On the relevance of Carl Schmitt’s concept of Großraum in contemporary international politics

Introduction

International political theory scholars have systematically explored Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre, often seeking useful theoretical ideas to be employed in their own work. Schmitt’s friend and enemy dialectic, political theology, the katechon, the nomos of the Earth and his political-spacial concepts have all found their way in international political discussions with a varying degree of success. Among those concepts is the idea of Großraum. ¹ In assessing the use of Großraum within international political theory, this article, on one hand, offers an analysis of Großraum’s structural components and of the context in which it was envisaged, while, on the other hand, evaluating the chances of its iterability in the largely different circumstances of the present time, by employing the theory of asymmetrical counterconcepts developed by Reinhart Koselleck (1989: 211–259). In contrast to those authors who claim that Großraum can enhance our understanding of contemporary international politics and geopolitics, this article argues that this is not the case.

Carl Schmitt famously argued in his Der Begriff des Politischen that all political concepts have a polemical sense (Schmitt, 2009 [1932]: 29). As the political is structured around the friend-enemy dialectic, political concepts both enhance, and are shaped by, relations of enmity. While the friend-enemy dialectic in the definition of the political presents a symmetric structure, and the political is not per se polemical, the historical operationalisation of enmity invariably requires the creation of political concepts, which Schmitt defined as inherently polemical, being introduced as bearers of particular interests by specific actors, explicitly or implicitly in opposition to the interests of other actors.

Reinhart Koselleck, whose work on the history of political concepts is openly acknowledging Schmitt’s influence, offered in his Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Futures Past: On the Semantic of Historical Time) a theoretical framework for the exploration of how asymmetric concepts shape the self-other dialectic, which is the engine of identity production. He particularly addressed concepts which he indicated as ‘asymmetric counterconcepts’ (asymmetrische Gegenbegriffe): conceptual pairs where one term of the relation is engaged (angesprochen) but not fully recognised (anerkannt) as equal (Koselleck, 1989: 211). The relation between concept and counterconcept is constantly changing, and so the ethical value attached to its terms. For instance, in the Greek/barbarian dichotomy, initially to be understood from the perspective of the Greeks who envisaged it, a negative connotation was attached to the barbarian. However, this was later overhauled in a number of ways. Stoic philosophers, partially anticipating the Pauline unity of mankind in Christ, already saw the non-Greek primarily as a fellow cosmopolitan citizen of the oikoumene. For others, for instance Tacitus, the barbarians of the North possessed superior moral qualities unfortunately lost by his fellow Romans as a consequence of corruption (anticipating the myth of the bon sauvage). The ethical value attached to the terms of an asymmetric conceptual pair can shift to the point of being reversed, and asymmetric counterconcepts may be iterated with modifications, sometimes substantial, throughout the history of (political) ideas. Yet, the conditions of their successful iterability are not always available.

In the case of Großraum, this article argues that, as a polemical concept, Großraum should be situated within the horizon of the asymmetric conceptual pair of human/non-human. The reproduction of this human/non-human dialectic is the key to the problem of Großraum’s structural iterability, as already alluded to by Martti Koskenniemi (2002: 434–435). In other words, as it will be explained below, Großraum assumes meaningfulness as the territorial-spacial articulation of a response to the problem of ‘humanity’ in a transient phase of Schmitt’s work.

Schmitt initially approached the problem of humanity from the perspective of international law in his effort to attack the Treaty of Versailles, and the political-ideological (Wilsonian) structure underneath, which constituted the object of his polemical engagement. In his Die Wendung zum diskiminierenden Kriegsbegriff (Schmitt, 2005 [1937]: 518–566), he described President Wilson’s declaration of war on Germany, pronounced on 2 April 1917, as the beginning of an effort to dehumanise the enemy in the name of humanity, as the US President declared that ‘[t]he present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind’ (quoted by Sondhaus, 2017: 115). Also the final declaration at the Nyon Conference in 1937, under the initiative of Britain and France, argued that the attacks conducted by German submarines in the Mediterranean within the context of the Spanish Civil War amounted to ‘acts contrary to the most elementary dictates of humanity, which should be justly treated as piracy’ (quoted by Finch, 1937: 662). According to Schmitt, such declarations intended to delegitimise the enemy by downgrading him to the historically established legal category of the pirate, in turn an expression of the more general category of ‘the enemy of mankind’, hostis generis humani. Daniel Heller-Roazen has dedicated an extensive study of this subject arguing that even ‘[. . .] today, long after the obsolescence of legal debates on submarines, the specter of universal enemies remains. There will be talk of pirates as long as something called humanity goes to war’ (Heller- Roazen, 2011: 24). Roberto Vilchez Yamato has expanded on this formulation, by introducing Koselleck’s asymmetric counterconceptual structuring of political ideas, leading to a ‘better understanding of the negative asymmetric counterconceptual position of the pirate [. . .]’ (Vilchez Yamato, 2019: 220–221), whereby the pirate is not simply what appears in his legal definition, but ‘it speaks of a structure that survives the historical singularity of his name’ (Vilchez Yamato, 2019: 228).

