrea Cavalletti refers to ‘The Großraum
Order’ text to show how during the Nazi years Schmitt conceived the political
‘biopolitically’, by re-addressing the friend–enemy relationship as a form of
‘primary spatialization’ (2005: 212; on this see also Minca, 2011b). Cavalletti
starts his analysis by recalling a rather unnoticed 1926 essay written by Italian
medievalist Luigi Valli, entitled ‘Il Diritto dei Popoli alla Terra’ (roughly ‘The
Right of the People to Land’), where, in a framework largely influenced by a
broader Ratzelian understanding of the fundamental ethical question of
demographic living space (sic.), Valli described people’s need for their proper
space as ‘a sacred biological right’, in the name of which war was fully
justified (2005: 211).
According to Cavalletti (2005: 210), Valli’s short intervention was nothing
but an attempt to identify a clear juridical framework for addressing the
‘problem of demographics’, a key concern for many states at that time –
especially those with totalitarian tendencies – or, better, for what he presented
as the need of ‘vital space’ for those people characterized by ‘too much
population’. The main problem in the definition of the proper living space
was thus identified with what Valli perceived as the existing gap between
‘the people’, as a political entity, and ‘the population’, that is, their biological
life (ibid.). This gap, for Valli, ought to be eliminated at all costs, since the
population had to coincide with the people: the biological and the political had
to return to be one and the same (ibid.; on this see also Giaccaria and Minca,
2015b; Minca 2011).
Cavalletti notes that Schmitt explicitly incorporated Valli’s approach in his
attempt to theorize, from a National-Socialist perspective, the above-described
 Großraum 175
Monroe Doctrine of greater spaces, by making reference to the 1934 German
translation of Valli’s book in ‘The Großraum Order’:

The theory of natural borders was determined overwhelmingly from the point
of view of geography and geopolitics, and above all by the state. From the
point of view of the nation and the growing population of a country,
however, another principle, the right of nations to space and soil,
especially the right of more population-rich countries with respect to less
population-rich countries, has often been named. This principle was especially
made valid in the course of the last century by the Italians and the Japa-
nese. From the literature of this subject I would like only to name the short,
but still rich and engrossing treatise of an Italian scholar, the Dante
researcher Luigi Valli, ‘The Right of the Nation to Land’. Valli described
this claim as the ‘demographic right’.
(Schmitt, 2011b: 81; italics added)

Although a few lines down Schmitt would note that while ‘[the] “demo-
graphic” right to land can be seen as a universal foundation for a justification
of territorial demands; it cannot, however, be seen as a concrete Großraum
principle of international law in a specific sense that contains recognizable lim-
itations and standards in itself ’ (2011b: 81), he is not shy in stating that ‘the
objective considerations upon which this claim rests are most striking’ (italics
ours). For Cavalletti, it is not by chance that Schmitt dedicated particular
attention to Valli’s work in the opening chapter, where it is argued that old
and obsolete spatial theories (based on the classic concept of natural borders)
must be abandoned to be replaced by a new (biopolitical) understanding of
the relation between space and (geo)politics (Cavalletti, 2005: 201).
According to Schmitt, as noted above, ‘the new concept of the order of a
new international law is our concept of the Reich, which proceeds from a
Völkisch Großraum order upheld by a nation’ (ibid.: 110–111). However, this
concept was immediately linked to a specific German form of ‘concrete order’
and the right to living space of the people, the German people in particular:

The term Reich, finally, corresponds to the German practice that employs
the word Reich … as an expression, be it a cosmos in the sense of con-
crete order, in the sense of a historical power ready for war and struggle,
grown to the challenge of its counter Reichs. … This organizational
minimum formed the real foundation of all that one could see as the
concrete order ‘Volksgemeinschaft’.
(Schmitt, 2011b: 103, 105; italics added)

In Schmitt’s view, the (living) right of the people (Volkerrecht) lacked a clear
spatial determination in international law, since, in his view, the con-
ceptualizations of space and the political idea were considered as separate
from the concrete existence of the Volk:
176 Großraum
German jurisprudence has … undertaken a most meaningful push
towards making a real law of nations out of the mere interstate order in
recent years. Norbert Gurke’s Volk und Volkerrecht (Tubingen 1935), the
first systematic draft of a new international law built upon the concept of
Volk, must be named above all as a positive scholarly achievement in this
direction.
(Schmitt, 2011b: 107; italics added)

It is perhaps important to recall at this point that in The Concept of the Political
Schmitt famously argued that a well defined political community depended
upon clearly identifying their specific enemy: ‘For as long as a people exists in the
political sphere, this people must, even if only in the most extreme case – and
whether this point has been reached has to be decided by it – determine by
itself the distinction of friend and enemy. Therein resides the essence of its
political existence’ (Schmitt, 2007b, 2005: 49). Accordingly, for Cavalletti
(2005: 212), by linking the definition of the political to ‘the living right of the
people’ and to a specific spatial reading of the friend–enemy relationship, this
1939 intervention was nothing less than a new formulation of Schmitt’s con-
cept of the political. The political was now rendered as the biopolitical, taking
on a formulation somewhat in line with the dominant position of the Nazi
ideologues about the German people’s need for an adequate vital space.
The biopolitical nature of the new spatialization of the political in
Großraum was thus for Schmitt inherent to the very concept of space around
which it was built. The word Groß, he argued, indicate ‘a qualitative escala-
tion’ rather than a ‘merely quantitative’ increase in space. Referencing Ratzel
again, Schmitt noted that ‘it is, therefore, not a space that is only greater
compared to a relatively smaller space; it is not an expanded minor space. …
the word “great” should and can change the conceptual field’, overturning the
existing mathematical, neutral concept of space: ‘the word and the concept of
Großraum remains an indispensable bridge from the obsolete to the future
conceptions of space … Großraum is, therefore, not a space that is only
greater compared to a relatively smaller space; it is not expanded minor
space’ (2011b: 119). It is then not by chance that Schmitt had recourse to
reference Ratzel once again, perhaps locating in his thought theoretical foun-
dation for his understanding of the people’s right to (living/vital) land/space
translated into ‘concrete order’: ‘there is, as Ratzel says, already something
greater – I would almost say creative and inspirational – in the wide space’
(ibid.: 122). ‘The addition of the word great should and can change the con-
ceptual field’; a concept of space that he noted again was constitutively
‘incomprehensible to the spirit of the Jew’ (ibid.: 119).
If a key objective of Schmitt’s work during the Nazi years and beyond was
to conceptualize the coincidence between people and population in a unified,
biopolitical space – the German nation – then the ‘other’, the enemy, were
those ‘not-of-that-space’, who resided (or had to be forced to reside) beyond
and/or outside that space/population. The essential relationship between
 Großraum 177
friend and enemy, in this perspective, may arguably be understood as a spatio-
ontological one (Minca, 2011a; Minca and Rowan, 2014; Rowan, 2011), a
relationship based on a sort of ‘primary spatialization’ capable of defining the
true body politic in fieri, and the very human essence of the German Volk
(see Giaccaria and Minca, 2011a, 2011b, 2015b). This primary spatialization
is, for example, and not surprisingly, at the origin of Schmitt’s virulent dis-
missal of the ways in which ‘a universal term like minority’ is conceptualized
in international institutions, without, in his view, any Völkisch understanding
of its implications:

The juridical and logical muddle that lies behind a universal term like
‘minority’ is today clear to all. In political and social reality, such obvious
different and contradictory circumstances – questions of the cleansing of
borders, questions of cultural and Völkisch autonomy, the completely and
thoroughly unique Jewish problem, … so obviously conceal themselves
behind the empty word minority.
(Schmitt, 2011b: 97)

The political, as the result of this co-implication of life and space, is thus
where the ontological nature of this spatialization emerges in all its force, with
the universalized recognition of the rights of minorities denied by Schmitt in the
name of what he identified as actual, concrete living communities that form
distinct Völkisch people: ‘in the reality of life this creature of minority does not
exist. In reality, there are living communities of the most different kind, and
even these Völkisch minorities are very different from one another’ (ibid.).
It is not surprising then that Schmitt also defined the ‘friend’, and not only the
enemy, in biopolitical terms, through a direct implication of life and death: ‘in
case of need, the political entity must demand the sacrifice of life’ (Schmitt, 2007b:
71; on this issue see also Axtmann, 2007; Rasch, 2005a; Slomp, 2009). For
Schmitt, the ‘primary spatialization’ at the origin of the friend–enemy relation-
ship is thus not a natural human condition in any simple sense, existing before
‘any form of civilized and political life’ but rather marked the direct politici-
zation of life. The friend/enemy distinction is produced in the act of decision/cut
which constitutes both groups, and hence is not ‘natural’ but precisely ‘political’.
This explains why Schmitt was convinced that any political theory was also
a sort of anthropology. Hence he followed Helmut Plessner, the founder of
European philosophical anthropology in his understanding on the nature of
individuals:

Man, for Plessner, is ‘primarily a being capable of creating distance’ who

in his essence is determined, unfathomable, and remains an ‘open ques-
tion’. If one bears in mind the anthropological distinction of evil and
good and combines Plessner’s ‘remaining open’ with his positive reference
to danger, Plessner’s theory is closer to evil than to goodness.
(Schmitt, 2005: 60)
178 Großraum
In the Concept of the Political Schmitt in fact described two fundamental
anthropological-political visions, from which, he argued, all other political
theories derived: one that believes humans to be naturally good, and the other
that considers them essentially bad and prone to violence (2007b: 59–60).
Affirming such a radical distinction was nothing but an attempt to establish a
philosophical and political anthropology capable of qualifying the friend–
enemy relationship as an ‘essential Constitution of Man’: a Hobbesian
understanding of human nature as inherently conflictual, and indeed, in his
reading, constitutively political (see, again, his speculations on political
anthropology in The Concept of the Political, Part 7, discussed in Chapter 3).
Galli (2010a: 757) is adamant about the fact that in Schmitt’s political
anthropology ‘the true nature of man’ was not a theological question. While
finding inspiration in Plessner’s fundamental anthropological pessimism,
Schmitt seemed convinced that the discussion around the nature of anthropos
ran the risk of becoming a moral rather than a political question. Whilst for
Galli this is not to be considered a key issue compared to Schmitt’s overall
conceptual architecture, by contrast, Agamben and Cavalletti seem to suggest
that precisely in the anthropological basis of his biopolitics we might be able
to locate the dark core of Schmitt’s project, or even an Arcanum of modern
politics as such. For Cavalletti:

The anthropological is now the perfect link between the political and the
spatial, where, according to Schmitt, the essence of the political rests
precisely in the possibility of asking the members of a people to be ready
to die: only in the availability to die each spatial concept becomes political;
only when life is interpreted as availability to die it becomes political, that
is, also spatial.
(Cavalletti, 2005: 247)

The unity of the German people as envisaged by Schmitt was, for Cavalletti,
conceived as a spatial organism capable of expanding or shrinking while
keeping the same demographic ‘intensity’:

the designation ‘Deutsches Reich’ is untranslatable in its uniqueness and

magnificence. It benefits the historic moment of every genuine political
eminence that it brings not just subsumable, but its own designation with
it and asserts its own unique name.
(Schmitt, 2011b: 102–103; italics ours)

This notion of primary spatialization – a manifestation in this case of the

untranslatable uniqueness and magnificence of a German Reich – was the
result of an understanding of the human that was immediately biopolitical,
since it was based on a calculative spatio-biopolitical concept, that of popu-
lation. The production of population – to echo Cavalletti – was therefore
based on an endless series of caesurae in the body politic by identifying its
 Großraum 179
‘right’, ‘just’ and necessary shape, dimension and substance. This was pre-
cisely the problem that concerned Schmitt during the Nazi years, as testified
by his attempts to theorize the threshold between the ‘right’ people and the
aliens, to divide the German people into a necessary part, and a part that was
not necessary in order to produce and reproduce the (spatialized) population
of the State (2005: 80).
According to Agamben, in this biopolitical reading of the dialectic between
people and population it is as if:

what we call ‘people’ were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical
oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the
People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the
people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; [on
the one hand, then] an inclusion that claims to be total, [on the other], an
exclusion that is clearly hopeless.
(1998: 177)

In other words, as the Italian philosopher suggests elsewhere, the concept of

‘the people’ always already carried within it a fundamental biopolitical frac-
ture (1996: 32; discussed in detail in Minca, 2007: 93).
Arguably Schmitt first built his concept of the political around this fracture,
but in the political regime created by the Nazi ‘biocracy’ (see Esposito, 2008)
his understanding of the people as Volk developed in line with the mytholo-
geme of the Gemeinschaft. The German people, for him, were thus called to
take a decision through which they would found their concrete presence,
their link to the origin of all things political:

Our Deutsche Reich is fundamentally determined on the basis of the nation

and is a fundamentally non-universalistic legal order built on the foun-
dation of respect for every national identity … this is all the more true as
the Deutsche Reich, in the middle of Europe between the universalism of
the powers of liberal-democratic, nation-assimilating West and the uni-
versalism of the Bolshevik, globally revolutionary East, has the holy
honor of defending a non-universalistic, Völkisch order of life with
respect for the nation.
(Schmitt, 2011b: 103)

The political is here thus also inherently conceived of as the biopolitical. In

Schmitt’s view sovereignty originated in the people and was manifest in their
total mobilisation, albeit by the movement; all of which depended upon a
biopolitical caesura that ‘cut’ into the body politic producing both the people
and those deemed not to belong.
For Agamben, the twentieth century’s ‘biopolitical machine’ involved a
process of continuously dividing, within each individual, ‘animal life from
organic life, the human from the inhuman … until a threshold is reached’; a
180 Großraum
threshold that, ‘like geopolitical borders’, is ‘essentially mobile’ (Agamben,
2002: 156; see Minca, 2007: 93). With the affirmation of biopower, therefore,
‘every ‘people’ is doubled by a ‘population’; every democratic people is, at
the same time, a demographic people’ (Agamben, 1998: 79). However, since
these biopolitical caesurae are essentially mobile, ‘in each case they isolate a
further zone in the continuum [of life], a zone which corresponds to a process
of increasing … degradation’ (ibid.), a zone where life is progressively more
vulnerable and penetrable by the caesura operated by ‘the political’ (see Minca,
2007: 93). This aspect is particularly important to understand the biopolitical
in Schmitt. In borderline situations, for Schmitt, human agency revealed its
truly contingent foundation, its exposure to the risk of absolute disorder.
Politics, in his view, must therefore confront this existential abyss that rests at
the core of modernity, a core full of empty but concrete orders: this meant
that the people, produced as a population by the nation state – to become a
united people – had always to be ready to fight for their own very existence.
To be ready to kill and to die (see also Galli, 2010a: 745). The ultimate aim,
biopower’s ‘final secret’, becomes then that of producing an ‘absolute biopolitical
substance that, in its isolation, allows for the attribution of [every and all]
demographic, ethnic, national and political identity’ (Agamben, 2002: 156;
also, Minca, 2007: 93). If we recall the fact that the actual capacity to identify
a clear distinction between friend and enemy is what makes the people’s con-
crete existence possible, then the principle of exclusion of the enemy was, in
Schmitt’s Nazi years, what allowed for ‘concrete order’ to emerge, in a context
of national ethnic homogeneity.

Today, however, a powerful German Reich has arisen. From what was
only weak and impotent, there has emerged a strong centre of Europe
that is impossible to attack and ready to provide its great political idea,
the respect of every nation as a reality of life determined through species
and origin, blood and soil, with its radiation into the Middle and East
European space, and to reject the interference of spatially alien and
unvölkisch powers. The action of the Führer has lent the concept of our
Reich political reality, historical truth, and a great future in international
law.
(Schmitt, 2011b: 111)

This capacity to identify the enemy is described by Schmitt as indicating a

sort of original energy, a process of aggregation based on exclusion, on the
expulsion of the strangers, the aliens outside the border, or its very neu-
tralization ‘within’ the borders. During the Nazi period, the friend–enemy
distinction thus became something far more radical: while before it contained
a void that needed to be ordered via the artifice of a decision, now, under
Nazi rule, it was presented as a fight between different peoples, character-
ized by unmanageable differences. The process of ‘concrete ordering’ entailed
the elimination from the body politic of all those who do not belong to the
 Großraum 181
people as interpreted by the movement and its leader. Rethinking the
friend/enemy relationship as a form of primary spatialization, Cavalletti sug-
gests (2005: 213), de facto meant translating the reference to a generic ‘demo-
graphic right’ to a proper living space, into a claim for a specific form of
‘concrete order’, in which people and population coincided, and the biological
turned into the biopolitical:

even more meaningful for our new concrete concept of space are the
biological investigations in which … another concept of space has found
acceptance. According to this theory, ‘movement’ for biological knowledge
does not proceed in the hitherto existing space of natural science; rather,
movement produces the spatial and temporal arrangement. The spatial as
such is produced only along with and in objects; [it] corresponds, rather,
to the actual situation, an event.
(Schmitt, 2011b: 123; italics added)

Ultimately, for Schmitt, ‘space became an achievement space-making’, a

genuine biopolitical twist in his thought, since he admitted that ‘these for-
mulations, for which I have the important work of the Heidelberg biologist
Viktor von Weiszacker to thank, can also be fruitful for our spatial problem
in jurisprudence’ (ibid.).
The spatial and the biological, Großraum and Lebensraum, here tended to
blur, revealing a place where the right to the living/vital space for the German
people indeed coincided with the European Großraum dominated by the
German Reich, as envisaged by Schmitt:

Reichs in this sense are the leading and bearing powers whose political
ideas radiate into a certain Großraum and which fundamentally exclude
the interventions of spatially alien powers into this Großraum … the
connection of Reich, Großraum and the non-intervention principles is
fundamental.
(ibid.: 101)

Großraum, when read through these biopolitical lenses, clearly proposed by

Schmitt in the opening pages of ‘The Großraum Order’, could thus be con-
ceived as a new spatial organism, with a specific ‘demographic intensity’:
within its mobile borders, a fully realized Großraum should prevent ontologi-
cal discrepancies, and should be populated by a homogeneous people, the
‘right’ people, and should clearly identify enemies, that is, figures alien to that
same spatial organism (see Cavalletti, 2005: 213).
Hence, rather than theorize a ‘German Monroe Doctrine’, Schmitt claimed
his work presented ‘an application of the idea of spatial order in international
law appropriate to the current political and historical position of the
German Reich and the East European space’ (Schmitt, 2011b: 99–100) and,
since a powerful German Reich had finally emerged, ‘to reject the interference
182 Großraum
of spatially alien and unvölkisch powers’ (ibid.: 111). The rising ‘sun of the
concept of Reich’ (ibid.: 101) had thus created the conditions for the realiza-
tion of a ‘völkisch Großraum order’ in a loosely defined ‘Eastern European
space’. ‘The action of the Führer had lent the concept of our Reich political
reality, historical truth, and a great future in international law’ (ibid.: 111)
he wrote, and ‘this development is bound up to a renewal of legal thinking
that can restore to the word peace its content, to the word homeland the character
of species-determining fundamental distinguishing characteristics’ (ibid.: 124;
italics added).
Schmitt’s concept of Großraum can thus be understood as a vision of a
new political form capable of spatializing the (bio)political, and ordering
distinct populations though spatial division.

The gross failure of Großraum

Despite his grand hopes of providing a theoretical framework for the respa-
tialization of world order, Schmitt’s vision of a Großraum failed both con-
ceptually and politically. Conceptually, Schmitt’s Großraum failed on its own
terms on a number of fronts. In the first instance, it is not clear how Schmitt’s
proposal for the realization of a Central and Eastern European Großraum
was related to the US Monroe Doctrine. Concerning the spatial extent of the
European Großraum Schmitt was in fact rather imprecise, referring at times to
‘East European space’ or ‘Central and Eastern European space’, and at
others to ‘Middle and Eastern European space’ (2011b: 96, 99, 111). This
terminological slippage doubtless reflects Schmitt’s attempt to keep abreast of
the on-going expansion of the Nazi empire, whose limits were not fixed
but in permanent redefinition, and a policy milieu also in constant change.
Regardless, it seems that his theoretical definition was catering to the Nazis’
eastward expansion and did not refer to anything that might be considered
‘continental’ in the sense the Monroe Doctrine had been for the ‘Western
Hemisphere’ (see Nunan, 2011: 16). Hence, one of the key factors necessary
for the realization of a Großraum order was missing in the very case
Schmitt sought to address. His work was thus caught in the antinomies of
attempting to provide a theoretical model for the changing political dynamics
of a specific geopolitical situation. Further, when read in relation to Schmitt’s
broader conception of spatial order, it is not clear how a Großraum order
would have provided a framework for governing the relations between poli-
tical entities and, at the same time, limit warfare. Indeed, Gyorgy also
noted that Schmitt’s work did ‘not offer any guidance to the legal relation-
ships of individual greater areas, or Großräume’ (1944: 266). Großraum was a
‘failure from the very outset’ because it failed to ‘set up legal norms gov-
erning the relationships of these regions inter se’ (ibid.: 267). The realities of
Nazi rule for which these writings were aimed at providing support, in particular
Hitler’s expansionism and, eventually, call for ‘total war’ and genocidal
practices, were certainly not producing anything like a limitation of conflict.
 Großraum 183
Perhaps more serious from the perspective of Schmitt’s own understanding
of spatial order was the fact that his Großraum order hoped to achieve a
balance between several ‘greater space powers’ that was planetary in scope.
The problem with this, according to Schmitt’s own terms, was that this fra-
mework provided no space of ‘outside’ that would make balanced relations
between Großräume possible and effective. In Schmitt’s view, the previous
European interstate balance had in fact relied upon a double global spatial
division between (i) Europe and the New World and (ii) land and sea. A
balance of power within Europe was achieved precisely because a constitutive
(unregulated) ‘outside’ existed, where antagonism could be played out. We
will return extensively to this vision of global order in the coming chapters,
but for now, it may suffice to say that Schmitt’s global Großraum order pro-
vided no such constitutive outside and seemed to simply place hope in the
ordering capacity of spatial difference as such. The division of the globe into
a number of Großräume might have allowed for an actual re-spatialization of
the political, but lacking any clear mechanism for governing their relations, and
with no ‘outside’ into which antagonism could be displaced. Schmitt provided
no indication of the means by which war could be contained. This was a fatal
oversight given that the limitation of war was for him the essential aim of
political order. Thus, even within his own terms, Großraum was a rather poor
attempt to theorize a new global order based upon a new political form.
Schmitt’s Großraum theory was also a failure politically. His vision of a
European Großraum led by a German Reich had been reduced to rubble by
the end of the Second World War. Further, the global reordering that emerged
from the ashes did not take the form of a new multipolar order based upon a
number of independent continental Großräume as he had envisaged. In the
years directly preceding the war Schmitt had indeed argued that the realities
of global power already reflected the existence of a Großraum order, even if
international law was yet to catch up. Ironically, however, the Nazi attempt to
formalize their own regional hegemony in a policy of aggressive expansion led
to a world war that erased any implicit balance between Großräume, as theo-
rized by Schmitt. The Second World War had served to dramatically extend
the global power of the United States and marked its decisive rejection of
continental isolation in favour of global interventionism. The formerly
sovereign states of Europe were maintained as hollowed out shells, the
‘meaningless fossils’ of magni homines (Schmitt, 2003a: 248). Europe was
partitioned between the universalist powers of East and West, both equally
committed to what, in Schmitt’s eyes, was the common civilizational horizon
of technical-industrial development and the utopia of world unity. The
Second World War had also served as the catalyst for an intensification of the
spatial disorder Schmitt already understood to have characterized the inter-
war years. In the immediate post-war years, regardless of the evidence of
emerging Cold War geopolitics, Schmitt clung to the hope that a new order of
the earth could be constructed around a number of continental Großräume.
Yet the new realities of global power made this appear the geopolitical
184 Großraum
fantasy of a reactionary Don Quixote rather than the vision of the realist sage
Schmitt fashioned himself as in the wake of German defeat.

Notes
1 Indeed, this was a practice Schmitt had already begun to follow, often adding ‘the
Jew’ as a prefix before the names of authors such as Stahl, Spinoza, and so on. On
this see also Gross, 2007; Zarka, 2005.
2 In contrast to the interests of the English, which commanded a ‘view of the entire
world’ and those of France which commanded a view of all Europe, Schmitt
described the interests of Germany as those of ‘a people interested primarily in its
industry, focused on the next moment, the next breath’ (ibid.: 292). Schmitt here
not only evokes emotive language that emphasizes the suffering of an ‘exhausted,
tormented people who seek above all calm and peace’ (ibid.: 293), but a biopoli-
tical understanding of the German Volk: a population, strangled by occupation,
fighting for its last breath. Likewise, whilst quite reasonably arguing that France
wanted to use the Treaty of Versailles to maintain its military and political hege-
mony on the European continent, he employed the image of a battle to the death
between peoples for living space. France, he argued, sought to preserve ‘the mili-
tary and political dominance of an armed nation of forty million over an unarmed
people of sixty million: an armed people with a falling birth rate over an unarmed,
sharply growing people whose industry is vainly seeking an outlet’ (ibid.: 292).
Although the occupation of the Rhine was something that clearly affected him at
the personal level it was evident even in this early text from 1925 that Schmitt
considered the relationship between sovereignty and the borders of the German
state to have bearing on the biological life of the people, something that, as we
have seen, had deep implications for the later development of his biopolitical
understanding of spatial politics during the Nazi years.
3 Schmitt highlighted that even European thinkers were not immune to the draw of
this depoliticizing logic, noting that Joseph Schumpeter had likewise argued in a
1919 book (The Sociology of Imperialism) that the United States, unlike the Prus-
sians, was not imperialistic, as its expansion was economic and therefore peaceful
(ibid.). In The Concept of The Political he again pointed to Schumpeter’s naiveté in
believing that a political position founded on economic superiority is ‘essential
unwarlike’ (ibid.).
4 Schmitt’s comments regarding the power of the United States to ‘forge for itself its
own concepts’ (ibid.: 44) might be read in light of his own attempts, beginning the
following year, to establish a particularly German understanding of empire, or
Reich: ‘It is unthinkable that a Great Power, and still less, that an imperialistic
world power, would commit itself to a codex of firm norms and concepts that an
externally situated foreigner could turn against it’ (ibid.: 35).
5 In many ways the structure of the pirate in international law mirrors the status of
the Homo Sacer, the correlate of modern sovereign power for Agamben (1988) at
once excluded from and subject to the law. For an erudite and informative gen-
ealogy of the figure of the pirate, as the ‘enemy of all’, that engages extensively
with Schmitt’s commentary on piracy and the international laws of war in the
twentieth century see Daniel Heller-Roazen’s superb The Enemy of All: Piracy and
the Law of Nations (2009).
6 In the article ‘Neutrality According to International Law and National Totality’,
published in 1938, Schmitt went so far as suggesting that the ‘total world view’
that produced an international law that dissolved the distinction between warring
and neutral parties was a greater threat to peace than National Socialism: ‘The
non-discriminatory war between states changes itself into an international civil war
 Großraum 185
and therewith it achieves a kind of totality that is as horrid and destructive as
everything of which a facile propaganda has accused the national totality’ (1999c:
44–45).
7 Schmitt noted that the League of Nations was structured around a contradiction
between federalism and universalism, being at once a federation of states but
wedded to concepts of justice and war whose horizon were universal. ‘The Geneva
League of Nations,’ he wrote, ‘may not yet be universal and ecumenical, [but] it must
eventually be so and at least recognize universalism as the final goal’ (ibid.: 70).
8 Matthew Hannah, who recently translated two of Schmitt’s 1930s texts on geopo-
litics and international law, argues that Großraum has been rendered in a range of
ways, ‘all of which have in common, first, the idea of a territorial expanse exceed-
ing the geographical boundaries of a single state, and second, the idea that a single
hegemonic power actually or at least potentially dominates this region politically
despite the nominal independence of states within its sphere. Thus “territorial
sphere of control,” “sphere of influence,” “global region” are all possible transla-
tions’ (Hannah, 2011: 52). In the light of the above, and of the fact that it is easily
understood, we will maintain the original term, treating it as ‘greater space’.
9 Schmitt’s comments here on the key role of industrialization, infrastructure, plan-
ning and organization of energy production and distribution in the development of
Großraum powers echo comments he made in his work elsewhere about the ‘elec-
trification’ of the earth and the role it played in the relationship between the
acceleration of historical development and the intensification of processes of
globalization. We return to the significance of this in Chapter 7.
10 Some months after the original edition of ‘The Großraum Order’ appeared in 1939
Schmitt published another article addressing Großraum, titled ‘Großraum versus
Universalism: The International Legal Struggle over the Monroe Doctrine’
(Schmitt, 2011c). This short polemical screed emphasized the critique of capitalism
in relation to US foreign policy and the ‘falsification’ of the Monroe Doctrine.
Although it represents one of Schmitt’s most ‘anti-capitalist’ texts it shows that this
critique is tightly wound up with his antipathy to the expansionist foreign policy of
the US, economic imperialism and liberal depoliticization being opposite sides of
the same coin as we have seen already.
11 Schmitt argued that this followed a pattern of thought at the beginning of the
twentieth century whereby ‘a concrete, spatially determined concept of order’ was
dissolved into a ‘universalist “world” [idea]’ (ibid.).
12 Schmitt argued that this principle of respect for every national group’s unique
nature found expression in Hitler’s Reichstag declaration of 20 February 1938 on
the ‘German right to protection of German national groups of foreign state citi-
zenship’ (ibid.: 99). Further, he claimed that the ‘purpose’ of the German–Russian
Border and Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939 was to ‘guarantee to the
peoples living there a peaceful existence corresponding to their Völkisch unique
nature’ (ibid.: 100).
13 In his influential biographical account, Balakrishnan (2000: 203) confirms that
during the 1930s and early 1940s Schmitt was frequently regarded by those outside
Germany as the ‘official philosopher’ of the Nazi state.
14 The sequence of dates proves little either way about the chain of influence. Rib-
bentrop referenced the Monroe Doctrine in a 4 March meeting. Schmitt’s speech in
Kiel was on 1 April and reached its first publication on 29 April, the day after
Hitler’s Reichstag speech.
15 Frank was himself influential in the Nazi reign of terror in Eastern Europe, acting
as Governor-General of occupied Poland’s ‘General Government’ between 1939
and 1945. He was tried for war crimes at Nuremburg and executed (see Housden,
2003).
16 For more on Geojurisprudence and Haushofer see Murphy, 1998.
186 Großraum
17 Indeed, Gyorgy shows little understanding of Schmitt’s thought in general and
goes so far as to compare his theory of greater spaces to Hans Kelsen’s ‘pure
theory of law’ to which, on the contrary, Schmitt conceived of his work in direct
opposition (ibid.: 266).
18 See for example Gyorgy’s discussion of other Geojurisprudence thinkers such as
Hans K. E. L. Keller and Eduard Bristler (1944: 265–269).
19 See Introduction, also Chapters 7 and 8; and Heffernan’s (2011) discussion on the
relationship between Schmitt and German Geography of the day.
7 Spatial histories

Man [sic] is not a creature wholly conditioned by his medium. Through his-
tory, he has the ability to get the better of his existence and his consciousness.
He is aware not only of the act of birth, but also of the possibility of a
rebirth … Man can choose, and at certain moments in his history, he may
even go so far, through a gesture peculiar to him, as to change himself into a
new form of his historical existence.
Carl Schmitt, 1942

Each time the forces of history cause a new breach, the surge of new energies
brings new lands and new seas into the visual field of human awareness, the
spaces of historical existence undergo a corresponding change. Hence new
criteria appear alongside new dimensions of political and historical activity,
new sciences, new social systems; nations are born or reborn.
Carl Schmitt, 1942

The day world politics comes to the earth, it will be transformed into a world
police power. That is a dubious progress!
Carl Schmitt, 1978

Schmitt’s post-war work is often considered to be characterized by a ‘spatial

turn’ (see for example Kervégan, 1999), and indeed much of the recent sec-
ondary literature focuses principally, if not wholly, on his most well known
and accomplished post-war book, 1950’s The Nomos of the Earth, and to a
somewhat lesser extent The Theory of the Partisan from 1963. Spatial themes
certainly dominate these late works but, as we have argued in previous chap-
ters, approaching these writings either as distinct from Schmitt’s earlier work
or as representative of his late spatial thought as a whole, not only fails to
consider how many of the ‘spatial’ themes and concepts that appear in The
Nomos emerged beforehand, but also overlooks some of the key developments
in his spatial thought in the immediately preceding years. Indeed, it is
common for analyses of Schmitt’s work to dwell either on his Weimar years or
on The Nomos and The Partisan whilst paying relatively little attention to the
works that appeared in between. In our view, the intervening period is crucial
in the development of Schmitt’s spatial thought, and his work more broadly,
188 Spatial histories
not least because it was during these years that he produced his theory of
Großraum, as examined in Chapter 6. However, it is also during these years
that Schmitt started to develop a key aspect of his late thought that has lar-
gely been neglected in his recent reception in Geography, and related discussions
in International Relations: a spatial history of modernity. Not only is this
‘spatial history’ one of the most fascinating and unexplored elements of
Schmitt’s oeuvre, which deserves attention in its own right, but it plays a
central structural role in his late work and is therefore key to understanding
his conceptualization of spatial order, or nomos, that will be addressed in the
next chapter. Indeed, the fact that studies of Schmitt’s late spatial thought by
and large focus on The Nomos without reading it in relation to his ‘spatial
history’ means that important aspects of that book might appear to be mar-
ginal notes or literary flourishes. Hence, before going on to examine the cen-
tral aspects of The Nomos and The Partisan in the following and final chapter
it is important to contextualize those works in relation to the spatial history
developed in the years before, which did so much to frame them.
Although Schmitt had already reflected on the philosophy of history in the
1920s, with works such as Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Political
Theology and The Age of Depoliticizations and Neutralizations, he first
examined it through an explicitly spatial lens only in The Leviathan in 1938.
In ‘The Großraum Order’ these reflections began to take shape in an ambi-
tious account of the spatial history of modernity, or rather, an account of
modernity as a period defined by the emergence and development of global
space, although it was in Land and Sea, published in 1943, that this theme
came to the fore most clearly. Although many of the themes and concepts
later addressed in The Nomos first appeared here, this key work has for the
most part remained relatively marginal to Anglophone debates around
Schmitt’s spatial thought.1 Indeed, even though the ‘spatial history’ can be
traced from here directly into key late works like The Nomos and The Partisan,
where it plays a key structuring role, it nonetheless remains somewhat
obscure, advancing as it does through a series of fragments and allusions
scattered across a variety of works and in a number of idioms, rather than finding
systematic articulation in a single text, or even a single conceptual register.2
Hence, in the coming pages we aim to excavate and reconstruct what is at
times a subterranean, albeit fundamental, dimension of Schmitt’s thought,
that has all too often been neglected in analyses of his late work. Accordingly,
we first sketch the contours of Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity, plotting
the relationship he charted between the history of modernity and the emer-
gence and development of global space, and the bearing this ‘globalization’
has on the nature of political order. We then examine two inter-related con-
ceptual registers showing how each shaped his account of this spatial history:
first, a mythical account of the relationship between geo-elemental geo-
graphies and social formations, and second, an eschatological Christian con-
ception of history. We hope that by situating his late work in relation to the
frequently overlooked spatio-historical framework in which it takes shape we
 Spatial histories 189
can provide a fuller appreciation of the conceptual trajectory along which his
spatial thought developed and better grasp the nature and stakes of his late
geopolitical reflections examined in the next chapter.

