On Schmitt and Space

Table of contents :
Cover
......Page 1
Half Title
......Page 2
Title Page
......Page 8
Copyright Page
......Page 9
Table of Contents
......Page 10
Acknowledgements......Page 11
Introduction......Page 14
The structure of the book......Page 18
Notes......Page 22
1. Writing Carl Schmitt
......Page 23
An intellectual adventurer......Page 24
Interpreting the sphinx......Page 37
Notes......Page 52
Why Schmitt now? A reactionary’s renaissance......Page 54
A new ‘spatial’ Schmitt
......Page 66
Notes......Page 81
3. Spatializing the political
......Page 87
Secularization and political form......Page 89
The political: the groundless grounds of order......Page 92
Spatializing the political: the concrete situation......Page 101
Notes......Page 105
4. Liberal Leviathan
......Page 112
Liberalism and the metaphysical image of the age......Page 115
Sovereignty......Page 119
Homogeneity......Page 123
Myth......Page 127
Article 48......Page 131
Towards the total state......Page 132
Notes......Page 136
Howling with the wolves......Page 142
The Nazi writings......Page 145
Towards the biopolitical state......Page 150
Notes......Page 164
6. Großraum
......Page 166
Liberalism, international law and war......Page 168
Großraum order
......Page 178
Nazism, Geojurisprudence, Lebensraum
......Page 183
Lebensraum and the ‘Jewish question’
......Page 185
Notes......Page 197
7. Spatial histories
......Page 200
Modernity and global spatial revolutions
......Page 202
Geo-elemental mythologies of land and sea......Page 208
Eschatological geopolitics
......Page 216
Notes
......Page 220
The Nomos of the Earth
......Page 224
Nomos as concept: the grounds of the political
......Page 226
Nomos as institution: jus publicum Europaeum
......Page 234
Twentieth century spatial chaos......Page 240
A new nomos of the earth?
......Page 245
The last sentinel of the Earth: the Partisan......Page 248
Notes......Page 251
Conclusion......Page 258
Limitations......Page 260
Engagements......Page 264
Notes......Page 270
Bibliography......Page 271
Index......Page 288

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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 analyses 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.

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Interventions

Edited by: Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic 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, politics 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 ([email protected]) and Nick Vaughan-Williams ([email protected]) As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’. In this spirit the Edkins–Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute 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 scholars 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.

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Critical Theorists and International Relations Edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams

War and Rape Law, memory and justice Nicola Henry

Ethics as Foreign Policy Britain, the EU and the other Dan Bulley

Madness in International Relations Psychology, security and the global governance of mental health Alison Howell

Universality, Ethics and International Relations A grammatical reading Véronique Pin-Fat

Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt Geographies of the nomos Edited by Stephen Legg

The Time of the City Politics, philosophy, and genre Michael J. Shapiro

Politics of Urbanism Seeing like a city Warren Magnusson

Governing Sustainable Development Partnership, protest and power at the world summit Carl Death

Beyond Biopolitics Theory, violence and horror in world politics François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder

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

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

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Theorising Post-Conflict Reconciliation Agonism, restitution and repair Edited by Alexander Keller Hirsch

Studies in the Trans-disciplinary Method After the aesthetic turn Michael J. Shapiro

Europe’s Encounter with Islam The secular and the postsecular Luca Mavelli

Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics The scars of violence Brent J. Steele

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

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

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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

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

Post-tsunami Reconstruction in Indonesia Negotiating normativity through gender mainstreaming initiatives in Aceh Marjaana Jauhola

International Politics and Performance Critical aesthetics and creative practice Edited by Jenny Edkins and Adrian Kear

Leo Strauss and the Invasion of Iraq Encountering the abyss Aggie Hirst

Memory and Trauma in International Relations Theories, cases, and debates Edited by Erica Resende and Dovile Budryte

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

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

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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

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On Schmitt and Space

Claudio Minca and Rory Rowan

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First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 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 utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 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

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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 Index

258 275

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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, completed 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, University of London, Claudio enjoyed one semester of sabbatical leave in Vancouver 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.

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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 overarching 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 problems 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 political 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 Geographies 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.

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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 correspondences. 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 skipper 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

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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,

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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 scholars, Schmitt has provided a theoretical basis for a bracing critique of a supposedly ‘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 interventionism, 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 sensitive 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

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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 politically 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 comprehensive 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 thinkers 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

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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 complicated 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 particularly 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 readings 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 ‘nonSchmittian 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 complexities 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 irreducibly 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,

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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 fundamental 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 trajectories of the recent interest in Schmitt’s work in English speaking academia, 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 political. 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 translated works and the additional detail afforded by those unavailable. However, as we argue at various points in the book, the ‘politics of translation’, especially 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 travelled 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 concerned 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 contemporary 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

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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 incorporated into contemporary debates, according to selective modalities, crucially 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 constitutive 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

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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 liberalism 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 earlier thought, undergoes a profound conceptual mutation. The relationship between these biopolitical stakes of Schmitt’s Nazi writings and the related geopolitical 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 spatial 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 appropriation 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 international 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 foundation to quell the escalating violence of the political crisis defining the

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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 globalizing 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 concerns 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 Dangerous 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 precisely the ‘banality’ of his evil, to use Hannah Arendt’s widely cited phrase. William 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 distasteful 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.

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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. Further, 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

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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 intellectual background within which to frame subsequent chapters. For the biographical 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 considers what came after of less intellectual interest, or rather ‘footnotes to earlier 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 provide 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 Bismarck 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

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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 suggested 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 transcendent 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 Catholicism 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 conflictridden 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 galvanize 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 semibohemian 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

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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 sentiments circulating the cafés he frequented, apparently immune to the ultrapatriotism 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 appearance. 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 conservatives 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 semibohemian 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 violently 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 quasibohemian 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

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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 opportunity 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 Dictator, 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 congenial 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 antinomies of liberalism, to fiery critiques of the new international order emerging 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

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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 medieval 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 political 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.

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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 University of Berlin, Schmitt began to develop a wide set of contacts within Berlin’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 Todorovic´, 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 proRepublic Hochschule für Politik, an academic institution outside the established 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. Balakrishnan 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, perpetuated 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 Constitution 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,

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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 government 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 Germany’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 Reichswehr 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 Hindenburg appoint him. In office, Schleicher sought to radically reshape the Weimar Republic along lines that solidified a broad-based populism under the presidency. 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 witnessing 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.

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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 publicly 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 fundamental 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 promulgated 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

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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 contribution 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 Catholic thinker more concerned with the fate of the state than that of the Party and the National Socialist Movement. The campaign forced Schmitt to withdraw 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

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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 controversial 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 conference of National Socialist jurists in Kiel on 1 April 1939 and then published 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 legitimacy for Nazi foreign policy but also to formulate a new basis for international 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 contemporary 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 commitments 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

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but towards military defeat. He played his part in its propaganda machine, travelling to Spain, Portugal, Romania and Hungary as a cultural ambassador, 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, published 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 interrogation 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 interrogation, 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 selfquestioning 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).

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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 academic post in the new Federal Republic because he refused to sign the certificate 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 complete and he was desperate to maintain influence even as he became increasingly concerned with his own self-image and reception. As Müller clearly demonstrates, he remained an éminence grise in his internal exile ‘paradoxically 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 ‘intellectual freemasonry’ stretching across Europe, and taking in many of the conservative 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 constitutional 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 difficulty of facing his own past and Europe’s future, drove Schmitt back to

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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 (Balakrishnan, 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 antediluvian 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 precisely 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.