This article argues along similar theoretical lines that the concept of Großraum is the territorial articulation of an upside-down human/non-human dialectic. While Schmitt’s preoccupation with the turn towards a discriminatory, dehumanising concept of unrestricted enmity was central in the interwar period, with the collapse of the Versailles system as a consequence of Germany’s triumphs in 1938–1941, this position changed. The seemingly unstoppable success of the non-human over the human appeared to be making President Wilson’s position untenable. Symmetrically, if a particular conception of spacial ordering in international law was prevalent because of Anglo-American hegemony, the forcible expunction of ‘humanity’ brought about by the German victories would yield a different concept of space in international law. This new concept of space is the Großraum. Großraum wishes to displace the Anglo-American spacial conception of a world of formally equal states and equally accessible state territories, which in turn displaced the spacial conception of Ius Publicum Europaeum, where European soil was privileged, and different rules of international political conduct, and especially of war, applied.

A plausible iterability of Großraum should start from considering the human/non-human dialectic, and from identifying the corresponding asymmetric poles in the current political landscape. The iterability of Großraum is premised on the overhaul of that spacial conception in international law, the one attacked by Schmitt, which is functional to the deployment of the human/non-human asymmetric conceptual pair. Such overhaul comes as a consequence of the more general superseding of the concept of humanity as a reference for the construction of international political and legal orders. Großraum is eventually an attempt to establish a nomos of the Earth which fully embraces a central idea in Schmitt, namely that politics arises out of humanity’s divisions (the political world is always a pluriverse, Schmitt, 2009 [1932]: 50), and that the common humanity of all is the starting problem of politics, not its solution. As it will be illustrated below, those who wish to recover the concept of Großraum for its employment in current international political debates do not address this fundamentally important aspect of Großraum, alongside a number of substantial features which made Großraum worth envisaging: first, its primary nature as legal concept, mainly (albeit not exclusively) destined to an audience of jurists, and second, its relation to Schmitt’s carefully crafted theory of the Reich.

In the next sessions, this article will provide an overview of the ways in which Großraum has entered contemporary international political debates, followed by a discussion of Schmitt’s main text on the topic, and finally offering an evaluation of the claim that Großraum is a useful theoretical concept for the present, concluding that the conditions for this concept’s structural iterability in the current international political context are not available.

(International) political theory and Großraum

Interest for Schmitt’s Großraum re-surfaces after the end of the Cold War, and becomes the subject of open discussion and appreciation in the 2000s. This has happened following two main threads: first, the general effort at recovering Schmitt’s thought within IR theory and the attempt to link it to the broader theoretical discussions in the discipline, including those concerning political geography; second, the use of Großraum as a genealogically relevant concept for the formulation of theories describing and explaining a globally interconnected but still divided world, possibly moving towards a multipolar order (Voigt, 2008; Zolo, 2007).

Gary Ulmen, one of Schmitt’s more prolific commentators, published in the mid-1990s a long article (Ulmen, 1996) in which he analysed the notion of a post-Cold War ‘new world order’ from a Schmittian perspective, debating those which represented at that time, and perhaps still represent today, the two fundamental visions of twenty-first century world politics: Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ argument and Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. Ulmen appears very critical of the Spenglerian spirit of Huntington’s position, but also of Fukuyama’s analysis. Both ‘remain trapped in an updated version of Wilsonianism assuming liberal democracy to be highest achievement of Western culture’ (Ulmen, 1996: 5). As he concentrates on Huntington, Ulmen criticises his understanding of civilisational differences, but eventually identifies some kind of affinity between the idea of a world divided up in different civilisations as political containers of states, and Schmitt’s Großräume. Huntington ‘seems to have in mind something akin to the concept of Großraum’, although he is also unable to articulate a discourse going beyond the nation state and particularly beyond the contingency of the American state with its liberal ideological structure, offering ‘no concept of international law or of world order’ (Ulmen, 1996: 14). Through a detailed discussion of the idea of European culture, international law and the spacial concepts underpinning it in the era of the jus publicum Europaeum, Ulmen introduces the Schmittian nomos, the division of world as the concrete foundation of any legal order and the establishment of the basic political unit, which in the classical jus publicum Europaeum had been the state, up until 1914. He concludes by affirming that Schmitt