Modernity and global spatial revolutions

During the early 1940s Schmitt began to develop an understanding of human
history as forged by radical shifts in the conception of space and related spa-
tial practices which he described as ‘spatial revolutions’ (1997: 28), and an
attendant account of modernity as inherently interwoven with the emergence
of global space. Further, although he had already been exploring political
forms beyond the spatial frame of the state in ‘The Großraum Order’, it was
during this period that he started to approach the question of political order
as a planetary concern, an issue relating to the totality of global space. These
ideas, which appeared first in nascent form in the later editions of ‘The
Großraum Order’ before receiving fuller articulation in the 1942 book Land
and Sea, and eventually in The Nomos, were to profoundly shape the sub-
sequent development of Schmitt’s political thought.3 Indeed, the trajectory of
modernity’s unique spatial history was of upmost importance for Schmitt as he
not only considered the future of global order to be at stake in its development,
but the very continuity of human existence as such.

Spatial revolutions
Crucial in understanding Schmitt’s conception of the relationship between
space and history is the idea of a ‘spatial revolution’. He first introduced this
concept, and elaborated it most fully, in Land and Sea, a book originally
composed as a sort of world-historical fairy tale to be read as a bedtime story
for his daughter Anima. A spatial revolution is an event that marks a massive
transformation in the material geographic conditions of human societies and
their understanding of space. Yet, changes in material conditions, whether the
discovery of hitherto unknown lands or the passage through new dimensions
of space opened by new technologies of navigation, transport or commu-
nication, do not alone amount to a spatial revolution. A true spatial revolu-
tion requires a shift in the very understanding of space, a transformation of
what he described as ‘spatial consciousness’: a change ‘so profound and so
sudden that it alters not only man’s outlook, standards and criteria, but also
the very notion of space’ (1997: 29). A spatial revolution presupposes ‘more
than just setting foot on land previously unknown’ and ‘assumes the trans-
formation of the notion of space at all levels and in all … aspects of human
existence’ (ibid.: 36). A transformation of this kind marks not only a change
in the human perception of space but also in the conception of the possibi-
lities and limitations opened to human experience and social organization by
these new dimensions of space, the former being a condition for the latter.
Hence, spatial revolutions were epoch-making insofar as they prompted a new
190 Spatial histories
phase in the historical development of human understanding and socio-spatial
possibilities. Indeed, he noted that, ‘all important changes in history, more
often than not imply a new perception of space’ (ibid.: 29).
Nevertheless, this did not mean that Schmitt adhered to a crude environ-
mental determinism, where causal relations existed between material change
and epistemological shifts. Rather, in Land and Sea he emphasized the
dynamic and mutually constitutive relationship between shifting geographic
formations, both material and social, and the dynamic and plural nature of
spatial imaginaries. Indeed, in a fascinating example, he noted that it is
uncertain whether the ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ by Europeans prompted
European mathematics to develop the space of the void or vice versa.4 Fur-
ther, he repeatedly stressed the importance of the English existential ‘decision
for the sea’ – the decision to adopt an ‘exclusively maritime existence’ – on
the course of modern European, and world, history (ibid.: 51). The English, a
nation of ‘sheep farmers’, were able to become ‘children of the sea’ and build
a world empire based upon the domination of the oceans precisely because
human social formations were not wholly determined by geographic environ-
ments, and socio-spatial relations could be shaped by collective decision.
Indeed, in a passage that might surprise some of those eager to assume a gulf
between Schmitt’s thought and contemporary debates in academic Human
Geography, he emphasized the plurality, historical contingency and subjective
constitution of human relationships to space:

Man (sic.) has a clear awareness of his space, which historically is subject
to deep-going perturbations. To the plurality of forms of existence corre-
sponds an equal plurality of spaces. … The plurality of skills or profes-
sions introduces a different environment in the acts of everyday life of
each one of us. The inhabitant of a big city has a different image of the
world than does a farmer. A whale hunter has a vital space that differs
from that of an opera-singer. Life and the world are seen in a different
light by an airplane pilot, and they have different dimensions, depths, and
horizons. The differences in the perception of space are even larger and
deeper among various nations and among the various periods in the history
of mankind.
(ibid.: 28)

Thus, it is clear that Schmitt understood the relationship between shifts in

spatial imaginaries and changes in material spatialities to be mutually con-
stitutive, but the important fact to note is that for a true spatial revolution to
take place both dimensions – material and conceptual – must be transformed.
Spatial revolutions had, Schmitt noted, occurred throughout history,
marking the beginning of every new historical epoch, but global spatial revo-
lutions were a phenomenon specific to modernity. In Schmitt’s account all pre-
modern spatial revolutions had been ‘local’ rather than global, and had been
bound to specific regional or cultural spheres and civilizations that identified
 Spatial histories 191
themselves as the centre of the ‘world’, either lacking knowledge of planetary
geography or assuming that the ‘other worlds’ that lay beyond their bounds
were of a different order.5 Indeed, it was the very globality of modern spatial
revolutions that defined their modernity, and further, this globality defined
modernity as such. Hence, for Schmitt, modernity was not simply a historical
periodization, but a spatio-historical category defined by the emergence, for
the first time, of global space as a ‘social fact’.
Nevertheless, in Schmitt’s account, modernity was not constituted by a
single global spatial revolution, but rather two, each with a distinct world-
historical character and particular political implications. The ‘first complete
spatial revolution on a planetary scale’ emerged with the European ‘discovery’
of the ‘New World’ and the circumnavigation of the globe between the fif-
teenth and seventeenth centuries (1997: 33).6 For the first time the picture of
the world as globe became a reality (for Europeans). However, this ‘spatial
revolution’ did not indicate simply ‘a quantitative enlargement of the geo-
graphic skyline’, but a fundamental shift in the conception of space itself, and
spawned a new form of ‘planetary consciousness’ (2003a: 86), at least for the
Europeans who came to collectively dominate new lands, new spaces and new
peoples – the impact of colonization on the native peoples of the ‘New World’
and the spatial imaginaries they harboured or developed are of no interest to
the resolutely Eurocentric Schmitt. Indeed, whilst the new spatial conscious-
ness produced by this revolution was global in scope it remained Eurocentric
in character, not only driven by European colonialism but taking shape in a
specifically Eurocentric form of international law in the jus publicum Euro-
paeum (Schmitt’s account of which we examine in detail in the next chapter).
Not only did this spatial revolution bring new continents, oceans and peoples
into the sphere of European power and international law, but they fundamen-
tally altered it in turn, helping give rise to a new political form – the modern
secular state – and new forms of power in the shape of the worldwide mar-
itime empires of Britain and later the United States, that would eventually
come to challenge the very same Eurocentric order.
Schmitt located the second global spatial revolution in the twentieth cen-
tury, with the emergence of radical new dimensions of human experience and
vectors of power opened by the development of new technologies of trans-
port, communication, energy and, crucially, war. Schmitt had already noted
in the 1941 edition of ‘The Großraum Order’ that, ‘change in the concept of
space is underway today in all areas of human inquiry and activity with
powerful depth and breadth’ (2011b: 118), but in Land and Sea he went fur-
ther, directly identifying these transformations with the beginnings of a
second global spatial revolution. If the first global spatial revolution had
produced a truly global space for the first time, then the second marked a
technological intensification of this globalization process, the political impli-
cations of which were not yet clear.7 Yet, if, as Schmitt argued in Land and
Sea, ‘every important change in the image of the Earth is inseparable from a
political transformation’, then this second global spatial revolution was sure
192 Spatial histories
to have profound political implications (1997: 38). Indeed, he had already
noted in ‘The Großraum Order’ that, ‘the great geopolitical events of the
present [contain] at their core such a change in the hitherto existing concep-
tions of space and presuppositions of space’ (2011b: 118). In the conclusion
to Land and Sea he included an optimistic note, speculating that a new
ordering of planetary space would emerge alongside this second global spatial
revolution that, the ‘fiercest confrontation between old and new forces [will]
generate just standards and criteria and forge new dimensions loaded with
meaning’ (1997: 59). Yet, at the very core of his reflections on the spatial
history of modernity lay a concern that the second global spatialization was
not only failing to generate such ordering measures of global space, but was
in fact systematically undermining the conditions for global order as such.

World unity and nihilistic anarchy

For Schmitt, the second global spatial revolution was accompanied by a
paradoxically ‘spaceless’ spatial consciousness that was undermining histor-
ical awareness of the concrete, situated nature of political relations and the
fundamental importance of spatial division in the production of political
order. Hence, in Schmitt’s view, a gulf was opening in the twentieth century
between the emerging spatial consciousness and the demands of political
ordering, exacerbating the epochal crisis of political form that the century
found itself embroiled within. Hence, although this paradoxically ‘spaceless’
spatial consciousness was in many respects driving the development of the
spatio-historical trajectory of modernity, and its political implications, it was
nonetheless symptomatic of broader conceptual changes effecting the twen-
tieth century, not least of which was the dominance of technological thinking.
Hence, the new spatial consciousness emerging in the twentieth century was
not only shaped by rapid technological change but bore the stamp of tech-
nological thinking. In ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticization’
(1929) Schmitt had identified ‘technological thinking’ as the ‘central intellec-
tual domain’ governing twentieth century thought, tracing its influence on the
liberal drive towards depoliticization and neutralization and its role in
undermining the state form. However, in his key works from the 1940s and
1950s, he began to examine the bearing the dominance of ‘technological think-
ing’ had on conceptions of space, and hence the fundamental relationship
between space and the political that lay at the core of his work.
For Schmitt, the influence of technological thought on twentieth century
spatial consciousness was most evident in the widespread belief that through
the development of modern technologies a new form of global space had been
produced: a singular, universal, homogenous globe without division – or, as
he later referred to it, a ‘terrifying world without exterior’ (in Ojakangas,
2007: 16).8 This spatial consciousness in awe of technological globalization
was of course familiar to the ‘mathematical-neutral, empty concept of space’
that he had associated with the Jewish ‘way of life’ in ‘The Großraum Order’,
 Spatial histories 193
and to which he had contrasted the powerful ‘qualitative’ conception of vital
space emanating from the Nazi Reich (2007b: 79).9 Such a conception of
space extended the quantitative totality that Schmitt had earlier identified
with the liberal total state (in ‘Further Development of the Total State’) from
the domain of the state to that of the earth, rendering not only the state but also
the globe itself a giant mechanism (see Schmitt, 2008d). Indeed, the political
consequences of this ‘spaceless’ spatial consciousness were clear to Schmitt in
the idea that increasing globalization in the technical sphere was laying the
foundations for world unity in the political domain. Indeed, he argued that a
commitment to world unity was common to all the dominant forces shaping
global politics in the twentieth century, given that universalism and the belief
in technology as a progressive force had become the default setting for poli-
tics, whether capitalist or socialist. This was a theme Schmitt had touched on
as early as 1922 when he argued in Roman Catholicism and Political Form
that capitalism and socialism were both committed to realizing an ‘electrified
earth’ (1996: 13). Indeed, he would repeat this view in his last text, ‘The Legal
World Revolution’, published in 1978 in the midst of the Cold War, claiming
that both ideological poles were beholden to the same forces of ‘englobement’
and ultimately aimed towards a technological appropriation of the planet
itself, what he called a Weltraumnahme (1987b: 78).10
The danger in this conception of space, in Schmitt’s view, was thus that it
risked turning the planet into a utopia: a non-place offering no meaningful
orientation (‘no starting point, location, and viewpoint’, 2008b: 46), and
allowing no spatial distinctions upon which to ground political order and
limit conflict. Indeed, in The Nomos, when reflecting upon the emergence of
the concept of utopia with Thomas More’s 1516 book Schmitt argued that:

Manifest in … the word Utopia, was the possibility of an enormous

destruction of all orientations … Utopia did not mean any simple and
general nowhere (or erewhon), but a U-topos, which, by comparison even
with its negation, A-topos, has a stronger negation in relation to topos.
(2003: 178)

Hence, the ‘spaceless’ conception of global space that was emerging in the
twentieth century was not just in keeping with the ‘total rootlessness of
modern technology’ (ibid.), but also had its correlate in utopian political
thinking. For Schmitt, the result could only be a historically unique form of
nihilistic anarchy, and a politics defined by meaningless violence.11 As he
wrote in The Nomos:

If ‘nihilism’ is not to become an empty phrase, one must comprehend the

specific negativity whereby it obtains its historical place: its topos. Only in
this way can the nihilism of the 19th and 20th centuries be distinguished
from the anarchistic conditions of the Christian Middle Ages. In the
connection between utopia and nihilism it becomes apparent that only a
194 Spatial histories
conclusive and fundamental separation of order and orientation can be
called ‘nihilism’ in a historically specific sense.
(2003: 66)

We will return to examine the specific importance of the relationship between

‘order and orientation’ in Schmitt’s conception of spatial order, or nomos, in
the next chapter, but the important point to stress here is the relationship he
established between a utopian (spaceless) conception of space and nihilistic
anarchy in the domain of the political.12
Indeed, for Schmitt, a state of nihilistic anarchy was the necessary result of
a ‘spaceless’ concept of global space insofar as the latter provided no basis for
drawing meaningful spatial distinctions from which order might arise. In
other words, a unified, homogeneous global space provided no way to spa-
tialize the political and therefore no way to ground order so as to limit con-
flict. Rather, a spaceless global space resulted in the radical despatialization of
the political at the global scale, and hence the loss of all those limits by which
conflict was constrained. A political space, for Schmitt, was necessarily a
divided space, and as such world unity could not be a political goal, nor a
unified world a political space. Imagining it to be so marked a failure to
understand the nature of the political and allowed conflict – previously lim-
ited to the bounds between clearly identifiable and spatially distinct political
entities – to exceed all bounds and escalate into a formless state of unlimited
global anarchy. Hence, lurking within the technologically informed spatial
consciousness of the twentieth century, and the utopian dreams of world unity
to which it gave rise, Schmitt consistently located the nightmare vision of a
technologically fuelled ‘global civil war’ (in Ulmen, 2007a: xx).
Nonetheless, although the horizon of the political had been radically
altered by the emergence of global space with the European ‘age of dis-
covery’, there was no iron law in the spatio-historical sequence this initiated,
no determining Geist inexorably led towards world unity and the nihilistic
anarchy of ‘global civil war’. Indeed, the jus publicum Europaeum – the
Eurocentric system of international law that was dominant between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries – was evidence that it was possible to
produce a global order based on the division of planetary space. Hence, the
key task of international politics was to develop political forms capable of
respatializing the political at a global scale in order to change the course of
global spatio-historical developments from their path towards world unity.
Hence, the great political struggle of the age was between those forces push-
ing towards a disordered, spaceless world unity and those taking measures to
establish a new planetary order based on the division of global space. In the
next chapter we will return to his concept of spatial order in more detail and
discuss his analysis of, and proposed solutions for, the despatialization of the
political in the twentieth century. In what follows, however, we examine two
key conceptual registers in which Schmitt plotted his spatial history of mod-
ernity, and that provided the subterranean Arcanum of his late spatial
 Spatial histories 195
speculations: geo-elemental mythology and eschatological political theology. In
order to understand the more normative aspects of Schmitt’s late spatial thought
found in The Nomos – what has been called his ‘realist institutionalism’ – it is
important to first engage with the more obscure conceptual undercurrents
that nourished it (see Colombo, 2007).

Geo-elemental mythologies of land and sea

Land and Sea is arguably not only Schmitt’s most curious book but also his
most ‘geographic’, even including engagements with geographers such as
Ernst Kapp and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Yet the status of geographic thought
within it remains uncertain. This uncertainty revolves around the key role that
the geo-elemental geographies of land, sea and air occupy in his account of
the spatial history of modernity. Although the book takes its title from these
geo-elemental geographies and despite the fact that they occupy a central
position in its argument, they nonetheless remain conceptually ambiguous.
On the one hand, Schmitt appealed to these geo-elemental geographies as
hard, pre-social material grounds that shape different forms of social reality,
special consciousness and the political, whilst on the other, he evoked them by
way of mythical tropes drawn from a number of different cultural and his-
torical domains. Indeed, Land and Sea opens with a reflection on the repre-
sentation of land and sea in various myths and legends and a discussion of
the four Pre-Socratic ‘elements’ – earth, water, air and fire – which he noted,
have ‘remained a living notion that could not be uprooted, despite all the
objections raised by science’ (1997: 4). Further, Schmitt warned that in his
discussion of land and sea, the elements ‘must not be regarded as purely sci-
entific entities, lest they dissolve into chemical substances, in other words, into
historical nothingness’ (ibid.). Whilst these opening sections of the book
clearly aim to conjure a sense of esoteric mystique and world-historical gran-
deur, they also mark a statement of intent insofar as Schmitt declared his
intent to ‘ground’ his geographical speculations, and his engagement with
geo-elemental geographies, in the realm of myth. Indeed, as he later noted
in the Foreword to The Nomos, although his work took influence from
Geography his thought was shaped more profoundly by mythical thought.

I am much indebted to geographers, most of all to Mackinder, [yet]

nevertheless, a juridical way of thinking is far different from geography.
Jurists have not learned their science of matter and soil, reality and
territoriality from geographers … the ties to mythological sources of
jurisprudential thinking are much deeper than those of geography.
(Schmitt, 2003a: 37)13

Hence, in his late spatial thought, Schmitt affirms the importance of myth
to political thought that he had earlier theorized in a different context in
The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. However, Schmitt’s reflections on
196 Spatial histories
geo-elemental geographies should be no less interesting for geographers for
being grounded in myth, or passed over as merely decorative, given that they
offer insights into his understanding of the spatial history of modernity and
the geopolitical struggles that he believed to have shaped it.

Leviathan and Behemoth

Central to Schmitt’s account of the spatial history of modernity, as presented
in Land and Sea and The Nomos in particular, is the distinction between
land and sea. He argued that these two geo-elements had determined two
distinct forms of human existence, one terrestrial and the other maritime, each
with its own set of concepts of power, war and law. From land and sea
emerged ‘two different worlds’ (Schmitt, 1997: 48). Further, it was the
struggle between these two forms of existence, and the two forms of power
they inhabited, that drove the history of modernity: ‘World history is the his-
tory of the wars waged by maritime powers against land or continental
powers’ (ibid.: 5).14 Schmitt suggested that this ‘elemental opposition between
land and sea had been acknowledged throughout history’ (ibid.: 6), and cited
the many variations of the mythical battle between great beasts of land
and sea, Behemoth and Leviathan, as testament to the enduring importance
of this distinction in human affairs. The contrast between Leviathan and
Behemoth had appeared in the Bible, in story of the Book of Job, and the
writings of the Cabbalist tradition, and even in the nineteenth century ‘the
tensions between Russia and England were given the popular image of a
scuffle between a bear and a whale’ (ibid.: 6). Indeed, he recounted a Cabb-
alist version of the battle between Behemoth and Leviathan as an allegory
both of the battle between land and sea powers and implicitly of the cor-
rupting influence of ‘Jewish’ thought in the history of the modern European
state.

According to the cabbalists, Behemoth tries to tear Leviathan to pieces

with its horns and teeth, while in turn, Leviathan tries hard to stop the
land animal’s mouth and nostrils with its flaps and fins in order to
deprive it of food and air. This is a graphic illustration, which only the
mythological imagery can convey, of the blockade to which a sea power
subjects a land power by cutting its supplies in order to starve it to death.
In the end, the two opponents kill each other. But the cabbalists go on to
say that the Jews solemnly observe the millennial festival ‘The Feast of
Leviathan’.
(ibid.)

In this version of the story – allegedly based upon the work of the fifteenth
century Iberian scholar and statesman Isaac Abravanel – the Jews stand back
and watch the Leviathan and the Behemoth – stand-ins for the worldly
powers of the gentiles – fight and kill one another, and then feast on the
 Spatial histories 197
bodies of the slain beasts, dividing them up amongst themselves. In reading
this as a parable of the modern state’s fate Schmitt clearly introduced an anti-
Semitic dimension to the critique of liberalism that had long been central to
his thought; although this reading had been prefigured by some years in The
Leviathan, where he first discussed the biblical image of a great battle between
Behemoth and Leviathan.15 This serves as an example of how Schmitt’s
account of the relations between land and sea operated freely across the geo-
political and mythological registers simultaneously. Yet, in order to under-
stand how they were bound together in his spatial history of modernity it is
important to try to understand the relationship between the geo-elements and
forms of social relations to which Schmitt claimed they gave rise.
Although Schmitt suggested that the struggle between land and sea can
account for historical change, the opening lines of Land and Sea make it clear
that it is the ‘land’ that occupies a primary place in his spatial imaginary.

Man is a terrestrial, an earthling. He lives, moves and walks on the

firmly-grounded Earth. It is his standpoint and his base. He derives his
points of view from it, which is also to say that his impressions are
determined by it and his world outlook is conditioned by it … Earth-
born, developing on it, man derives not only his horizon from it, but also
his poise, his movements, his figure and his height.
(1997: 1)

‘Among the four elements (earth, water, air and fire), it is the first,’ Schmitt
claimed, ‘which leaves its mark on him to the fullest’ (ibid.: 1–2). Nonetheless,
he acknowledged that it is not clear whether humans are ‘essentially and
exclusively earthly and earth-oriented’ (ibid.), noting that:

The question of whether a human existence other than strictly terrestrial

is possible has more sense than it appears at first sight. It is enough for
you to go to the seaside and glance into the distance from the shore: the
immense surface of the sea will occupy [your entire] horizon. Is it not
remarkable that a human being standing on the shore would direct its
eyes quite naturally from the land towards the sea and not the other way
round, that is, from the sea to the land? In people’s deepest and often
unconscious memories, water and the sea are the mysterious and pri-
mordial source of all life. In their legends and in their myths, most peo-
ples conjure up deities and human beings emerging not only from the
ground but also from the sea.
(1997: 2)

History has seen, he noted, both ‘autochthonous’ and autothalassical’ peoples

and indeed human life is defined by its flexibility and capacity to adapt to
changing conditions rather than by the determinations of land or sea alone.
198 Spatial histories
[The] implicit determinisms, and particularly the land and maritime
forms of historical existence do not act according to a compulsory and
mechanical program … Were man merely a living being wholly deter-
mined by his environment, he would accordingly be a ground animal, a
fish, a bird, or still, a fantastical combination of these elemental deter-
minants. … Human life would be entirely programmed by nature, as
would be its destiny, in the way plants and animals are … There would be
no human history in the sense of a history of man’s acts and decisions.
(ibid.: 4–5)

Despite these qualifications regarding the relative indeterminacy of the

human condition, it is nonetheless clear that it is to land, and its apparent
order-bearing capacity, that Schmitt’s affections and intellect were drawn and
to which he repeatedly returned.

Land and sea

Although the distinction between land and sea is the explicit focus of his
book by that name Schmitt elaborated the relationship between each element
and the form of social order it determines more fully in The Nomos. There
he claimed that, ‘every ontonomous and ontological judgement derives from
the land’ (2003a: 45). ‘In mythical language, the earth became known as the
mother of law’ and signified a ‘three-fold root of law and justice’ (ibid.: 42).
In this mythical frame:

The earth is bound to law in three ways. She contains law within herself,
as a reward of labor; she manifests law upon herself, as fixed boundaries;
and she sustains law above herself, as a public sign of order.
(ibid.)16

The crucial point here is that the land, insofar as it is both divisible and stable,
has an inherently representational quality that allows order to become visible
in clear lines of demarcation. Thus, land – as the ‘terrestrial fundament’ – has
the capacity to ground order precisely because it can be marked out so as to
represent distinctions and divisions that bear order.
By contrast, ‘the sea knows no such apparent unity of space and law, order
and orientation’ (ibid.). The sea cannot be divided nor bear fixed lines and
hence, in Schmitt’s terms, provides no ground for order: ‘On the sea, fields
cannot be planted and firm lines cannot be engraved’ (ibid.). The sea, Schmitt
argued ‘has no character, in the original sense of the word, which comes from
the Greek charaessein, meaning to engrave, to scratch, to imprint’ (ibid.: 43),
and hence, unlike the land, lacks an inherently representational quality. In the
traditions of pre-modern law, the sea was considered a lawless ‘free’ space
where ‘there were no limits, no boundaries, no consecrated sites, no sacred
orientations, no law, and no property’ (ibid.). ‘Land and sea were completely
 Spatial histories 199
different orders,’ he claimed (ibid.: 353): on land there was law, whilst ‘on
the sea, there was no law’ (ibid.: 44). Even if law was extended to the
‘free’ sea in the modern age with the emergence of global maritime empires,
by Schmitt’s account, its primordial lawlessness – its inability to bear
ordering lines – endured.17 We will return to the distinction between land
and sea in relation to the concept of nomos and the history of modern
international law in the next chapter but the key point of emphasis here is the
role the distinction between land and sea played in Schmitt’s spatial history of
modernity.
As fanciful as this geo-elemental mythology of land and sea might seem,
with its tension between historical contingency and environmental determin-
ism, it had significance in Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity precisely
because in Land and Sea he described real historical powers as the bearers of
this mythos. On the one hand, stood the land powers, which Schmitt
identified with the continental states of modern Europe – France, Spain and
above all Germany. On the other, stood the sea powers, which he identified
with the maritime empires of the Dutch and eventually the United States,
but crucially the English. However, Schmitt did not cast the history of
geopolitical competition between states in terms of the geo-elemental
mythology of land and sea solely for rhetorical force. Rather, he sought to
highlight the distinct forms of political order, warfare and international law
that were developed by the continental European states and the maritime
empires of the Atlantic, and present them as the representatives of two
different forms of spatial consciousness: the terrestrial powers emphasizing
stability and order based on bounded spaces; the maritime powers a uni-
versal, global order based on free trade and movement.18 Hence, the tra-
jectory of their development and the struggle between them mapped
against Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity, and the narrative of a struggle
between those forces supporting an ordered global space and those leading
towards a nihilistic world of spaceless unity.
The arc of Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity, from a Eurocentric
ordering of global space to a spaceless state of global disorder, follows the
eclipse of the continental land powers by the rising power of the maritime
empires of the Atlantic. In Land and Sea, written in the midst of Second
World War, Schmitt is explicitly critical of the tradition of German geopo-
litics for missing the importance of the sea by remaining within a land-locked
mentality that excluded the country from the world-historical struggle
between land and sea. The country’s understanding of history had remained
for the most part:

bound to a continental, territorial perspective. Consequently they have

eyes only for the continental space and state issues, and as far as Germany
is concerned, only for the territorial evolution, and as result remained
addicted to the narrow perspective of the petty states and confined spaces.
(1997: 46)
200 Spatial histories
Indeed, for Schmitt, even those European powers with naval and colonial
histories – Portugal, Spain and France – had not truly departed from the geo-
elemental orbit of the land and had remained tethered to a spatial con-
sciousness based upon ‘continentalization and territorialization’ (ibid.: 45).
In contrast, Schmitt emphasized the dynamism of the English who domi-
nated the ‘maritime surge’ unleashed by the first global spatial revolution and
hence had been able to steer the course of history towards the second (ibid.:
49). The English were, in Schmitt’s view, ‘a nation of sheep-breeders’ who, in
the sixteenth century radically changed to become ‘a nation of sea children’
(ibid.: 50). They made an ‘existential decision for the sea’ that marked a
‘fundamental transformation of the political and historical essence of the
island itself ’ (ibid.), and allowed Britain to become ‘the carrier and the focus
of the elemental transition from land to high seas’ (ibid.: 49). In Schmitt’s
account, the English were unique in undergoing an ‘elemental metamor-
phosis’, turning their ‘collective existence seawards and centered it on the sea
element’ (ibid.: 28).
Indeed, Schmitt maintained that in the course of its ‘elemental drift to the
sea’ (23):

the island of Britain, the metropolis of a world empire raised on a mar-

itime destiny, would be uprooted and lose its territorial character. Like a
fish, it was able to swim to another spot of the globe.
(ibid.: 51)

Further, the English ‘decision for the sea’ supported and determined a certain
conception and form of social and political order – one based on economics
and universal concepts. Indeed, Schmitt speculated at length in ‘The
Großraum Order’ about the relationship between a world economy bound to
trade routes and the British desire to promote liberal universalism, and forms
of law that could apply in all places, given that it was ‘the mobile centre of a
world empire, the possessions of which were strewn in no coherent pattern
over all continents’ (2011b: 51).19 For Schmitt, however, this legal framework
dissolved all situated specificity in a universal sea, eroding all meaningful
boundaries and the spatial divisions on which order was built. Hence, the
elemental metamorphosis of the English marked the first step on the path to
the spaceless nihilism that he understood to be undermining order in the
twentieth century.
Indeed, Schmitt located the emergence of the technological worldview, from
which the paradoxically ‘spaceless spatial consciousness’ defining the twen-
tieth century emerged, within the development of England’s maritime exis-
tence. The industrial revolution produced ‘an internal mutation [that] had
affected the elemental being of the great Leviathan’ (ibid.: 53). With the
advent of industrial shipping ‘machinery was interposed between the sea
element and human life’, producing a shift in the elemental existence of the
English: ‘a fish until then, the Leviathan was turning into a machine’ (ibid.: 54).
 Spatial histories 201
Just as the English had once left behind a terrestrial existence to embrace the
sea, they now left behind this maritime existence to embrace a world of
machines. ‘The industrial revolution,’ Schmitt wrote, with some sense of loss,
‘had transformed the children of the sea into machine-builders and servants
of machines’ (ibid.: 54). Indeed, in its embrace of the industrial ‘the genuinely
maritime existence that had been the secret of the British world power, suf-
fered a blow to its very core’, and marked the beginning of imperial decline
even if its rapid industrial development appeared to affirm its power all the
more in the nineteenth century (ibid.: 54). However, just as the British mar-
itime Empire began to sink into the movement of world-history, the United
States emerged as a naval power to take its mantel, pursuing its interests in an
expanding pattern of interventionism and armed with a portfolio of uni-
versalist ideas to legitimate a global exceptionalism. If England’s spatial con-
sciousness had been inimical to the territorializing drive of the continental
European states, it had nonetheless been existentially bound to the elemental
space of the sea. Yet, with the growing dominance of technological thinking in
all domains and the rise of the United States as an imperial power, the uni-
versalizing processes of globalization that were drawing human existence
away from both land and sea were intensifying. It was in this context that a
new geo-element entered the spatio-historical development of modernity: air.