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Interpreting the sphinx

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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’ (Balakrishnan, 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 catastrophic 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 compromised 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 fundamental 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

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stock in conventional sources of conservative legitimacy, whether nationalism, class politics or the power of traditional elites. Indeed, the fascinating radicalism 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 natural 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 disorder, 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 revolutionary’ (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 Socialism. 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 conservatism 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 contradictions 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 institutional 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 conservative’ 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 conservatism – which might or might not be realized in particularly conservative positions centered on gradual change in actual politics’ (ibid.). Müller’s identification 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

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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 unrestrained 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 Parliamentary 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 conservatism 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 envisaged 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 revolutionary 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.

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The Crown Jurist of National Socialism? For those approaching his work, Schmitt’s complicity with National Socialism 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 propagandist for a regime that slaughtered millions on the basis of a racist ideology, 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 historically. 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

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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 antiintellectual 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 interventions 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 complicity 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 introduced to Anglophone audiences by Joseph Bendersky and George Schwab, both of whom were in close friendly contact with Schmitt and acted as quasiapologists. 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,

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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 difference, 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 opposition 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 Socialism, 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 interrogation 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 Holocaust 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

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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 generation 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 germane, 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 continuity 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

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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 follows ‘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

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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 tendencies 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). Arguably, the Nazis provided many of the trappings for what Schmitt had conceived 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 homogeneity. 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

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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 aberration or an opportunistic lapse risks absolving Schmitt of personal responsibility and repressing the affinities his work shared with Nazi ideology and practice. Conversely, an approach that foregrounds continuity and understands 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 hermeneutic 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 serious 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 framework 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 determined 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.

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As noted above, there are clear affinities between aspects of Schmitt’s political 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 antiSemitism 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 personal 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 conceptually 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 contends 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 English 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 therefore argues that Schmitt’s theory cannot be dissociated from anti-Semitism since it is structured around a series of conceptual oppositions to particularism, universalism 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. According to him, Schmitt’s work ‘achieves its unity through ideas that take up

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anti-emancipatory and secularized anti-Jewish theological motifs of Catholic and Protestant origin’ (2007: 227). Anti-Semitism is thus for this interpretation 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 convergences between different, but inter-related sources of antagonism depending 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 ‘polycentric’ 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 stereotypical 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 Socialism. 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

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‘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 antiSemitism 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 prejudices (ibid.: xv). In Strong’s case, the aim is not to excuse Schmitt’s antiSemitism but to understand its conceptual structure more clearly. In Schwab’s case, however, these distinctions are employed to ensure that Schmitt’s antiSemitism, 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 pronouncements … 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.

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The question of whether a distinction between anti-Semitism and antiJudaism 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 structural position in his thought. As has been argued above anti-Semitism represents 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 contradiction 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 disruptive 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

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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 antiSemitism in Schmitt’s conceptual framework and his decision to throw his weight behind the Nazi regime. Although for a time Schmitt stood in opposition 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 socalled ‘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 identified 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 biopolitical lens, as the enemy to be expelled from the German body politic, a deterritorialized 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 intellectual 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 necessity hangs heavy on Schmitt’s work and we will face it head on in those areas where it casts the starkest shadow.

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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 confirmed 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 believers 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 ruthless, 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 inadvertently 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 landscape of European thought is the subject of Müller’s book, which carries out a rigorous 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.

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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 article 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 philosemite. 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 antiSemitism 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 Horkheimer 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.

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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 intellectual figure who provokes quite such polarized views’ (Hooker, 2009: 2). It is of course not surprising that Schmitt provokes such deeply divided responses, 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 association, ‘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 Nuremburg 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 worldhistorical 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 historical hub at the centre of Europe’s dark twentieth century through which various lineages of modern political thought and their contemporary

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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 voluminous 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 project 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 contexts. 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 scholarship 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 English, 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 editors 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

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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 resurrection 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 controversy? 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

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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 humanitarian 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 development 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 implications 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 political 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 international 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.

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It might appear counter-intuitive that at the moment of liberalism’s apparent 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 primarily as a critic of liberalism. On the one hand, those who feared that liberalism 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 battering ram to escape its restrictions and reaffirm the possibility of an alternative 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 authoritarian 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 disastrously identify the National Socialist regime as a potential source of legitimate 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,

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‘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 different 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 constitutionalism in the Weimar era therefore found an important echo in the 1990s, in part because they raised fundamental structural questions concerning liberalism’s ‘first principles’. Furthermore, a triumphant liberalism reluctant 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 problem of legal indeterminacy or, more specifically, the role that personal decisionmaking played in a liberal Constitution, remained, then Schmitt’s work continued to illustrate unsolved problems inherent to contemporary liberalism, 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.

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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 parliamentary 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 analytical 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 liberalism 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 problems within existing liberal democracy … at each juncture his own theoretical 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 reinvigoration. It may have been a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures, but his popularity on the Left is one of the most intriguing aspects of

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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 unprecedented 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 theoretical 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 socalled ‘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 antagonistic 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

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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 biography 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 political’ 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 genuinely 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 fundamentally 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

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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 liberal utopia of the 1990s. Mouffe, for example, claimed that the rise of Right wing populist movements in Europe and the United States, and the emergence 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 international 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 postfoundational 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 philosophy’s ongoing struggle with the legacy of Heideggerian phenomenology. Postfoundational work is understood by some as having extended Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics to the field of political thought in order to rethink the

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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 socalled ‘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 sovereignty 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 identification of Schmitt as something like a post-foundational thinker avant la lettre

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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 Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek have enjoyed public prominence in Anglophone intellectual circles, the names of Schmitt-inspired scholars of the European New Right, such as the late Italian political philosopher 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 identities in underpinning political order, in contrast to a supposedly ‘weak’ liberal 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 antiimmigrant 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 unexpected convergences. As noted above, the New York-based journal and publishing 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

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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 federalism 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 difference 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 postwar 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. Previously, 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 surprising given the widespread discussions on military interventionism during

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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, exponential 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 factors. 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 postCold War decade, the second was forged in the wake of the attacks of September 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 germane 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 audiences 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.

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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 ‘international’ and indeed spatial thinker that has defined the second phase of his ‘revival’ during the 2000s.

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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 producing 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 renditions’ 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

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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 international 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

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literature that employed insights from Schmitt’s work to understand the extension of US power under the rubric of the ‘war on terror’ related principally 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 expanded 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

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could thus be exposed to the most extreme forms of violence. Second, the distinction between war and peace was dissolved, as war became indistinguishable 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 permanent, 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 provided a fertile ground for a second phase of Schmitt’s Anglophone ‘renaissance’ 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 Anglophone 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, particularly 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 introduced 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

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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 biopolitics 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 complementary, 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 workers 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 political’ 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 Agamben’s reading of the relationship between Schmittian sovereignty and Foucauldian 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

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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 extralegal subjects generated by the ‘war on terror’ such as the inmates of Guantanamo 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 producing a new form of biopolitical order. It was in this highly charged political context that Agamben’s biopolitical reading of Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty became widespread (see, for example, Huysmans, 2008; Norris, 2005). As the rule of exception appeared to take an ever greater role in the operations of global power, so too Schmitt became an increasingly frequent reference 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 profound impact on the reception of Schmitt’s work in the 2000s was his introduction 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

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thought, it appeared only in later works that were not available in English until 2003, and had therefore not received significant attention before Agamben made use of it other than in the most sustained engagements. The publication 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 unlocalizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration 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 detention 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 illustrate 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 indistinction’. The ‘constitutive link between localization and ordering of the old nomos was broken’ and ‘the “juridically empty” space of the state of exception … has transgressed its boundaries and now, overflowing outside them, is starting to coincide with the normal order’ (ibid.: 38). This new nomos,

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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’, everyone 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 ‘extraordinary 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 biopolitical 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 exception, was rapidly dissolving, rendering the entire globe the site for the potential ‘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

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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 Partisan).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). Several 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 afforded 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 disturbing, 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 calling for a new, multipolar world order based on Schmitt’s concept of

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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 European New Right intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist and Russian ‘neoFascist’ 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 framework 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 genuine political pluralism under the conditions of unipolar US domination (see de Benoist, 2007; Mouffe, 2005a). Likewise the US-led ‘war on terror’ illustrates 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 postwar 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 international political thought, but replicates the methodological and political problems inherent to it. Working from the perspective of ‘international historical sociology’ (see Teschke, 2003) Teschke argues that Schmitt’s methods are ‘selfconsciously anti-sociological’ (ibid.: 215), and result in an account of international 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

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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 positions themselves’ (ibid.: 28). Chandler argued that in their critiques of humanitarian 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 positions 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 ontological and political concerns’ in the field of IR (ibid.: 30–31), he did not provide 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 neoSchmittian 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.