[u]nimpressed with the duration of the Cold War and its mixture of neither war nor peace, [. . .] speculated on the possibility of the eventual development of what he called Großräume – larger spacial entities, similar to but not synonymous with federations or blocs – displacing states and constituting a new nomos. Since his death in 1985 and the subsequent collapse of communism, the likelihood of his diagnosis and prognosis has increased. While the international situation remains confused and leading intellectuals such as Fukuyama and Huntington, unable to think beyond predominant liberal categories, can only recycle new versions of the old Wilsonianism, Schmitt’s vision of a world of Großräume as a new geopolitical configuration may well be in the process of being realized. (Ulmen, 1996: 26–27)

The re-introduction of these Schmittian motives in the analysis and prognosis of post-Cold War world politics has been deepened and much publicised by Jürgen Habermas. The German philosopher published in his Der gespaltene Westen (The Divided West) an extensive analysis of the world political situation in the aftermath of globalisation and in the context of the then-raging global war on terror (Habermas, 2005). Habermas evaluates the chances of his own neo-Kantian liberal project of global governance set against three main adversaries: the unipolar, hegemonic, US-led neo-liberal thrust, founded on an incorrect reading of the liberal tradition; the vision of a global ‘Empire’ as the product of economic privatisation of any public political space, which was articulated and popularised by post-Marxist authors (Hardt and Negri, 2000); the Schmittian and anti-Kantian project of Großraum-based order (das anti-Kantische Projekt von Großraumordnungen) (Habermas, 2005: 184–185). Habermas is very careful in handling Schmittian ideas while always denouncing its reactionary intents, but he recognises, however, in this instance that a modernised version of the Großraum theory could be re-elaborated as a tool to think about the intermediate stage of a Kantian cosmopolitan order, one where, instead of prematurely moving towards a world polity, various regional entities (Großräume) could be created by joining nation states. Only at a later stage in the process such Großräume would then in turn converge towards a truly cosmopolitan project. Although Habermas resists realist theories of International Relations as they are fundamentally at odds with his political-philosophical conception, in the specific setting of the mid-2000s he was conceding that

under the realist key assumption that justice among nations is fundamentally impossible, while the possible balance [of power] alone can be achieved through a militarily secured equilibrium of interests, Carl Schmitt’s Großraum theory still appears presently to offer the best approximation to the scenario of a desirable world order. (Habermas, 2008: 118)

In the same period, interest for Schmitt in IR reached its peak. Mika Luoma-aho dedicated a book chapter in the now standard reference volume The International Thought of Carl Schmitt to Schmitt’s spacial thought, explicitly entitled Geopolitics and gross-politics: from Carl Schmitt to James Burnham and E.H. Carr (in Odysseos and Petito, 2007: 36–55). The idea that Großraum matters for contemporary international political theorists is elaborated through historical lenses, showing a genealogical continuity between the German author and some similar reflections on geopolitical space in the aftermath of Second World War advanced by E.H. Carr and James Burnham. Großraum emerges as the intermediate solution between an illusory universalism and an overhauled nation state:

Both Schmitt and Carr saw the potential of Europe in the new nomos of the Großräume, and also saw that to realise this potential fully Europe had to have a political subject, a Reich willing and able to make authoritative decision’s in Europe’s name. Decades of economic and political integration since the world wars have not constituted a Reich out of the European Union, and there is little indication of anyone letting the EU become the political subject of Europe any time soon. (Odysseos and Petito, 2007: 52)

The period from the early 2000s to 2007 showed therefore an increasing interest in the idea of Großraum, which was viewed positively by a number of authors with regard to its theoretical potential for the contemporary.