Air war
Schmitt was one of the early commentators on the profound impact of ‘air
war’ on wider political structures, and although he addressed it only briefly it
occupied a key position in his spatial history of modernity, particularly with
regard to how the geo-elements shape concepts of space and the possibilities
for political order. Indeed, Schmitt argued that air power introduced a new
dimension into human existence, radically altering existing spatial conceptions
and possibilities:

[In] acquiring a new means of transportation, as well as a new weapon …

standards and criteria undertook further changes. Hence, man’s possibi-
lities to dominate nature and his fellow men were given the widest
scope … The spatial revolution which it is carrying out is especially
direct, forceful, and obvious.
(ibid.: 57)

On the one hand, air power appeared to make world unity technically feasible
for the first time in human existence, but on the other, it allowed a vast
expansion and intensification of war. The primary importance of the emer-
gence of air power was in relation to war, given that it had dramatically
altered the notion of the battlefield and the constraints that had previously
existed for the practice of war, something that was indeed not abstract for
Schmitt as allied bombs rained down on Berlin as he wrote in Land and Sea.
202 Spatial histories
Now asymmetric wars could be waged without regard for the boundaries
between states or the distinction between land and sea. Indeed, with the
development of air power, ‘the distinction land/sea, on which the relation between
the dominion of the oceans and world supremacy rested until recently,
becomes redundant’ (ibid.: 58–59). He noted in fact that perhaps air power
could be considered to have unleashed the element of fire rather than air,
even suggesting that the Phoenix, the mythical bird of fire, be added to his
world-historical bestiary, next to Leviathan and Behemoth, as the great beast
of the air.
Air power was of particular importance for Schmitt because it obliterated
all spatial distinctions rather than revolutionizing them so as to produce new
distinctions. For Schmitt, it was purely a tool of destruction, fit for destruc-
tion but not ordering. Not only did it transform the domain of the political
by overriding its spatialization, but it also transformed the notion of the enemy,
who could now be considered the object of discrimination to be annihilated,
rather than a subject to be faced as an equal in combat. Hence, the techno-
logical and spatial asymmetry that opened between those who had air power
and those who had not, was accompanied by a legal and moral asymmetry –
one of Schmitt’s most fascinating insights into war and technology. Air power
thus ensured that the second global spatial revolution was defined by the
possibility of absolute global wars of annihilation and confirmed that the
political had finally been untethered from the grounding distinctions upon
which the order of the modern European state had rested. Its power had thus
produced what Schmitt later would refer to as a ‘force field of irresistible
technical-industrial progress’ (2007c: 76) from which there seemed to be no
possible resistance. Writing this at the height of the Cold War nuclear tensions
in 1963, it seemed plausible that air power had produced the possibility for
the first truly planetary politics; not one ‘leading to a millennial paradise on
earth’ (1997: 53) but to catastrophic destruction.
In Land and Sea, as elsewhere in his work, Schmitt was hence torn between
two conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, an analysis of the deep con-
tingency shaping human social existence and, on the other, an attempt to
locate some sort of foundation to stabilize this shifting existence so as to
support a rigid political order. His appeal to a form of geo-elemental deter-
minism, however qualified, marked an attempt to find some deeper grounds
for order at a moment of deep historical and political crisis. Yet, his appeal to
myth perhaps revealed a recognition that this geo-determinism was insuffi-
cient with regard to not only the historical specificity of the political forma-
tions he was attempting to legitimate – some form of bounded European
order – but also to account for the malleability of the human condition at a
time of rapid and seemingly irresistible change across all domains of exis-
tence. His evocation of a geo-mythology of land and sea can perhaps be
understood as a sign of desperation at a moment when he was retreating from
the reality of the war raging around him, and a revolutionary regime whose
fate he was bound to but for which he had lost faith.
 Spatial histories 203
Eschatological geopolitics
The second conceptual register in which Schmitt developed his spatial history
of modernity was the Christian eschatology that came to play an increasingly
important role in his late work. The significance this ‘Christian concept of
history’ had within Schmitt’s spatial thought has not always been recognized
but it is crucial in understanding his reflections on world order developed in
texts such as The Nomos and The Partisan, which have recently been the
subject of renewed attention. It is important to note first that Schmitt’s
thought underwent a profound shift in how the relationship between theology
and politics is mapped around the time of The Leviathan, a shift visible to
some extent in all his writings that followed.20 In Chapter 3 we argued that in
early works such as Political Theology and Roman Catholicism Schmitt
developed an account of secularization, whereby Christian theological struc-
tures cast a long shadow over the concepts of modern secular politics, the
concepts and institutional forms of the former finding secular correlates in the
latter. This was first of all a political theology, that is, a political reading
of theology rather than a theological reading of politics, an examination of
the theological structure still animating political thought rather than an
attempt to suggest politics should become religious at the level of content;
indeed in Roman Catholicism he specifically argued that it is neither possible
nor desirable for modern political structures to be ‘theologized’. However,
starting with The Leviathan Schmitt’s work is marked by a quite different
engagement with theology, with key moments in late texts being frequently
punctuated with references to Christian eschatology and religious imagery.
Indeed, whilst political theology was a method and object of analysis in his
Weimar work from the 1920s, his writings from the late 1930s on were argu-
ably shaped by a theological politics, that ran quite counter to his earlier
engagement with the legacy of Christian thought.21 This is by no means to
suggest that his concern with profane political issues became entirely deter-
mined by a theological perspective, but rather that the latter came to have a
powerful influence in his late work alongside a number of other strands of
thought such as the geo-elemental mythology examined above.
The precise role that theology played in shaping his late thought, and his
spatial history of modernity in particular, nonetheless remains somewhat
obscure, appearing as it does largely in the form of allusion and insinuation
rather than being addressed methodologically or directly thematized. This
dense subterranean layer of theological allusion certainly played an important
role in the rhetorical strategies of Schmitt’s work from the 1940s, especially after
the war when, banned from teaching, he cloaked his work in an air of religious
mystery and eschatological foreboding, partly to evade controversy after his
internment in Nuremburg and partly to engage in a self-mythologizing built
around the idea of a ‘Arcanum’ (see Müller, 2003). Nonetheless, although
these theological references became an increasingly important element of his
late style, they should not be dismissed as being mere rhetorical effects
204 Spatial histories
beyond which the ‘real’ analyses were located. Rather, given the fact that
these allusions and hints occurred at key structural moments in his work we
believe that they were significant to this phase, especially with regard to the
spatial histories that subtended his late work.
Tellingly, Schmitt’s discussion of Christian eschatology emerged in The
Leviathan in relation to the differing conceptions of history held by Christians
and Jews. Christians, having had the Messiah revealed to them, now awaited
the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement. The Christian concept of
history was therefore eschatological, governed by the imminence of the end
times. However, the Jews, for whom Christ had not been revealed as a Mes-
siah, did not conceive of earthly history as an interregnum before Judgement.
For Schmitt the fact that Jews did not conceive of their existence as deter-
mined by the coming end times, meant that they failed to recognize profane
authorities as God’s representatives on earth. As Tracy B. Strong notes,
Schmitt, following Hobbes, claimed that until the Second Coming:

the kings of this earth were in effect Christs and they should therefore be
obeyed in the manner that one would obey God as king. Earthly king-
doms thus are Godly in that they hold back human instincts towards
anarchy and chaos until the Second Coming.
(2008: xxv)

Seen in this light, the Jews, ‘who deny that Jesus is the Messiah constitute a
threat to [Schmitt’s] entire political doctrine’, freed as they were from the ties
of obedience to authority (ibid.: xxvi). Hence, in Schmitt’s terms, the failure
of the Jews to recognize the truth of Christ’s appearance as Messiah, and
hence of the imminent Second Coming, meant that they were fundamentally
‘state-destroying’ (Schmitt, 2008b: 10). This is, as Strong argues, ‘the oldest
form of anti-Semitism given a new twist: the denial of Christ as Messiah
constitutes a threat to the possibility of political order’ (ibid.). It is not clear
precisely to what extent this interpretation of the difference in theological
conception of history shaped Schmitt’s anti-Semitism or vice versa, but he
clearly understood the relationship between what he referred to as the
‘unique, totally abnormal condition of and attitude of the Jewish people’, and
the worldly affairs of state through the lens of this theologico-historical dis-
tinction (Schmitt, 2008b: 8). Indeed, Schmitt’s eschatological Christian con-
cept of history clearly positioned the Jews on one side of the struggles that, in
his view, defined the spatial history of modernity, as we will see below.
The key concept in Schmitt’s eschatological Christian philosophy of history
was the Katechon, an obscure Biblical figure that became a central reference
point in his late work, appearing in key passages of Land and Sea (1997: 8,
43) and The Nomos (2003d: 59–62). Schmitt borrowed the figure of the Kate-
chon from Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians where it stands in
opposition to the Antichrist (see also Agamben, 2005b, 2013; Esposito, 2013;
Gross, 2007; Hell, 2009; Taubes, 2004, 2013; Virno, 2008). As Paul writes:
 Spatial histories 205
For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work [energeitai] but only
until the person now holding it back [ho katechon] gets out of the way.
Then the lawless one [anomos] will be revealed, whom the Lord will
destroy with the breath of his mouth.
(in Agamben, 2005b: 109)

In Saint Paul’s account the Katechon acts in the period between the First and
Second Coming of the Messiah, that is, during the interregnum between the
death of Christ and the Day of Judgement. In this eschatological framework,
the coming Day of Judgement cannot be avoided, as it is the result of God’s
will, but it can be accelerated or delayed by actions within the profane world.
The Antichrist, the ‘lawless one’, acts in order to hasten the Second Coming
of Christ, and hence accelerates history towards the apocalyptic end times.
The Katechon, by contrast, is a historical ‘restrainer’, a force that opposes the
work of the Antichrist and ‘holds back the end of the world’ (Schmitt, 2003a:
60). Hence, in this eschatological framework, the history of the interregnum is
defined by a struggle between the Katechon and the Antichrist – between
forces of historical acceleration and forces of historical restraint.
The question arose however, as to which profane forces embodied the work
of the Antichrist and which stood as the Katechon, a difficulty exacerbated by
the fact that the operations of the Antichrist, the ‘mysterious one’, always
appeared in disguise. Hence, identifying the figures of Antichrist and Kate-
chon in the realm of profane history required interpretative work on behalf of
those with insights into the Arcanum of Christian eschatology. For Schmitt, it
was clear that the Antichrist, insofar as it was a force of historical accelera-
tion, could be identified with those forces of technology, modernization, uni-
versalization and neutralization that he considered to be undermining
political order and spreading chaos across the earth. Viewed from the per-
spective of Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity, the Antichrist was thus at
work in the intensification of globalization and the drive to world unity,
which, as we have seen, he understood to be leading towards a nihilistic state
of global civil war. In contrast, the Katechon was an essentially conservative
force, identified with those that defended a world of fixed distinctions and
stable boundaries; a ‘delaying factor’ against the forces of acceleration and
dissolution (1997: 43). Hence, Schmitt cast the geo-elemental struggle
between land and sea powers – and hence the geopolitical competition
between the continental states of Europe, and particularly Germany, and the
universalizing maritime empires of Britain and the United States – into the
theological register, heightening the stakes of these conflicts into the fate of
human history as such.
A rogue’s gallery of Schmitt’s intellectual and political opponents thus
came to stand in the place of the Antichrist: liberalism, socialism, capitalism,
individualism, technological thought, the metaphysics of immanence, legal
positivism, the United States and of course, the Jews. However, what is of
most interest here is not so much the fact that Schmitt, in a feat of supreme
206 Spatial histories
world-historical vanity, cast his own enmities in global and metaphysical
terms, but that this eschatological concept of history defined by the struggle
between Antichrist and Katechon bore directly on the narrative of spatio-historical
decline, and the relationship between intensifying globalization and increasing
violence examined at the beginning of the chapter. In Schmitt’s mind, the
forces pushing for world unity and those driving the acceleration of history
were one and the same, and both followed the path of the Antichrist. Hence,
the political project of world unity amounted to a reckless historical acceleration
towards the apocalypse, which the Katechon was tasked with restraining. The
Katechon was thus the defender of a world defined by ordering distinctions and
firm lines, in the face of the relentless spatio-historic universalization. In a sense
therefore, it was a force that literally restrained history by dividing space –
boundaries in space acting as historical constraints. Hence, for Schmitt, the
Katechon was the ultimate defender of political form, a force guaranteeing the
spatialization of the political, but further an eschatological dam, a ‘rampart’
containing the movement of history towards its own eclipse (1997: 8).
Within this philosophico-historical framework the presence of enmity and
historical struggle were signs that the Katechon was still battling the Antichrist
and the end of history was being successfully held at bay. Human history
was not only defined by struggle, but conversely the continuity of struggle
guaranteed history. As he noted in his diary in 1947:

Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Thus begins the history of
humanity. Thus appears the father of all things [Heraclitus’s famous
description of war]. This is the dialectic tension animating the movement
of world history, and world history is not yet at an end.
(in Gross, 2007: 196)

Yet, if the Katechon was at work it remained unclear who or what it may be
identified with in the age of technological globalization and political uni-
versalism. Schmitt associated the Katechon with a motley crew of historical
figures from the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II to the Byzantine Empire
in Land and Sea (2007: 43, 8) and the Roman Emperor in The Nomos (2003a:
59–60), but a contemporary name was wanting. It is nonetheless telling that
all the historical figures Schmitt associated with the Katechon were repre-
sentatives of empires. Indeed, the imperial nature of the Katechon seems
apparent in Schmitt’s claim in The Nomos regarding the continuity between
the Roman Empire the and Christian Medieval Empire:

The decisive historical concept of this continuity was that of the restrai-
ner: Katechon. ‘Empire’ on this sense meant the historical power to
restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon;
it was a power that withholds (qui tenet), as the Apostle Paul said in his
Second Letter to the Thessalonians.
(ibid.)22
 Spatial histories 207
Although Schmitt did not name a specific profane power as the contemporary
Katechon, it seems he would have identified it with some form of imperial
force capable of respatializing the political on a global scale. Indeed, in the
immediate post-war years Schmitt continued to argue that a multipolar world
order on the model of his Großraum order was the antidote to spaceless disorder,
even as he dropped the term Reich and abstracted his comments from the
context of Germany’s position in the distribution of world power. The closest
he came to identifying a Katechon capable of addressing the spatial crisis of the
late twentieth century was in fact not a new imperial force, but the rather more
marginal figure of the partisan fighter, defending a local space and auto-
chthonous form of life against the devastating forces of encroaching rootlessness.
However, even in 1963’s The Partisan he appeared to acknowledge that these
lonely figures were too disparate, marginal and lacking in the force necessary to
truly restrain the impending processes of historical acceleration and the possi-
bility of an apocalyptic global war. It is perhaps then no surprise that a heavy
sense of world-historical pessimism hung over his work from these years.
Whether Schmitt understood himself to be merely experiencing the last
breaths of a cherished political civilization and simply used eschatology as a
rhetorical device to dramatize profane world politics, or truly saw the begin-
ning of the end of the world and a theological struggle between agents of
Christ and Antichrist in the great stirring of the second global spatial revo-
lution, the manner in which worldly and apocalyptic stakes bleed in to one
another in his account of the spatio-historical development of modernity
cannot be discounted. This is particularly the case when examining the
apparently more sober analytics of The Nomos, to which we now turn.

Notes
1 For example, Land and Sea falls outside the discussion in the essays included in the
collections edited by Rasch (2005b), Odysseos and Petito (2007), and Legg (2011),
the interventions by Dean (2007) and Mendieta (2011) being exceptions, joined only
by more substantial engagements by Balakrishnan (2000), Ojakangas (2006) and
Hooker (2009), some brief commentary in Meyer et al. (2012), Minca and Rowan
(2015) and a smattering of isolated papers by Connery (2001), Derman (2010) and
Tavardze (2013). The relatively low profile Land and Sea has enjoyed in English lan-
guage is likely due to the fact the book exists only in a poorly translated and hard to
find edition from an obscure publisher, although a slightly amended version has been
made accessible online by Counter Currents, an American neo-reactionary website that
plays host to discussion of thinkers of the European New Right such as Alain
de Benoist and Guilliame Faye as well as conservative European thinkers from
the twentieth century such as Schmitt, Julius Evola, Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler.
2 There are many other later texts where the ‘spatial history’ can be traced, notably
including ‘Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History’ (1950), the
three corollaries he produced to ‘The Nomos’ between 1953 and 1957, and even
Schmitt’s last published work, The Legal World Revolution (1978).
3 It was in the final section of ‘The Großraum Order’, ‘The Concept of Space in Jur-
isprudence’, added in 1941, that Schmitt first aired these speculations (see Schmitt,
2011b).
208 Spatial histories
4 He argued that the mathematical changes ‘implicit in the concept of the infinite void,
cannot be explained merely as a result of purely geographical expansion of the
known world. It is so essential and revolutionary that one may affirm the contrary,
namely that the discovery of the new continents and the voyage around the world
were only the result and the manifestation of much deeper mutations’ (1997: 35).
5 We return to examine Schmitt’s account of pre-modern conceptions of space in
reference to his potted history of international law in the following chapter.
6 As such, the emergence of global space, and modernity, is linked intimately to
technological developments, particularly modes of navigation and transport.
Hence, in Land and Sea Schmitt’s focus fell less on the colonial institutions estab-
lished in the ‘New World’ by Spain and Portugal, but rather on the Dutch and
English, who he claimed led the way towards the realization of global space with
the construction of ocean worthy vessels in the pursuit of whales: ‘it was the whale
that guided us’ (ibid.: 16). Schmitt drew heavily here on the nineteenth century
French historian Jules Michelet’s book The Sea – his discussion of the importance
of whaling and his unusual discursion in praise of the whale’s nobility largely
following the remarks of this influential historian of the French Revolution (see
Michelet, 2012) – evoking the figure of the Leviathan as a symbol of the state,
slain by the imperial maritime powers of England, the United States and the ‘rootless’
Jews. We return to Schmitt’s evocations of the Leviathan and its anti-Semitic dimensions
later in the chapter.
7 We adopt the term ‘globalization’ here even though Schmitt did not use it; we are
fully aware, in doing this, of the risk of ideological and historical over-determina-
tion, as the term carries a lot of baggage. However, we believe that Schmitt’s critique
of modernity (at least after the second spatial revolution in the twentieth century)
is based on an idea of globalization of capitalism, although the spread of capi-
talist markets is only one element of a wider tendency towards the practical uni-
fication of planetary space through technology and the ideological predominance
of universalism, something he understood to be dominant in both liberal capital-
ist and Soviet communist thinking (see his late reflections on technology and the
Cold War in ‘Appropriation/Division/Production’, ‘The New Nomos of the Earth’
and ‘The Legal World Revolution’). In his last published work, ‘The Legal World
Revolution’ (1978) Schmitt did adopt the terms ‘englobe’ and ‘englobement’ from
the French economic historian François Perroux, a concept that although unde-
veloped might usefully be read in light of the work on Peter Sloterdijk’s con-
temporary world-historical musings on spatial history (Schmitt, 1987c: 78; see
also Sloterdijk, 2011b, 2013, 2014).
8 In his work on Schmitt (see Ojakangas, 2006, 2007), Mikas Ojakangas argues that
Schmitt’s thought was fundamentally structured around a critique of the meta-
physics of immanence, which he had identified at the origin of many of the ills of
modern political thought in Political Theology (see Chapter 4). Ojakangas con-
vincingly demonstrates that for Schmitt a world conceived wholly in terms of
immanence was unable to account for any true change in conditions as it lacked an
outside from which such a rupture could emerge. This was terrifying to Schmitt as
it assumed the world, and hence the political, to operate like a fully self-contained
mechanism, a vision in which no true freedom was possible. We can see here of
course the shadow of Schmitt’s debate with the legal positivists about the need to
account for the personal nature of the sovereign’s decision within constitutional
law. We do not suggest here that technological thought is of greater importance in
understanding Schmitt’s spatial thought than the metaphysics of immanence, the
focus of Ojakangas’ analysis – a choice of the defining concept of the age as pre-
sented in The Age of Neutralization and Depoliticization over that in Political
Theology – but rather that the two conceptual structures are largely co-terminus in
Schmitt’s work, which lacks the systematicity necessary to give one precedence
 Spatial histories 209
over the other. Hence, whilst we are indebted to Ojakangas’ analysis we choose to
emphasize technological thought rather than the metaphysics of immanence as a
matter of the economy of this book’s structure and argument.
9 Indeed, the anti-Semitic echoes of Schmitt’s critique of the ‘empty concept of
space’ that he supposed to arise from ‘Jewish thought’ and his ‘rejection of all
ideals of assimilation, absorption, and melting pots’, in his critique of the ‘space-
less’ universalism of the United States and twentieth century spatial thought more
broadly are strong. Raphael Gross has elaborated the connections between them at
length (Gross, 2007).
10 Here he reflected on the common fate of an industrial, globalized earth regardless
of the victor of the Cold War: ‘It is possible to conceive of the political unity of
humanity through the victory of one industrial superpower over the other or
through the union of both with the goal of politically subjugating the total industrial
power of the earth. That would be a planetary appropriation of industry’ (ibid.: 80).
11 Schmitt’s critique of the nihilistic violence and the loss of meaning as a result of
technological globalization bears a strong resemblance to Heidegger’s famous cri-
tique of technology, and particularly his reflections on the ‘age of the world picture’,
the ‘enframing of the earth’ into a ‘standing reserve’ (see The Question Concern-
ing Technology and Other Essays, 1982), which seems particularly strongly evoked
in Nomos–Nahme–Name (Schmitt, 2003c), one of corollaries to The Nomos pub-
lished in 1957, where Schmitt talked about the just administration of ‘concrete’
measures that is possible ‘as long as the earth and mankind have not become the mere
raw materials of spaceless planning’ (ibid.: 340). Here as elsewhere, the degree of
Heidegger’s influence remains unclear although Schmitt was of course aware of
his work, quoting him approvingly at the end of Land and Sea, although only
as an anonymous ‘contemporary German philosopher’ (1997: 58).
12 The union of order and orientation, or what we have called the spatialization of
the political, was crucial for Schmitt since it not only limited conflict (even as it did
not eradicate it) but, further, gave to life meaningful orientations, which, as we
examined in Chapter 3, arose out of the concrete situatedness of the political itself.
As he wrote in The Nomos: ‘It is imperative to distinguish clearly between the
anarchy of the Middle Ages and the nihilism of the twentieth century. … The
European medieval order certainly was very anarchistic in terms of a smoothly
functioning modern factory, but it was not nihilistic, despite all the wars and feuds,
as long as it retained a fundamental unity of order and orientation’ (2003a: 57).
13 It is likely that Schmitt here wanted to distance his work from the field of German
geopolitics in the light of German defeat and the two years he had spent interned
at Nuremburg as a result of his Großraum work.
14 Schmitt here noted the influence not only of Alfred Thayer Mahan but also the French
Admiral Raoul Castex’s 1929 book Théories Stratégiques: La Mer Contra La Terre.
15 In The Leviathan Schmitt grounded his reflection on an analysis of the image of
the modern state as Leviathan in the work of Thomas Hobbes. He argued that
Hobbes’s work was flawed because the political symbol of The Leviathan failed to
gain cohesion (indeed, the sub-title of Schmitt’s book is The Meaning and Failure
of a Political Symbol). Hobbes depicted the Leviathan not only as a great sea
monster, but also as a giant man and a gigantic machine, creating a monstrous
confusion between animal, man and machine that sapped it of the aesthetic power
it needed to operate as an effective political idea. Schmitt recounted how the
Leviathan, a beast of the sea, suited the image of a maritime power, like England,
but that the state theorized by Hobbes was instead the centralized bureaucratic
state, which developed instead in continental Europe from the seventeenth century.
Further, the decisiveness of the Magnis Homme, or great man, was undercut by the
image of the state as a big machine, operating automatically with no need of
decision. The legal positivism of twentieth century German constitutionalism and
210 Spatial histories
liberal political thought was, for Schmitt, already implicit in Hobbes’s image of the
Leviathan. Hence, the image of this beast of the sea presented contradictions that
undermined the very conception of the state Hobbes was employing them in aid of.
However, in reading Hobbes, Schmitt seemingly followed the rather peculiar idea
that, because the political symbol was unclear, the actual history of the state wit-
nessed its un-working from within. Although this analysis was certainly fantastical,
it did serve to underscore the importance of myth, and more broadly the ‘political
idea’, in Schmitt’s thought.
Schmitt closed the book with a small image of a whale that appeared without
comment. However, he had started the book with the image of the whale hooked
on a cross, which he read as a symbol of the state hooked to the figure of Christ
the Messiah and presented in relation to the claim that the most important sen-
tence of all Hobbes’ work was: ‘Jesus is the Christ’ (Schmitt, 2008b: 83). However,
without the hook – a reference to the Jews who did not believe Christ was the
Messiah – the Leviathan or rather the state was depicted as without Christ, or
rather perhaps dominated by the Jews. It was an ambiguous image, of which exist
contending interpretations (see for example Hooker, 2009; Meier, 1998; Strong
2008). It seems clear however that Schmitt sought to spin a web of anti-Semitic
allusion that linked the Jews to the fate of the pluralist liberal state.
16 This echoes Schmitt’s claim that the institution of nomos was defined by the three-
fold relationship between appropriation, distribution and production, which we
will discuss in the following chapter.
17 One fundamental difference between land and sea, in Schmitt’s account, was their
differing capacities to bear fixed lines and hence to represent order. Viewed from
this aesthetic perspective land was always valorized as a form-giving and stabiliz-
ing element opposed to the formless and destabilizing element of the sea. Of
course, it was not the land itself that stabilized boundaries, but rather a form of
spatial imaginary that presumed stable boundaries to exist. The distinction
between stable land and unstable sea hence concerned the domain of representa-
tion alone, rather than the concrete situated spatialities that Schmitt had claimed
were proper to the political. Hence the importance of myth to Schmitt’s account:
his geo-elemental mythology supported a cartographic mythology and an aesthetic
understanding of politics as representation.
18 In a further move, he mapped the distinction between land and sea powers against
that between the Catholic and Protestant powers of Europe. As he wrote of the
European imperial competition in the ‘New World’: ‘the struggle for the ownership
of the new Earth turned into a struggle between Reformation and Counter-
Reformation, between the world Catholicism of the Spaniards and the world
Protestantism of the Huguenots, the Dutch, and the English’ (ibid.: 42). It is no
doubt significant that Schmitt identified Catholicism with the ‘true measures’ and
bounded spaces of the continental European states, who stood (perhaps collectively
as the Katechon) against the spaceless nihilism of Protestant sea-faring empires.
19 See ‘The Principle of the Security of Traffic Routes of the British World Empire’ in
‘The Großraum Order’ (Schmitt, 2011b: 90–95).
20 Although his work on the Großraum came after The Leviathan it is an exception as
it is largely lacking in theological discourse.
21 This shift is clearly evident in a comparison of Political Theology, published in
1922, and Political Theology II, published in 1970.
22 Indeed, he made the imperial nature of the Katechon even more explicit in claim-
ing that in res publica Christiana, ‘the emperor’s office was inseparable from the
work of the Katechon’ (2003a: 62), and that ‘the empire of the Christian Middle
Ages lasted only as long as the idea of the Katechon was alive’ (ibid.: 60).
8 A new Nomos of the Earth?

I am looking for a new nomos of the Earth, a geo-nomy; this does not arise
from the dictate of a lord of the world, into whose hands a few Nobel prize-
winners maneuvered power; it arises from a tremendous reciprocal ‘match of
powers’ … man remains a son of Earth.
Carl Schmitt, 1955

The new nomos of our planet is growing irresistibly. Many see therein only
death and destruction. Some believe they are experiencing the end of the world.
In reality, we are experiencing only the end of the former relations of land and
sea. To be sure the old nomos has collapsed, and with it the whole system of
accepted measures, concepts, and customs. But what is coming is not therefore
boundlessness or nothingness hostile to nomos. Also in the timorous rings of old
and new forces, right measures and meaningful proportions can originate.

Also here are gods and rules,

Great is their mass.
Carl Schmitt, 1955

The Nomos of the Earth

Without doubt Schmitt’s most significant work of spatial theory and politics
is his 1950 book The Nomos of the Earth. In recent years the book has been
given many labels, from a ‘Fascist epic’ to a ‘missing classic of IR’ (Balak-
rishnan, 2011: 67; Odysseos and Petito, 2007: 2; see also Legg and Vasude-
van, 2011). There is some consensus, however, that it represents Schmitt’s
most significant work of the post-war period and arguably of his entire
oeuvre, even considered by some to be his ‘magnum opus’ (Hooker, 2009).1 A
work of considerable historical scope and philosophical erudition, it marks
his most sustained and mature attempt to develop a spatial theory at once
providing an original and provocative spatial history of modern international
law and explicitly theorizing the spatial basis of political order.
212 A new Nomos of the Earth?
Although originally published in 1950, it was largely written in Berlin
between 1942 and 1945, whilst war raged across Europe. Schmitt claimed in
the Foreword, penned in 1950, that he faced ‘all sorts of restraints and
restrictions’ whilst writing the book,2 twice noting that the book’s subject
matter and the situation in which it was composed were ‘overwhelming’
(Schmitt, 2003a: 38).3 This should be read not simply in reference to the dif-
ficulties of wartime writing, but also to his internment by American forces in
the aftermath of German defeat. Hence, the book was structured around a
series of strategic silences in order to shield its author from further accusa-
tion. Indeed, he warned in the Foreword that he will ‘avoid mention of con-
temporary affairs and break off at many points’ to ‘avoid unnecessary
controversy’ (ibid.: 38–39). Thus, there is no mention of several matters one
might have expected Schmitt to comment on given his previous work, the theme
of the book and the context in which it appeared. Remarkably, he made no
reference to Hitler and the National Socialist expansion in Europe, the
Holocaust, the German defeat or the Second World War, the occupation of
Europe by American and Soviet Forces and the emergence of the Cold War’s
geopolitical fault-line through his native Germany. Even his work on
Großraum order, carried out in the late 1930s and early 1940s, went largely
unmentioned. These omissions were obviously prompted by Schmitt’s perhaps
prudent desire to ‘avoid unnecessary controversy’ at a time when he had just
been released without charge from interrogation at Nuremburg. They were
evidently part of a concerted effort to ‘cleanse’ his record and present his
work as acceptably sober and ‘objective’ scholarly analysis.4
Despite the book’s considerable size, Schmitt’s desire to avoid incriminating
topics left it oddly truncated and seemingly without conclusion. The theoretical
and historical trajectories followed by the book led him inevitably towards a
critique of Europe’s post-war settlement and the continued expansion of US
power, but he left these things largely implied rather than stated directly. Like
his other works, The Nomos was a polemical engagement with the political
conditions of the day, but his critique here must be read between the lines.
During the 1950s Schmitt published a number of short corollaries that acted
as something of a stand-in for the original publication’s missing conclusion.
Hence, in a sense, the book remained unfinished until the mid 1950s, when
these supplements were added. Further, The Nomos represented the culmina-
tion of the work Schmitt had carried out in late 1930s and early 1940s and
collated the various strands of his thought during this period in a form that
‘cleansed’ them of Nazi taint.5 The ideas contained within it are at once the
result of previous work and the springboard for subsequent efforts. The
Nomos is thus, in our opinion, best understood as the centrepiece of a wider
span of work stretching from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s.
The book itself is a complex and sweeping work of vast ambition. Even
readers opposed to Schmitt’s ideas have been struck by its magnitude and
erudition. The book contains several core elements and can be broken down
into broad sections. First, it outlines a concept of nomos that indicates the
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 213
inherently spatial foundations of legal and political order. Second, it provides
an account of the rise of the first global spatial order of the earth, the Euro-
centric global order referred to as the jus publicum Europaeum. Third, it
mounts a critique of the various factors contributing to the collapse of this
very global spatial order in the twentieth century. Last, it indicates the most
pressing question for political thought in the shadow of this collapse: what
form might a new spatial order of the earth take? In the remainder of this
chapter we briefly address each of these elements in turn, highlighting their
importance to the understanding of Schmitt’s overall spatial thought, before
examining their relation to his late geopolitical speculations in The Theory of
the Partisan.