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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 interventions 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 geopolitical 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 discussion. 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

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small number of contributors discuss other post-war writings such as ‘The Großraum Order of International Law’ (Elden, 2011), Land and Sea (Mendieta, 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 political has exerted on both post-war European political thought and on contemporary 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 controversial, 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 critically assessing the recent appropriation of his work in various disciplines, especially since this appropriation often takes place with little critical attention to the long tradition of grand spatial theories (and their critical engagement in the last thirty years of geographic scholarship), a tradition in which

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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 relationship is frequently considered the nadir of the discipline. Indeed, geographers 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 literature.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 investigation, 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 understanding that geography is arguably uniquely well placed to cast a more critical light on the current appropriation of Schmitt’s grand spatial theories, and the entanglement of the spatial and the political with both the geopolitical 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 thousandpage 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 language. 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

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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 Russian 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. 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. Arguably Schmitt was as shadowy presence in Anglophone scholarship before his 1980s ‘arrival’. William Scheuerman has suggested that Schmitt exercised a ‘subterranean 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 University of Chicago in the post-war years, conducted his work in a ‘hidden dialogue’ with Schmitt (Meier, 1995). Meier contends that beyond the points where Schmitt and Strauss openly acknowledged the influence of the other’s work or critique, 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). 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). See for example the heated exchanges between David Chandler and Louiza Odysseos 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. 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. 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). Thinking ‘with and against Schmitt; or pitting ‘Schmitt against Schmitt’ has been a common rhetorical strategy used by liberals and Leftist thinkers working with

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The return of Carl Schmitt Schmitt in order to mark a distance from him even as they draw on his insights (Arditi, 2008). See Mouffe, 1993, 1999. For a much more critical reading see Caldwell, 1997. 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 institutions’ (1991: 1). 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 possibility of another parliamentary takeover by anti-democratic forces (see Kennedy, 2004; Scheuerman, 1999). 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. In Legality and Legitimacy (1999) Dyzenhaus argues that other Weimar jurisprudence 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. 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 historian Ernst Nolte in the 1980s ‘historians’ debate’, it still arguably has some bite with regard to Left Schmittians. 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. 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. 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 attributes to Schmitt’s wide appeal is just as much a feature of the Left as it is of the Right. See Müller, 2003: 249. Unmoored from the strictures of class identification, the political could be conceived 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. 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).

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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 postfoundational 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 Juristic 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 Terrorism’, 14 February 2003: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/relea

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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. 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. 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 academic 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 dissolution of international order that Schmitt critiqued in US foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson. See Mouffe, 2005b. This paper was a response to David Chandler’s polemical attack on the Schmitt ‘revival’ in International Relations. See Chandler, 2008. 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. This vitriolic attack on humanitarian warfare was replicated in a 1930 essay. See Schmitt, 1999a. For more on Foucault and biopolitics see Foucault, 1976, 2007, 2010. 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. 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. For more on the ‘autonomous’ movement see the collection of articles edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi originally published in 1980. See Lotringer and Marazzi, 2007. See again Minca (2012b); and Esposito’s most recently translated work, Living Thought (2012). See Chapter 8 for a detail analysis of this concept in Schmitt. Francois Debrix, unpublished paper quoted in Legg and Vasudevan, 2011: 14. See also Debrix, 2010; Vaughan-Williams, 2010. On the concept of the ban and its spatialities in Agamben see Minca, 2005, 2007. 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 VaughanWilliams, 2012. 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

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Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito, which included perspectives from International Relations; and, more recently, Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011), edited by Stephen Legg, which collected essays largely penned by geographers. 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. 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. The European state system is commonly referred to as ‘Westphalia’ in International Relations after the Treaty of Westphalia signed in 1648, that putatively brought the European wars of religion to a close. This is an argument made most extensively by Chantal Mouffe. See Mouffe, 2005a. For a critique of this multipolar argument that draws on the internal tensions of Schmitt’s thought see Rowan, 2011. For a succinct critical review of his spatial thought see Minca and Rowan, 2015. 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). 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 geographer 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.

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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 theoretical, 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 compromises 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

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Weimar years had not merely been the birth pangs of a new order but symptomatic 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 traditional 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, Political 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 conceptually 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 history 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 philosophical dimensions of his early work in turn. Accordingly, in what follows, we first outline the historical analysis that supports Schmitt’s conceptualizations and, second, closely examine the key philosophical tenets that he established 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.

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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 Catholicism and Political Form (1923). Central to both was the claim that the history of the modern European state’s development and subsequent dissolution in the twentieth century was closely related to the process of secularization, which he understood to have been one of the major factors that defined European modernity. Indeed, Schmitt, in one of his most often quoted statements 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 ‘economic thinking’ that he considered to be dominant across the political spectrum 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

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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 oppositorum’ (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 difference, 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 realization 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 oppositorum 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.

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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 framework 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 European 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 disputed 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 unifying 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

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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 cauldron 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 provided a neutral, secular frame within which to conduct politics as an alternative 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 religion. 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 concept 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.

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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, beautiful and ugly, profitable and non-profitable respectively, so too the political is defined by the distinction between friend and enemy: ‘All action with a specifically political meaning can be traced’ to this distinction (ibid.). Two questions 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 comprehend 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

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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. Nevertheless, 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 possibility (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 peculiar 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.

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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 twentieth 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.

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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 situational relations as opposed to essentialist substances, he nonetheless considered 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 political 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’,

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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 relation 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 enemies 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 foundations? To what category of thought does the political belong? Schmitt does not systematically categorize the foundations of the political but his understanding 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 difference (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 historical conditions. We will thus briefly examine the ontological and anthropological conditions of the political in the next section, before turning to the more complex question of the relationship between the political and the possibilities 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

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definition of the political as friend–enemy relations presupposes the existence of multiple political entities. Difference is thus the most primary and foundational 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 arguments: 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 systems … 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 existence 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 political. 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

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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 political 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 elsewhere, 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 ‘original sin’, his main point of orientation nonetheless remained the real possibility of friend–enemy antagonisms. ‘Because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas’ could not, he argued, ‘very well start with an anthropological 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 presupposes 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 ontological 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 precisely in the claim that the very cleavage of antagonistic difference dividing human society should be the grounds for order. Although order is necessary

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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 foundation. 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 perspective grounding order and ungrounding difference are not opposed concepts for Schmitt, but are rather locked in an embrace within the political. Likewise, and as Finnish political theorist Mikas Ojakangas has pointed out, foundation and rupture are not opposed terms for Schmitt but rather coterminous. 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 element 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 difference – both in the sense that difference is an ontological condition and conflict 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 conditions 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

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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 ontological 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 historically 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 necessarily spatial, it is clear from many passages of his work that Schmitt considered 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 struggle 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

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specific spatial conditions, but also the source of an equally specific production 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 ‘localisation’ rather than ‘orientation’ to underline not only the concrete spatial particularities 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 abstractions 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 relation 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 spatialized, 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

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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 occupies a structural position within his early work as well, even if it remains implicit. 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 universal 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 fundamental 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 spatialization 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 formalized 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

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‘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 colonies.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 suggested 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 international 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 geopolitical 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 precariously 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 conflict. 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

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management of conflict found in his early work emerged not simply as a theoretical abstraction but through his attempt to develop conceptual resources 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 despatialization 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 spatialization 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 suggested 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 individualism; 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 politics, Political Theology emphasizes difference and a thoroughly secular understanding 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 universal concept of politics – indeed quite the opposite – and that the role of Catholicism 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 denominator 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 discuss in the following chapter, and, more importantly, his much later reflections on nomos, where he criticized both Marxism and capitalism for their focus on production – 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.