However, critical voices soon appeared to counter this trend, primarily that of William Hooker, who has championed a more sceptical evaluation of Schmitt. His book Carl Schmitt’s International Thought: Order and Orientation offers a comprehensive examination of Schmitt’s international political theories, including an upfront analysis of the Großraum concept (Hooker, 2009: 126–155). Hooker directly contributed to the debate, largely initiated by Odysseos and Petito’s above-mentioned publication, about whether Schmitt should be integrated within international political theory debates as a classical author, and whether his thought provides still valuable insights for contemporary issues. Hooker’s answer to these questions is overwhelmingly negative. ² He distinguishes however the quality of Schmitt’s writings with reference to the ones mostly dedicated to the analysis of the past, and the ones looking at present and future trajectories. On this point, Hooker argues that ‘Schmitt’s Begriffsmagie [magic of concepts, of conceptualisation] would never attain the same sparkle in shaping the future as it did depicting the past’ (Hooker, 2009: 125). The Großraum theory is the most evident manifestation of this failure. He affirms indeed that Schmitt’s ‘theory of a new politics of new spaces [. . .] was essentially a fudge’ (Hooker, 2009: 200). At best it can be considered

a theory of its time, in its appeal to pan-European politics as the only credible antidote to the bipolarity of Russia and America. But when we relate the theory of Großraum to Schmitt’s more fundamental concerns, it is evidently little more than a flourishing delay tactic. If the Großraum is intended to contain politics, then it clearly faces an astonishing task in creating (or enforcing) the bonds under which the logic of protego et obligo gains traction. On the other hand, if the Großraum is seen as a simple arbitrary imposition, then surely it will generate new horizons of antagonism both within and between the various Großräume. In short, there is no reason to believe in the Großraum as a response to all the problems of dissolution and the erosion of authority that Schmitt diagnoses. (Hooker, 2009: 200)

Also the prominent Schmittian scholar Michael Salter revisited the relevance of Großraum in the context of the end of the Cold War and of the different scenarios which Schmitt already envisaged in the last part of his life, when he argued that the bipolar system of international relations which emerged after Second World War was not destined to last forever. Such situation could have evolved either into a unified world under the control of the United States, or instead into a pluralistic world characterised by regional blocs, that is, a ‘spacial order of different Großräume’ (Salter, 2012b: 15). Salter’s analysis concentrates on Großraum as a category of international law, one which ‘presents itself as a new realist framework to tackle a fundamentally changed spacial pattern of international relations’ (2012b: 25), based not on traditional ways of developing international law by means of analogy, but on an overhaul of established legal doctrines. Such project ought to be assessed in ‘pragmatic, rather than purely historical, biographical or jurisprudential terms’ (Salter, 2012b: 13), but remains however, in Salter’s judgement, unconvincing, as the concept put forward by the German jurist appears underdeveloped, combining ‘some very sharp conceptual determinations with unacceptably vague and indeterminate ideas’ (Salter, 2012b: 29) such as the numerous unanswered questions pertaining the internal organisation of each Großraum as well as the relations between Großräume.

However, Salter published in the same year a lengthy article with the Chinese Journal of International Law (Salter, 2012a), where he seems to propose a rather different view of the matter. He makes an argument for the contemporary relevance of Großraum in the light of both the obsolescence of the state and state-centred international law as well as its insufficiency to make sense of twenty-first century politics, and of the continuing US imperialism, exercised under the banner of alleged universal (ethical) values. Großraum would be in this context proposed as a valuable, ‘alternative approach to optimizing peaceful relations’ (Salter, 2012a: 395), particularly with regard to the People’s Republic of China and the region it can hegemonise (East Asia), as a counterweight to US dominance. Salter’s core reflection appears to be that,

Schmitt’s Großraum analysis is not and [. . .] essentially cannot be politically neutral. On the contrary, it is specifically geared up to combat this [American] imperialistic form of assimilation that diminishes a people’s right to exercise political self-determination and popular sovereignty. Against the familiar arrogance of imperialist disregard for the integrity of other States expressed in a stance of righteous unilateralism concealing its own hegemonic power, Schmitt’s Großraum concept projects ‘the principle of national respect’ as a doctrine that ought to operate as a key doctrine of international law. (Salter, 2012a: 419–420)

As such, Großraum remains in Salter’s view a ‘central category for a distinctively pluralistic and self-restraining form of international law scholarship’ (Salter, 2012a: 423).

More recently, Walter Rech and Janis Grzybowski have briefly explored the potential of Großraum to explain the nature of the European Union as a political construction which intends to move beyond the state. The result of such evaluation is ambiguous. On one hand, Rech and Grzybowski recognise that ‘the complex internal architecture of the EU between intergovernmental politics and collective institutions escapes Schmitt’s Großraum’, and on the other hand, ‘Europe resembles a Großraum centred on the EU as a Reich’, but then again the EU project is imbued with those universal liberal values Schmitt intended to fight (Rech and Grzybowski, 2017: 148–149). Rech and Grzybowski dismiss, therefore, Großraum as a theoretical tool for analysing the EU, focusing instead on the Bund or federation.

