Empire and the Social Sciences by Jeremy Adelman;

Author:Jeremy Adelman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350102538
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Chapter 8

Modern imperialism and international law: Carl Schmitt and Ernst Rudolf Huber on the ‘international legal order of great spaces’

Joshua Derman*

Theorizing imperialism in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Over the past decade, the German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) has received a renewed wave of attention for his writings on imperialism and American foreign policy.1 This phenomenon owes much to the rediscovery of his Weimar-era articles on international law, such as ‘The Rhineland as an Object of International Politics’ (1925) and ‘The USA and the International Legal Forms of Modern Imperialism’ (1933), as well as to the recent English translation of his last major work, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950).2 In these texts Schmitt presented a trenchant critique of ‘modern imperialism’, by which he meant the efforts of Western powers to extend their power at a time when prior strategies of conquest no longer seemed practical or politically acceptable. It was characteristic of modern imperialism, he argued, that the institutions and verbiage of international law had replaced territorial aggrandizement as the decisive means of projecting political influence. Legal machinations not only helped obscure power interests but also served to ‘morally paralyse’ the victims of imperialism by inducing them to accept the justifications under which they were dominated as legitimate.3

The historical conjuncture of the early twenty-first century has proven to be especially propitious for the revival of Schmitt’s themes. In the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the George W. Bush administration’s ‘global war on terror’, debates about ‘liberal empire’, humanitarian intervention and globalization have provided a context in which Schmitt’s work has found new readers.4 What has been largely absent from these discussions and appropriations, however, is an effort to situate his critique of imperialism within the context of his support for National Socialism.5 For Schmitt was not merely a noted diagnostician of hegemonic power relations; he was also the most prominent theorist and intellectual propagandist of the Nazi New Order among his contemporaries. On 1 April 1939, only a few weeks after the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Schmitt delivered a public lecture in which he called for legally partitioning the world into multiple continental Großräume or ‘great spaces’. The prototype for this kind of international legal order, he argued, was the ‘original’ Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which demanded recognition for a continental space (the Western hemisphere), imbued by a politically awakened people (the United States) with a specific political idea (republicanism), that excluded interventions by extrahemispheric powers (Russia and the Holy Alliance). Germany, or any other Reich with its own distinctive political ideology, he counselled in the published version of his lecture, The International Legal Order of Great Spaces, would do well to claim its own continental zone and exclude outside interventions.6

Though it is unlikely that Schmitt’s writings made a causal impact on the course of Nazi foreign policy, they did succeed in staking out – or at the very least anticipating – two key concepts in the regime’s propaganda.

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