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6 Schmitt drew this idea from the fifteenth century German philosopher and Cardinal 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, something 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 similarities 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 Thessalonians, 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 published 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

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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. 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. 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). 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.). A type of thinking that denies the possibility of antagonism is not therefore political 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). Hence, for Schmitt, war is an exceptional extreme threat and certainly not a ‘continuation of politics by other means’ as Clausewitz had argued (ibid.: 34). Indeed, Schmitt stands at a considerable distance from his friend and fellow conservative, 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 spiritually 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 technological prowess (See Chapter 5 of Herf, 1986). However, we consider this conflation 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. 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). This draws on the distinction between public and private enemies in Plato’s Republic (ibid.: 28 n9).

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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 international law he identified in later works as the jus publicum Europaeum. In his description of the jus publicum Europaeum Schmitt highlighted the central importance of the mutual respect that warring parties within Europe awarded each other since they were considered as sovereign equals, and thus approached as ‘just enemies’ 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 ‘concrete’ 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).

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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 politics against that between Being and beings (see for example Arditi, 2008; Marchart, 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 presuppose 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 quotation. 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

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political. See Sitze, 2010: xiv and xxvi; also, in Italian, Galli’s 2008 Lo sguardo di Giano. Saggi su Carl Schmitt. Ojakangas argues that each of Schmitt’s key concepts is defined by such a ‘founding rupture’, not only the political but the sovereign exception, the people’s ‘existential total decision’ on the Constitution, the act of land appropriation, nomos, and so on. Rowan (2011) argues that this structural tension is the constitutive backbone running 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 structural ambiguity that makes his concepts strangely resistant to deconstruction and leaves them hard to locate in the field of traditional conservative forms of thought. 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 thinkers and accounts for some of his recent appeal within Continental political thought on the Left (see Chapter 2). Schmitt’s conceptual edifice established a difficult relationship to historical necessity, 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. 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). Hence, Zarmanian stresses the active nature of nomic ordering in Schmitt’s conception 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. 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 powerfully evidenced in the centrality Schmitt allotted to the biblical figure of the Katechon 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. 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 distinction 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 distinctions, 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. 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. 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.

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Spatializing the political To a degree, Schmitt’s depiction of European modernity as fundamentally predicated on colonialism perversely makes his thought something like a postcolonialism 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 postcolonialism such as Frantz Fanon (1963), Edward Said (1978) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999).

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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 decoration, 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 profound 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

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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 contained. 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 twilight 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 complexico, 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 spatialization 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 despatialization of the political. Schmitt located various forces that were undermining 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,

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characterized by the total breakdown of all legal distinctions and all formgiving 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 preceding 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 complexico 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 different 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 borderline between states whereby unity was guaranteed inside the state and difference 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 Medieval 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 outside of the state borders. Second, all the members of a specific political community 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

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theoretical grounding or any universal category, the political idea that provided 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 emergence and consolidation of the United States as an imperial power and the influence 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 conditions 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 understanding 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 historical consciousness and sets the terms of its political possibilities (Schmitt, 2005: 46).

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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 transcendence 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 exceptional 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 bestseller The Decline of the West (1918–1923), this short article traces a genealogy 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 [changed], as did the content of its intellectual interests, the basis of its actions,

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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 corresponded 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 humanisticmoral 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 consequential 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 Depoliticizations’ 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 premises allowing for the possibility of security, clarity, prudence, and peace’ (ibid.). In Schmitt’s narrative, this search for neutrality provided a powerful

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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 historical period became even sharper and more intense with each successive phase of neutralization. This progressive pattern of historical exacerbation culminated 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 neutrality 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 distinction 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 neutrality 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

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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 technological thinking – and hence of depoliticization – in the domain of politics, and was presenting a profound challenge to the Weimar state by systematically 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, community 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 opening 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

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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 political 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 outside, 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 outside 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 spatialization 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, therefore required a solid and consolidated form of sovereign authority in order to ensure that the spatialization of the political be maintained. If the sovereign was indecisive order could not be secured and the political could not be spatialized effectively.

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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 positivism – 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 dominance 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 positivism, its impact on the interpretation of the Weimar Constitution was undeniably powerful, with Hugo Preuss and Max Weber, two towering figures in early twentieth century German liberalism, having helped craft the Constitution 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 sovereign’ (ibid.: 7). Schmitt argued that Kelsen ‘solved the problem of sovereignty by negating it’, quoting as evidence the great positivist’s claim that ‘the concept 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

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personality were aftereffects of absolute monarchy’ (ibid.: 30). But in Schmitt’s view, the depersonalized conception of legal order the legal positivists promoted 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 President 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 maintain order at a time when its integrity was being sorely tested. This was evidence, 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 constitutional 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 debating circle and into the constitutional court and a morally disastrous moment in the political limelight.

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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 limited, 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 produce 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 misplaced 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 understood as a racial category in his early work, but rather as a specifically political 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 definition a racial unity. The essential point for him was that political difference

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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 expression 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 individual imagined by such pluralist theorists lived ‘in a multiplicity of unordered, 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 superand subordination’ (ibid.). Hence, the bonds of association on which the unity of the ‘public’ relied were loosened, citizens becoming little more than ‘customers 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

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moment of equilibrium between the conflicting groups, a kind of clearing office, a peacemaker’ (ibid.). This meant that the decisive friend–enemy relation 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 distinction between state and society. Rather than stand above political differences 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 spatialization 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

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of economics and ethics and the friend–enemy distinction would find expression in these terms, where its persistence could be concealed or denied (ibid.).19 Hence, liberalism in truth did not incorporate the universalist categories 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 seemingly 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 universal 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 difference 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 concept’ like humanity, Schmitt noted, ‘every distinction may be negated and every concrete community ruptured’ (ibid.). The horizon of liberal humanitarian 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

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Schmitt’s work implicitly but necessarily spatialized along an inside–outside dividing line. Global pluralism and universal homogeneity were ‘spaceless’ concepts 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 homogeneity – 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 powerful 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. However, 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 powerful 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 differences between them were crucial. In Schmitt’s rather crude terms, nationalism 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 distinction 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 ‘formgiving’ 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.