Geopolitics and Großraum

In geopolitical circles it is not uncommon to treat, with some caveat, Schmitt as a geopolitical thinker alongside with other classical authors of that discipline. The most prominent advocate of this reading has been in recent years Claudio Minca in a series of publications, particularly his 2016 volume On Schmitt and Space, co-authored with Rory Rowan (Minca and Rowan, 2016). In a previous 2012 article on the idea of border, he described Schmitt’s move away from a hopeless recovery of the state as the fundamental unit of international order in favour of the Großraum, a move which was underpinned by a more general reflection on the underlying ways to think about the relation between space and politics, which Schmitt articulated in his concept of nomos (Minca and Vaughan-Williams, 2012). Minca adds, furthermore, that,

[i]f, as Schmitt’s analysis [concerning the changing nature of spacial conceptualisations spurred by ideological transformations] implies, the changing nature and location of borders between states is symptomatic of broader shifts in the [. . .] ‘spacial consciousness of the earth’, then recent work on the transformation of contemporary bordering practices chimes with his speculations on the emergence of a new nomos. (Minca and Vaughan-Williams, 2012: 766)

The usefulness of Schmitt in geopolitical studies resides in the idea of the nomos, which allows a deeper reflection on relevant contemporary issues, such as the question of borders, especially following Giorgio Agamben’s seminal work on the topic, grounded in the investigation of biopolitical practices, and R.B.J. Walker’s work on the multi-dimensionality of the border. Such approaches however are criticised by Minca as limited. ‘[T]he lens of the nomos adds greater thickness – spacial, temporal, and historical – to the analysis of contemporary bordering practices and the spacial consciousness they reflect’. (Minca and Vaughan-Williams, 2012: 768).

In On Schmitt and Space, Minca explores Großraum in its historical trajectory and in the context of Schmitt’s work, coming to the conclusion that Großraum can be understood as ‘a vision of a new political form capable of spatializing the (bio)political, and ordering distinct populations though [sic] spacial division’ (Minca and Rowan, 2016: 182). In the end however, it also proved to be a failure, due to a series of conceptual shortcomings, and to its final political unviability. Indeed it remains unclear how the link between a Central and Eastern European Großraum is to be reconnected genealogically to the Monroe doctrine, and how Großraum is supposed to function in governing the relations between different polities, and in constraining war. Politically, Germany’s defeat in war meant that the envisaged Großraum-based order was replaced by a dramatic extension of US power worldwide, anticipating the post-1991 unipolar moment of global politics (Minca and Rowan, 2016: 182–183), the opposite of the geopolitical and ideological pluralism which Schmitt undoubtedly yearned for.

Minca’s argument on Schmitt consists eventually in a careful evaluation of what is to be rescued of Schmitt for the sake of geopolitical studies. The result of such evaluation is that Schmitt correctly advocated a thorough reflection on the way in which the conceptualisation of space impacts political dynamics and relations of power, where different ideas of space and its concrete ordering (nomos) are never politically neutral. They are also chiefly responsible for the containment of war (of lack thereof). This core idea, which can be read as some kind of sociology of international law and geopolitics, appears to be worth retaining. However, the more detailed and historically situated articulations by Schmitt of such core idea, some of them developed in the context of his intellectual militancy for National-Socialism, remain unconvincing due to their internal conceptual confusion, imprecision or sheer obsolescence.

The most outspoken advocate of the Großraum’s usefulness in explaining contemporary international political developments is Ignas Kalpokas. Kalpokas boldly argues that ‘Großraum is increasingly becoming a crucial analytical category for approaching international security’ (Kalpokas, 2017: 166), as well as that ‘the current global order is based on multiple Großräume [. . .] each composed of a group of states possessing a common identity’ (Kalpokas, 2017: 163). He intends to explain the way in which political violence is now distributed in geographic terms around the world, namely its patterns. These are allegedly better captured by a dualism of core and periphery, or, to use more Schmittian terms, areas of relative order and others which have become instead ‘permanent zones of exception’ (Kalpokas, 2017: 163). Such areas constitute distinct case studies in order to demonstrate the validity of Großraum as a conceptual device to explain and understand contemporary international politics,

to manifest different outcomes of the present nomos: Ukraine as limited proxy war due to a standoff between two Großräume, Syria as an all-out proxy war due to the complexity of a multi-way inter-Großraum conflict and South China Sea as a mostly non-violent stand-off, taking place in the immediate inter-Großraum. (Kalpokas, 2017: 163)