Nomos as concept: the grounds of the political

Ordnung und Ortung

At the heart of the book lies the concept of nomos from which it draws its
title. Nomos, Schmitt argued, indicated a fundamental ‘unity of space and law,
order and orientation’ (2003a: 42).6 It is a concept that points to the neces-
sarily ‘spatial context of all law’, or rather to the fact that ‘all law is law only
in a particular location’ (ibid.: 98). Schmitt claimed that the term, ‘under-
stood in its original spatial sense is best suited to describe the fundamental
process involved in the relation between order and orientation’ (ibid.: 67). ‘It
constitutes the original spatial order, the source of all further concrete order
and all further law’ (ibid.: 48). Nomos, for Schmitt, indicated that all order is,
at the most fundamental level, spatial order. Hence, all forms of political,
legal and social order rest upon the foundational unity of law and space,
represented by a nomos: ‘All subsequent regulations of a written or unwritten
kind, derive their power from the inner measure of an original, constitutive
act of spatial ordering. This original act is nomos’ (ibid.: 78). Thus, regardless
of the specific form taken by a political order and the particularities of its
normative content, it is necessarily based on a ‘structure-determining con-
vergence of order and orientation’ (ibid.). Nomos, for Schmitt, therefore con-
cerned the most fundamental question of legal foundations or, as he wrote,
‘the existential question of jurisprudence’ (ibid.: 38).7 Nomos was therefore
foundational not only historically but in a quasi-ontological sense. It was, in
Schmitt’s view, the most fundamental concept of legal order, from which
every other concept emerges and from which everything else emanates.
Nomos denominated a foundational unity of space and law, yet this should
not be understood to presuppose a neutral, universal or undifferentiated
concept of space on which order rested. Rather, nomos points to the process
by which order is grounded in the differentiation of spaces. Nomos, above all,
concerns spatial difference. It is, Schmitt noted, a ‘fence-word’ (ibid.: 78);
therefore, order is not simply founded in space but through foundational acts
of spatial differentiation. Schmitt suggested that nomos is originally the
214 A new Nomos of the Earth?
Ancient Greek word for ‘the first of all subsequent measures, for … the first
partition and classification of space, for the primeval division and distribu-
tion’ (ibid.: 67). Thus, the foundations of nomos, and hence all subsequent
order, rest on the division of space: ‘nomos is the measure by which the land
in a particular order is divided and situated’ but ‘also the form of political,
social, and religious order determined by this process’ (ibid.: 70). Hence, these
foundational acts of division simultaneously order space and spatially situated
order. It is through these foundational acts of spatial division that an order
takes tangible form: ‘Nomos is the immediate form in which political and
social order of a people becomes spatially visible – the initial measure and
division’ (ibid.). Hence, by dividing space order becomes visible and takes a
clear form: ‘measure, order, and form, constitute a spatially concrete unity’
(ibid.). The nomic division of space not only lays the foundations for order
but gives that order an inherently representational form. Political form thus
fundamentally rests, in Schmitt’s view, on an act of spatial differentiation.

The forgotten nomos

Schmitt argued that the original meaning of nomos as spatial order had been
forgotten in European legal and political thought, a lapse of cultural memory
he understood to have had far-reaching consequences in the twentieth
century: ‘The word nomos has undergone many changes in its more than
three-thousand-year history, and it often is difficult to retain the big picture,
given the etymological and semantic assessments at any particular time’
(Schmitt, 2003c: 341). Schmitt set about the task of etymological excavation
of the word in European thought, stretching from Greek antiquity to the
twentieth century, in order to understand how the original meaning of nomos
as spatial order had been lost.

the original meaning was destroyed by a series of distinctions and

antitheses. Most important amongst them was the opposing of nomos
and physis, where nomos became an imposed ought dissociated from and
opposed to is. … Originally, the word did not signify a mere act whereby
is and ought could be separated, and the spatial structure of a concrete
order could be discarded.
(Schmitt, 2003a: 69)

But by the twentieth century, Schmitt noted:

the Greek word nomos [had been] transformed from a spatially concrete,
constitutive act of order and orientation – from an ordo ordinans [order of
ordering] – into a mere enactment of acts in line with the ought and,
consistent with the manner of thinking of the positivistic legal system,
translated with the word law.
(ibid.)
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 215
In losing sight of the original meaning of nomos, legal thought was severed
from its necessary relationship to space. Legal acts were no longer conceived
in relation to a particular concrete situation, but had become abstracted into
free-floating norms that could be enacted by the ‘motorized legislator’.
In Schmitt’s view, therefore, the historical erasure of nomos as spatial order
had culminated in the system of abstract norms and measures he identified with
legal positivism (ibid.: 69). However, Schmitt understood the roots of the
problem to lie much deeper in the past. Indeed, although he based his reading of
nomos on a return to the original Greek term, Schmitt argued that, ‘in anti-
quity nomos already had lost its original meaning’ (ibid.: 67).8 He noted that the
link between nomos and spatial order had been lost ‘since the Sophists’ and
that ‘already in Plato, nomos signified a schedon – a mere rule’ (ibid.: 167).9 The
Greek legacy of rendering nomos as a mere law was compounded by the
Roman orator Cicero, who, according to Schmitt, ‘translated nomos as Lex’
(ibid.: 342).10 Nonetheless, Schmitt’s critique of interpretations that detached
the concept of nomos from its original spatial meaning was squarely aimed at
legal positivists. Indeed, he maintained that returning to the original meaning of

the word nomos is useful … because it shields perceptions of the current

world situation from the confusion of legal positivism, in particular from
the muddle of words and concepts characteristic of nineteenth century
jurisprudence dealing with domestic matters of state.
(ibid.: 69)

In this view, it was precisely the ‘legislative excesses’ of positivism that made
it ‘necessary to recall the word’s original meaning and its connection to the
first land-appropriation’ (ibid.).11 Schmitt thus employed the concept of
nomos polemically against the ‘spaceless’ jurisprudence of positivism. Under-
stood as spatial order, the concept of nomos could direct thought away from
abstract ‘oughts’ towards the concrete question of legal foundations, which
positivist thought always tried to occlude.12 In other words, by returning
nomos to its original meaning of spatial order, Schmitt sought to posit an
alternative framework for understanding law to that presented by positivism’s
abstract system of norms.13 His stated aim was to ‘restore to the word nomos its
energy and majesty’ (ibid.: 67).14 However, for this to happen, it was necessary
for ‘human thinking again [to] be directed to the elemental orders of its
terrestrial being here and now’ (ibid.: 39).

Land-appropriation
As we saw in the previous chapter, the category of land was of primary
importance to Schmitt’s late spatial thought and it served to ground his
account of nomos. In his view, the unity of law and space, order and orienta-
tion, meant above all that law was tied to the earth. ‘Law’ – Schmitt noted –
‘is bound to the earth and related to the earth’ (ibid.: 42). The earth was the
216 A new Nomos of the Earth?
‘terrestrial fundament, in which all law is rooted, in which space and law,
order and orientation meet’ (ibid.: 47).15 In other words, nomos indicates that
law is literally grounded in the division of land. ‘The great primeval acts of
law,’ he argued, are wedded to ‘terrestrial orientations: appropriating land,
founding cities, and establishing colonies’ (ibid.: 44). The appropriation and
division of land lie at the root of every spatial order, and hence every other
form of social, legal and political order rests upon it: ‘appropriating land and
founding cities always is associated with an initial measurement and dis-
tribution of usable soil, which produces a primary criterion embodying all
subsequent criteria’ (ibid.: 45).16
The act of land-appropriation or ‘Landnahme’ is central to Schmitt’s
account of nomos (ibid.: 80). For him, land-appropriation was the most fun-
damental process in establishing law, the ‘primeval act in founding law’ (ibid.:
45), the ‘archetype of a constitutive legal process’ (ibid.: 47). As the funda-
mental constitutive act of a spatial order, it represented ‘the primary legal title
that underlies all subsequent law’ (ibid.: 46). The act of appropriating land
‘creates the most radical title, in the full and comprehensive sense of the term
radical title’ (ibid.: 47).17 Hence, if all order was grounded in spatial order, all
spatial order was grounded in land-appropriation. All further forms of law
and order were derived from this foundational ‘process of order and orienta-
tion’ (ibid.: 80).18 Thus, the act of land-appropriation needed to be distinguished
from other forms of law. ‘In the strictest sense, law is mediation’, but nomos,
understood as land-appropriation, ‘is precisely the full immediacy of a legal
power not mediated by laws: it is a constitutive historical event – an act of
legitimacy, whereby the legality of a mere law first is made meaningful’ (ibid.: 73).
It is crucial, in this respect, that the historical reality of these acts of
legitimacy be recognized. Schmitt warned that land-appropriation should not be
thought of ‘as a purely intellectual construct’, but rather considered ‘a legal
fact, to be a great historical event, even if, historically, land-appropriation
proceeded rather tumultuously’ (ibid.: 46). Indeed:

in some form, the constitutive process of land appropriation is found at

the beginning of the history of every settled people, every commonwealth,
every empire. This is true as well for the beginning of every historical
epoch … Not only logically, but also historically, land-appropriation
precedes the order that follows from it … It is the reproductive root in the
normative order of history.
(ibid.: 48)

The statement ‘in the beginning was the fence’, therefore does not merely
point to the mythical foundations of law, but to the real historical processes
through which order is founded (ibid.: 74).19

Every new age and every new epoch in the coexistence of peoples,
empires, and countries, of rulers and power formations of every sort, is
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 217
founded on new spatial divisions, new enclosures, and new spatial orders
of the earth. … the history of colonialism in its entirety is … a history of
spatially determined processes of settlement in which order and orientation
are combined.
(ibid.: 79, 81)

The historically determining process of land-appropriation, Schmitt claimed,

‘grounds law in two directions: internally and externally’ (ibid.). Internally,
the act of land-appropriation establishes the fundamental division of space on
which all forms of ownership and property relations of the land-appropriating
group were based. Every form of property ‘remains dependent on the
common land-appropriation and derives legally from the common primeval
act’ (ibid.: 45). ‘To this extent’ – Schmitt wrote – ‘every land-appropriation
internally creates a kind of supreme ownership of the community as a whole’
(ibid.). Thus, whilst any spatial order necessarily includes some degree of
internal distribution of space, this division is ‘only a consequence of land-
appropriation; … the effluence and effect of the radical title’ established by
the land appropriation (ibid.: 81). Externally, the land-appropriating group is
confronted with other similar land-appropriating powers. In this case, Schmitt
argued, land-appropriation represents a legal title in international law in one
of two ways. Either land ‘is extracted from a space that until then had been
considered to be free’ or land ‘is extracted from a formerly recognized owner
and master’ (ibid.: 45–46).20 However, although every nomos depends on
land-appropriation, ‘not every land-appropriation, not every alteration of
borders, not every founding of a new colony creates revolutionary change in
terms of international law, i.e. is a process that constitutes a new nomos’
(ibid.: 82). Whether a land-appropriation constitutes a new nomos depends on
‘whether there is free land to be had, and whether there are accepted forms
for the acquisition of non-free land’ (ibid.: 81). When there is neither ‘free’ land
nor accepted ways for land to be legally acquired, then land-appropriation
would neither find a new nomos nor take place within the existing nomos.
Such acts would thus not produce spatial order but rather spatial disorder.
Finally, Schmitt suggested that there was a fundamental relationship
between land-appropriation and the act of naming. He claimed his concern
was with ‘the legal-historical meaning of the relation between Nahme and
name, power and name-giving’ (ibid.: 348). Although Schmitt left the question
of whether there is an etymological connection between the words Nahme and
name open, he employed the word Landnahme for land-appropriation pre-
cisely to imply this connection: ‘a land-appropriation is constituted only if the
appropriator is able to give the land a name’ (ibid.).21 This is a crucial aspect
of land-appropriation because ‘in a name and in name-giving a third orien-
tation of power takes effect; the tendency to visibility, publicity, and cere-
mony’ (Schmitt, 2003c: 349),22 something particularly important since a name
‘overpowers the satanic attempt to keep power invisible, anonymous, and
secret’ (ibid.). This seems to indicate that land-appropriation not only makes
218 A new Nomos of the Earth?
order visible, performing the representative task of political form, but further
is ‘able to make Nahme a sacred act’ (ibid.: 348).23 Land-appropriation not only
produces an ordered space but a sacred space that provides orientation in a
struggle against invisible satanic forces. In light of what we saw in the last
chapter about the theological dimension of Schmitt’s late spatial thought we
can understand sacred space to be produced by a Katechon which holds back
the invisible forces of the Antichrist.
Writing in 1950, Schmitt acknowledged that, ‘it is conceivable that the air
will envelop the sea and perhaps even the earth, and that men will transform
their planet into a combination of produce warehouse and aircraft carrier’
(Schmitt, 2003a: 49).24 Hence, he clearly saw that the emergence of air power
might eclipse the existing foundations of spatial order in the relationship
between land and sea. ‘If the domination of airspace is added as a third
dimension’ to land and sea, ‘still other new spatial orders [will] arise’ (ibid.:
80). Although such a transformation might alter the relationship between
order and orientation, law and space, it would not erase the foundational
importance of land. Hence, Schmitt suggested that, even after the advent of
air-war and the development of new technologies of communication and
transport, an ‘approach to the study of international law based on the concept
of land-appropriation is still meaningful’ (ibid.: 80). Indeed, one of the major
flaws in existing approaches to international law, for him, was the fact that it
sought to elide the fundamental importance of land-appropriation and the
division of the earth. By employing the concept of nomos Schmitt therefore
intended to bring jurisprudence back down to earth. Against the groundless
abstractions of legal positivism and the boundary-defying dimensions of air
power, he wanted to reassert the fundamental question of concrete spatial
foundations and the primary division of the land.

Appropriation, distribution, production

If land-appropriation is the foundational act upon which a nomos is groun-
ded, it is not sufficient alone to explain the nature of spatial order. Rather, in
‘Nomos–Nahme–Name’, the corollary published in 1957, Schmitt turned once
again to the etymology of the word nomos. Spatial order is defined by three
‘primal processes of human history’, appropriation, distribution and produc-
tion (ibid.: 352). Each of these processes is ‘part and parcel of the history of
legal and social orders’ (ibid.: 327). Schmitt thus located all three meanings in
the Greek root of nomos, the verb nemein. ‘Nomos is the nomen actionis of
nemein [to appropriate]’ (ibid.: 345). Hence, the first meaning of nomos for
Schmitt was appropriation. ‘The second meaning of nemein is teilen [to divide
and distribute]’ (Schmitt, 2003b: 326). Nomos therefore indicates a ‘funda-
mental process of division and distribution, of divisio primaeva’ (ibid.).
Finally, Schmitt explained that the ‘third meaning of nemein is weiden [lit-
erally, pasturage] … the productive work that normally occurs with owner-
ship’ (ibid.: 327). Hence, a nomic order is constituted through a sequence of
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 219
processes from the appropriation of land, its division and distribution into a
certain set of property relations and the productive use of this same property.
Therefore a nomos does not only concern the foundations of legal order but
addresses ‘the basic questions of every social and economic order’ (ibid.: 324).
The problem for Schmitt was that the sequence and evaluation of these
processes change in accordance with transformations ‘in methods of production
and manufacture, even changes in the image people have of themselves, of
their world, and of their historical situation’ (ibid.: 328). These changes have
profound effects on how the fundamental questions of social and economic,
as well as legal, order are understood. For Schmitt, of course, appropriation came
first as it was the most fundamental element of any order, a fact he argued
was forgotten in modern political and legal thought, which operated on the basis
that ‘no longer is anything taken, but only divided and developed’ (Schmitt,
2003c: 346). Schmitt claimed that ‘doctrinaire thinkers’ have ingeniously ‘shifted
attention away from appropriation and distribution to production’ (Schmitt,
2003b: 335). There was, he claimed, ‘something utopian about constructing social
and economic systems in terms of mere production’, a belief Schmitt con-
sidered characteristic of both liberal and socialist thought (ibid.). Yet ‘precisely
because socialism raised the question of the social order as one of division and
distribution, it once again raised the old problem, of the sequence and
evaluation of the three original processes of social and economic life’ (ibid.: 333).25
It is crucial, in Schmitt’s view, to return to address the sequence of appro-
priation, distribution and production, so the primacy of appropriation could
again be brought to light. That the industrial powers of East and West both
argued for the primacy of production not only led to a dangerous utopian
belief that mankind could give and divide without taking, but concealed
continuing appropriations under layers of ideology.26 This is especially
important as far as the question of world unity is concerned. ‘Has humanity
today’ – Schmitt asked in 1953 – ‘actually “appropriated” the earth as a
unity, so that there is nothing more to be appropriated? Has appropriation
really ceased? Is there now only division and distribution? Or does only pro-
duction remain?’ (ibid.: 335). If this was so, then further questions followed:
‘who is the great appropriator, the great divider and distributor of our planet,
the manager and planner of unified world production?’ (ibid.). Thus, the
supposed eclipse of appropriation in production bore directly on the question
of who the decisive subject of global order was. Indeed, the question of
appropriation had become ‘even more serious with the appropriation of
[outer] space’ (Schmitt, 2003c: 347). ‘We have no right’ – Schmitt warned –
‘to close our eyes to the problem of appropriation, and to refuse to think any
more about it’ (ibid.).27

Nomen actionis: groundless ground

One crucial aspect of this conceptualization of nomos is its strange dual
nature. The word indicates at once a verb and a noun. Or, rather, it is a
220 A new Nomos of the Earth?
peculiar type of noun, ‘a nomen actionis, i.e., it indicates an action as a pro-
cess whose content is defined by the verb’ (Schmitt, 2003b: 326). Schmitt thus
presented nomos as both an act of ordering and an institutional order. He
used nomos to refer to both the foundational acts of land-appropriation on
which order rests, and the ‘concrete order’ that emerges from these very acts.
Hence, by rendering nomos a nomen actionis, Schmitt inscribed indeterminacy
into the very foundations of his concept of spatial order. This duality within
the concept of nomos reflects the deep tension between order and indetermi-
nacy that characterizes his work as whole.28 Thus, although the concept of
nomos represents Schmitt’s core attempt to theorize the ‘concrete’ social,
geographical and historical rootedness of order, he nonetheless emphasized
the fact that order ultimately rests upon contingent acts of political power in
land-appropriation. In the figure of land-appropriation, Schmitt cast this
structural tension he located at the heart of political existence between
order and indeterminacy, in directly spatial terms.29 On the one hand, land-
appropriation literally grounds order in the earth. On the other hand, how-
ever, these acts reveal the ultimate groundlessness of order, its foundation in
contingent processes of grounding.30
The significance of this tension for Schmitt was that insofar as every spatial
order relies upon acts of land-appropriation, it is historically contingent.
Precisely for this reason, the concept of nomos and the category of land-
appropriation have enduring relevance. Thus, whilst the ‘constitutive processes’
of land-appropriation ‘are certainly not everyday occurrences … neither are
they simply matters of bygone times and only of archaeological or antiquar-
ian interest’ (Schmitt, 2003a: 78). Not only could the historical development
of spatial order be traced through successive patterns of appropriation, but
the end of the reigning nomos of the earth could also be foreseen:

As long as world history remains open and fluid, as long as conditions

are not fixed and ossified: in other words, as long as human beings and
peoples have not only a past but also a future, a new nomos, will arise in
the perpetually new manifestations of world-historical events.
(ibid.)

Schmitt wrote The Nomos in the context of what he considered a period of

world-historical transition, ‘on the threshold of a new stage of human spatial
consciousness and global order’, the cusp of a second global ‘spatial revolu-
tion’ (ibid.: 48). Although the shape of the new nomos of the earth is not yet
fully apparent, its contours would take shape from the collapse of the old. It
is in fact the attempt to grasp the collapse of the old order of international
law that drew Schmitt to the question of the nomos in the first instance. Thus,
in order to understand his late spatial thought, it is crucial to first grasp his
account of the rise and fall of the Eurocentric global order that lies at the
heart of The Nomos of the Earth.
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 221
Nomos as institution: jus publicum Europaeum
‘There had always been some kind of nomos of the earth’, Schmitt wrote
(ibid.: 351). ‘In all the ages of mankind, the earth has been appropriated,
divided and cultivated’ (ibid.). However, every pre-global nomos had been
‘purely terrestrial’ and ‘every powerful people considered themselves to be the
center of the earth’, to rule over a domicile of peace and freedom beyond
which chaos reigned (ibid.). Each bounded world sought to protect itself from
the disorder beyond by building ‘a fence, a line, a Chinese wall’ and marking
its limits with mythical concepts like the Pillars of Hercules (Schmitt, 2003d:
352). ‘Humanity had a mythical image of the earth but no scientific under-
standing of it as a whole’ (Schmitt, 2003a: 50). Because there was no ‘concept
of a planet … a jus gentium [international law] capable of encompassing the
whole earth and all humanity was impossible’ (ibid.). Thus, while distinct
nomoi had always existed, there was ‘no spatial ordering of the earth as a
whole, no nomos of the earth in the true sense’, before the world emerged as a
globe (ibid.: 51).
This first, multiple, nomos of the earth was eclipsed in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries with the European discovery of the New World and the open-
ing of the world’s oceans, something Schmitt identified with the first global
‘spatial revolution’ examined in the previous chapter. Schmitt argued that:

no sooner had the contours of the earth emerged as a real globe – not
just sensed as myth, but apprehensible as fact and measurable as space –
than there arose a wholly new and hitherto unimaginable problem: the
spatial ordering of the earth in terms of international law … The new
global image … required a new spatial order, … the struggle over the
land- and sea-appropriations of the New World began immediately after
its discovery.
(ibid.: 86)

In other words, a new form of order was needed, an order adequate to

address the new conflicts produced as a result of these the new spaces. Thus,
from the ‘new planetary consciousness of space’ emerged a new nomos of the
earth, the first spatial order that encompassed the earth as a whole (ibid.).
However, although the new nomos of the earth that resulted from the Eur-
opean appropriations of land and sea was global in scope, ‘Europe was still
the centre of the earth’. Thus, the second nomos of the earth was both global
and Eurocentric. Further, in contrast to the first nomos of the earth, the new
global order of the earth encompassed not only terrestrial spaces but for the
first time, the world’s oceans. A distinction was made between ‘firm land’
divided into states, colonies, protectorates and spheres of influence, and ‘free
sea’, marking the entrance of the free sea into a comprehensive spatial order
of the earth. Thus the ‘main characteristics of this second nomos of the earth
lay first in its Eurocentric structure and second in that … it encompassed the
222 A new Nomos of the Earth?
oceans’ (Schmitt, 2003d: 352). From this global spatial order emerged the
historically unique form of international law that, for Schmitt, had ordered
the world from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the jus publicum
Europaeum.

Jus publicum Europaeum

At the centre of The Nomos lies an account of the historic rise and fall of the
global spatial order produced by the jus publicum Europaeum. Schmitt’s peri-
odization of the jus publicum Europaeum was rather slippery, in part perhaps
because he attempted to describe gradual processes of emergence and dis-
solution, but it is most often identified with the period between the sixteenth
and twentieth centuries.31 The tremendous achievement of the jus publicum
Europaeum was the limitation of war through the division of space: ‘from the
sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, there was real progress,
namely a limiting and a bracketing of European wars’ (Schmitt, 2003a: 140).
Hence, European international law achieved a humanization and a rationali-
zation of warfare, at least in continental Europe, that Schmitt argued to be
‘nothing short of a miracle’ (ibid.: 151). This ‘arose solely’ – in his view –
‘from the emergence of a new spatial order’ (ibid.: 140). More specifically, it
rested upon two forms of spatial division: (i) the distinction between Europe
and the ‘free’ space of the New World, and (ii) the distinction between ‘firm
land’ and ‘free sea’. Schmitt’s analysis of the collapse of global spatial order
in the twentieth century and the possibilities he saw for the emergence of a
new global nomos need to be understood against the background of this
bracketing of war in a double division of space.

Beyond the line

For Schmitt ‘the struggle among European powers for land-appropriations
made necessary certain divisions and distributions’ on which order could be
established (ibid.: 87). In response to this demand, a new form of thinking
about international law emerged, which Schmitt called ‘global linear thinking’
(ibid.). This was at the most basic level a form of dividing up the lands and
seas newly opened by European appropriations, with the use of lines that
could provide ordering orientations.32 The question of drawing global lines
‘was political from the start’ and ‘could not be dismissed as “purely geo-
graphical”’ (ibid.: 88). Although Schmitt argued that even if ‘scientific,
mathematical, or technical disciplines, geography and cartography certainly
are neutral’, they could, ‘as every geographer knows’, be instrumentalized in
highly political ways (ibid.). Hence the nature and location of global lines of
order were a politically charged question over which there had been historical
struggle. Schmitt argued that three phases of ‘global linear thinking’ had
taken shape since the European appropriations of land and sea in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries: first, was the Spanish–Portuguese rayas; second, came
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 223
the English–French ‘amity lines’; and finally, America’s unilateral declaration
of the Western Hemisphere as its zone of influence.
The important transition in Schmitt’s conception of the jus publicum Euro-
paeum took place between the Spanish–Portuguese rayas and the English–
French ‘amity lines’.33 The rayas were the first global lines drawn after the
European discoveries of the New World and carved the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans into areas of Spanish and Portuguese control. Schmitt understood
these lines, passed into law in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and the Treaty
of Saragossa (1526), to remain largely within the worldview of the Medieval
Christian Empire, as the Roman Pope still acted as a common authority with
the ultimate right to recognize the division of the New World. By contrast,
the ‘amity-lines’, that appeared in secret verbal clauses of the Treaty of
Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, emerged as a result of the lack of a common
authority that could arbitrate between parties of a shared faith. They were
‘modern … to the extent that they had replaced the old theories and formulas
inherited’ from the Medieval Christian world, the product of the competition
between Catholic and Protestant powers in Europe (ibid.: 95).34 These lines
marked the point at which ‘Europe ended and the “New World” began,’ the
point at which ‘European public law’ ended (ibid.: 93). Within the line, Europe
was a place of legally bracketed war, but beyond the line was an ‘overseas
zone in which, for want of any legal limits to war, the law of the stronger
applied’ (ibid.: 93–94). Through the development of amity lines the European
powers constructed a space of freedom ‘beyond the line’, a ‘conflict zone’ (ibid.: 95)
where ‘force could be used freely and ruthlessly’ (ibid.: 94): ‘Everything that
occurred “beyond the line” remained outside the legal, moral, and political
values recognized on this [the European] side of the line’ (ibid.).35
The amity lines established in the late sixteenth century thus marked a
fundamental distinction between European and non-European spaces, gov-
erned by different legal statuses and different rules of war. There were none-
theless two types of ‘open’ space, two spaces of freedom ‘beyond the line’ in
which European powers could act without restraint: the ‘free’ land of the
New World and the ‘free sea’. Both played a role in the construction of the
jus publicum Europaeum, but the essential point for Schmitt was the funda-
mental distinction the amity lines established between a European space of
order defined by legally bracketed war and a disorderly non-European space
‘beyond the line’, where force could be tested freely. The bracketing of war
within Europe was thus dependent on the emergence of the distinction
between European and non-European space marked by the amity lines: ‘the
designation of a conflict zone outside Europe contributed … to the bracketing
of European wars’ (ibid.: 97–98).36 The identification of non-European space
‘beyond the line’ as a free space of competition was thus, for a defiantly
Eurocentric Schmitt ‘a tremendous exoneration of the internal European
problematic’ (ibid.: 94).37
In Schmitt’s account, therefore, the bracketing of European war rested
precisely on the distinction between the interstate order of continental Europe
224 A new Nomos of the Earth?
and the ‘free’ spaces of competition ‘beyond the line’. On the one hand, the
‘open spaces’ of the New World and the ‘free sea’ played the role of the
‘constitutive outside’ of European legal order, confirming its status as a realm
of higher order separated from the space of disorder beyond. On the other,
conflict between European powers could be displaced from European soil into
the conflict zone, ‘beyond the line’.38 Hence, the bracketing of war in Europe,
the miraculous achievement of the jus publicum Europaeum for Schmitt, was
dependent on the clear distinction between a European space – where the
relation between states was governed by international law – and non-European
spaces where powers were able to exercise force without legal constraint.
Continental Europe could thus be constituted as a realm of relative depolitici-
zation, insofar as it was clearly distinguished from a realm ‘beyond the line’
where the political was unconstrained and homo homini lupus.39

Firm land and free sea

In Schmitt’s analysis, a balanced situation emerged within Europe because the
‘free’ space of the New World allowed competition and conflict between
European powers to be outsourced to colonial lands ‘beyond the line’. How-
ever, this balance of power between states within Europe relied on a second
foundational spatial distinction – that between land and sea: ‘The separation
of firm land and free sea was the basic principle of the jus publicum Europaeum’
(ibid.: 183). For Schmitt, land and sea were:

divided into two separate and distinct global orders within the Euro-
centric world order that arose in the sixteenth century … From the per-
spective of the jus publicum Europaeum, all land on the earth belonged
either to European states or to those of equal standing, or it was land free
to be occupied, i.e., potential state territory, or potential colonies … [By
contrast] the sea remained outside any specific state spatial order: it was
neither state or colonial territory nor occupied space … was free of any
type of state spatial sovereignty.
(ibid.: 172)

Each realm had ‘its own concepts of enemy, war, booty, and freedom’ and
hence, ‘land and sea confronted each other as two separate worlds’ (ibid.).
However, Schmitt argued that it was precisely ‘the antithesis of land and sea’
that provided ‘the universal foundation of global international law’ (ibid.). ‘The
total decision for international law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
culminated in a balance of land and sea – in the opposition of two orders that
determined the nomos of the earth precisely in their mutual tension’ (ibid.: 173).
Schmitt suggested that the key to balancing the tensions between land and
sea was England, which from the seventeenth century had emerged as the
great European maritime power: ‘The island of England, was the connecting
link between the different orders of land and sea’ (ibid.).40 Through its
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 225
dominance of the seas, England was able to act as a ‘sovereign of the balance
of land and sea’ (ibid.) and assume this ‘world-historical intermediary position’
because it alone had taken the ‘step from a medieval feudal and terrestrial
existence to a purely maritime existence’ (ibid.). By completing the ‘transition to
the maritime side of the world’, England prevented a ‘maritime equilibrium
of the sea powers’ and gained sole dominance of the maritime side of the
nomos of the earth (ibid.). England became, in Schmitt’s eyes, ‘the repre-
sentative of the universal maritime sphere of a Eurocentric global order, the
guardian of the other side of the jus publicum Europaeum’ (ibid.) and from its
position of maritime dominance, it ‘balanced the whole terrestrial world’ and
‘determined the nomos of the earth from the sea’ (ibid.). Hence, England
occupied a unique position of power in Schmitt’s view. Not only was it the
dominant global sea power, but also the principal force upholding the balance
between land and sea on which the internal equilibrium of continental Eur-
opean land powers rested. England had ‘the decisive spatial perspective’
without which ‘there would have been no European international law’ (ibid.:
145). Schmitt thus regarded the fate of the jus publicum Europaeum, and speci-
fically the bracketing of war in Europe, to rest to a large extent with the English
power to dominate the seas and balance the relations between land and sea.