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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 reasons. 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 technological 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 determined 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 dragging 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-hundredyear-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

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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 harnessed 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 Hobbesian Leviathan had become a ‘stato agnostico’, unable to produce unity and subject to a divisive plurality of interests (Schmitt, 1999a: 198).24 The twentieth 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 resistancedestroying, 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 possibility, 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

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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 inimical 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 strengthening 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 fundamentally dictates the terms of the state. There was no contradiction, in Schmitt’s mind, between a declaration of the people’s will and its representation 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 authority 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 Mussolini’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

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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 orientated 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 Constitution, 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 financial crisis and hyper inflation the Weimar state was losing its ‘monopoly on

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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 government 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 catapulted 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 Constitutional 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 commissar. 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 Constitution, 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

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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 simultaneous collapse and totalization of the state. As the Weimar Republic stumbled 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 complete: ‘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 Fascist ‘qualitative total state’.30 They were to be sharply distinguished: the liberal ‘quantitative total state’ was identified as the origin of state crisis, the Fascist ‘qualitative total state’ as a potential source of renewal. Put in different terms, the former was dissolving the state’s ability to spatialize the political, while the latter potentially provided the conditions for its respatialization. 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

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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 distinguish ‘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 distinguish 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 ‘quantitative 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 dispersion’ 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 ‘quantitative 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

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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 [qualitative] 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 democratic 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 externally. 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 Mussolini’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

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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 similarities 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 authoritarian 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 represented the best chance for the renewal of the state form and hence the spatialization 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 William 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’

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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 rumination 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. 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 avowedly positioned against any form of historical-materialism it is not clear how Schmitt understood the relationship between these determining philosophical concepts 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 production, warfare or transport and patterns of colonization. Schmitt never explicitly theorized this relationship or built a general picture of the influence social processes 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 European 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. 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. Liberalism, he argued a year later, ‘should be understood as a consistent, comprehensive metaphysical system’ emanating from the ‘rationalist spirit’ (Schmitt, 1988: 35). Importantly, Schmitt did not posit a radical break in the nineteenth century whereby political legitimacy suddenly shifts ground from conceptions of transcendence 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 metaphysical 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). 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. 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

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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). As early as 1922 Schmitt had located a common root for European liberal and Russian 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. 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 technology 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 antediluvian 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). 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). 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. 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

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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. 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 positivism 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. 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 constitutional law, Constitutional Theory, a work that lies at the heart of Schmitt’s reception in Germany, but that has been long overlooked by English language readers, something that has continued even though it appeared in translation in 2008. 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 geopolitical order of an expanding German Reich based upon a ‘law of nations’ (see Schmitt, 2011a: 107). But the pluralist theory of state was not simply an intellectual current propagated in learned writings. Rather, Schmitt noted in 1930, ‘the pluralistic worldview corresponds with the actual empirical situation which one can observe today in most industrial states’ (ibid.: 198). 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). 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. 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 suffered 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

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sense, therefore, Schmitt’s work contains an early critique of capitalism’s globalizing 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, providing, 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 particular Renato Cristi’s Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism: Strong State, Free Economy (1998). Indeed, for Schmitt, liberalism was a world of subterfuge, dissemblance and disguise 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 interventionism, the market’s ‘invisible hand’, but also the Jews who, lacking an ‘authentic’ rootedness to land, were depicted as shape shifters. Indeed, in his reading 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. 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. 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 political 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 international 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 spatial 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. 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 suggested that it was a veiled ‘act of resistance’ against the Nazi state, this should be

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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. 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). 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. This was an argument that built on Schmitt’s work on the legal history of dictatorship 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. 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. 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 passiveaggressive 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). 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). 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. 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 calculation and mathematical measurement that placed such ideas in the realm of technological thinking and the spaceless space of the void (see Schmitt 2011b). We will return to this in Chapter 6. The ‘political monopoly’ of the political parties saw ‘the political will itself … parcelled out among some five party lists’ (Schmitt, 1999b: 25). 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).

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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 decision’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

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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 discourse 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 apparatus 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 accusations 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 opportunism 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 postwar 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 leadership comes wholly from the concrete, substantive thinking of the NationalSocialist 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 associated 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

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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 influence. 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 failures 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 professed 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.

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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 Constitution 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 quasiorganic 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 guaranteeing a homogenous political community were the central challenges of the

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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 relationship 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 immanent 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 precisely 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

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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 challenges 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 revolutionary 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 decisionism, 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 political 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’.

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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 traditions 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 postwar 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 development of his spatial thought in two ways. First, his appeal to an historically and culturally embedded institutional basis for juridical order, beyond a constitutional framework, set Schmitt on the path to locating sources of political legitimacy beyond the state form. In a sense, then, the reference to extraconstitutional 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 understanding 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

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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 Balakrishnan, 2000: 191) In his infamous intervention known as ‘The Führer Protects 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 opponents 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 emerging 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 chapters. 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).

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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 community, 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 question 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 relationship between ‘friend and enemy’ being dependent upon and necessitating unified 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.

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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 ‘movement’, 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 protection of decisions reached in the higher regions of the political order’: ‘the organizational basic lines are set by the State, Movement, People triad, consistently 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 movement 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 ‘independence’ of the judges, as well as the apolitical character of the traditional

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sphere of popular auto-administration are possible, with all the advantages 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 political 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 conceptualization 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 sovereign ‘who decides on the exception’ locating himself at the same time both outside and inside the juridical order. The exception, in fact, not only constantly 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 precisely 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 dispositive ‘through which law relates to life and includes it via its own suspension’ (2004: 52). The structure of the sovereign exception, as formulated by

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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 fundamental 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 catastrophe 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 ‘conflicting 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 understood 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 processes of ‘concrete ordering’ were instead to be understood as political strategies 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 envisaged by Schmitt in State, Movement, People and other writings of this

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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 differently 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 popular 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.

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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 requirement, it also implies an absolute ethnic identity between leader and following. 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 tyrannical 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 Movement, as the political leader of the German people. The local elections of 12 March confirmed once more the same will of the people. The Reichstag 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 juridical 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 subject 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

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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 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, 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 thanapolitical 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 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, 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 substance 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’.

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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, sanctioned 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 ‘normality’ 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 constitutional 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)

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Whilst in his previous writings Schmitt had presented an account of politics defined by the relationship between the state and the people, he now adopted a triadic account where the leadership of the Party and its Führer introduced 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 political body, carrying State and People, have the task to prevent and overcome 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 pillars of his theory of the political during this period. This is a notoriously contentious 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).

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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 motivations 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 species (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 homogeneity’ 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 identification of the people with the leader, because they were of ‘the same substance’. 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)

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According to Schmitt, racial homogeneity ‘made judicial decision determinate’, as both judges and the people were part of an overall ‘concrete order’ preserved by the Führer. This fundamental statement implied a new formulation 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 sovereign 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

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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 tyranny – 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 apolitical 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 particularly 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, nonstructured 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

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(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 atmosphere 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 acclamation: 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’ formulated 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 biopolitical terms, even marked by reference to biologically defined groups. However, 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) distance 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.

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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 attitude towards the Jews and, although less explicitly, with his spatial speculations 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 weakness 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 commentators 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 conceptualization 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 movement, he soon considered it to have decisively killed off his most revered historical 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 emerging. 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

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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 political 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 Notebooks’ 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 condemnation from Swiss exile entitled ‘On the Path to Emigration or the Concentration 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

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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 nationalistic discourses populating the German political scene in the first decades of the twentieth century, and was incorporated by Nazi propaganda and mainstream ideologues.

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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 jurisprudence. 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 reference 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 persecution 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

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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 consolidation 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 Association, 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 antiSemitism 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,

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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 policyambitious 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 international 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.

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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 consequence. These including: the payment of punishing reparations to compensate the war’s victors; military restrictions (which placed limits on key areas such as domestic industrial production, logistics and policing); a loss of territory 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 Rhinelander, 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 limitations 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 interests’ and satisfy the interests of the United States (ibid.).2 German nationalism played an important role in Schmitt’s interwar critiques 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 (founded 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 critique. 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

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United States, despite all protestations to the contrary, emerged as an imperial 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 principally 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 pursuing 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 surprise 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 distribution 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

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therefore … nonpolitical, essentially peaceful means of force. A 1921 League of Nations resolution enumerates as examples: economic sanctions 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 accomplishment 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 worldhistorical 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 intellectual 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

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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 especially 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 universal, 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 particular 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

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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 ‘humanity’ 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, playing 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 designated … 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 intensification 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

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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 concept 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, totalizing 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 concept 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 concept of the enemy’ which ‘in essence rejects the differentiation between combatants 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 development, 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)

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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 treaties, 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

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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 possibility 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 nonneutrality’ (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 convincing 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

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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 conception of just and unjust wars may have fitted with the ‘ecumenical universalism’ (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 despatializing 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 universalizations’ (ibid.: 46) of US foreign policy and the ‘Geneva League’ dissolving 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.

