On Schmitt and Space

Claudio Minca, Rory Rowan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134448166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book represents the first comprehensive study of the influential German legal and political thinker Carl Schmitt's spatial thought, 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, controversial involvement in Weimar politics and 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 states of exception to his often overlooked spatial history of modernity. Locating a fundamental relationship between space and 'the political' lies at the core of his thought.

The book explores the critical insight that Schmitt's spatial thought bears 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 century.

1 Writing Carl Schmitt

DOI: 10.4324/9780203796207-2

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 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 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 conflict-ridden civil society and risk dragging state institutions into a partisan fray, as had been the case in the Kulturkampf.⁴

Schmitt was not especially concerned with political affairs during the swansong of the Empire, and even the First World War did not seem to 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 semi-bohemian romantic adventurer in the city's coffee houses, moving amongst the intellectual literati, penning Dadaist musings under a pseudonym and writing appraisals of the minor expressionist poet Theodor Däubler, whilst serving in the Bavarian Ministry of War as a propaganda censor. During this 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 ultra-patriotism sweeping the country. As Balakrishnan has argued in his excellent reconstruction of Schmitt's early life and work, he remained curiously aloof from any strong sense of German nationalism during the war, and initially unmoved by the collapse of the German Empire into a state of civil war in the wake of the country's defeat.

But if his politicization came late, it was all the more sharp in its 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 semi-bohemian existence, but also a polemical rejection of much of what typified German, and especially Catholic, conservatism in the early years of the twentieth century: a romantic sense of German nationalism often emphasized through the idea of a high German Kultur standing above and apart from Europe, and the celebration of the restless, impressionable and often irrational will of the individual; all of which Schmitt took as an excuse for deferral of decisive action in an ‘endless conversation’ (Balakrishnan, 2000: 22).

This abrupt political awakening emerged from his shock at the civil war that had broken out in Munich the same year. Anarchists had declared a Council Republic in April 1919 and communist revolutionaries had broken into Schmitt's office at the Bavarian Ministry of War, shooting a fellow officer. This sudden immersion in the disintegration of the old order brought home to Schmitt not only how radically destabilized the political grounds had become, but how unfit the conceptual framework of romantic nationalism was to deal with the advent of mass politics, something which he later argued had 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 quasi-bohemian youth and reckon with the challenges that the changed realities of the post-war world posed to political thought, he tacked towards the state, against the revolutionary masses and lurched to the Right.

In the early years of the Weimar Republic, Schmitt seemed to opt for a path of caution that at once accepted the revolutionary upheaval through 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,⁶The 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 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 s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Writing Carl Schmitt
• 2 The return of Carl Schmitt
• 3 Spatializing the political
• 4 Liberal Leviathan
• 5 Nazi Behemoth
• 6 Großraum
• 7 Spatial histories
• 8 A new Nomos of the Earth?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index