The bracketing of war

As noted above, for Schmitt, a key achievement of the jus publicum Euro-
paeum had been to create the conditions for ‘the rationalization and huma-
nization of war, i.e., the possibility of bracketing war in international law’
(ibid.: 141). Schmitt regarded it to be an ‘astounding fact’ that European inter-
national law had realized a bracketing of war for several centuries (ibid.: 148):41
‘this was achieved by limiting war to a military relation between states’, at least
in the space of continental Europe (ibid.: 100). Hence, Schmitt considered the
modern secular territorial state that emerged in Europe during the seventeenth
century to be the agent of this bracketing of war. The state ‘constituted the
only ordering institution of this time’ and hence was the core of the nomos of the
jus publicum Europaeum (ibid.: 148).42 However, such an inter-state legal order in
Europe was only possible ‘against the background of the immense open spaces
of a particular type of freedom’ (ibid.). The balance of power between states
within Europe that allowed war to be rationalized and humanized fundamen-
tally rested upon global spatial division: on the one hand, the distinction
between land and sea, on the other, that between Europe and the New World.
This spatial division of the earth allowed the European states to collectively
uphold a ‘special territorial status in international law’ (ibid.). Hence, Europe
could be considered a realm of peace and order distinct from the disorderly
‘free’ spaces ‘beyond the line’. Internally Europe was divided into a number of
territorially bounded sovereign states that recognized each other as equals
‘living on common European soil and belonging to the same European
“family”’ (ibid.: 41).43 This mutual recognition allowed war between
226 A new Nomos of the Earth?
European states to become ‘somewhat analogous to a duel, i.e., a conflict of
arms between territorially distinct personae morales [moral persons], who
contended with each other on the basis of the jus publicum Europaeum,
because European soil had been divided under their aegis’ (ibid.: 141–142).44
The warring parties ‘both recognized each other as states’ with the ‘same
political character and the same rights’ (ibid.: 142). ‘The equality of sover-
eigns made them equally legal partners in war’ and thus they became collec-
tively invested in its legal limitation. As a result, war became solely an affair
of states, a ‘purely state war’ conducted within formal constraints (ibid.: 141).
This ‘war in form’ created the conditions for the ‘strongest possible rationali-
zation and humanization of war’ (ibid.), and ensured that Europe constituted
‘a realm of relative reason’ (ibid.: 142).
The bracketing of war in the jus publicum Europaeum turned on the fact
that European states recognized each other as justis hostes, just enemies, ‘both
legally and morally on the same level’ (ibid.: 147). By recognizing each other
as equals, European states produced ‘a concept of enemy able to assume legal
form’ (ibid.: 142). This had been made possible because ‘the problem of just
war had been divorced from the problem of justa causa, and had become
determined by formal juridical categories’ (ibid.: 141). The justice of war was
no longer ‘based on the conformity with the content of theological, moral, or
juridical norms, but rather on the institutional and structural equality of
political forms’ (ibid.: 143). In other words, Schmitt claimed that, by removing
the question of just cause, a new concept of just enemy could be recognized as
the regulative basis of wars between European states.
A series of important distinctions followed from the principle of justus
hostis. First, its implementation made it possible for European states to recog-
nize each other as justi hostes and not as criminals who needed to be pun-
ished. Between such equals a ‘non-discriminatory concept of war’ was possible
(ibid.: 147): the enemy was no longer one ‘who must be annihilated’ (ibid.: 142):

even if one accepts that ‘man is a wolf among men’ in the bellum omnium
contra omnes [war of everyone against everyone] this has no discriminatory
meaning, because also in the state of nature none of the combatants has
the right to suspend equality or claim that only he is human and that his
opponent is nothing but a wolf.
(ibid.: 147)

Second, and as a result, war could be sharply distinguished from peace. War
with a legal and moral equal did not have to end with the enemy being van-
quished or annihilated, but ‘could be terminated with a peace treaty’ (ibid.: 148).
Third, the concept of justus hostis allowed combatants and non-combatants
to be distinguished in two ways. On the one hand, wars were conducted only
between the armies of European states, rather than between civilian popula-
tions, so combatants and civilians could be differentiated. On the other, it
‘created the possibility of neutrality’, as states involved in the conflict, and
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 227
third parties who were not, could likewise be clearly distinguished (ibid.: 142).
Hence, in Schmitt’s view, the concept of the justus hostis allowed European ‘war
in form’ to discern between enemies and criminals, war and peace, combatants
and civilians, and between warring and neutral parties. From these distinc-
tions arose that ‘marvellous product of human reason’, the bracketed warfare
of the jus publicum Europaeum (ibid.: 151).

Twentieth century spatial chaos

Despite its endurance across several centuries, the jus publicum Europaeum
nonetheless remained a fragile order. First, it rested on a precarious balance
based on its two spatial divisions: between Europe and the lands ‘beyond the
line’, and between land and sea. These spatial distinctions were in fact
increasingly challenged by a combination of rapid technological develop-
ments and the self-assertion of new powers beyond Europe. Second, the most
important achievement of the jus publicum Europaeum, the bracketing of war,
only extended as far as the boundaries of Continental Europe, and relied
upon a concept of war increasingly undercut by the neutralizing tendencies of
modern European legal thought and emerging technologies of transport,
communication and warfare. As the nineteenth century led into the twentieth,
these tendencies began to eat away at the basis of European international law
and unravel the nomos of the earth. One crucial aspect of The Nomos is
Schmitt’s attempt to grasp these processes of world-historical dissolution. If
his pre-war work had examined the crisis of the modern European state, his
1950 masterwork sought to contextualize this crisis in a wider collapse of the
Eurocentric spatial order.
The last section of the The Nomos in fact offers a critical analysis of the
factors contributing to the collapse of the jus publicum Europaeum at the start
of the twentieth century. Schmitt provided here a sweeping account of the
convulsions of global politics and an agile dissection of the subtle shifts that
affected mainstream conceptions of international law, from the late nineteenth
to the mid twentieth centuries. Although his analysis of ‘world-political
development’ during this period is too rich to examine in its entirety here, the
dominant factors ranged against the integrity of the jus publicum Europaeum
can be identified (ibid.: 225–226). His account of the collapsing nomos high-
lights three core shifts: (i) the collapse of the Eurocentric spatial order
through the ‘relativization of Europe’ and the rise of US power; (ii) the
emergence of a discriminatory concept of war; and, finally, (iii) the develop-
ment of modern technologies of war that intensified the first two tendencies.
We will discuss each in turn.

The eclipse of Europe

Schmitt suggested that by the early years of the twentieth century Europe had
been eclipsed as the centre of global power relations. This had universal
228 A new Nomos of the Earth?
repercussions since the jus publicum Europaeum had been a Eurocentric
global order based on the special status of Europe in international law. For
Schmitt, this ‘relativization of Europe’ spelled the end of the nomos of the
earth, as it dissolved the foundational distinction between European and non-
European space on which global spatial order rested (ibid.: 217). Although
this process was gradual, and came about through a complex matrix of fac-
tors, Schmitt identified two principle causes: the failure of European jur-
isprudence to understand the concrete spatial basis of international law and
the rise of the United States as a global power.
First, Schmitt argued that from the late nineteenth century European legal
thought increasingly lost sense of Europe’s special spatial status within inter-
national law, and largely overlooked the concrete spatial foundations of
global order. This was a symptom of the growing influence of positivism in
jurisprudence, that same positivism dismissed by Schmitt when analysing the
sphere of domestic state law in the 1920s and 1930s: ‘European international
law lost any sense of the spatial structure of a concrete order’ and had
become solely concerned with abstract systems of norms (ibid.: 220). This
form of legal thought was inherently ‘spaceless’ and undermined the concep-
tion of Europe as a space defined by a distinct legal system. The European
juridical framework at the beginning of the twentieth century was character-
ized by the ‘spacelessness of a general universalism’ and unable to grasp the
concrete spatial foundations of international law (ibid.: 230), to grasp the
nomos of the earth, and thus fell into a deep disorientation. For Schmitt,
European jurisprudence was not only producing judgements in deep contra-
diction with its own foundations, but was systematically excluding all foun-
dational questions of political, economic and spatial basis of order, wrongly
considered as ‘unjuridical’ (ibid.: 239).
Schmitt also noted that the influence of positivism in legal practice directly
undermined the spatial distinction between Europe and the ‘free’ space
‘beyond the line’, as a growing number of cases arose in which European and
colonial lands were given ‘territorial parity’ in law by European jurists (ibid.:
218). This fundamentally questioned the Eurocentric nature of global spatial
order by removing the legal distinction between European and non-European
space on which the jus publicum Europaeum was based. Schmitt identified as
a turning point the Congo Conference in Berlin (1884–1885). Whilst he con-
sidered its results ‘a remarkable final document’ of Europe’s belief in its right
to the land-appropriation of ‘free’ space, it nonetheless marked a definitive
confusion in terms of fundamental international legal distinction (ibid.: 216).
The United States, although not a participant in the conference, in fact
recognized the flag of the International Congo Society in 1848, a move which
prompted the European powers to extend to the colonial lands the same
rights recognized in the European states, something clearly expressed in the
Congo Act that emerged from the conference, effectively equating ‘the status
of colonial soil with that of the state territory of the motherland’ (ibid.: 218).
In Schmitt’s view the Congo case set a dangerous precedent insofar as it
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 229
signalled a failure to understand the ‘different soils’ statuses’ that underpinned
the fundamental spatial ordering of the earth (ibid.: 221). European interna-
tional law was in fact dissolving its own foundations by appealing to universal
and abstract norms that made no reference to their spatially concrete situat-
edness. This became particularly evident, according to Schmitt, between 1890
and 1918, in the shift from a specifically European international law to a form
of ‘international law’ applicable everywhere in the same abstract way. The
‘spaceless universalism’ of this international law ate away at the spatial dis-
tinction upon which the specifically European international law of the jus
publicum Europaeum had rested.
However, if Schmitt identified the decline of the Eurocentric nomos partly
with the universalization and abstraction of European jurisprudence, a much
more profound challenge emerged from outside Europe, in the form of new
global powers questioning this Eurocentric division of the world. Although he
dedicated passing attention to the emergence of Japanese power in Asia, the
main focus of his analysis was the rise of the United States to global emi-
nence. By declaring the ‘Western Hemisphere’ its sphere of interest, the
United States presented a direct (and mortal) challenge to the spatial order
produced by the jus publicum Europaeum, the first ‘counterattack of the “New
World” against the Old’ (ibid.: 99). Drawing on his work from the 1930s on
the development of US foreign policy, Schmitt thus argued that the United
States’ unilateral declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 had established
a third form of global line (following the European rayas and amity lines),
separating the space of the New World from European intervention. The
Monroe Doctrine therefore gave origin to a new continental sphere of inter-
national law that dissolved the distinction between ‘Old Europe’ and the New
World as the foundations for the jus publicum Europaeum. Further, although
the Monroe Doctrine was declared unilaterally, it became key to the conduct
of United States foreign policy, since it was signed into bilateral treaties with
other states in the Western Hemisphere, giving the United States extensive
rights to intervention. Schmitt clamed that these treaties gave the United
States ultimate sovereignty over the internal affairs of those states in its sphere
of influence. In this new continental ante litteram Großraum, the United
States occupied a strange position of ‘absent presence’ within other states, ‘a
mixture of absence in principle and presence in practice’ (ibid.: 217). Whilst
such treaties respected the territorial integrity of other states, in Schmitt’s
view, they ‘hollowed out’ the substance of their sovereignty by ceding ultimate
power over relations with other states to the United States. Hence the Monroe
Doctrine was both the recognition and the legitimation of the increased
‘spatial sovereignty’ of the United States in the Western Hemisphere (ibid.:
253; see also Chapter 6).
Schmitt highlighted how the application of the Monroe Doctrine was stea-
dily extended during the early part of the twentieth century, as the United
States increasingly moved from an isolationist to an interventionist approach
to global affairs. Hence, whilst the Monroe Doctrine had originally extended
230 A new Nomos of the Earth?
the United States’ ‘spatial sovereignty’ to the continental space of the Western
Hemisphere, it gradually became the ground for what Schmitt had previously
referred to as a ‘pan-interventionism’, now global in scope (Schmitt, 2011b:
90). He argued that American involvement in the First World War, and post-
war legal settlement in Europe, allowed the ‘absent–present’ power of the
United States to penetrate into European affairs, ultimately signalling the
complete eclipse of continental Europe as a specific sphere of international law.
When confined to the Western Hemisphere, so Schmitt’s argument went, the
Monroe Doctrine originally had the potential to provide a new form of spa-
tial order. However, as the means by which the ‘pan-interventionist’ expan-
sion of the United States was legitimized, it produced only a form of ‘spatial
chaos’ (Schmitt, 2003a: 246). For Schmitt, the League of Nations established
in 1919 gave perfect expression to such a ‘spatial chaos’. On the one hand, the
‘Geneva League’ was based on the idea of a universal international law that
applied equally across the globe and gave legal parity to powerful European
states and relatively marginal former colonies alike. On the other, the United
States, the world’s dominant ‘spatial power’, was not a signatory while at the same
time operating by proxy through the supposedly independent states under its
sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere (ibid.: 245). Thus the rise of
United States power not only dissolved the formerly core distinction between
European and non-European space, but provided no firm spatial distinction
on which a new nomos could be grounded, prefering to operate through the
hollowed out structure of the old state system.

Discriminatory war
Thanks to the bracketing of war, in Schmitt’s account, continental Europe
had become a realm of relative order, characterized by ‘war in form’ between
sovereign states that recognized each other as equals. Schmitt argued that the
First World War revealed this bracketing of war to have definitely collapsed
along with the correspondent spatial ordering of the earth. However, what
emerged in the aftermath of this total war was not a new spatial balance
between states and a new bracketing of war, but rather a new concept of war. In
contrast to the non-discriminatory concept of war of the jus publicum Euro-
paeum, a new discriminatory concept of war appeared on the global scene. If
the old European international law had replaced a notion of just war with
one of just enemy, Schmitt suggested that the laws of war that emerged in the
wake of the First World War reversed this process. A new concept of just war was
affirmed and, along with it, a concept of an unjust enemy. This new concept
of the enemy dissolved the grounds on which all the distinctions through
which war had been limited in the jus publicum Europaeum had been based.
Rather than providing a structure for a new bracketing war, the international
legal frameworks established after Versailles allowed for its escalation.
Schmitt thus claimed that the new discriminatory concept of war turned on
the criminalization of ‘aggressive’ war that had progressively come to
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 231
dominate international legal thinking between 1919 and 1939. He tracked this
new criminalization of ‘wars of aggression’ from its first appearance in the so
called ‘war guilt’ clauses of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, through the Geneva
Protocol issued by the League of Nations in 1924, to the 1928 Kellogg Pact,
where the condemnation of aggressive war became part of US national policy.
Rather than a conflict between two legally and morally equal belligerents, a
discriminatory concept of war distinguished between the legal and moral
status of the warring parties. On the one side, was a legitimate party pursuing
a just war, on the other, was an ‘unjust enemy’ now rendered a criminal in
international law. ‘Interstate war in European international law had been
replaced by … action against a criminal felon’ (ibid.: 269). Further, as war
came to be considered the legal pursuit of a criminal enemy, the concept of
‘third party neutrality’ became increasingly untenable.45 When the justice and
the ‘criminality’ of warring parties were enshrined within the framework of
international law, non-combatant states could not uphold neutral status. By
dint of their involvement in international legal agreements, third party states
were already legally implicated in the conflict, and thus forced to take sides.
Last, the distinction between war and peace became increasingly problematic as
a peace treaty could not be signed with a criminal enemy on a different legal
and moral footing. A war against an unjust criminal enemy would be con-
sidered as a series of punitive measures that could be pursued to the point of
annihilation. This was a tendency Schmitt had already identified in the cri-
tique of humanitarian wars ‘against war’ in earlier works such as The Concept
of the Political. From his standpoint, the emergence of a new discriminatory
concept of war unravelled the lattice of distinctions on the basis of which
European war had been bracketed in the jus publicum Europaeum.

Rootless technology and spaceless war

Technological developments at the beginning of the twentieth century inten-
sified the two processes contributing to the collapse of the jus publicum
Europaeum: the un-bracketing of war with the loss of the justus hostis, and the
collapse of the Eurocentric spatial order with the rise of the United States as
a global interventionist power. Technologies of transport, communication and
military power rendered the spatial divisions on which order rested increas-
ingly redundant, and the growing destructive capacity of these same technol-
ogies allowed the escalation of enmity. It was indeed principally in the sphere
of warfare that the influence of technology on the collapse of the previous
nomos of the earth was most visible. Although Schmitt acknowledged the
importance of submarines on the transformation of war, his analysis focused
largely on the appearance of air power and the new methods and conceptions
of war that emerged as a result, as discussed in the previous chapter.
First, Schmitt noted that air power dissolved the traditional distinction
between theatres of war that had characterized the jus publicum Europaeum.
With the advent of air war it was ‘no longer possible, as it was before, to
232 A new Nomos of the Earth?
speak of a theatre of war’ (ibid.: 319). He argued that the Eurocentric nomos
of the earth had rested upon a distinction between land and sea, each of
which had its own concepts of war and enmity, tied to the specific spatial
theatre of conflict. However, the emergence of air power marked the dissolu-
tion of land and sea as distinct theatres of war and a collapse of the cate-
gories of warfare on which it had been bracketed. In air war ‘all institutions
and principles’ that made a bracketing of war possible ‘lose their meaning’
(ibid.). By introducing a new vertical dimension into the conduct of war, air
power rendered the two theatres of war, ‘the surfaces of both land and sea …
indiscriminate’ (ibid.: 320). International law struggled to keep up with this
‘transformation in the spatial perspective’ but was unable to account for the
changes effected by air war within the existing frames of land and sea war
(ibid.: 313).
Second, the increased destructiveness of air warfare created an intensifica-
tion of enmity. The combatant who could effectively marshal air power had a
decisive advantage over their opponent, but a moral asymmetry followed
directly from this technological asymmetry: ‘Intensification of the technical
means of destruction, opens an abyss of an equally destructive legal and
moral discrimination’ (ibid.: 321). ‘If the weapons are conspicuously
unequal’ – Schmitt wrote – ‘then the mutual concept of war conceived of in
terms of an equal plane is also lacking’ (ibid.: 320). The asymmetries of
power resulting from the emergence of air warfare meant it was ‘no longer
possible to realize the concept of justus hostis’ (ibid.: 321). As a consequence,
a discrepancy in military power intensified the discrimination against the
enemy, the two processes running in tandem with each other, ‘superiority in
weaponry’ indeed taken to be ‘an indication of … justa causa’ (ibid.). Tech-
nologies of destruction would perhaps inevitably be used more freely in wars
conducted as punitive measures against a criminal enemy. Given that war had
been ‘transformed into a police action against trouble-makers, criminals, and
pests,’ Schmitt argued that, ‘the methods of this “police bombing” must be
intensified’ (ibid.). Thus the development of new technologies ‘was pushing
the discrimination of the opponent into the abyss’ (ibid.). A crack had opened
in the spatial order of the earth through which a terrifying vision of future
war could be glimpsed – a world of spaceless wars where absolute enemies
were cast into a zone of moral discrimination where they could be annihilated
through aerial bombardment in the name of peace and humanity.

A new nomos of the earth?

The horizon of Schmitt’s work in The Nomos was the question of what new
global spatial order might emerge from the wreckage of the jus publicum
Europaeum. The stakes of this task could not have been higher for Schmitt.
The world depicted in The Nomos faced a stark choice between an emerging
state of global civil war and a new global spatial order that could respatialize
the political and provide a new framework for limiting war. In the book’s
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 233
Foreword, written in 1950, Schmitt posed the question of a new nomos of the
earth as the decisive problem of the age. He nonetheless offerred little indi-
cation of where an answer might be found. He remarked only that a solution
would no more be provided by new scientific discoveries than by ‘men on
their way to the moon discovering a new and hitherto unknown planet that
could be exploited freely and utilized effectively to relieve their struggles on
earth’ (ibid.: 39). The Foreword closes by echoing the New Testament:
‘The earth has been promised to the peacemakers. The idea of a new nomos
of the earth belongs to them’ (ibid.). But no elaboration of what that idea
might be is offered. Indeed, the comments Schmitt made elsewhere in the
book were just as sketchy. Although Part IV of the book – the closing chapter
in the original publication – carries the title ‘The Question of the New Nomos
of The Earth’, this question is not addressed there. Rather here is where
Schmitt outlined the definitive collapse of the jus publicum Europaeum and
complained that a coherent nomos of the earth was lacking.
A fuller answer had to wait until Schmitt took the question up again in a
short text entitled ‘The New Nomos of the Earth’ published in 1955.46
Schmitt then acknowledged that ‘today [1954], the world in which we live is
divided into two parts, East and West, which confront each other in a cold
war and, occasionally, hot wars’ (Schmitt, 2003d: 353). However, it is obvious
that he did not consider the Cold War to be more than a fleeting historical
moment, even though it had carved the world into opposing camps around a
geopolitical and ideological fault-line cut through his native Germany.47 The
Cold War division is presented merely as the final collapse of the old nomos
into an unstable dualism where both sides were equally determined by the
‘religion of technology’.48 Schmitt thus looked beyond the Cold War bipo-
larity to find a new nomos of the earth, suggesting that there were only three
possibilities. ‘The first, and apparently the simplest’, was for one of the Cold
War parties to emerge victorious: ‘The victor would be the world’s sole
sovereign and would appropriate the whole earth – land, sea, and air – and
divide and manage it according with his plan and ideas’ (ibid.: 354).49
Schmitt argued that advances in modern technology led many to assume this
to be an inevitable course, but warned that the belief in a unification of the
world by technological means could only ultimately lead to destruction.50 The
second possible nomos he foresaw was an attempt to recreate the balance of
land and sea that typified the jus publicum Europaeum by using modern
technology to combine the rule of the sea and air. The United States had the
power to play the role of a global hegemon that would nonetheless maintain
the balance of the rest of the global spatial order.51 This had the ‘greatest
chance’ of success in Schmitt’s view, given that it had ‘accepted tradition and
custom on its side’ (ibid.: 355). Finally, Schmitt presented a third possibility
that he clearly viewed with favour. It was also based on the idea of a global
balance, but not under a single hegemonic power. Rather, Schmitt argued
that, ‘a combination of several independent Großräume or blocs could con-
stitute a balance … and precipitate a new order of the earth’ (ibid.). This was,
234 A new Nomos of the Earth?
in his view, the most ‘rational’ option (ibid.). It would only work, however, if
the Großräume were ‘differentiated meaningfully and … homogenous intern-
ally’ – but Schmitt gave no indication here of what this might mean (ibid.).
The idea of a new global spatial order based upon a number of large ter-
ritorial blocs was of course not new to Schmitt in 1955. It had in fact been at
the centre of his attempts to conceive a post-state world order since the late
1930s. Although it predated the question of the new nomos of the earth by
some years, Schmitt’s Großraum theory represented his most sustained effort
to develop a new form of spatial order from the wreckage of the jus publicum
Europaeum. Schmitt, however, made no mention of this earlier work in The
Nomos or in the 1955 corollary. This is doubtless because, as noted in previous
chapters, he had originally developed the concept in part to theorize Nazi
expansion in Europe, and it was precisely these efforts that had led to his
arrest and interrogation at Nuremburg. However, we would like to pause here
briefly to consider why Schmitt favoured this one possibility for a new nomos
of the earth.
To understand why Schmitt favoured a global spatial order based around a
number of Großräume we must first ask what he hoped a new nomos would
achieve. The question of a new nomos of the earth was pressing for Schmitt
because the alternative was a catastrophically violent spaceless disorder. The
fundamental problem for him was that order had become largely untied from
orientation and hence allowed the political to become despatialized. Without
a spatial framework within which enmity could be fixed in order to clear
inside–outside distinctions, war could float free of all constraint. The central
task of a new nomos of the earth was thus to provide a framework within
which the political could be respatialized. By providing new spatial determi-
nations between inside and outside, it would allow new constraints on war to
emerge and stand against the growing tide of spaceless disorder. However, for
Schmitt, powerful new political forms capable of producing these new spa-
tializations were needed for such an order to become a reality, since a single
world sovereign would erase all spatial differentiations and would thus utterly
fail to provide a form capable of producing order. A global balance overseen
by one hegemonic power would provide a limited degree of spatial distinction,
but would replicate the precarious state of the jus publicum Europaeum,
dependent on one power unable or unwilling to enforce its rule. A Großraum
order, by contrast, would establish clear spatial divisions and hence allow the
respatialization of the political along the lines of new inside–outside distinc-
tions. It represented, in Schmitt’s mind, the clearest chance for constructing a
new spatial order of the earth, even if the vision of a German-dominated
Europe he elaborated in the late 1930s and early 1940s had failed to come to
fruition and the planet appeared to be increasingly dominated by two global
super powers, equally committed to the universal rule of technology.
The search for a new nomos of the earth that shaped Schmitt’s late thought,
therefore, involved an attempt to define new political forms that could respa-
tialize the political after the eclipse of the European state system. Schmitt
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 235
took it as a given that such a new spatial order of the earth was necessary.
The core question was what nature it would take: ‘The development of the
planet, finally had reached a clear dilemma between universalism and pluralism,
monopoly and polypoly’ (Schmitt, 2003a: 243). However, Schmitt understood
this ‘core question of the spatial structure of international law – the alter-
native of a plurality of Großräume or the global spatial unity of one world order,
the great antithesis of world politics, namely the antithesis of a centrally ruled
world and a balanced spatial order, or universalism and pluralism, monopoly
or polypoly’, to have been systematically excluded from an international law
increasingly governed by universalist concepts (ibid.: 247). The real stakes of
this debate were therefore the opposition to the dominant universalist con-
ceptions of global order that could lead only towards an ever deeper ‘spatial
disorder’, as they would not provide the grounds for spatial differentiation,
and hence political form. For Schmitt, universalism was formless, and with-
out political form there could be no subject capable of spatializing the poli-
tical and hence limiting war. By contrast, pluralist conceptions of global
order necessarily rest on some type of differentiation, and could potentially
provide the grounds for a political form capable of spatializing the political
and fusing order and orientation, the political and the spatial, once again.

The last sentinel of the Earth: the Partisan

Schmitt’s last attempt to imagine a new political form capable of respatializ-
ing the political came in his short 1963 book on partisan warfare, The Theory
of the Partisan. Here he sought to directly engage with what new relationships
might be forged between the political and the spatial in late twentieth century
conditions, seemingly defined by the complete domination of ‘technical-
industrial’ universalism. However, the book strikes a rather minor key in
contrast to the world-historical bombast of his mid century writings. The
author himself noted that The Partisan was a ‘sketchy work’ taking ‘modest
form’, and its uncharacteristically uncertain tone contrasts sharply with the
majority of Schmitt’s output (Schmitt, 2007c: 1). It appears the product of a
man desperately clinging to the latest developments in current affairs as he
was increasingly swept out of time by the tide of change. Although he was
keen to display his grasp on the contemporary moment, peppering his text with
topical references to Che Guevara, Ho Chi-Minh and the Cold War ‘Space
Race’, Schmitt nonetheless oscillated between nostalgic glances to a lost world
of order and an ominous apprehension of a catastrophic future. Since the
early 1940s, Schmitt had argued that the world was caught at a world-historical
crossroads between a spaceless techno-industrial disorder and a new form of
global spatial order. This book marked his last attempt to salvage the possibility
of the latter from the growing inevitability of the former.
The Theory of the Partisan investigated the changing concept of the poli-
tical, and hence of the enemy, in the late twentieth century, when all domains
of life were flowing ‘into the force-field of technical-industrial development’
236 A new Nomos of the Earth?
(ibid.: 68). Indeed, Schmitt subtitled the book ‘An Intermediate Commentary
on the Concept of the Political’, thus explicitly linking it to his earlier book,
just in time for the publication of a new edition. As discussed at length above,
in the late twentieth century warfare had become, according to him, increas-
ingly untied from state bracketing, as the global antagonisms of the Cold War
were played out in civil wars and wars of decolonization. This had made
partisan warfare, once a relatively obscure issue of interest mostly to military
planners, a pressing concern in which the very nature of the political could be
located. These very changes had made the once marginal partisan into ‘a key
figure in world-history’ (ibid.: 88). Schmitt hoped that an investigation of this
seemingly peripheral figure would therefore open a series of subsequent
questions bearing on the concerns that had shaped his work. Tellingly, the
book’s closing sentence states that ‘the theory of the partisan flows into the
question of the concept of the political, into the question of the real enemy
and of a new nomos of the earth’ (ibid.: 95).

Telluric and motorized partisans: real and absolute enemies

Schmitt at first attempted to define the nature of the partisan, tracing the
development of the concept from the Spanish guerrilla war in 1808 to the
decolonization struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. The most fundamental
aspect of the partisan, on which ‘his essence and his existence’ lay, was the
fact that they stood outside the traditional bracketing of war between states
(ibid.: 11). By pushing beyond these brackets, the partisan moved from a
realm of ‘conventional enmity’ into a new and more intense realm of ‘real
enmity’ (ibid.). Schmitt further qualified the ‘essence’ of the partisan in sev-
eral ways, noting that they were defined by irregularity, mobility and intense
political commitment (ibid.: 14–20). The irregular and mobile nature of par-
tisans set them apart from state armies and their intensely political status
distinguished them from mere criminals or pirates, from a ‘corsair on land’
(ibid.: 70).52 Despite these common defining features, Schmitt suggested that
two distinct types of partisan had emerged in the late twentieth century, the
‘motorized’ partisan (ibid.: 76) and the ‘telluric’ partisan (ibid.: 20), each of
which bore relation to a specific type of enmity. The distinction between them
provided a lens through which the changing relationship between space and
the political could be understood.
The telluric partisan had a defensive character, tied to the protection and
integrity of a particular space. Although their intense political commitment
generated a ‘real’ enmity, more intense than the ‘conventional’ enmity of
bracketed state warfare, it was still bound to a specific place and hence spa-
tially limited. By contrast, the motorized partisan had an aggressive character
detached from a particular place. The motorized partisan was one who ‘leaves
his own turf and becomes more dependent on technical-industrial means’
(ibid.: 76). In adapting to the ‘technical-industrial environment’, the motor-
ized partisan developed an ‘absolute’ enmity unbounded from spatial limits
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 237
and increasingly dependent on technologies of mass destruction (ibid.: 78;
also 88–95).53 Hence, for Schmitt, the distinction between the two types of
partisan turned on the question of the relationship between enmity and spa-
tial limitation. The ‘real’ enmity of the telluric partisan was spatially limited,
and therefore limited in intensity, whereas the ‘absolute’ enmity of the
motorized partisan was by contrast unlimited in space and intensity.
Although both types of partisan are defined by enmities that went beyond the
bracketing of ‘conventional’ state warfare, only the ‘real’ enmity of the telluric
partisan had any inherent limitation. ‘The war of absolute enmity knows no
bracketing’ and has no inherent limitation (ibid.: 52).

An autochthonous Katechon?
The distinction between a telluric partisan and a motorized partisan is sig-
nificant within the trajectory of Schmitt’s late spatial thought, as the former
represented his last attempt to locate a new ordering subject capable of
respatializing the political and limiting war. The telluric partisan was the last
figure he identified as capable of standing against the techno-industrial force
field of absolute enmity and spaceless war. This position of importance rests
on the telluric partisan’s ‘specifically terrestrial’ character (ibid.: 21), the fact
that ‘[he] defends a piece of land with which he has an autochthonous rela-
tion’ (ibid.: 92). Writing in 1962, Schmitt reminded his readers that, ‘the
names Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi-minh, and Fidel Castro indicate that the tie to
the soil, to the autochthonous population, and to the geographical particu-
larity of the land – mountain ranges, forests, jungles, or deserts’ remained a
topical concern in world politics (ibid.: 21). However, he argued that the
telluric partisan had a relevance that went far beyond the latest communist
revolution: ‘Until now, the partisan always has been a part of the true earth;
he is of the last sentinel of the earth as a not yet completely destroyed element
of world history’ (ibid.: 71). Thus, for Schmitt, the telluric partisan was the
last bearer of an order grounded in the earth that could fix enmity to spatial
limitations in an age of air war, nuclear weapons and the appropriation of
extraterrestrial space.
In heralding the telluric partisan as the last agent of terrestrial order,
Schmitt was drawn to celebrate an unusual mix of figures from the Right and
the Left of the political spectrum. Thus, Chairman Mao and Raoul Salan are
both lauded for the spatial particularism of their struggles, despite the fact
that the former was the leader of a communist revolution in China and the
other of a failed coup against the French decolonization of Algeria.54 Both
presented, for Schmitt, resistance to the despatialization and absolutization of
enmity that grew from universalist political thought and the growing
destructiveness of military technologies. However, even the telluric partisan
can be ‘drawn into the force-field of irresistible, techno-industrial progress’
(ibid.: 22), becoming ‘completely disorientated’ and morphing into a motor-
ized partisan (ibid.). Schmitt claimed that this was precisely the danger during
238 A new Nomos of the Earth?
the Cold War when ‘powerful central [agencies] of world politics’ sought to
use the partisan as a ‘transportable and exchangeable tool’ that could be
deployed in overt and covert wars and ‘deactivated’ when no longer useful
(ibid.). Indeed, given the forces ranged against these last remaining telluric
partisans, Schmitt acknowledged that they might disappear ‘in the smooth-
running fulfillment of technical-functional forces just as a dog disappears on
the freeway’ (ibid.: 77). Perhaps even unfit for survival in the ‘thoroughly
organized technological world’ it seemed unlikely that the telluric partisan
could produce a new nomos of the earth (ibid.). Even appeared as the telluric
partisan is little more than a world-historical clutching at straws born of
theoretical exhaustion. He ended the book by reflecting on a near distant
future when the world will have slid into an ‘abyss’ of absolute enmity, a time
when ‘destruction will be completely abstract and completely absolute’ (ibid.: 94).
Even before Schmitt came to write The Partisan it was clear that his model
of the political based on the clear division of space was no longer adequate to
the times. Investing hope in the idea that marginal localized struggles could
produce a new global spatial order was perhaps the sign of a chastened
intellect. The world of the European spatial order that he had so soundly
theorized and identified with so strongly had come to an end. But rather than
accommodate himself to the new post-war world Schmitt instead seemed to
conflate the end of the Eurocentric nomos with the end of the world itself. A
diary entry from 1948 appeared to already have delivered his last word on the
future of spatial order: ‘That is the new Nomos of the earth; no more Nomos’
(in Ulmen, 2007a: xx).