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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 international 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 thinking 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 levelled ‘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 international 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 capable 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

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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 underway, 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 ‘characteristically not in the domain of the state but rather in the domain of technics, 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 infrastructures across Europe had made Großraum a reality in the ‘energy economy’ 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 transformations (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.

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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 falsification’, 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 extraAmerican 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, interference 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 important precedent’ for thinking about continental large spaces in international law (ibid.: 83). However, Schmitt suggested that the doctrine had a remarkable ‘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 diplomacy”’ 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 general, 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 transformed ‘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 interventions’ (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

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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 particular space and a specific political idea. However, Schmitt qualified this further, 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 politically 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 historical situations’ (ibid.: 84; italics added). Indeed, for Schmitt, this core idea, ‘namely the thought of the impermissibility under international law of interventions 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 overcoming 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

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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 intervention of external ‘spatially foreign’ powers and internally divided into different 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 influential 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 overcome, 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 fermenting agent in the dissolution of concrete spatially determined orders’ (ibid.), but their ‘misunderstanding … with respect to everything that concerns 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.

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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 important 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). Accordingly, 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 Foreign 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 establishment, 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

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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 European 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 political scientist Andrew Gyorgy claimed, this ‘surprising product of the artificial crossbreeding between geopolitics and other sciences’ bore witness to the ‘allpervasive 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 ‘foremost exponent’ (ibid.: 266). However, in a polemical rush to condemn Geojurisprudence 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

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and Manfred Langhans-Ratzeburg’ (Murphy, 1998: 29). Hence, if on the one hand Schmitt employed insights from key thinkers of the German geopolitical 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 reconciliation 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 geography 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 ‘impossible 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 significant, relationship to the biopolitical element found in these ideas of ‘vital space’. The notion of Lebensraum, initially born out of the Ratzel’s conceptualization 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 conventionally been rendered in English either as ‘living space’ or as ‘vital space’, although much recent work has shown that this distinction may be

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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 biological and racial categories normally involved in the propagandistic use of a pseudo-scientific reading of Lebensraum, formulated by writers like Haushofer 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 homogeneity, 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 problem’ 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 disentangle. Schmitt developed his ideas in support of the Nazis’ genocidal imperial expansion and, even if he did not adopt the crude biological reductionism 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 resettlement 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 Lebensrecht [‘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 antiSemitism 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

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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

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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 Japanese. 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] “demographic” 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 limitations 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 concrete 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 conceptualizations of space and the political idea were considered as separate from the concrete existence of the Volk:

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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 concept 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 escalation’ 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 foundation 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 conceptual 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

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friend and enemy, in this perspective, may arguably be understood as a spatioontological 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 dismissal 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 relationship 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 politicization 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 question’. 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)

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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 population. The production of population – to echo Cavalletti – was therefore based on an endless series of caesurae in the body politic by identifying its

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‘right’, ‘just’ and necessary shape, dimension and substance. This was precisely 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 fracture (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 mythologeme 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 foundation 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 universalism 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

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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 concrete 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 neutralization ‘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, characterized by unmanageable differences. The process of ‘concrete ordering’ entailed the elimination from the body politic of all those who do not belong to the

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people as interpreted by the movement and its leader. Rethinking the friend/enemy relationship as a form of primary spatialization, Cavalletti suggests (2005: 213), de facto meant translating the reference to a generic ‘demographic 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 formulations, 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 conceived as a new spatial organism, with a specific ‘demographic intensity’: within its mobile borders, a fully realized Großraum should prevent ontological 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

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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 realization 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 respatialization of world order, Schmitt’s vision of a Großraum failed both conceptually 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 political entities and, at the same time, limit warfare. Indeed, Gyorgy also noted that Schmitt’s work did ‘not offer any guidance to the legal relationships of individual greater areas, or Großräume’ (1944: 266). Großraum was a ‘failure from the very outset’ because it failed to ‘set up legal norms governing 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.

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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 framework 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 provided 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 theorized 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 interwar 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

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fantasy of a reactionary Don Quixote rather than the vision of the realist sage Schmitt fashioned himself as in the wake of German defeat.

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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 biopolitical 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 hegemony 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 military 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 Prussians, 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 genealogy 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

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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). 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). Matthew Hannah, who recently translated two of Schmitt’s 1930s texts on geopolitics 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 exceeding 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 translations’ (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’. Schmitt’s comments here on the key role of industrialization, infrastructure, planning and organization of energy production and distribution in the development of Großraum powers echo comments he made in his work elsewhere about the ‘electrification’ 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. 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. 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.). 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 citizenship’ (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). 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. The sequence of dates proves little either way about the chain of influence. Ribbentrop 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. 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). For more on Geojurisprudence and Haushofer see Murphy, 1998.

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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.

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Man [sic] is not a creature wholly conditioned by his medium. Through history, 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 secondary 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 chapters, 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,

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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 largely 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 marginal notes or literary flourishes. Hence, before going on to examine the central 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 ambitious 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 emergence and development of global space, and the bearing this ‘globalization’ has on the nature of political order. We then examine two inter-related conceptual registers showing how each shaped his account of this spatial history: first, a mythical account of the relationship between geo-elemental geographies and social formations, and second, an eschatological Christian conception 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

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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.

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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 spatial 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 subsequent 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 communication, do not alone amount to a spatial revolution. A true spatial revolution 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 transformation 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 possibilities 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

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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 environmental 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 Further, 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 environments, 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 corresponds an equal plurality of spaces. … The plurality of skills or professions 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 constitutive, 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 revolutions were a phenomenon specific to modernity. In Schmitt’s account all premodern spatial revolutions had been ‘local’ rather than global, and had been bound to specific regional or cultural spheres and civilizations that identified

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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 worldhistorical 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 fifteenth 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 geographic 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 consciousness 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 Europaeum (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 fundamentally 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 maritime 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 century, with the emergence of radical new dimensions of human experience and vectors of power opened by the development of new technologies of transport, 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 further, 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 implications 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

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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 conceptions 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 historical 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 twentieth 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 technological thinking. In ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticization’ (1929) Schmitt had identified ‘technological thinking’ as the ‘central intellectual 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 thinking’ 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’,

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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 politics, 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

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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 spatialize the political and therefore no way to ground order so as to limit conflict. 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 limited 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 discovery’, 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 pushing 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 modernity, and that provided the subterranean Arcanum of his late spatial

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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 historical domains. Indeed, Land and Sea opens with a reflection on the representation 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 scientific 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 grandeur, 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

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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.

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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 history 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 Cabbalist version of the battle between Behemoth and Leviathan as an allegory both of the battle between land and sea powers and implicitly of the corrupting 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

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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 antiSemitic 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 geopolitical and mythological registers simultaneously. Yet, in order to understand 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 … Earthborn, 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 primordial source of all life. In their legends and in their myths, most peoples 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.

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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 determined by his environment, he would accordingly be a ground animal, a fish, a bird, or still, a fantastical combination of these elemental determinants. … 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

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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 determinism, 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 universal, global order based on free trade and movement.18 Hence, the trajectory 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 geopolitics 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)

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Indeed, for Schmitt, even those European powers with naval and colonial histories – Portugal, Spain and France – had not truly departed from the geoelemental orbit of the land and had remained tethered to a spatial consciousness based upon ‘continentalization and territorialization’ (ibid.: 45). In contrast, Schmitt emphasized the dynamism of the English who dominated 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 metamorphosis’, 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 maritime 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 twentieth century emerged, within the development of England’s maritime existence. 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).

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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, suffered 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 maritime 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 universalist ideas to legitimate a global exceptionalism. If England’s spatial consciousness 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 universalizing 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 possibilities 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 emergence 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.

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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 destruction 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 technological 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 contingency 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 determinism, 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 insufficient with regard to not only the historical specificity of the political formations 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 existence. 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.