Notes
1 The book has received an enthusiastic if often critical reception across a number of
disciplines in the Anglophone academy since its publication in English translation
in 2003, as noted earlier. Frederic Jameson quickly declared The Nomos to be a
work of ‘astonishing contemporaneity’ (2005: 199). Giacomo Marramao had ear-
lier said that The Nomos was Schmitt’s ‘magnum opus and one of the greatest
books of the Century’ (2000: 1570). Even in 1955 Alexandre Kojève wrote to
Schmitt that he considered it ‘extremely brilliant’ (Kojève and Schmitt, 2001: 94).
2 The book’s English translator Gary Ulmen suggests that this primarily indicated a
lack of access to sources. Indeed, Ulmen notes that the original German edition
included many minor errors that were corrected in the English edition, following
Schmitt’s stated wishes (2003a: 35).
3 Within a few lines of each other he wrote, ‘the given subject and the present
situation are overwhelming’ and ‘both the theme and the situation are over-
whelming’ (2003: 38–39).
4 He claimed indeed that his aim was to ‘present new ideas objectively’ (ibid.: 39).
This was the defence Schmitt offered of himself whilst under interrogation at
Nuremburg (see Schmitt, 1987b).
5 Schmitt largely avoided his work on Großraum order here. It seems likely that,
given that this work had its inception in the context of the Nazi expansion in
Eastern Europe, he wanted to avoid any further association with the Nazi regime,
especially since his Großraum work had already brought him under suspicion. The
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 239
English edition of the book includes the three corollaries dating from 1953 to 1957.
Interestingly, although the concept of Großraum appears in one of these cor-
ollaries, ‘The New Nomos of the Earth’ (1953) no mention is made of its original
inception in the context of Nazi expansion in Europe.
6 The first chapter of The Nomos carries the title ‘Law as a Unity of Order and
Orientation’. In the original German, Schmitt rendered order and orientation with
the rhyming couplet Ordnung und Ortung. Italian political theorist Thalin Zarma-
nian translates Ordnung und Ortung as ‘order and localisation’ (2011: 291). Zar-
manian uses the term ‘localization’ rather than ‘orientation’ to underline not only
the concrete spatial particularities implied in Schmitt’s concept, but also the dynamic
and active nature of Ortung. In the Italian translation of the book the term is
rendered as localizzazione, that is, again, localization, and the whole (extremely
vast and articulated) secondary literature on Schmitt in that language incorpo-
rates that interpretation (see Galli 2010a; Minca 2011a). Hence, any crudely geo-
graphically determinist reading of the relationship between order and orientation
is avoided as the active nature of nomic ordering is emphasized.
7 Schmitt enigmatically noted in the 1950 Foreword to The Nomos that the ‘exis-
tential question of jurisprudence’ was at that time ‘sundered between theology and
technology’ (ibid.: 38). This comment can be understood in relation to the funda-
mental battle Schmitt staked out between those forces driving the world towards a
‘spatial chaos’, which he associated with a utopian belief in technology, and those
capable of producing spatial order who could act as the Katechon.
8 Even if this point would seem to undermine much of the value of his philological
argument Schmitt reiterated it a few pages later: ‘The original spatial character of
the word nomos could not hold in Greek antiquity either’ (ibid.: 75). Schmitt lay
great emphasis on the etymological roots of the word nomos in making the claim
that it should be understood as spatial order and carried out extensive philological
work to back his argument in the opening chapters of The Nomos and, again, in
‘Nomos–Nahme–Name’, the corollary published in 1957. However, his argument
was riddled with inconsistencies and when the etymological evidence did not suit
he simply disregarded it.
9 Schmitt made considerable polemical mileage from drawing parallels between the
Greek Sophists and the legal positivists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Indeed, at points, in his critique of the formalist normativism that according to
him had obscured the original meaning of nomos, the two groups seemed to merge
into one.
10 Schmitt suggested that, ‘the consequences of this fusion with a Roman legal con-
cept are still with us’. He again equated the anti-nomic legacy of classical legal
thought with the development of legal positivism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. He agreed with the Spanish Romanist Alvaro d’Ors ‘that the translation
of nomos with Lex is one of the heaviest burdens that the conceptual and linguistic
culture of the Occident has had to bear. Anyone familiar with the further devel-
opment of the law-state and the present crisis of legality knows this to be true’
(Schmitt, 2003c: 342). Hence, Schmitt cast Cicero as the forefather of Kelsen.
11 Indeed, for Schmitt, ‘the intellectual trick of the postulate “not men, but laws” was
easy to see through, if one knew the linguistic history of nomos’ (ibid.). Hence, he
hoped that by returning to the original meaning of nomos abstract formalism of
positivistic legal thought could be undermined.
12 Schmitt argued that, ‘jurists of positive law, i.e. of constituted and enacted law,
have been accustomed in all times to consider only the given order and the pro-
cesses that obtain within it. They have in view only the sphere of what has been
established firmly, of what has been constituted: in particular, only the system of a
specific state legality. They are content to reject as “unjuridical” the question of
what processes established this order’ (ibid.: 82). This emerged, in Schmitt’s view,
240 A new Nomos of the Earth?
from the rationale of ‘a state bureaucracy, which has no interest in the right of its
origin, but only in the law of its own functioning’ (ibid.).
13 It is on this point that the relationship between the concept of nomos as spatial
order and the theoretical framework of ‘concrete order thinking’ that Schmitt laid
out in 1934 becomes most apparent.
14 It is worth highlighting that Schmitt mentioned in passing his ‘great respect for the
efforts of Wilhelm Stapel and Hans Bogner, who have given nomos the meaning of
Lebensgesetz [law of life]’. However, Schmitt noted his opposition, first, to the
word Leben, since it has ‘degenerated into the biological’ and, second, to the word
Gesetz, which ‘unlike the Greek word nomos … is not an Urwort [primeval word]’. ‘It
is deeply entangled in the theological distinctions between Jewish law and Chris-
tian grace – the (Jewish) law and the (Christian) gospel … [and] expresses only
the positivistic artifice of what is enacted or obliged – the mere will to com-
pliance’ (ibid.: 70 n10). The difficulty of deciphering Schmitt’s complex relationship
to German conservatism and anti-Semitism are clearly evident in this passage. On
the one hand, he commended these thinkers of the ‘conservative revolution’ and
opposed the use of the term Gesetz on anti-Semitic grounds, tacitly equating Jews
with positivism. On the other, he rejected their biological interpretation of law as
a conceptual ‘degeneration’ (ibid.).
15 In discussing the primacy of the land in the concept of nomos Schmitt used the
words ‘earth’, ‘land’ and ‘soil’ interchangeably. Stuart Elden has noted that this
terminological instability has implications for Schmitt’s discussion of territorial
sovereignty in The Nomos (see Elden, 2010). Elden correctly notes that Schmitt
paid insufficient attention to the conceptual shifts indicated by the different terms
employed at different times and in different contexts across modern European
history.
16 Schmitt argued further that, ‘all subsequent legal relations to the soil … and all
institutions of the walled city or of a new colony are determined by [the] primary
criterion’ of land appropriation (ibid.: 45).
17 Schmitt, throughout his discussion of land-appropriation, made frequent use of the
term ‘radical title’, derived from the English philosopher John Locke, who also
claimed that the basis of all social order was land, although he based his analysis
on the investment of labour in cultivating the land rather than notions of
appropriation.
18 ‘At this origin of land-appropriation, law and order are one: where order and
orientation coincide, they cannot be separated’ (ibid.: 81).
19 Schmitt took this statement from the German linguist Jost Trier and approvingly
quoted Trier’s claim that ‘the enclosure gave birth to the shrine by removing it
from the ordinary, placing it under its own laws, and entrusting it to the divine’
(ibid.: 74). This seems to have had an influence on Schmitt’s conception of land-
appropriation as ‘the process of naming of a sacred space’, something that we will
address below. Schmitt built on Trier’s work in his claim that, ‘law and peace
originally rested on enclosure in the spatial sense’ (ibid.).
20 Schmitt did, however, immediately qualify this by introducing a further distinction
between forms of land-appropriation: ‘There are two different types of land-
appropriations: those that proceed within a given order of international law, which
readily receive the recognition of other peoples, and others, which uproot an
existing spatial order and establish a new nomos of the whole spatial sphere of
neighbouring peoples’ (ibid.: 82). Technically, in Schmitt’s terms, both forms of
land-appropriation that extract land previously considered ‘free’ and those that
extract land from a previous owner, could have taken place within an existing
system of international law and received legal recognition and, at the same time,
found a new nomos of the earth. Thus, there is a degree of slippage between these
two sets of land-appropriation, that seems to indicate that Schmitt has not fully
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 241
worked out the relationship between these various concepts of land-appropriation
and how they related to the historical case of European colonialism, or rather,
finds it convenient to forego a critical examination of these processes.
21 Indeed, in one of the most peculiar and troubling passages of the corollary
‘Nomos–Nahme–Name’, published in 1957, Schmitt drew the connection between a
woman taking the name of her husband in marriage to the naming of land in land-
appropriation, precisely on the basis of the relationship between Nahme and naming.
22 The reference to a third tendency of power here relates to Schmitt’s reading of the
German Jesuit theologian P. Erich Przywara, who argued that power tended
toward secrecy, centrality and visibility.
23 Schmitt noted that, ‘nomos can be described as a wall, because, like a wall, it, too,
is based on sacred orientations’ (ibid.: 70). For a deeper examination of the act of
land-appropriation as a sacred act see Ojakangas (2009) and Palaver (1996).
24 Schmitt wrote that, if this were to occur, new ‘amity lines will be drawn, beyond
which atomic weapons and hydrogen bombs will fall’, although he still expressed
‘the hope that we will find the normative order of the earth, and that the peace-
makers will inherit the earth’ (ibid.: 49).
25 One exception here is Marx, who Schmitt considered a thinker particularly attuned
to the nature of modern appropriation. In Schmitt’s reading, Marx did not focus
on distribution, as many socialists did, but rather on a powerful new form of
appropriation, what Schmitt called ‘industry-appropriation [Industrie-Nahme]’
(Schmitt, 2003c: 334).
26 ‘Only a god’ – Schmitt noted – ‘can give, divide, and distribute without taking’
(ibid.: 345). Hence, for Schmitt, in claiming to have reached the stage where production
could take place without appropriation mankind was claiming the status of gods.
27 Indeed, this is a point that Schmitt would return to in one of his last published
texts, 1978’s ‘The Legal World Revolution’, where he discussed the industrial
appropriation of the world, or ‘Weltraumnahme’, although he left it open as to
whether this process had already occurred (see Schmitt, 1987c: 73–89).
28 For further comment on this structural tension between order and indeterminacy
see Chapter 3. For accounts that specifically relate this tension to the concept of
nomos see Ojakangas (2006) and Rowan (2011).
29 Hence, the structure of the ‘founding rupture’ that Ojakangas locates at the heart
of Schmitt’s thought is eminently spatial. Land-appropriation marks both a rupture
that divides space and a new foundation for order.
30 The metaphors of grounds and groundlessness lie at the core of philosopher
Michael Marder’s recent book Groundless Existence (2010). This text offers per-
haps the most sustained analysis of the ontological elements of Schmitt’s thought
to date from a post-structuralist perspective. One flaw that can be identified in
Marder’s analysis is that the importance of spatiality in Schmitt’s thought is too
often downplayed. Regardless, his work deserves further engagement and represents
a significant contribution to debates around the relationship between spatiality
and ontology in Schmitt’s corpus.
31 At various points Schmitt offered different periodizations, suggesting that the jus
publicum Europaeum lasted ‘for 400 years’ (ibid.: 49), then ‘300 years’ (ibid.: 140)
and finally, ‘for more than two centuries’ (ibid.: 181). In the 1955 corollary ‘The
New Nomos of the Earth’ he offered at least a precise end date claiming that, ‘the
Eurocentric nomos of the earth lasted until World War I’ (ibid.: 352), but tendered
no such precise start date.
32 Interestingly, Schmitt here noted that ‘global linear thinking’ was ‘conceptually
clearer and historical more accurate’ than other designations ‘such as Friedrich
Ratzel’s word “hologaic” [literally, whole earth]’ which failed to capture the divi-
sion of the globe (ibid.: 88). This is one of only two mentions Ratzel received in
242 A new Nomos of the Earth?
The Nomos, the other concerning the development of the seas as a human ‘space’
(ibid.: 283).
33 Schmitt attached great significance to the emergence of the Western Hemisphere in
the nineteenth century, but this will be addresses below, as it concerns the collapse
rather than the constitution of the jus publicum Europaeum.
34 ‘Geographically,’ the amity lines ‘ran along the equator of the Tropic of Cancer in
the south, along a degree of longitude drawn in the Atlantic Ocean through the
Canary Islands or the Azores in the west, or a combination of both’ (ibid.: 93).
35 Interestingly, Schmitt noted that the state of exception in English law ‘was analo-
gous to the idea of a designated zone of free and empty space’, ‘beyond the line’
(ibid.: 98). This is a rather minor point mentioned only in passing in The Nomos
but something that Giorgio Agamben seized upon in his reading of the spatiality
of the exception in Homo Sacer (see Agamben, 1998: 36–38).
36 Again, Schmitt wrote elsewhere in the book that, ‘the appearance of the vast free
spaces and the land-appropriation of a new world made possible a new European
international law amongst states’ (ibid.: 140).
37 In the Foreword to The Nomos Schmitt talked about powers able to ‘relieve their
struggles’ in ‘free’ spaces of competition. It is possible therefore that Schmitt
understood the conflict zones ‘beyond the line’ to act as areas where Europe could
‘relieve’ its inner tensions and shed the excess energies of the political.
38 The zone of conflict ‘beyond the line’ hence allowed conflict to be limited and
legally managed within European space, as it had been under the Medieval Chris-
tian Empire (according to Schmitt’s earlier analysis in Roman Catholicism and
Political Form). Just as the higher authority of the Catholic Church had allowed
antitheses between European powers to be contained on the basis that a frame-
work existed for mutual recognition, so too the spaces of the New World acted as a
way for antitheses within Europe to be managed on the grounds of mutual recog-
nition. The appropriation of the New World thus produced something like a colo-
nial complexico that resulted in a form of mediating order with no the need of a
higher authority whose legitimacy was based on theological claims. The unifying
principle containing warfare in Europe was thus outsourced from a no longer
universally legitimate authority standing above the collective of European powers
on to the difference from an Other who stood outside.
39 Schmitt argued that although Hobbes’s state of nature was ‘a no man’s land ’ that
did not mean it existed ‘nowhere’. Rather, ‘Hobbes locates it, among other places, in
the New World’ (ibid.: 96). Hence, the New World was deemed to lack any legitimate
ownership claims and was free to became the property of European states.
40 Schmitt paid little heed to the historical development of internal politics in the
British Isles and frequently referred to Great Britain simply as England. Further, in
numerous places he identified England as an island, rather than simply the
dominant country or crown within the complex and shifting relations between the
countries of the British Isles. However, as early as in 1938, in The Leviathan,
Schmitt highlighted the fact that England did not adopt the form of centralized
state that emerged in continental Europe in the seventeenth century. The form
of state developed in England was, in Schmitt’s mind, defined rather by a more
open legal system based on the relations to the ‘free sea’ and ‘free trade’.
41 Again, Schmitt’s periodization of the successful bracketing of war was slippery. He
at times noted that war was bracketed for ‘200 years’, other times for ‘400 years’.
However, we focus here on the conceptual framework rather than test the historical
details of Schmitt’s account of the jus publicum Europaeum.
42 Here the word ‘state’ refers to the concrete historical institution that characterized
the period ‘from about 1492 to 1890’ (ibid.: 148). Hence, Schmitt located the
eclipse of the state earlier than he did in his pre-war work. It is perhaps best to
 A new Nomos of the Earth? 243
understand this periodization as marking the beginning of the state’s decline as the
ordering institution of the global spatial order.
43 Interestingly, Schmitt noted that, in contrast to the amity lines that marked the
cleavage between European and non-European space, ‘the border between two
territorial states of modern European international law did not constitute an
exclusion, but rather a mutual recognition, above all of the fact that neighbouring
soil beyond the border was sovereign territory’ (ibid.: 52).
44 Schmitt lay great emphasis on the importance of the ‘personification’ of European
states, suggesting that the balance of powers worked fundamentally on the basis of
an ‘international personal analogy’ (ibid.: 146). Indeed, Schmitt noted that ‘after
1648, with the Peace of Westphalia, the practice of political relations also was
conceived, in some measure, in terms of such constructions’ (ibid.: 145). Hence,
Schmitt’s account of the jus publicum Europaeum shared some degree of similarity
with the standard account of ‘Westphalia’ in International Relations theory.
45 This was a point Schmitt had already made in his 1937 article ‘The Turn to the
Discriminating Concept of War’ (2011e) and ‘Neutrality According to Interna-
tional Law and National Totality’ from the following year (1999c).
46 This is the last of the three ‘Concluding Corollaries’ included with the English
translation out of historical sequence.
47 Schmitt’s comments on the Cold War here are confused and riddled with contra-
diction, but are nonetheless thought-provoking. He noted that East and West
are ‘geographical concepts’ but ‘in terms of the planet they are also fluid and
indeterminate concepts’ (ibid.: 353). He contrasted the concept of East and West
to the poles of North and South, in a curious combination of human and physical
geographies. His point, however, was that the line between East and West was in
fact indeterminate. He suggested that, ‘in purely geographical terms, it is impos-
sible to find either an established border or a declaration of mutual enmity’
(ibid.). However, ‘behind the geographical antithesis, a deeper and more elemental
antithesis is visible’, that between land and sea (ibid.). In Schmitt’s view, the East
(the Soviet Union and China) was a giant land mass and the United States domi-
nated West an oceanic world covering the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Thus, he
cast the Cold War in terms of the geo-elemental distinction between land and sea.
48 He indeed seemed to consider it likely that ‘the present global antithesis would
become only the last stage before an ultimate, complete unity of the world’ (ibid.: 354).
49 He noted that, ‘most of those considering this frightful problem rush blindly
toward a single sovereign of the world’ (ibid.: 355).
50 Thus, he reprised an argument running through his late work, that technology
could only overcome the inherent conflictual nature of human nature by destroying
humanity: ‘no matter how effective modern technical means may be, they can
destroy completely neither the nature of man nor the power of land and sea with-
out simultaneously destroying themselves’ (ibid.: 355).
51 America would thus step into the shoes of England, in Schmitt’s view. It would be,
‘the greater island that could administer and guarantee the balance of the rest of
the world’ (ibid.: 355). The ‘greater island’ is a reference to the American admiral
Alfred Thayer Mahan’s proposals to join the United States and the United King-
dom into a ‘greater island’, in order to achieve dominance of the world’s sea, and
hence the world.
52 In his recent book on the figure of the pirate in European legal history, Daniel
Heller-Roazen (2009) draws extensively on Schmitt’s analysis of the relationship
between pirates and modern partisan fighters.
53 The book’s translator, Gary Ulmen, notes that Schmitt introduced the distinction
between ‘real’ and ‘absolute’ enemies as ‘the German language makes no distinc-
tion between enemy (Feind), i.e., a legitimate opponent, whom one fights according
to recognized rules and whom one does not discriminate against as a criminal, and
244 A new Nomos of the Earth?
a foe, i.e., a lawless opponent, whom one must fight to the death and destroy’ (in
Schmitt, 2007c: 89 n90).
54 Indeed, Schmitt noted that Mao’s poem Kunlun outlines a ‘pluralistic image of a
new nomos of the earth’ (ibid.: 59). The Partisan is one of the hardest of Schmitt’s
texts to situate politically. The book emerged from lectures originally delivered in
Francoist Spain in 1962 and cast Salan as the obvious hero of the piece. However,
despite being vehemently anti-Leninist, Schmitt celebrated, albeit with reservation,
many figures of the communist Left including Mao and Ho Chi-Minh, for pro-
moting a politics grounded in specific places: a chthonic communism evidently
being more acceptable than a deterritorialized and deterritorializing global
liberalism.
Conclusion
Thinking beyond the line

Through it all I have passed,

And through me it all has passed.
Carl Schmitt, 1947

The main contention of this book is that spatial concepts have played a cen-
tral structural role in Carl Schmitt’s work. We have thus tried to demon-
strate that Schmitt consistently conceived political order as grounded in the
division of space. We have argued that Schmitt’s thought was fundamentally
orientated towards the problem of founding political order, the aim of which
was to contain war, and that he located the solution in spatial divisions, upon
which other ordering distinctions could arise. Indeed, we hope to have shown
that the central category of Schmitt’s thought, the concept of the political,
which he understood to indicate the inherent antagonism of political rela-
tions, was essentially tied to ‘spatial division’. Further, in contrast to those
readings that locate the spatial elements of Schmitt’s thought exclusively in
Schmitt’s late work, we have claimed that such spatial divisions play a fun-
damental role throughout his entire oeuvre. Accordingly, we have illustrated
how Schmitt’s concern with the spatial foundations of order was present even
before he developed explicit conceptualizations of spatial ordering in the
concepts of Großraum and nomos. For Schmitt, political order necessarily
involved what we call the spatialization of the political or, put simply, the
mapping of political difference against a foundational division in space.
The spatialization of the political was the means by which war could be
contained as it established clearly bounded political units. Sovereign was
the power that had the capacity to produce and maintain this spatialization of
the political and decide on any exceptional threat to its integrity from within
or without.
We have also argued that Schmitt’s work is best understood as a series of
attempts to find institutional forms capable of producing and guaranteeing a
stable spatialization of the political to ‘ground’ order. Schmitt claimed the
modern European state to have successfully provided a stabilizing political
form for several centuries, limiting conflict within Europe, but to have fallen
246 Conclusion
into a profound crisis in the twentieth century, prompting him to radically
rethink the spatial foundations of the global order that had emerged around
it. Hence, we have suggested that, although Schmitt first identified the spa-
tialization of the political with the state, from the late 1930s onwards he
began searching for new political forms capable of respatializing the political
beyond the state form. We have shown that during the early years of National
Socialist rule Schmitt theorized the new regime as a potential renewal of the
state form, a ‘total state’ based upon a fundamentally biopolitical fusion of
‘the people’ and their leader, the Führer. We then examined in depth Schmitt’s
two principal attempts to envisage new political forms and new spatializations
of the political after the eclipse of the state: an international order based
around a plurality of Großraum powers, and, finally, the lonely figure of the
partisan fighter standing against the unification of the world into a state of
‘spaceless chaos’. We have also traced how Schmitt developed these conceptions
against the backdrop of a ‘spatial history’ of modernity defined by successive
waves of globalization that resulted from a sequence of ‘spatial revolutions’,
that is, historical shifts in both the ‘spatial consciousness’ of the leading
powers (and the related strategies of dominance and governance) and the
fundamental relationship between social formations and material spatialities
on which ‘global order’ rested. Although his post-war work on global order
has sometimes been interpreted in relation to the realist tradition in Interna-
tional Relations, Schmitt in fact increasingly read the accelerating patterns of
globalization in a key infused with his own brand of Christian eschatology,
where the unravelling of the spatio-political fabric of modern international
law threatened to spawn an era of catastrophic global disorder and war, behind
which he identified the hidden hand of the Antichrist at work. We therefore
concluded our analysis by arguing that even within Schmitt’s own conceptual
framework, his proposals for new political forms essentially failed to provide
an adequate answer to the problem of founding a new spatial order and that,
by the 1960s, he was left theoretically isolated, staring into the abyss of a global
spatial disorder he believed was endangering the continuity of human history.
On Schmitt and Space hence offers the first comprehensive account of
Schmitt’s spatial thought, and presents him as a fundamentally spatial thin-
ker, an argument relatively novel not only within the field of Geography, but
also within the expansive secondary literature devoted to his work from other
disciplines. Although a number of studies have read Schmitt’s work in relation
to his biography and his controversial political involvements, this is the first to
systematically assess his spatial thought in relation to his shifting political
allegiances and biographical fortunes. The volume has accordingly been
structured chronologically in order to track the changing role that spatial
categories had throughout his entire body of work. For this same reason, we
have chosen to focus on Schmitt’s writings directly, rather than the secondary
literature, to let him ‘speak’ as much as possible.
We hope to have convincingly demonstrated that spatial concepts have
played a key structural role in Schmitt’s work and to have made a
 Conclusion 247
contribution to better understanding of the nature of his thought within
Geography and related fields. Nonetheless, the question remains as to how
this account might help us grasp the utility and limitations of Schmitt’s
thought for contemporary attempts to understand the relationship between
space and politics, geopolitics and biopolitics. It is to these questions that we
would like to turn briefly in the following, concluding, section.

Limitations
One does not have to look deeply to identify some of the limitations of
Schmitt’s spatial thought and its use for understanding the contemporary
relationship between space and politics. Several are immediately manifest.
First, unsurprisingly, is the bearing his relationship to Nazism and anti-
Semitism has on his spatial thinking. As discussed in the opening chapters of this
book, assessing the relation between Schmitt’s theoretical work and his political
commitments is a complex matter of great controversy. Whilst we argue that
Schmitt’s complicity with Nazism or evident anti-Semitism must be squarely
faced, we also do not believe that his conceptual work can be reduced to
‘Nazi theory’. Rather, we suggest that an approach is needed that remains
aware of the antinomies of Schmitt’s polemic and is careful not to over-
determine his entire body of work with his disastrous fling with the Nazi state.
Nonetheless, Schmitt specifically developed his theory of a Großraum order
for the purposes of legitimizing the National Socialists’ aggressive expansion
in Eastern Europe. Further, this was the only case where Schmitt’s spatial
thought had a chance of influencing policy, even if this ultimately remained
remote. Schmitt took this opportunity to propose an image of a European
spatial order based on the differences between ‘national groups’, dominated
by an imperial Germany and in which it was claimed the Jewish population
had no place, even if he avoided addressing what this might mean in practice.
Although Schmitt’s Großraum theory in no way characterized his spatial
thought as a whole, it reflected what we consider to be its key structural con-
cern, that is, the relationship between spatial division and political difference,
understood as the relations of enmity between unified political groups, which
during the Nazi years he defined in partly racial terms. Schmitt’s vision of a
European Großraum order thus perhaps reflects some of the dangers in a con-
ceptual framework that fixes the political to spatial differences. This is of
particular concern in relation to Schmitt’s implicit claim that the European
Jews were the ‘spatial enemies’ of the German Reich. This also reveals, of course,
the deep subterranean relationship between Schmitt’s concept of the friend–
enemy relation, his spatial understanding of order and the influence of anti-
Semitism in his work. The idea of a pluralist world order based upon a number
of independent Großräume was not essentially tied to the specifics of Nazi
foreign policy, but the fact that he developed his ‘multipolar’ world vision in
this context should give pause to those wishing to appropriate the concept in
attempts to rethink the nature of contemporary world order (see Rowan, 2011).
248 Conclusion
A second concern, and one that inevitably flows into the others, is the
relationship Schmitt charted between spatiality and the concept of political.
Although Schmitt’s definition of the political as the relationship between
friend and enemy has an undeniable conceptual force and stands as some-
thing of an unmovable object within contemporary continental political
theory, it nevertheless expresses an extremely limited understanding of the
possibilities for politics; it assumes one aspect of political relations, or indeed
what might be considered a discrete set of historically produced relations, as
an a-historical condition of politics as such. This is not the place to enter into
the extensive and complex contemporary debate on the nature of the political,
but suffice to say that by approaching politics solely through the lens of
antagonistic difference, Schmitt excluded many other frameworks within
which different forms of political relations can be imagined. For example,
Schmitt developed his understanding of political difference as a polemical
counterpoint to all forms of universalist thinking in politics. However, he
understood political universalism to either assume, or aim towards, an undif-
ferentiated totality, or to be an ideological foil for the pursuit of particular
interests. This excluded many understandings of the relationship between
universality and difference that could be conceived of in the realm of political
co-existence. We might think here, for example, of the different forms of
political universalism that have a more complex relationship to ontologies of
difference not unsimilar to Schmitt’s, proposed by thinkers such as Alain
Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Ernesto Laclau, Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Žižek,
to name but a few. As a thinker avowedly committed to pluralism, Schmitt’s
vision of plurality took a severely limited form. Indeed, as argued in Chapters
3 and 4, his thought was principally focused on the means by which pluralism
can be limited whilst nonetheless maintaining a minimum of difference.
Accordingly, he excluded any consideration of non-hierarchical differences
from political consideration, and indeed insisted that the political realm
required all forms of difference to be subordinated (and hence depoliticized)
to the dominant set of relations that define the political, that is, the antagonistic
relationship of the political entity to its enemy.
These limitations inherent to Schmitt’s concept of the political are sig-
nificant in relation to his spatial thought, because he understood political
order to be founded precisely upon a spatialization of the political. Since the
division of space is the means by which political difference is both given
expression and managed, he believed order to operate precisely by fixing
political differences to spatial differences. In this sense spatial difference is
thus principally considered a strategic element in the ordering of political
difference. Although he made many comments about the fluid and contingent
nature of the relationship between space and the political, Schmitt was always
insistent that political differences should be mapped against clear spatial
divisions between inside and outside. In this way, he believed conflict could be
limited by channelling antagonism into clearly defined constraints provided
by spatial containers. Space is hence seen both as a medium for antagonism
 Conclusion 249
and the means of its containment. Whilst this certainly might go some way to
explaining certain forms of relations between space, violence and political
subjectivity, it fails to acknowledge the possibility of political spaces of co-
operation and collective action, unless as sites for the representation of
homogenous political communities whose collectivity ultimately remains
defined by enmity. Further, within Schmitt’s framework, spaces of mobility,
exchange and transformation represent only the possibility of political dis-
order, the dissolution of political unity and escalating levels of antagonism
freed of spatial restraint. This is not only a deeply reactionary conception of
the relationship between politics and space, but provides few entry points for
understanding the complexity of contemporary political subjectivities defined
by the intersection of multiple, dynamic and overlapping sets of spatio-political
relations that operate through a variety of networks and cut across a number
of scales. In this sense, whilst Schmitt might offer a perceptive analysis of
modern spatio-political relations, he provides few tools for grasping the
nature and complexity of the present (see Galli, 2010a on this).
A third limitation of Schmitt’s spatial thought is that it was shaped by a
largely representational understanding of space. Schmitt repeatedly stressed
the importance of visibility for order in a number of works, and he considered
spatial division to be a medium through which order could be rendered visi-
ble. Hence, although Schmitt railed against the empty, neutral understanding
of space typical of modern scientific thought, his own conception remained
largely embedded in a tradition of conceiving political space as a flat repre-
sentational plane that can be visibly partitioned. Indeed, he valorised land over
sea precisely because it can bear fixed lines of demarcation, and hence can
allow order to be made visible. Despite interesting discussions of the shifting
patterns of ‘spatial consciousness’, the changing human relations to the spaces
of the oceans and of the new dimensions opened to human experience by the
aeroplane, as well as interesting gestures towards ‘planetary thinking’,
Schmitt’s thought for the most part remains bound to a cartographic ima-
ginary that views space as a flat surface for the projection of calculation and
dominance from the perspective of a ‘god’s eye view’ (see Elden, 2010). Such
a representational understanding of space has long been subject to critique in
Political and Cultural Geography, among other fields, for its exclusions of
other conceptions of space, and hence the limitations it places on how the
relationship between space and politics may be understood. Therefore,
although Schmitt appealed to the importance of ‘spatial consciousness’, and
to the relationship between a political idea and a political group’s awareness
of its concrete spatial situatedness, his representational understanding of
space leaves no room for thinking through the multiple performative practices
and affective attachments that bind a political community to a sense of place
and shape specific understandings of space and their political resonances.
Last, Schmitt’s spatial theory remains remarkably weak in relation to poli-
tical economy. Although his work on the Monroe Doctrine and the develop-
ment of US interventionism includes perceptive remarks on the relationship
250 Conclusion
between capitalism and imperialism, especially with regard to their relation to
space, such analyses are not typical of his spatial thought as a whole. His
historical account of the rise and fall of the European state system indeed
paid little attention to the influence of socio-economic factors. He made no
significant analysis of the importance of the economic relationships between
Europe and its New World colonies, nor how they shaped socio-economic
developments within Europe including the industrial revolution, noting only
how the latter created a mutation in the ‘maritime consciousness’ of the
English. When he did address historical developments such as the French
Revolution or the emergence of the industrial proletariat, he did so mostly by
emphasizing the changing relations between the state and the people, which,
although perceptive in themselves, show scant attention to impact upon, or
response to, broader shifts in socio-economic relations. Although Schmitt
took European colonialism in the Americas is taken to be the key driver of
European modernity in the fields of law and politics, he paid little attention to
the socio-economic relations that constituted colonialism, with scant regard
to the role of international capital or labour movements, no mention of slav-
ery and, surprisingly, of the relationship between warfare and economics,
other than identifying trade war with naval blockades and the changes in
enmity he associated with liberal internationalism. His discussion of the rela-
tive importance of ‘appropriation’, as opposed to distribution and production,
in the foundation of spatial order can be understood as an active attempt to
shift analysis away from socio-economic processes to singular political acts.
His was an understanding of spatial order that ultimately highlighted the
importance of political decisions over and above socio-economic processes. In
doing so, Schmitt seemed overall indifferent, as noted by Heffernan (2011)
and Teschke (2011a, 2011b, 2011c), to the battle for the access to natural resources
that guided so much of the colonial divisioning of planetary space, but also to
Hitler’s geopolitical projections in Eastern Europe. The bearing this con-
spicuous lack of socio-economic engagement has on his spatial thought is also
most evident in Schmitt’s discussion of the key role of England in the jus
publicum Europaeum. Rather than engaging with the development of socio-
economic factors that shaped, and were conversely shaped by, the spread of
Britain’s maritime empire, Schmitt claimed it was based upon a ‘decision for the
sea’, a political act by the English to tie themselves to the geo-elemental force
of the sea. Hence, Schmitt displaced an analysis of socio-economic transforma-
tions into the realm of mythical events. Such an account of modern European
international law and spatial order fundamentally overlooked one of the
principal factors driving and structuring the European colonial empires and
the competition between them: the emergence of a capitalist world economy.
The lack, or indeed the active avoidance, of broader socio-economic factors
renders Schmitt’s spatial history of the jus publicum Europaeum deeply ques-
tionable historically and geographically, never mind politically reactionary.
Whilst Renata Cristi (1998) claims that Schmitt was essentially an author-
itarian liberal driven by the desire to protect the capitalist economy with a
 Conclusion 251
strong state seems exaggerated, and Scheuerman likely makes too much of the
links between Schmitt and Hayek, we can perhaps agree with Benno
Teschke’s recent assertion that Schmitt’s work is ‘sociologically weak’ and
programmatically so in order to maintain the reactionary orientation of his
thought (Teschke, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c). Nonetheless, despite all these short-
comings, there is much in Schmitt’s work that appears to suggest he might be
productively read alongside elements of Marxist thought, and particularly the
‘world system’ theorists’ accounts of the development of global capital; his
work not only providing a useful, although clearly troubling, political ‘sup-
plement’ to Marx, as Balakrishnan has argued (2011: 72), but to the work of
Arrighi (1999), Brenner (1993), Wallerstein (1984), among others.

Engagements
These serious limitations of Schmitt’s spatial thought need to be born in mind
when discussing his work, but they should not deter one from identifying
areas for productive engagement and potential utility. This is a task that
doubtless needs careful consideration, for the reasons described above, espe-
cially his political involvement with the Nazis, but one that we think would be
wrong to neglect. There is indeed much valuable work to be done in locating
Schmitt’s spatial thought more squarely in the history of ideas and more
specifically in the relationship between spatial and political thought in twen-
tieth century Europe. As one of the key political and legal theorists of the
twentieth century, Schmitt’s spatial thought deserves further critical examination
not only within Political Theory but also within Geography. This is especially
true given Schmitt’s wide and deep influence across a number of historical
and national contexts and reception across opposing ends of the political
spectrum. More particularly, however, Schmitt’s work occupies a fascinating
position at the juncture of different intellectual traditions and scholarly dis-
ciplines during a period of turbulent political transition on which he reflected
directly and within which he was embroiled. Hence, his work represents a rich
political and philosophical crossroads in which the significance of spatial
thought has yet to be fully examined (see, again, Heffernan, 2011 on this).
The fact that Schmitt conceived of the political crises of the twentieth
century to have their roots in a deep-seated crisis of spatial order should
be of significant interest to those attempting to understand the relationship
between political and geographic thought in the last century.
Accordingly, we would like to suggest that there are several areas worthy of
further investigation, which indeed might potentially provide the impetus for
further projects to be undertaken, hopefully in close dialogue with On Schmitt
and Space. First, the relationship between Schmitt’s thought and the tradition
of German geopolitical thought is an area certainly deserving additional
scrutiny. As argued previously, the fact that Schmitt explicitly engaged with
German geopolitical thought during the period of his complicity with the
Nazi regime might provide interesting avenues for an examination of the
252 Conclusion
impact of geopolitics on other realms of German intellectual life during the
first half of the twentieth century and a lens through which to map the rela-
tionship between Nazi spatial thought and modern German political thought
more broadly (see for example: Atkinson, 2011; Barnes and Minca, 2013;
Giaccaria and Minca, 2011a, 2011b, 2015a; Murphy, 1998). Likewise, it
would be fruitful to trace the chains of influence running from Schmitt’s spa-
tial thought to the wider field of post-war intellectual thought in Europe and
the United States. Of particularly interest here would be an analysis of his
influence upon the nascent discipline of International Relations in the United
States via German émigré intellectuals such as Hans Morgenthau and Leo
Strauss, although he should not be considered the sinister Svengali operating
behind these thinkers as is sometimes suggested. Tentative studies have
already been made of the relationship between Schmitt’s thought and Mor-
genthau’s influential work, but it seems a direction that can be developed
further (see Coleman, 2011; Scheuerman, 1999: 225–252). A similar study
might be possible of the influence of Schmitt’s spatial thinking on conceptions
of world order in post-war Europe developed by those such as Alexandre
Kojève and Raymond Aron, with whom Schmitt engaged in friendly intel-
lectual dispute in the 1950s and 1960s (see Müller, 2003: 96–103; Howse,
2006). Furthermore, Schmitt’s work occupies a crucial position within the
largely unexplored relationship between twentieth century spatial thought and
the debates concerning secularization, the meaning of history and the ‘legiti-
macy of the modern age’ both within and beyond Germany (see Blumenburg,
1985; Habermas, 1991; Koselleck, 1987; Taubes, 2004, 2013). Here Schmitt’s
work on the spatial history of modernity could be read alongside the resur-
gence of interest in his political theology (see for example Agamben, 2005b;
Critchley, 2011; Davis et al., 2003, 2011; Hammill and Lupton, 2012; Kahn,
2012; Northcott, 2013; Taubes, 2004). This was something Meyer et al. (2012)
and Müller (2003) took tentative steps towards, but which might be developed
in productive dialogue with the historical and intellectual context of exchan-
ges taking place within Europe and across the Atlantic in the middle decades
of the last century, amongst figures that spanned the political spectrum
sometimes in rather surprising ways. Investigating the relationship of
Schmitt’s spatial thought to these debates could prove useful in excavating the
unarticulated spatial imaginaries that underpin them, and possibly set his
work in conversation with still pertinent questions about the relationship
between philosophies of history and global order – questions of renewed
interest in a time of intense geopolitical change when new challenges present
themselves in a world more networked and more divided than ever before,
from financial crises to violent inequalities and the threat of anthropogenic
climate change and environmental destruction.
Second, we also believe Schmitt’s analysis of the spatial foundations of
order and the patterns of historical change through which they are trans-
formed might offer further suggestive insights into the nature of modern
European and world politics. The question of the nomos of the earth provides,
 Conclusion 253
for instance, a framework for thinking about the spatial foundations of poli-
tical order that moves beyond the limited state-based understandings typical
of much International Relations scholarship, whilst avoiding the environ-
mental determinism of the German geopolitical tradition, and its con-
temporary descendants such as Alexander Dugin in Russia and Robert
Kaplan in the United States. The concept of nomos may indeed provide a
provocative starting point for interdisciplinary investigations tracing the his-
torical dynamics that have shaped the constitutive relationship between space
and law, in ways that both build on and challenge Schmitt’s work. Despite its
historical sweep and its global ambition, Schmitt’s own investigation of the
spatial foundations of order in the concept nomos, while undoubtedly showing
a number of conceptual and empirical flaws, at the same time opens a
potentially rich seam of historical and philosophical reflection on the spatial
nature of political order and international law.
There has been some significant work in recent years which has attempted
to employ Schmitt’s history of modern international law in conjunction with the
work of other thinkers in order to understand and re-imagine the con-
temporary relationship between politics, space and international law. Important
here are the sadly overlooked Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of
International Law by the British Marxist and science fiction novelist China
Miéville (2006) and The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of
International Law 1870–1960 by the international lawyer and Finnish diplomat
Martti Koskenniemi (2004). However, neither Miéville nor Koskenniemi take
up the concept of nomos in order to develop it along new lines. David Dela-
ney’s The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making: Nomo-
spheric Investigations (2011) develops the concept of nomos as a conjunction
of law and space in strict opposition to Schmitt, whose work is not engaged in
depth. Whilst interesting, Delaney’s concept of the ‘nomosphere’ is so diffuse
as to lack much conceptual traction on the specificity of the contemporary
relations between law and space. One more novel use of Schmitt’s nomos
comes in design theorist Benjamin Bratton’s provocative essay ‘The Black
Stack’ (2014), where he outlines the potential emergence of new relationship
between law and space in light of future technological developments.
Although Bratton’s use of nomos as part of a broader speculative examination
of future possibilities for geopolitics is unique and exciting, caution is neces-
sary with regard to the ways in which speculation and proscription might
become blurred, especially when framing discussion in Schmitt’s terms.
Nonetheless, despite their respective limitations, Bratton and Delaney provide
examples of how the concept of nomos might be constructively employed in
theorizing contemporary, and indeed future, relations between law and space.
Third, Schmitt’s gestures towards ‘planetary’ thought find much common
ground with recent attempts within Geography, but also in Philosophy, Poli-
tical Theory and Environmental Studies, to pose the question of how the
‘world’, the ‘earth’ and ‘the planetary’ might be thought in relation to politics.
Such questions have gained relevance at a time when the critical discourses
254 Conclusion
around ‘globalization’ have begun to peter out even as the processes they
described have continued to intensify, and anthropogenic planetary environ-
mental change has made the urgent need for new frameworks within which to
re-imagine global politics ever more apparent. The ‘spatial histories’ that
Schmitt sketched in Land and Sea, The Nomos and elsewhere offer one avenue
through which a productive engagement between his work and this emerging
literature on the question of ‘planetary’ space might be possible. Indeed there
are strong resonances between Schmitt’s work on the planetary and the
renewed interest in questions of the ‘world’ or ‘worldliness’ across a number
of disciplines, whether building on the legacy of Martin Heidegger (Elden,
2002; Gaston, 2013; Malpas, 2008; Nancy, 2007), Alan Badiou (Prozorov,
2013) or more recently, Peter Sloterdijk, whose popularity has ballooned in
English speaking academia, and particularly in Geography, after a slew of
recent translations (see Sloterdijk, 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2014; and the essays
collected in Elden, 2011).1 This is likewise true of the potential relevance
Schmitt’s work may have to contemporary attempts to rethink the, until recently
marginal, tradition of geophilosophy after Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1996; Gasché, 2014; Grosz, 2008; Negarestani, 2011; Protevi 2013;
Woodard, 2013), which seeks to grasp the mutually constitutive and disruptive
relationships between the earth and philosophy, and the implications of such a ‘true
to the earth’ thinking for politics.2
These reflections have taken on particular relevance in light of the changes
in social and natural systems as indicated by the Anthropocene, the so-called
‘geologic age of man’. A debate has emerged around the political and geopoli-
tical implications of the Anthropocene across a number of disciplines, and
Schmitt’s discussion of ‘planetary’ politics may have potential relevance here
(see Chakrabarty, 2009; Clark, 2011; Dalby, 2007, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2013).
Indeed, more specifically, Schmitt’s political theology has recently been employed
to think through the political dimensions of climate change from a variety of
perspectives: Bruno Latour delivered the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh Uni-
versity in February 2013 on the theme of ‘Facing Gaia’, where he drew
heavily on Schmitt’s concept of the political as a framing device; the ethical
theorist, Michael S. Northcott recently published A Political Theology of Cli-
mate Change (2013) which draws explicitly on Schmitt’s work including The
Nomos as a way to think through questions around global governance in light
of climate change; the geographers Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright recently
framed their widely discussed 2012 paper ‘Climate Leviathan’ in relation to
Schmitt’s distinction between land and sea and the different forms of order
that emerged from these (Wainwright and Mann, 2012). In all these cases, Schmitt
can act as a provocateur, pushing challenging questions and opening avenues for
potential exploration rather than charting a path to adequate responses, but
the ambition and scope of some of the questions he touched upon gives his
thought a prescience for questions he had perhaps no way of imagining.
Further, Schmitt’s work may additionally provide an important link
between debates on the nature of political pluralism and spatial order (and
 Conclusion 255
contestation). As discussed earlier in this book, Schmitt highlighted the cen-
tral importance of the distinction between universalist and pluralist forms of
world order, unipolarity and multipolarity. This remains a crucial question at
a time when the balance of global power is changing with the emergence of
new regional powers and an American hegemony weakened by military
adventurism, financial crisis, diplomatic decline and the shift of the world’s
economic pivot eastward. Although his vision of a globe carved up between
hermetically sealed pan-regional hegemons is neither likely, at least in the
short term, nor desirable, Schmitt’s work can nonetheless make an important
contribution to better understanding some of the problems inherent to world
unity and the spatial foundations of any possible pluralist world order. Fur-
thermore, although Schmitt largely remained marginal to mainstream debates
on the relationship between space, the political and democratic contestation,
his work may selectively offer important insights that bear on these discus-
sions. Not only was Schmitt the first to develop the concept of ‘the political’,
but also directly related it to questions of space. This aspect has been largely
overlooked, for example, by geographers engaging with the question of spatial
contestation, or by political theorists using Schmitt’s work as a resource in
developing concepts of radical democratic pluralism. Thus, the relationship
between Schmitt’s spatial thought and his use within democratic theory
remains to be examined in full. Although, as noted above, Schmitt’s spatial
thought is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of contemporary spatio-
political relations, it might nonetheless provide useful tools for developing a
concept of democratic spatial contestation, if engaged carefully, selectively
and in conjunction with the work of others.
In addition, although it has already received significant attention, further
productive engagement can be made with Schmitt’s diagnosis of the collapse
of the spatial order of the earth in the twentieth century. Schmitt’s critique of
US interventionism, humanitarian warfare and the antinomies of uni-
versalism in international law may appear to be routes of scholarly critique
well worn during the last decade, but in our view they remain bracingly rele-
vant to contemporary global politics. Schmitt’s analysis indeed continues to
offer profound insights into the nature of the contemporary relations between
space, law and violence that have in no way been exhausted. Although these
concerns within Schmitt’s work came to prominence in Anglophone debates
during the period of the ‘war on terror’, they continue to shed light on the
nature of global disorder. This phase of US interventionism cannot be con-
sidered of merely historical interest given that the US-led war in Afghanistan
is still ongoing, the use of drone attacks along the frontier with Pakistan has
been expanded under President Obama’s administration, detainees continue
to be held without charge in Guantanamo Bay and a series of new conflicts
have emerged in North America and the Middle East from the wreckage left
by the US invasion of Iraq, conflicts the US has intervened in once again in
the guise of NATO. Hence, the concerns to which Schmitt’s critique was
considered relevant over the last number of years persist. This is despite a
256 Conclusion
shift in media, and often scholarly, attention that appears to have followed a
change in the discursive frame in which US foreign policy is conducted. More
importantly, however, the deeper concerns reflected in this engagement with
Schmitt’s work are areas that remain topical to contemporary global politics
and require ongoing critical examination. That many prescient insights can be
drawn from Schmitt’s spatial thought in the investigation of these areas is in
fact demonstrated by the existing literature. However, the appearance of new
translations of Schmitt’s work from the late 1930s and early 1940s provides a
further resource for critical engagements with present global geo-orderings.
These texts are particularly of interest in regard to the relationship between
biopolitics and geopolitics in Schmitt’s work and how they may bear on their
changing relationship in the current global political situation.
Finally, we hope that the present investigation has made a convincing case
for a biopolitical reading of Schmitt’s spatial thought, or rather for how
questions of ‘life’ are implicated in the relationships he charted between the
spatial and the political. While the relationship between ‘the biopolitical’ and
‘the spatial’ has been examined by a number of contemporary Italian political
philosophers, notably by Giorgio Agamben, we also hope to have created a
platform for further exploration of these categories. In addition, having
examined the relationship between biopolitics and geopolitics in Schmitt’s
thought during the Nazi years, we believe that in-depth investigations of the
relationship between these two categories is not only key to understanding the
spatial politics of National Socialism but also the nature of twentieth and
twenty-first century governance more broadly. We hope therefore that by
analysing ‘the spatial’ throughout Schmitt’s entire intellectual trajectory, some
of these still unexplored, but crucial, corners of his work may be examined,
revealing the continuities and tensions that make Schmitt a thinker forever
bound to his time, and the horrors of the Nazi regime, but also a challenging
presence in contemporary thought that it is difficult to exorcize.
The Italian political theorist, Carlo Galli and geographers Robert Meyer,
Janosch Prinz and Conrad Schetter have argued that Schmitt’s spatial thought
is invaluable in interpreting the ‘spatial-political nexus’ of the modern era of
nation states, but has little to offer attempts to understand contemporary
spatio-political relations (Meyer et al., 2012: 696; Sitze, 2010: liv). They claim
that the categories of Schmitt’s spatial thought are no longer adequate to
grasp the increasing complexity of spatio-political relations today. As pre-
viously noted, we agree with this argument to some extent. It is clear, for
instance, that the solutions Schmitt proposed for the crisis of twentieth cen-
tury spatial order provide little positive orientation for a progressive engage-
ment with contemporary spatial politics. However, such a view possibly goes
too far in positing a break between the era of the modern state and the con-
temporary moment. Arguably, many of the problems Schmitt diagnosed were
not confined to his time alone and their legacy continues to shape the present.
That Schmitt’s critiques of humanitarian warfare and US interventionism
have been considered germane by so many in recent years, despite originating
 Conclusion 257
over seventy years ago, attests to this fact. Thus, even if the limitations of
Schmitt’s spatial thought ought to be fully acknowledged, we believe that it
should not simply be consigned to the status of a reactionary curiosity from a
dark chapter in European history that is out of joint with the times. None-
theless, any engagement must approach his work with a critical awareness of
its conceptual limitations and a historical and political sensitivity to the pro-
foundly compromised context of its emergence, including aspects of political
and professional opportunism. We hope that this book has made a contribu-
tion to clarifying the complex and context-bound nature of Schmitt’s spatial
thought, and indeed to establishing him as a spatial thinker, within both
Geography and other disciplines where Schmitt’s work draws interest. We also
hope that readers will find this book has gone some way to providing a con-
textual and conceptual framework within which future scholarly engagements
with his understanding of the relationship between ‘the political’ and ‘the
spatial’ might be pursued.

Notes
1 Indeed, Sloterdijk’s work has strong resonances with many aspects of Schmitt’s
analysis: the complex relationship between ontology and space, especially as they
relate to the boundaries between inside and outside; the oceanic development of
world capitalism; the shifting patterns of the world pictures that defined modernity;
the interlocking steps of technological development and the space of warfare,
notably with regard to the profound impact of air power. Although references to
Schmitt in Sloterdijk’s oeuvre are not extensive it seems likely that he may have
been a subterranean (or disavowed) influence on the latter given the occasional
paraphrasing of Schmittian tropes and arguments.
2 Indeed, there are specifically ‘Italian’ readings of geophilosophy from Cacciari
(2009) and Esposito (2012) both of which engage the concept in relation to
Schmitt’s concept of the political. However, their conception of geophilosophy is
arguably more in the lineage of Heideggerian thought than the specific trajectory
after Deleuze and Guattari.
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Index
Abravanel, Isaac 208
Absent-presence (see also Intervention-
ism, United States) 57, 229, 230
Absolutism 15
Absolute Enemy (see also Unjust enemy)
82, 83, 93n11, 113, 161, 202, 232,
236–238, 243n53
Acceleration (historical) 23, 34, 47, 49,
54, 145, 197, 217, 218, 219
Adorno, Theodor 52, 273n19
Aesthetics 70n17, 80, 209n15, 2010n17,
249
Agamben, Giorgio (see also Italian
political philosophy) 3, 5, 52, 54,
58–62, 106–107, 125n10, 137–143,
146–148, 178–180, 184n5, 242n35,
252, 256
Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticiza-
tions, The 71n32, 92n5, 103–106,
124n2, 125n8, 188, 192
Air (as geoelement, see also Air power
and Geoelements) 195
Air power 201–202, 218, 237, 257n1
Americas (discovery of, see also Colonial-
ism and New World) 124n2, 190–191,
208n4, 221
Amity lines (see also Global linear
thinking and Rayas) 222–224, 241n24,
242n34, 243n43, 229
Anarchy (see also Nihilism and
Utopianism) 193, 209n12
Anarchism 13, 35, 86
Anomie (see also Despatialization of the
political, Nihilism and Spaceless
chaos) 205
Anthropocene 254
Anthropology, political (see also Political
anthropology) 7, 25, 84–87, 96n33,
112, 137, 148, 177–178
Antichrist (see also Eschatology and
Katechon) 34, 127, 204–207, 218, 246
Anti-Semitism (see also Holocaust, Jews
and space, ‘Jewish thinking’, ‘Jewish
form of existence’, National Socialism
and Race) 7,10,11, 18, 20–21, 27–38,
40n18, 40n20, 85, 94n12, 126n17,
127n20, 128n24, 128n27, 153–154,
169–182, 203–205, 240n14, 247,
209n15 208n6
Arcanum 35, 142, 178, 194, 203, 205
Arendt, Hannah 9n2, 70n17, 151n3
Article 48 (see also Weimar Constitution
and State of Exception) 16–17, 118–119
Aron, Raymond 22, 252
Assimilation (see also Cosmopolitanism
and World unity) 169, 174, 209n9
Atkinson, David 27–28, 67, 252
Authoritarianism 15, 24, 31–33, 45–46,
123, 131, 142
Badiou, Alain 254
Balakrishnan, Gopal 2,6,10–13, 23–27,
31, 39n3, 49, 64–65, 70n19, 92n4,
93n8, 94n11, 144, 170, 185n13, 207n1,
251
Balibar, Etienne 71n25, 248
Ball, Hugo 24
Bassin, Mark 67, 172
Behemoth (see also Geoelements,
Leviathan and Behemoth, myth of and
Spatial histories) 131, 133, 196–198,
202
Benderksy, Joseph 28, 39n5, 40n16, 42,
134
Benn, Gottfried 27
Benoist, Alain de 52–53, 64, 71n28,
71n29, 207n1
Berlin 9n3, 11–21, 44, 119, 153–154, 201
276 Index
‘Beyond the Line’ 222–227, 242n35
Bible (see also Christianity and Escha-
tology) 196–197, 97n41, 204–207
Biology (see also Anti-Semitism, Biopo-
litics, Demography, Population and
Race) 19, 32, 35–37, 40n15, 60, 133,
139–151, 169, 171–184, 240n14
Biopolitics (see also Agamben, Giorgio,
Anti-Semitism, Demography, Foucault,
Michel and Population) 54, 58–62,
137–141, 174–182, 247–256
Bismarck, Otto von (see also Kultur-
kampf) 11–12, 39n4
Bloch, Ernst 75
Blumenburg, Hans 252
Bolshevism (see also Communism and
Soviet Union) 35, 114–116, 125n8,
127n23, 129, 179
Bombardment, naval (see also Sea
power) 224
Bombing, aerial (see also Air Power) 21,
201–203, 231–232, 241n24
Borders (bordering practices; see also
Borderline and Inside and Outside) 51,
62, 67, 72n47, 88–92, 93n10, 99–101,
106–114, 155–170, 174–182, 184n2,
185n12, 215–218, 243n43
Borderline (see also borders, inside and
outside) 99–108, 113–114, 180
Bracketing of war (see also Spatialization
of the political) 90–91, 95n22, 148,
222–237, 242n41
Bratton, Benjamin 253
Bush, George W (see also Iraq war and
War on terror) 3, 55–58, 60, 65, 71n33,
72n34, 72n35)
Butler, Judith 71n25, 72n40
Byzantine Empire 206
Cacciari, Massimo (see also Italian
political philosophy) 59, 257n2
Caldwell, Peter 27, 29, 34, 43
Capitalism (see also Economics, Free
Trade, Interventionism, United States
and Sea powers) 15, 24, 44, 56, 92n5,
126n19, 127n20, 185n10, 193, 205,
208n7, 250, 257n1
Cartography (see also Geography,
discipline) 210n17, 227, 249
Catholicism (see also Complexio Oppo-
sitorum, Eschatology, Political theol-
ogy and Roman Catholicism and
Political Form) 11–15, 24, 35, 39n4,
69n2, 76–79, 86, 91, 92n4, 93n6, 93n7,
93n8, 96n33, 100–101, 114, 154,
203–207, 210n18, 223, 242n38
Cavalletti, Andrea (see also Italian
political philosophy) 5, 137, 145,
174–182
Centre Party, Catholic 11–12, 76
Chandler, David 64–65, 69n5, 72n36
China 42, 237, 243n47
Christaller, Walter (see also Geography,
discipline of, Großraum, Lebensraum
and National Socialism) 68
Christianity (see also Antichrist,
Anti-Semitism, Bible, Catholicism,
Christian Concept of History,
Eschatology, Katechon, Political
Theology, Protestantism and
Secularisation) 12, 23, 36–37, 76–79,
93n10, 97n38, 102–105, 114, 124n4,
128n29, 187–188, 193, 203–207,
210n22, 223, 240n14, 246
Christian Concept of History (see also
Eschatology, Katechon and Three
Possibilities for a Christian Concept of
History) 203–207
Civil war (see also Global Civil War and
State, crisis of) 13, 16, 63, 74–79,
95n20, 100, 112–116, 118–121, 164,
184n6, 194, 205, 232
Class (Class antagonism, Class politics
and Class identities) 25, 47–49, 59,
70n18, 114–115, 127n21
Cold War 3,7, 22–23, 43–44, 47–49,
54–55, 69n6, 183, 193, 202, 208n7,
209n10, 212, 233, 235–238, 243n47
Cole, G.D.H. 39n4, 111
Colonialism (see also Americas, dis-
covery of, Decolonization, Land
appropriation and New World) 8, 55,
67–68, 88–91, 97n43, 97n44, 124n2,
156, 167–170, 191, 200, 187–192,
198–201, 208n6, 215–218, 221–230,
236–238, 240n16, 240n20, 250
Colonial War (see also Beyond the line,
Decolonization and Spatialization of
the political) 88–92, 22–227, 236.
Communism (see also Bolshevism and
Soviet Union) 13, 24, 47, 59, 105, 113,
126n19, 127n21, 128n33, 193, 205,
208n7, 237, 244n54
Complexio Oppositorum (see also Med-
ieval Christian empire) 76–79, 91,
93n6, 93n7, 101, 114, 242n38
Concept of the Political, The 14, 16, 42,
51, 57, 72n28, 79, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88,

94n12, 94n 13, 96n27, 99, 112, 120,
127n21, 135, 151n2, 157, 159, 161,
162, 176, 178, 184n3, 231, 236
Conservatism (see also Conservative
revolution, Fascism and Reactionary
modernism) 1–3, 13–17, 23–27, 38,
39n10, 56, 69n3, 70n14, 72n35, 97n36,
119, 125n12, 134, 140, 152n8, 165,
205, 207n1, 240n14
Conservative Revolution (see also
Conservatism and Reactionary
modernism) 16, 25, 240n14
Combatants and non-combatants (see
also Discriminatory war) 55–58, 158,
161, 225–227, 230–231
Concrete (concept of, see also Concrete
order and Concrete order thinking) 10,
19, 38, 65, 74–75, 80–86, 88–92,
94n12, 109, 113, 123n1, 126n13, 130
Concrete Order (Concrete order think-
ing, see also Concrete, concept of)
134–136, 140, 145, 147, 149, 150,
158–159, 167–169, 174–176, 180–181,
185n11, 192, 210n17, 213–220,
228–229, 239n6, 240n13, 249
Concrete order thinking (see also Con-
crete, concept of and Concrete order)
133–135, 240n13
Congo, Conference 228
Constituent power (see also Democracy
and Constitutional Theory) 32, 117,
123, 132–133, 139–141, 140, 151n6
Constitution, Weimar (see also Article
48) 15–18, 32, 45–47, 106–109,
118–119, 129–132
Constitutional Theory 14, 26, 71n32,
126n14, 132, 133, 140, 151n6
Cortes, Donoso (see also Counter-revo-
lution, French and Spanish) 15, 96n32,
96n33, 117
Cosmopolitanism (see also Assimilation,
Spatial consciousness and World
unity) 63, 65, 114
Counter-revolution, French and Spanish
(see also Cortes, Donoso and de
Maistre, Joseph) 15, 96n32, 96n33,
117
Criminalization of war (see also Comba-
tants, and non combatants, Dis-
criminatory war, Enemy, Geneva
protocol and Neutrality) 161–165,
184n6, 202, 230–231, 226–227
Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy 42,
106, 110, 114, 117, 123, 128, 132, 195
Index 277
Cristi, Renato 126n19, 250
Critchley, Simon 96n33, 69n3, 252
Daitz, Werner 173
Däubler, Theodro 12
Dean, Mitchell 27
Death, and the political 75, 83, 149, 177,
184n2, 196, 243n53
Decisionism (see also Sovereign Deci-
sion) 75, 92n2, 95n23, 96n27, 97n35,
106–112, 121, 125n11, 126n18, 130,
134–139, 143–150, 158, 177–180,
208n8, 209n15, 224, 250
Decolonization (see also Colonization)
236–237
Democracy (see also Constituent power,
Constitutional Theory and Crisis of
Parliamentary Democracy) 3, 24, 32,
43–47, 70n10, 94n17, 114–123,
137–149, 151n6
Demography (see also Anti-Semitism,
Lebensraum and Population) 174–182
de Maistre, Joseph (see also Cortes,
Donoso and Counter-revolution,
French and Spanish) 15, 96n32,
96n33, 117
denazification 2, 9n2, 18, 22
Depoliticization (see also Despatializa-
tion of the political) 49, 50, 81,
102–106, 112, 115, 120, 123, 160,
185n10, 192)
Despatialization of the political (see also
Depoliticization, liberalism, concept
of, Spaceless universalism and Space-
less war) 91, 99–102, 123, 194, 237
Derrida, Jacques 3, 51–52, 71n26,
121n10
Deterritorialization (see also Despatiali-
zation of the political, Spaceless
universalism and Spaceless war)
244n54
Dictatorship 128n26
Dictatorship (see also Democracy) 32,
68n1, 108, 114, 117, 140, 142, 151n6
Difference (ontological, see also Political,
concept of) 3, 8, 47–53, 79–92, 99,
103, 110, 112–114, 183, 245, 248
Discriminatory War (see also Comba-
tants, and non combatants, Crim-
inalization of war, Enemy, Geneva
protocol and Neutrality) 161–165,
184n6, 202, 230–231, 226–227
Disorder and space (see also Spatial
chaos) 4, 8, 25, 61, 62, 90, 108, 139,
278 Index
180, 183, 199, 207, 217, 221, 224, 234,
235, 246, 255
Domestic law (and international law)
100, 136, 166, 215, 228
Dugin, Alexander 64, 68n1, 253
Dyzenhaus, David 45–47, 70n13
Economy (see also Capitalism and Free
Trade) 15, 25, 35, 44, 48–49, 76, 80,
83, 87–88, 92n5, 100, 104, 111–113,
125n8, 151n4, 157–161, 164, 166,
184n3, 185n10, 200, 208n8, 219,
249–250, 255
Elden, Stuart 2,4, 67, 72n37, 73n55,
151n2, 240n15, 249, 254
Elemental thought (see also Air, Geoele-
ments, Land and Sea, Myth and
Spatial histories) 21, 118, 127n22,
187–188, 195–202, 205, 210n17,
215–218, 243n47, 250
Enmity (see also Friend-enemy distinc-
tion and Concept of the political, the)
57, 71n26, 80, 81m 82, 84, 86, 88, 89,
93n11, 112, 113, 138, 168, 206, 231,
232, 234, 236
Englobement (see also Globalization and
World unity) 193
Eschatology (see also Bible, Christian
concept of history, Katechon, Political
theology and Spatial histories) 22–23,
101, 187–188, 203–207, 246
Esposito, Roberto (see also Italian poli-
tical philosophy) 5, 59, 72n43, 179,
204, 257n2
Ethic of State and Pluralistic State 39n4,
109–116
Eurocentricism (see also Bracketing of
War, Colonialism, Jus Publicum Euro-
paeum and New World) 8, 76, 97n42,
103, 124n6, 191, 194, 199, 220–232,
238, 241n31
European and non-European space (see
also Bracketing of War, Colonialism,
Land and sea, distinction and New
World) 223, 224, 228, 230, 243n43
Evola, Julius (see also Italian political
philosophy) 207n1
Eytmology (of nomos) 214–215, 218–219
Ex Captivitate Salus 21
Fascism (see also Conservatism, Con-
servative revolution, Mussolini,
National Socialism and Reactionary
modernism) 4–5, 15, 18, 27–33, 48, 52,
64, 70n16, 117, 120–123, 127n23,
128n30, 211
First world war 12–13, 25–26, 74,
155–156, 160–165, 230–232
Flick, Friedrich (see also International
Crime of War of Aggression and the
Principle “Nullum crimen, nulla poena
sine lege”) 21, 126n19
Forms of Modern Imperialism in Interna-
tional Law 157–158
Forsthoff, Ernst 22
Foucault, Michel 54, 58–59, 72n40, 138,
147
Founding rupture 87, 241n29
France 2, 15, 24, 42, 50–53, 68n1, 93n8,
117, 134, 156, 161, 184n2, 199, 200,
208n6, 223, 249, 250
Frank, Hans 20, 141, 154, 170, 185n15
Frankfurt School (see also Adorno,
Theodor) 16
Free trade (see also Capitalism, Eco-
nomics and Free sea) 199, 200, 242n40
Free sea (see also Geoelements, Land
and Sea) 221–227, 242n40
Friend-enemy distinction (see also The
Concept of the Political and Enmity)
70n17, 71n26, 79–84, 88–92, 94n13,
95n24, 96n33, 122, 137, 141, 144, 157,
160–161, 176–180, 248
Freund, Julien 22, 40n16
Führer (see also Biopolitics, Hitler, Adolf
and National Socialism) 18, 19,
132–149, 170, 180, 182, 246
Fukuyama, Francis 44, 49
Further Development of the Total State in
Germany 120, 122, 125n9, 128n32
Galli, Carlo (see also Italian political
philosophy) 5, 10, 31, 40n19, 68, 76,
87, 88, 96n34, 130, 133, 137–152, 178,
239n6, 256
Geneva Protocol (see also Criminaliza-
tion of war, Discriminatory war,
League of Nations and Versailles
Treaty) 231
Geoelements (see also Air, Elemental
thought, Land and Sea and Land and
sea, distinction) 21, 118, 127n22,
187–188, 195–202, 205, 210n17,
215–218, 243n47, 250
Geography, as discipline 3, 4, 5, 54, 66–68,
135, 172, 275, 186n19, 188, 190–191,
195, 222, 247, 249, 251, 254, 257
Geojurisprudence 170–172