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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 structures 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 arguably 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 determined 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

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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 Messiah, did not conceive of earthly history as an interregnum before Judgement. For Schmitt the fact that Jews did not conceive of their existence as determined 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 kingdoms 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 distinction (Schmitt, 2008b: 8). Indeed, Schmitt’s eschatological Christian concept 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 Katechon 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:

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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 Katechon 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 acceleration, could be identified with those forces of technology, modernization, universalization and neutralization that he considered to be undermining political order and spreading chaos across the earth. Viewed from the perspective 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

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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 universalism. 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 representatives 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 restrainer: 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

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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 autochthonous 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 possibility 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 beginning 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 revolution, 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 language 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 Jurisprudence’, added in 1941, that Schmitt first aired these speculations (see Schmitt, 2011b).

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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 established 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-determination, 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 capitalist markets is only one element of a wider tendency towards the practical unification of planetary space through technology and the ideological predominance of universalism, something he understood to be dominant in both liberal capitalist 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 undeveloped might usefully be read in light of the work on Peter Sloterdijk’s contemporary 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 metaphysics 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 convincingly 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 presented 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

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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. 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 ‘spaceless’ 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). 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). 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 critique 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 Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 1982), which seems particularly strongly evoked in Nomos–Nahme–Name (Schmitt, 2003c), one of corollaries to The Nomos published 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). 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). 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. 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. 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

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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 witnessed 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 sentence 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. This echoes Schmitt’s claim that the institution of nomos was defined by the threefold relationship between appropriation, distribution and production, which we will discuss in the following chapter. 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 stabilizing 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 representation 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. 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 CounterReformation, 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. See ‘The Principle of the Security of Traffic Routes of the British World Empire’ in ‘The Großraum Order’ (Schmitt, 2011b: 90–95). Although his work on the Großraum came after The Leviathan it is an exception as it is largely lacking in theological discourse. This shift is clearly evident in a comparison of Political Theology, published in 1922, and Political Theology II, published in 1970. Indeed, he made the imperial nature of the Katechon even more explicit in claiming 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).

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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 prizewinners 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’ (Balakrishnan, 2011: 67; Odysseos and Petito, 2007: 2; see also Legg and Vasudevan, 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.

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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 difficulties 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 accusation. Indeed, he warned in the Foreword that he will ‘avoid mention of contemporary 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 culmination 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

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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 Eurocentric 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 necessarily ‘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, ‘understood 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 convergence of order and orientation’ (ibid.). Nomos, for Schmitt, therefore concerned 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

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Ancient Greek word for ‘the first of all subsequent measures, for … the first partition and classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution’ (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.)

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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 antiquity 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. Understood 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 orientation, 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

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‘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 distribution 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 fundamental process in establishing law, the ‘primeval act in founding law’ (ibid.: 45), the ‘archetype of a constitutive legal process’ (ibid.: 47). As the fundamental 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 orientation’ (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

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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 landappropriation; … 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 precisely 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 orientation of power takes effect; the tendency to visibility, publicity, and ceremony’ (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

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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 grounded, 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 production (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 ‘fundamental process of division and distribution, of divisio primaeva’ (ibid.). Finally, Schmitt explained that the ‘third meaning of nemein is weiden [literally, pasturage] … the productive work that normally occurs with ownership’ (ibid.: 327). Hence, a nomic order is constituted through a sequence of

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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 considered 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 appropriation, 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 production 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

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peculiar type of noun, ‘a nomen actionis, i.e., it indicates an action as a process 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 indeterminacy 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, landappropriation literally grounds order in the earth. On the other hand, however, 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 landappropriation 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 antiquarian 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 revolution’ (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.

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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 understanding 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 opening 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 European 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

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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.

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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 periodization of the jus publicum Europaeum was rather slippery, in part perhaps because he attempted to describe gradual processes of emergence and dissolution, 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 rationalization 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 geographical”’ (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

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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 Europaeum 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, governed by different legal statuses and different rules of war. There were nonetheless 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 fundamental 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

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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 depoliticization, 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’. However, 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 Eurocentric world order that arose in the sixteenth century … From the perspective 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

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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 representative 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 European 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 specifically 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 Europaeum had been to create the conditions for ‘the rationalization and humanization of war, i.e., the possibility of bracketing war in international law’ (ibid.: 141). Schmitt regarded it to be an ‘astounding fact’ that European international 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 fundamentally 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

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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 sovereigns made them equally legal partners in war’ and thus they became collectively 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 rationalization 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 recognize each other as justi hostes and not as criminals who needed to be punished. 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 vanquished 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 populations, so combatants and civilians could be differentiated. On the other, it ‘created the possibility of neutrality’, as states involved in the conflict, and

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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 distinctions 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 developments 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 highlights 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 development 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

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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 nonEuropean space on which global spatial order rested (ibid.: 217). Although this process was gradual, and came about through a complex matrix of factors, Schmitt identified two principle causes: the failure of European jurisprudence 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 international 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 conception of Europe as a space defined by a distinct legal system. The European juridical framework at the beginning of the twentieth century was characterized 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 contradiction with its own foundations, but was systematically excluding all foundational 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 considered 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

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signalled a failure to understand the ‘different soils’ statuses’ that underpinned the fundamental spatial ordering of the earth (ibid.: 221). European international law was in fact dissolving its own foundations by appealing to universal and abstract norms that made no reference to their spatially concrete situatedness. 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 distinction 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 eminence. 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 international 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 steadily 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

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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 postwar 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 spatial order. However, as the means by which the ‘pan-interventionist’ expansion 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 Europaeum, 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

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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 considered 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 critique 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 intensified 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 increasingly redundant, and the growing destructive capacity of these same technologies 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

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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 dissolution of land and sea as distinct theatres of war and a collapse of the categories 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 intensification 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.). Technologies 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

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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 indication 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 bipolarity 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 constitute a balance … and precipitate a new order of the earth’ (ibid.). This was,

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in his view, the most ‘rational’ option (ibid.). It would only work, however, if the Großräume were ‘differentiated meaningfully and … homogenous internally’ – 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 territorial 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 determinations 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 spatializations 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 distinctions. 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 respatialize the political after the eclipse of the European state system. Schmitt

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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 alternative 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 conceptions 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 without political form there could be no subject capable of spatializing the political 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 respatializing 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 ‘technicalindustrial’ 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 political, 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’

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(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, increasingly 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 several ways, noting that they were defined by irregularity, mobility and intense political commitment (ibid.: 14–20). The irregular and mobile nature of partisans 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 spatially 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 motorized partisan developed an ‘absolute’ enmity unbounded from spatial limits

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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 spatial 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 significant 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 relation’ (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 particularity 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 motorized partisan (ibid.). Schmitt claimed that this was precisely the danger during

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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 smoothrunning 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 earlier 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 overwhelming’ (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

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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 corollaries, ‘The New Nomos of the Earth’ (1953) no mention is made of its original inception in the context of Nazi expansion in Europe. 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 Zarmanian translates Ordnung und Ortung as ‘order and localisation’ (2011: 291). Zarmanian 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 incorporates that interpretation (see Galli 2010a; Minca 2011a). Hence, any crudely geographically determinist reading of the relationship between order and orientation is avoided as the active nature of nomic ordering is emphasized. Schmitt enigmatically noted in the 1950 Foreword to The Nomos that the ‘existential question of jurisprudence’ was at that time ‘sundered between theology and technology’ (ibid.: 38). This comment can be understood in relation to the fundamental 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. 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. 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. Schmitt suggested that, ‘the consequences of this fusion with a Roman legal concept 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 development 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. 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. 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 processes 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,