Geopolitik (German Geopolitics, see also
Geojurisprudence, Großraum, Haush-
ofer, Karl, Lebensraum and Ratzel, Frie-
drich 20, 68, 68n1, 127n22, 168–175, 199,
209n13, 250–251
Governmentality 59
Global Linear Thinking (see also Amity
lines, Colonialism and Rayas)
222–223, 241n32
Global Civil War (see also Spaceless war
and World Unity) 63, 113, 194, 205,
232
Globalization (see also Englobement)
188–195, 201, 205–206, 208n7,
209n10, 209n11, 219, 221, 243n50,
246, 254
Globe (see also Englobement, Globali-
zation and Planetary thought) 57, 62,
153, 183, 191, 192, 193, 200, 221, 230
Glossarium 29, 33
Great Britain (England, see also Capital-
ism, Free trade, Land and sea,
distinction and Sea power)
Göring, Hermann 19, 129, 154
Gross, Raphael (see also Anti-Semitism)
1, 11, 28, 33–39, 40n18, 40n20, 93n8,
94n12, 96n30, 126n17, 150–151,
172–174, 184n1, 206, 209n9
Großraum (see also Anti-Semitism,
Großraum and Lebensraum,
Großraum Order in International Law
with a Ban on the Intervention of For-
eign Powers, the, Großraum versus
Universalism, Monroe Doctrine and
National Socialism) 8, 18–21, 29, 38,
63, 64, 67, 110, 118, 127n22, 128n31,
131, 137, 149–184, 185n8, 185n9,
185n10, 188–192, 200, 207, 209n13,
212, 229, 234, 238n5, 245, 246, 247
Großraum Order in International Law
with a Ban on the Intervention of For-
eign Powers: A Contribution to the
Concept of Reich in International Law,
The (see also Großraum and Lebens-
raum, Großraum versus Universalism:
the International Legal Struggle over
the Monroe Doctrine, Monroe
Doctrine and National Socialism) 20,
67, 128n31, 149, 165–184, 185n10,
189–192, 200, 207n3, 210n19
Großraum versus Universalism: the
International Legal Struggle over the
Monroe Doctrine 185n10
Guerrilla War (see also Partisan) 236
Index 279
Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 235
Gurian, Waldemar 40n17, 151n3
Habermas, Jürgen 23, 28, 70n14, 252
Hamlet and Hecuba: The Intrusion of
Time in to Play (see also Hamlet,
Shakespeare’s) 39n11, 112, 123,
126n18
Haushofer, Karl (see also Geopolitik and
Ratzel, Friedrich) 168, 171–172
Hauriou, Maurice 134, 151n4
Hayek, Friedrich von 69n3, 251
Heffernan, Michael 80, 250
Hegel, G. W. F. 12, 93n7, 96n31, 123n1,
132, 154
Heidegger, Martin 27, 5–51, 67, 96n29,
129, 131, 151n2, 209n11, 254, 257n2
Heller, Herman 70n13, 94n18, 128n27, 129
Heller-Roazen, Daniel 85, 96n28, 184n5,
243n52
Herf, Jeffrey (see also Reactionary mod-
ernism) 25, 94n17, 125n9
Hitler, Adolf (see also Führer and
National Socialism) 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
25, 32, 39n7, 120, 129–131, 170–172,
182, 185n12, 185n14, 212, 250
Hobbes, Thomas 40n21, 96n31, 104, 107,
115–116, 125n11, 154, 160, 165, 178,
204, 209n15, 242n39
Holocaust (see also Anti-Semitism and
National Socialism) 2, 73n56, 131, 212
Homogeneity 32, 38, 106, 110–114,
117–118, 126n14, 141, 147–148, 180
Hooker, William 41, 63, 70n15, 73n55,
96n33, 123n1, 207n1, 211
Humanitarian warfare (see also Crim-
inalization of war, Discriminatory war,
Enemy, Interventionism, United States
and Just war) 3, 53, 57, 72n38, 232,
255–256
Humanity, as concept 57–58, 82, 85–87,
113, 115, 158–164, 209n10, 219, 221,
243n50
Imperialism (see also Colonialism, Com-
plexio Oppositorum, Katechon, Med-
ieval Christian Empire and Sea power)
29, 52, 57–58, 76, 81, 91, 113,
155–156, 167, 171, 174, 182, 184n4,
185n10, 190–191, 199–201, 205, 206,
210n18, 216, 223, 242n38, 250
Immanence (metaphysics of, see also
Transcendence) 102–104, 108–115,
125n5, 141, 205, 208n8
280 Index
Indirect powers (37, 164)
Indeterminacy, Legal 14, 45–47, 58
Individualism, critique of (see also
Pluralism, liberal and Political
Romanticism) 13, 75, 205, 96n27
Infrastructure, and Großraum 166, 185n9
Inside and outside (see also Borders and
Spatialization of the political) 58–62,
88–92, 102, 106–107, 110–111, 115,
122, 234, 248, 257n1
International Crime of War of Aggression
and the Principle “Nullum crimen,
nulla poena sine lege” (see also Flick,
Friedrich) 126n19
International law (see also Jus Publicum
Europaeum) 20, 53–58, 63, 65, 91,
96n28, 97n43, 110, 127n23, 153–184,
184n5, 184n6, 185n8, 191, 199, 211,
217–235, 240n20, 242n36, 243n43,
246, 250, 253, 255
International Relations (discipline of) 2,
4, 53–56, 62–65, 72n36, 188, 243n44,
252–253
Interrogation, at Nuremburg 1, 131, 155,
173, 212, 234, 238n4
Interventionism, United States (see also
Absent-presence) 3, 9, 44, 53, 54–57,
65, 72n37, 100, 158, 167–168, 183,
201, 229–230, 249, 255–257
Iraq war (see also Bush, George W. and
War on terror) 55–58, 255
Italian political philosophy (see also
Agamben, Giorgio, Cavalletti,
Andrea, Esposito, Roberto; Galli,
Carlo, Marramao, Giacomo,
Negri, Antonio and Virno, Paolo)
3, 5, 59, 68n1, 89, 137, 149, 174–182,
256
Jameson, Fredric 62
Japan 166, 170, 175, 229
Jesus, Christ (see Antichrist, Anti-Semitism,
Christianity, Eschatology and
Katechon) 204, 209n15
‘Jewish thinking’ (see also Anti-Semitism
and ‘Jewish form of existence’) 37,
126n17, 149, 150, 153, 159, 196, 204,
209n9, 209n15, 240
‘Jewish form of existence’ (see also Anti-
Semitism, ‘Jewish thinking’ and Jews
and space) 38, 127n20, 128n 24, 149,
153, 159, 192–193, 208n6, 247
Jews and space (see also Anti-Semitism,
Biopolitics, Großraum and ‘Jewish
form of existence’) 38, 169, 172–174,
177, 180–182, 209n9
Jünger, Ernst 1, 22, 25, 27, 40n15, 52,
94n17, 207n1
Jurisprudence and Geography 171–172,
176, 181, 195, 213, 215, 229
Jus Publicum Europaeum 1, 95n22, 194,
213, 221–235, 241n31, 242n33,
243n44, 250
Just war (see also Criminalization of war,
Discriminatory war, Humanitarian
warfare, Justa causa and Justus hostis)
226, 230–231
Justa causa (Just cause, see also Crim-
inalization of war, Discriminatory war,
Humanitarian warfare, Just war and
Justus hostis) 226, 232
Justus hostis (Just enemy, see also Crim-
inalization of war, Discriminatory war,
Humanitarian warfare, Just war and
Justa causa) 82, 226–232
Kant, Immanuel 104
Kaplan, Robert. D. 253
Kapp, Ernst 195
Katechon (see also Acceleration,
historical, Antichrist, Eschatology and
Political theology) 93n10, 97n41,
203–208, 210n18, 210n22, 218, 237,
239n7
Kelsen, Hans 16, 70n13, 108, 125n12,
186n17, 240n10
Kellog Pact (Kellog-Briand Pact) 231
Kempner, Robert 21, 35
Kirchheimer, Otto 16
Kojève, Alexandre 34, 238n1, 252
Kosovo war 54
Koskenniemi, Martti 253
Koselleck, Reinhart 124 n2, 252
Kulturkampf (see also Bismarck, Otto
von) 11, 12, 39n4
Laclau, Ernesto 48, 71n17, 248
Land and order (see also Geoelements,
Land and sea, distinction, Rootless-
ness and Spatial histories) 37, 127n20,
169, 172, 174, 175, 195–202, 210n17,
214, 215–221, 222–234, 237–238,
240n15, 240n16, 240n17, 240n20,
242n36, 243n47, 249
Land Appropriation (see also
Colonialism, Jus Publicum Euro-
paeum, Nomos) 97n35, 97n36,
215–218, 240n16

Land and Sea (see also Land and sea,
distinction and Land power, versus sea
power) 8, 19, 21, 29, 67, 97n42, 118,
124n2, 127n22, 135, 187–192,
195–207, 207n1, 208n6, 209n11, 254
Land and sea, distinction (see also Land
power, versus sea power and Sea
power) 161, 183, 195–201, 205,
210n17, 210n18, 211, 218, 221,
224–227, 232–233, 243n47
Land power, versus sea power (see also
Land and sea, distinction and Sea
power) 198–203, 224–225
Laski, Harold 39, 111, 126n17
Latour, Bruno 254
League of Nations 14, 15, 102, 155–158,
162–164, 185n7, 230–231
Lebensraum (see also Anti-Semitism and
Großraum) 137, 154, 169–174, 181
Legal Positivism 45–47, 7-n12, 106–110,
115, 118–119, 125n12, 128n25,
128n27, 134, 205, 209n15, 215, 218,
239n10, 239n10, 240n14
Legal World Revolution, The (see also
Englobement and World unity) 151n4,
193, 207n2, 208n7, 241n27
Legality and Legitimacy 26, 70n13,
71n32, 119, 128n28
Legg, Stephen (and Alexander
Vasudevan) 2, 3, 67, 72n48, 207n1,
211
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (see also
Bolshevism) 125n8, 244n54
Leviathan and Behemoth, myth of (see
also Behemoth, myth, Geoelements,
Land and sea, distinction and Spatial
histories) 196–198, 202
Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas
Hobbes, The 20, 29, 32, 40n21, 71n32,
97n42, 115, 126n11, 127n22, 128n24,
149, 154, 188, 197, 203, 204, 209n15,
242n40
Liberalism, critique of (see also Depoli-
tization, Despatialization of the poli-
tical and State, crisis of)3, 8, 13–16,
25, 32, 37, 43–49, 53, 55, 70n14, 92n2,
94n17, 102–114, 116–118, 121, 124n4,
125n8, 125n9, 126n13, 127n20,
128n24, 128n25, 131, 132, 134, 141,
155–159, 164, 179, 185n10, 192, 193,
197, 209n15, 219, 244n54
Locke, John 240n17
Löwith, Karl 95n26, 130–131
Lukács, György 15, 127n21
Index 281
Machiavelli, Nicollò 22, 96n32
Mackinder, Halford (see also Geography,
as discipline) 95
Mahan, Alfred Thayer (see also Sea
power) 195, 209n14, 243n51
Maistre, Joseph de (see also Cortes,
Donoso and Counter revolution,
French and Spanish) 96n32, 117
Mao, Zedong 22, 237, 244n54
Marchart, Oliver 2, 51, 71n22
Marder, Michael 93n6, 125n10, 241n30
Maritime power (see also Land and sea,
distinction, Leviathan and Behemoth
and Sea power) 161, 163, 195–202,
208n6, 208n15, 209n15, 223–225,
250
Marramao, Giacomo (see also Italian
political philosophy) 238n1
Marx, Karl (see also Marxism) 104,
124n3, 241n25, 251
Marxism (see Marx, Karl) 16, 48, 49, 59,
92n5, 93n7, 114, 116, 148, 151n1, 251
McCormick, John P. 45
Medieval Christian Empire (see also
Complexio Oppositorum, Imperialism
and Katechon) 24, 206, 223
Meier, Heinrich 39n10, 69n3, 209n15
Melville, Herman 1, 9n2
Michelet, Jules 208n6
Miéville, China 253
Miglio, Gianfranco 52–53, 71n29
Minca, Claudio (see also Agamben,
Giorgio, Biopolitics, Rowan, Rory and
Spatial ontology) 3, 4, 5, 25, 43, 54,
58, 61, 66, 67, 68, 89, 137, 139, 140,
154, 173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 207n1,
239n6, 252
Modernity (see also Globalization,
Secularization, Spatial histories) 7, 8,
25–26, 67, 76–79, 84, 92n4, 97n44,
104, 115, 140, 141, 180, 188–207,
298n6, 208n7, 246, 250, 252, 257n1
Mohler, Armin (see also Conservative
revolution) 35, 40n14
Monroe Doctrine (see also Großraum
and Interventionism, United States)
57, 167–182, 185n10, 185n14,
229–230, 249
Morgenthau, Hans 93n11, 252
Moses, Dirk 28
Motorized partisan (see also Telluric
partisan) 236–237
Mouffe, Chantal 3, 30, 40n16, 45–53,
70n10, 71n20, 72n35, 96n29
282 Index
Müller, Jan-Werner 1, 5, 9n1, 11–12,
22–23, 25–28, 39n2, 41–42, 48, 53, 56,
68n1, 70n17, 146
Multipolarity and Unipolarity (see also
World Unity) 63–64, 73n53, 183, 207,
235, 247, 255
Murphy, David T. 67, 171
Mussolini, Benito (see also Fascism) 15,
114, 162
Myth (see also Geoelements, Leviathan
and Behemoth, myth of and Political
idea) 21, 26, 32, 93n9, 94n14, 106,
114–118, 127n22, 128n24, 179, 188,
195–203, 209n15, 210n17, 216, 221,
250
National Socialism (Nazism) 1–10,
18–19, 20–21, 26–38, 39n7, 41, 56,
63–68, 73n56, 85, 93n9, 96n29, 111,
118, 120, 123, 127n22, 128n25,
128n28, 128n29, 1290151, 153–184,
185n13, 193, 212, 234, 238n5, 247,
251–252, 256
National Socialist spatial thought (Nazi
spatial thought, see also Geojur-
isprudence, Geopolitik, Lebensraum
and National Socialism) 5, 67–68,
171–182, 252
Nationalism, German 13, 25, 114,
127n21, 128n33, 155, 156, 162
NATO 54–55, 255
Naval power (see also Land and sea,
distinction, Leviathan and Behemoth,
Maritime power and Sea power) 161,
163, 195–202, 208n6, 208n15, 209n15,
223–225, 250
Negri, Antonio (and Michael Hardt, see
also Italian political philosophy) 59
Neocleous, Mark 28, 31–32, 48, 70n16, 81
Neutralization (see also Depoliticization)
49, 103–106, 115, 205, 208n8
Neutrality (see also Criminalization of
war, Discriminatory war and Neu-
trality According to International Law
and National Totality) 47, 104–105,
163–164, 226, 230–231
Neutrality According to International
Law and National Totality 184n6,
243n45
New Left 2, 48, 52, 71n23
New Right (Nouvelle Droite) 50–53, 64,
207n1
‘New World’ (see also Colonialism and
Jus Publicum Europaeum) 8, 91,
97n44, 183, 190–191, 208n6, 210n18,
221–229, 242n36, 250
‘New World Order’ (see also Bush,
George W., NATO, War on terror) 44,
56
Nietzsche, Friedrich 13
Nihilism (see also Spaceless war, World
unity and Utopianism) 20, 23, 35,
95n26, 100, 193–194, 200, 209n12,
210n18
Nomos (as concept, see also Nomos as
institution and Spatial order) 7, 34,
60–62, 89, 194, 212–220, 228, 239n8,
240n13, 240n14, 240n15, 241n23,
244n54, 253
Nomos (as institution, see also Jus Pub-
licum Europaeum and Nomos as con-
cept) 7–9, 61–62, 206, 210n16, 211,
221–235, 238, 240n15, 242n37, 244n54
Nomos of the Earth, The 4, 8, 19, 53, 54,
57, 62–67, 118, 124n2, 126n13,
127n22, 135, 187–189, 193–198,
203–207, 209n11, 209n12, 211–213,
220–235, 238n1, 239n6, 239n7, 239n8
240n15, 242n35, 242n37, 254
Nomos - Nahme – Name 209n11, 218,
239n8, 241
Non-intervention (see also Intervention-
ism, United States and Monroe
Doctrine, the) 167–168, 181
Nunan, Timothy 39n9, 170–171, 182
Nuremburg, interrogation 1, 131, 155,
173, 212, 234, 238n4
Obama, Barak 255
Odysseos, Louiza (see also Petito, Fabio)
56, 63, 65, 72n48
Ojakangas, Mikas 87, 97n35, 192, 207n1,
208n8, 241n23
On the Three Types of Juristic Thought
19, 133–136, 166
Order and disorder (see also Disorder
and space) 61, 62
Order and Orientation (Ordnung und
Ortung, see also Nomos) 37, 89,
97n39, 194, 198, 209n12, 213–215,
235, 239n6, 240n18
Ortega y Gasset, José 103
Outer space (Extraplanetary space) 159,
233, 235
Palaver, Wolfgang 97n41, 241n23
Parliamentarianism (see also Liberalism,
critique of) 102, 111, 118, 119

Particularism (see individualism and
Pluralism) 34, 35, 37, 237
Partisan (Motorized and Telluric Parti-
sans, see also Theory of the Partisan,
The) 8, 63, 207, 235–238, 243n52,
244n55, 246
PATRIOT Act 56, 60
Paul, Saint 93n10, 127n20, 2014–206
Peace 58, 90, 100, 104, 113, 155, 158,
160, 162, 182, 184n2, 221, 225, 226,
227, 231, 232, 240n19
Peace of Westphalia (see also Interna-
tional relations, as discipline) 63,
73n51, 243n44
People, the (see also Biopolitics, Con-
stituent power, Democracy, Homo-
geneity, National Socialism and
Population) 5–8, 18, 19, 38, 77, 97n36,
107, 114–118, 122, 126n14, 129,
132–133, 137–151, 158, 159, 174–183,
184n2, 214, 246
Petito, Fabio (see also Odysseos, Louiza)
56, 63, 64, 65, 72n48
Piracy (and privateers, see also Unjust
Enemy) 96n28, 163, 184n5, 236,
243n52
Philosophy of History (see also Coloni-
alism, Secularization and Spatial
history) 8, 103, 124n6, 140, 188, 204
Planetary industrial appropriation (Wel-
traumnahme) 193, 241n27
Planetary Thought 151n1, 153, 159, 167,
189–194, 202, 208n7, 209n10, 211,
218–221, 233, 235, 243n47, 249,
253–254
Plettenberg 11, 22
Plight of European Jurisprudence, The
21, 29
Pluralism 8, 35, 37, 39n4, 46, 52, 64, 85,
110–114, 117, 120, 122, 143, 235, 248,
254–255
Poland 169, 185n15
Political, concept of (see also Concept of
the Political, The, Enemy, Spatializa-
tion of the political) 5–10, 27, 32, 38,
48, 50–52, 65–68, 70n17, 70n18,
71n21, 71n26, 75, 78–85, 87–92, 93n9,
93n11, 94n12, 94n13, 97n37, 99–118,
120–123, 126n13, 133, 135–140,
143–145, 148, 149–150, 157–161, 164,
165, 168, 173–180, 183, 192, 194,
200, 202, 207, 208n8, 209n12,
210n17, 231, 233–238, 242n37,
245–257
Index 283
Political anthropology (see also Anthro-
pology, political) 25, 84–87, 96n33,
112, 137, 148, 177–178
Political form 7, 8, 20–21, 32, 38, 69n2, 76–
79, 93n10, 99–106, 113, 114–117, 120,
122, 137, 145, 149–150, 163, 165, 182–
183, 191–193, 206, 214, 218, 235, 245
Political Idea (see also Großraum and
Myth) 77, 93n8, 93n9, 101, 102, 114–118,
167–168, 173–180, 209n15, 249
Political ontology (see also Spatial
ontology) 49, 50–53, 84–89, 96n29,
112, 148, 243n30
Political Romanticism 13, 42, 75, 96n27,
145
Political theology (see also Anti-Semit-
ism, Catholicism, Christianity, Kate-
chon, Modernity, Political Theology:
Four Chapters on the Concept of
Sovereignty, Secularization) 35, 37,
76–79, 86, 90, 96n33, 97n41, 101, 104,
140–141, 178, 195, 203–207, 208n8,
218, 226, 240n14, 242n38, 252, 254
Political Theology: Four Chapters on the
Concept of Sovereignty 3, 14, 42, 76,
77, 92, 96n35, 97n41, 103, 106, 115,
117, 124, 188, 203, 208n8, 210n21
Political Theology II: The Myth of the
Closure of Any Political Theology 23,
71n32, 210n21
Pope 77, 78, 223
Popitz, Johannes 16, 21, 119, 129
Population (see also Demography and
Biopolitics) 59–60, 136, 138–142, 144,
154, 158, 161, 174–182, 184n2, 237, 247
Positive Law State 109, 115, 127
Postcolonialism (see also Colonialism
and Decolonization) 98
Post-foundational political thought 2,
50–53, 71n21, 71n22, 71n25, 97n37
Presidential power (see also Article 48
and Weimar constitution) 16, 17, 32,
119, 123
Proletariat (see also Bolshevism and
Class) 114, 250
Protestant Reformation 78, 210n18
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 113, 160
Prozorov, Sergei 42, 72n40, 125n10, 254
Prussia 11, 17, 21, 119, 129
Race (and racism, see also Anti-Semitism,
Biopolitics, Demography, Population)
27, 36, 52, 130, 141, 146, 147, 150, 169,
173
284 Index
Rasch, William 48,49, 64, 88, 207n1
Rathenau, Walther 13, 126n19
Ratzel, Friedrich (see also Geopolitik and
Haushofer, Karl) 169, 172, 174, 176,
241n32
Rayas (Spanish and Portuguese, see also
Amity lines and Global linear think-
ing) 222, 223, 229
Rawls, John 40, 70n12
Reactionary modernism (see also Con-
servative revolution and Herf, Jeffrey)
25–26, 125n9
Realism (International Relations) 3,
123n1
Reich, concept of 153, 156, 165–170,
174–183, 184n4, 193, 207
Religious wars, Europe (see also Hobbes,
Thomas, Reformation and Seculariza-
tion) 73n51, 78–79, 104
Res publica Christiana 210n22
Rhineland (see also Versailles Treaty) 11,
12, 156
Roman Catholicism and Political Form
14, 69n2, 76, 78, 89, 104n4, 96n33,
125n8, 188, 193, 242n38
Romanticism (see also Political Roman-
ticism) 75, 93n7, 96n27, 125n9
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 170
Roosevelt, Theodore 167
Rootlessness (see also Anti-Semitism,
Cosmopolitanism, Nihilism and
Spaceless universalism) 37, 128n24,
153, 193, 207, 208n6, 231–232
Rosenberg, Alfred 40n15, 154, 173
Rowan, Rory (see also Minca, Claudio,
Multipolarity and Unipolarity, Spatial
histories and Spatial ontology) 4, 25,
43, 53, 58, 64, 66, 67, 73n53, 87, 89,
97n36, 177, 207n1, 241n28, 247
Russia (see also Bolshevism and Soviet
Union) 42, 64, 68n1, 105–106,
114–115, 125n8, 185n12, 196, 253
Salan, Raoul 237, 244n54
Scheuerman, William 9n2, 45–47, 69n3,
70n12, 93n11, 146, 250–251
Schleicher, Kurt von 17, 20, 32, 136
Schwab, George 28–29, 32–33, 36–37,
40n16, 42, 73n50, 93n11, 128n25, 131,
166, 123
Sea appropriation (see also Land appro-
priation) 221
Sea power (see also Land and sea, dis-
tinction, Leviathan and Behemoth,
Maritime power and Naval power)
161, 163, 195–202, 208n6, 208n15,
209n15, 223–225, 250
Second world war 1–2, 18, 20–21, 25, 38,
68n1, 183, 199, 212, 213, 132, 202
Secularization (see also State and secu-
larization) 12, 76–79, 92n4, 101, 140,
203, 252
September 11 (9/11) 3, 44, 53–59, 62, 67,
72n47
Sitze, Adam 40n19, 54, 96n34
Sloterdijk, Peter 208n7, 254, 257n1
Sorel, Georges 15
Sovereignty (see also Decisionism and
State of exception) 3, 32, 38, 54–60,
72n37, 103, 106–109, 114, 117,
126n14, 134, 126n14, 134–139, 155,
156, 163–164, 169, 179, 184n2, 224,
229–230, 240n15
Sovereign decision (see also Decisionism,
Sovereignty and State of Exception)
97n36, 106–109, 130
Soviet Union (see also Bolshevism, Cold
War and Russia) 15, 39n8, 44, 105,
115, 123, 125n8, 125n9, 128n30,
208n7, 212, 243n47
Spaceless universalism (see also Cosmo-
politanism, Utopianism and World
Unity) 209n9, 228, 229
Spaceless war (see also Global civil war,
Spaceless universalism and World
Unity) 231–232, 237–238
Spatial chaos 227–232, 239n7
Spatial consciousness 189, 192–194,
199–200, 220, 246, 249
Spatial histories 7, 187–211, 246, 250, 252
Spatial ontology (see also Political
ontology and Spatial order) 66, 67,
84–85, 90, 118, 127n22, 177, 198, 213,
241n30, 257n1,
Spatial order (see also Nomos) 2,7, 8, 20,
34, 61, 67, 93n10, 123, 253, 181–183,
188, 194, 213–224, 227–238, 239n7,
239n8, 240n13, 242n 42, 246, 247, 250,
252, 254–256
Spatial revolution 91, 93n10, 189–192,
200–202, 208n7, 221
Spatialization, of the political (see also
Political, concept of and Despatializa-
tion of the political) 8, 88–92, 97n42,
99–114, 121, 133, 165, 168, 176, 183,
206, 209n12, 245, 248
Spengler, Oswald 25, 40n15, 103, 124n7,
207n1

Spinoza, Baruch de 104, 184n1
S.S. (see also National Socialism) 19, 29,
40n17, 127n23, 143, 151n3, 154
State, crisis of (see also Liberalism, cri-
tique of, Political form and Spatial
chaos) 8, 18, 20, 56, 75–76, 90–92,
100–105, 154, 227
State and Secularisation (secular state)
37, 40n21, 73n51, 78–79, 90–91, 92n4,
101, 104–105, 191, 203, 225
State and society distinction (see also
Pluralism, State, crisis of and Total state),
102m 110–113, 119–123, 132–133)
State of Exception (see also, Exception,
state of) 2–3, 7, 54, 58–62, 95n23,
97n35, 99, 106–109, 123, 122n10,
126n13, 130, 137, 140, 146, 242n35
State, Movement, People 18, 19, 26, 123,
132–133, 137–150, 151n5
Strauss, Leo 69n3, 72n35, 252
Strong, Tracy B. 36–37
Submarines (see also Naval war and
Piracy) 231
Taubes, Jacob 22, 204, 252
Technological thinking 22, 35, 59, 92n5,
104–105, 116, 125, 192, 193, 194, 200,
201, 206, 208n8, 233, 234, 239n7
Technology and mass politics 25, 26, 123
Technology and spatial consciousness
(see also Technological thinking and
Technology and warfare) 124n2,
189–191, 218, 238
Technology and warfare (see also Tech-
nological thinking) 161, 202, 227,
231–232, 237, 243n50, 257n1
Telluric partisan (see also Motorized
partisan) 236–237
Telos 30, 42, 52, 54, 71n29
Territory (see also Territorial Integrity)
34, 38, 57, 139, 153, 162, 169, 170,
175, 185n8, 195, 199–200, 224–229,
240n15, 243n43
Territorial integrity 57, 72n37, 229
Terrorism (see also Theory of the Parti-
san and War on terror) 55, 63
Teschke, Benno 64–65, 72n35, 123n1,
250–251
Theology (see also Anti-Semitism, Cath-
olicism, Christianity, Katechon, Political
Theology and Secularization) 35, 37,
76–79, 86, 90, 96n33, 97n41, 101, 104,
140–141, 178, 195, 203–207, 208n8,
218, 226, 240n14, 242n38, 252, 254
Index 285
Theory of the Partisan 54, 63, 67, 73n49,
187, 188, 203, 207, 213, 235–238,
244n54
Three Possibilities for a Christian Con-
cept of History 124n2
Total Enemy, Total War and Total State
155, 161
Total state (Qualitative total state and
Quantitative total state) 18, 32,
120–123, 125n9, 128n25, 131, 132,
150
Total war 20, 58, 161, 182, 230
Totality, concept of 121, 128n31, 184n6,
193, 248
Totalitarianism (see also Total state) 32,
34, 123, 174
Transcendence (see also Immanence)
103, 124n5
Tronti, Mario 59
Turn to a Discriminating Concept of War
161–165, 184n6, 243n45
Ulmen, Gary L. 43, 63, 72n30, 131,
243n53
United States
Universalism 35, 37, 77, 113, 167, 179,
185n7, 193, 200, 208n7, 209n9, 228,
229, 235, 248
Unjust enemy (see also Absolute Enemy
and Justus hostis) 113, 161, 230, 243
Utopianism (critique of, see also
Nihilism, World Unity) 48, 49, 87,
101, 116, 183, 192–194, 219, 239n7
Versailles Treaty 14–15, 56, 155–156,
162–164, 184n2, 230–231
Virno, Paolo (see also Italian political
philosophy) 59
Visibility, and authority 217, 241n22, 249
War of Aggression (see also Criminaliza-
tion of war, Discriminatory war,
Geneva Protocol, League of Nations
and Versailles Treaty)126n19, 163
War on terror (see also Bush, George W
and Iraq war) 3, 44, 54–65, 255
Way to the Total State, The 120–121,
125n9
Weber, Max 13, 15, 92n2, 92n3, 108,
124n3
Weimar Republic 8, 13–18, 25, 29, 32,
45, 46, 74–76, 90, 106, 109, 118–120,
123, 123n1, 131
286 Index
Weimar Constitution (see also Article 48)
15–18, 32, 45–47, 108–109, 118, 130,
132
Western Hemisphere (see also Global
linear thinking, Monroe Doctrine and
Interventionism, United States) 57,
182, 223, 229, 230, 242n33
Wilson, Woodrow 43, 72n35, 161–163,
167
Wolin, Richard 25, 27, 40n14
World Order (see also New World Order)
44, 55, 56, 64, 90, 109n42, 165, 182,
203, 207, 224, 234, 235, 247, 252, 255
World Unity (see also Despatialization,
Englobement, Global civil war,
Globalization, Nihilism, Spaceless war
and Utopia) 183, 192–195, 201, 205,
206, 209n10, 219, 221, 243n50, 255
Young Conservative Movement (see also
Conservatism) 24
Žižek, Slavoj 3, 47–52, 71n20, 248
Zarmanian, Thalin 89, 97n40
Zolo, Danilo 53, 64