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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.). 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. 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 Christian grace – the (Jewish) law and the (Christian) gospel … [and] expresses only the positivistic artifice of what is enacted or obliged – the mere will to compliance’ (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.). 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. 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). 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. ‘At this origin of land-appropriation, law and order are one: where order and orientation coincide, they cannot be separated’ (ibid.: 81). 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 landappropriation 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.). Schmitt did, however, immediately qualify this by introducing a further distinction between forms of land-appropriation: ‘There are two different types of landappropriations: 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

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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. 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 landappropriation, precisely on the basis of the relationship between Nahme and naming. 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. 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). 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 peacemakers will inherit the earth’ (ibid.: 49). 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). ‘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. 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). 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). 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. The metaphors of grounds and groundlessness lie at the core of philosopher Michael Marder’s recent book Groundless Existence (2010). This text offers perhaps 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. 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. 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 division of the globe (ibid.: 88). This is one of only two mentions Ratzel received in

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The Nomos, the other concerning the development of the seas as a human ‘space’ (ibid.: 283). 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. ‘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). Interestingly, Schmitt noted that the state of exception in English law ‘was analogous 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). 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). 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. 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 Christian 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 framework 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 recognition. The appropriation of the New World thus produced something like a colonial 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. 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. 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’. 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. 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

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understand this periodization as marking the beginning of the state’s decline as the ordering institution of the global spatial order. 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). 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. 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 International Law and National Totality’ from the following year (1999c). This is the last of the three ‘Concluding Corollaries’ included with the English translation out of historical sequence. Schmitt’s comments on the Cold War here are confused and riddled with contradiction, 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 impossible 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 dominated 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. 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). He noted that, ‘most of those considering this frightful problem rush blindly toward a single sovereign of the world’ (ibid.: 355). 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 without simultaneously destroying themselves’ (ibid.: 355). 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 Kingdom into a ‘greater island’, in order to achieve dominance of the world’s sea, and hence the world. 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. The book’s translator, Gary Ulmen, notes that Schmitt introduced the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘absolute’ enemies as ‘the German language makes no distinction 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

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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 promoting a politics grounded in specific places: a chthonic communism evidently being more acceptable than a deterritorialized and deterritorializing global liberalism.

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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 central structural role in Carl Schmitt’s work. We have thus tried to demonstrate 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 relations, 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 fundamental 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

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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 spatialization 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 International 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 thinker, 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

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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 antiSemitism 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 overdetermine 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 concern, 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 conceptual 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 antiSemitism 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).

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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 something 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 undifferentiated 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 significant 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

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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 cooperation 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 disorder, 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 visible. 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 representational 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 imaginary 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 political economy. Although his work on the Monroe Doctrine and the development of US interventionism includes perceptive remarks on the relationship

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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 slavery 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 relative 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 conspicuous 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 socioeconomic 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 transformations 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 questionable historically and geographically, never mind politically reactionary. Whilst Renata Cristi (1998) claims that Schmitt was essentially an authoritarian liberal driven by the desire to protect the capitalist economy with a

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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 shortcomings, 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 ‘supplement’ 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, especially 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 twentieth 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 disciplines 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

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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 relationship 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 spatial 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 Morgenthau’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 intellectual 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 ‘legitimacy 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 resurgence 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 exchanges 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 transformed might offer further suggestive insights into the nature of modern European and world politics. The question of the nomos of the earth provides,

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for instance, a framework for thinking about the spatial foundations of political order that moves beyond the limited state-based understandings typical of much International Relations scholarship, whilst avoiding the environmental determinism of the German geopolitical tradition, and its contemporary 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 historical 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 contemporary 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 Delaney’s The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making: Nomospheric 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 necessary 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, Political 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

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around ‘globalization’ have begun to peter out even as the processes they described have continued to intensify, and anthropogenic planetary environmental 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 geopolitical 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 University 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 Climate 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

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contestation). As discussed earlier in this book, Schmitt highlighted the central 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. Furthermore, 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 discussions. 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 spatiopolitical 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 universalism in international law may appear to be routes of scholarly critique well worn during the last decade, but in our view they remain bracingly relevant 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 considered 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

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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 previously noted, we agree with this argument to some extent. It is clear, for instance, that the solutions Schmitt proposed for the crisis of twentieth century spatial order provide little positive orientation for a progressive engagement 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 contemporary 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

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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. Nonetheless, any engagement must approach his work with a critical awareness of its conceptual limitations and a historical and political sensitivity to the profoundly compromised context of its emergence, including aspects of political and professional opportunism. We hope that this book has made a contribution 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 contextual 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 Interventionism, 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 Depoliticizations, 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 Colonialism 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

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Index

‘Beyond the Line’ 222–227, 242n35 Bible (see also Christianity and Eschatology) 196–197, 97n41, 204–207 Biology (see also Anti-Semitism, Biopolitics, 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 Kulturkampf) 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 Oppositorum, Eschatology, Political theology 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, discovery 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 Medieval 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,

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Index 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 thinking, 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 Concrete, 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-revolution, 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 Combatants, and non combatants, Discriminatory 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

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 Decision) 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 Despatialization 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 Spaceless war) 91, 99–102, 123, 194, 237 Derrida, Jacques 3, 51–52, 71n26, 121n10 Deterritorialization (see also Despatialization 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 Combatants, and non combatants, Criminalization 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

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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, Geoelements, 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 distinction 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 political 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 Europaeum 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, Conservative 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 International 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, Economics 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 Criminalization 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

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Index Geopolitik (German Geopolitics, see also Geojurisprudence, Großraum, Haushofer, Karl, Lebensraum and Ratzel, Friedrich 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, Globalization and Planetary thought) 57, 62, 153, 183, 191, 192, 193, 200, 221, 230 Glossarium 29, 33 Great Britain (England, see also Capitalism, 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 Foreign 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 Foreign Powers: A Contribution to the Concept of Reich in International Law, The (see also Großraum and Lebensraum, 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

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 modernism) 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 Criminalization 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, Complexio Oppositorum, Katechon, Medieval 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

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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 AntiSemitism, ‘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 Criminalization of war, Discriminatory war, Humanitarian warfare, Just war and Justus hostis) 226, 232 Justus hostis (Just enemy, see also Criminalization 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, Rootlessness 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 Europaeum, Nomos) 97n35, 97n36, 215–218, 240n16

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Index 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 Depolitization, Despatialization of the political 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

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

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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 Geojurisprudence, 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 Neutrality 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 Publicum Europaeum and Nomos as concept) 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 Interventionism, 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

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Index Particularism (see individualism and Pluralism) 34, 35, 37, 237 Partisan (Motorized and Telluric Partisans, 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 International relations, as discipline) 63, 73n51, 243n44 People, the (see also Biopolitics, Constituent power, Democracy, Homogeneity, 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 Colonialism, Secularization and Spatial history) 8, 103, 124n6, 140, 188, 204 Planetary industrial appropriation (Weltraumnahme) 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, Spatialization 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

283

Political anthropology (see also Anthropology, 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-Semitism, Catholicism, Christianity, Katechon, 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

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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 thinking) 222, 223, 229 Rawls, John 40, 70n12 Reactionary modernism (see also Conservative 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 Secularization) 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 Romanticism) 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 appropriation) 221 Sea power (see also Land and sea, distinction, 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 secularization) 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 Cosmopolitanism, 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 Despatialization 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

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Index Spinoza, Baruch de 104, 184n1 S.S. (see also National Socialism) 19, 29, 40n17, 127n23, 143, 151n3, 154 State, crisis of (see also Liberalism, critique 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 Technological 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 Partisan and War on terror) 55, 63 Teschke, Benno 64–65, 72n35, 123n1, 250–251 Theology (see also Anti-Semitism, Catholicism, 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

285

Theory of the Partisan 54, 63, 67, 73n49, 187, 188, 203, 207, 213, 235–238, 244n54 Three Possibilities for a Christian Concept 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 Criminalization 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

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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