Kalpokas takes Großraum as ‘a principle that denotes the presence of distinct core states and their groups, organised into spacial and symbolic sub-orders’. Like Schmitt’s international political thought whereof it is part, it ‘remains a crucial analytical tool for understanding global order’ (Kalpokas, 2017: 176). However, Schmitt’s original concept must be modified, as ‘the possible scope of Großraum organisational forms must be broadened in order to both account for today’s realities and to rescind Schmitt’s pan-Germanic bias’ (Kalpokas, 2017: 167). So for instance it is possible to conceive the EU as a collective Großraum, without a hegemonic Reich in its centre. To its East, Russia can be seen as the Reich hegemonising a group of states making up a Großraum (the reference here seems to be to the members of Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)), while China is a Großraum on its own.

His theory suggests that conflicts occur between Großräume, reflecting an underlying nomos, which limits the scope of such conflicts, particularly by making wars between core states improbable, and channels the confrontation as well as the ensuing violence towards peripheral territories, non-Großraum states. These are the contemporary version of the early modern lands lying ‘beyond the line’, thus open to contestation and conquest (Kalpokas, 2017: 176). It is therefore not true, according to Kalpokas, that Schmitt’s Großraum theory is outdated or not useful for understanding today’s world politics, as such obsoleteness ‘is clearly overstated’ (Kalpokas, 2017: 176).

From the various positions illustrated so far, a complex picture emerges, one where Schmitt’s commentators and political thinkers significantly diverge on the contemporary relevance of the Großraum theory. On one hand, such theory has been considered, even by prominent intellectuals like Habermas, as a possible scenario (with important modifications) for the post-Cold War world order, translating a more general sense that world politics is moving towards a multipolar system of some sort, away from a unipolar US dominance. Großraum helps in this context as a conceptual tool to imagine the spacial and geopolitical nomos of the contemporary as well as possible future world. On the other hand, through a closer reading of Großraum in the context of Schmittian interpretive literature, this concept appears hopelessly anchored to the time and circumstances which saw its birth, therefore outdated, and burdened with imprecision, underdevelopment, uncomfortable proximities to aggressive expansionist and illiberal ideologies.

Schmitt’s Großraum as a Völkerrechtsbegriff

Großraum was put forth by Schmitt as a theoretical construction in a series of conferences between 1938 and 1939, resulting in the publication in 1941 of the short book Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte. This complex title can hardly be translated into English. ‘The Großraum-based International Legal Order with Interdiction of Intervention by External Powers’, where ‘external’ would mean political powers not belonging to the Großraum, is perhaps the most literal translation. More interesting, and often neglected in the literature, is the subtitle of this book, namely Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff im Völkerrecht, ‘A Contribution on the Concept of Reich in International Law’. Reich (plural: Reiche) cannot be completely translated as ‘empire’, given the remarkable etymological differences and its historical usage in the context of German history. More importantly, this subtitle indicates that Großraum should be understood as a function of the Reich, which constitutes the actual core of this work.

Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung articulates the idea that there is a mutually constitutive relation, a feedback loop, between the political-ideological worldview promoted by a certain political community once it attains a significant stature in world history, its concrete territorial-spacial order, and the legal-abstract conception of space which it intends to establish as dominant in international law. In international law indeed,

[. . .] space and political ideas cannot be separated. For us, there are neither political ideas without space, nor spaces or spacial principles without ideas. In turn, a specific political idea is typically carried by a specific nation, and has in mind a specific adversary, through whom it acquires the quality of the political. (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 29)

Schmitt points to the precedent of the Monroe doctrine, not to be understood, however, as a direct conceptual antecedent of Großraum, but only to highlight precisely the above mentioned mechanism of reciprocal strengthening between political ideology, concrete space order and legal space conception.

The Monroe doctrine reflected the rising power of the United States of America, a nation carrying a specific political-ideological principle. At that time, the adversary of the US national ideology was the British Empire and European imperialism more in general, animated by a counter-revolutionary effort underpinning the restoration of European monarchies after the rise and fall of revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Such efforts included attempts at re-establishing control by the Spanish Crown over Latin American colonies, which had just gained their independence, and the concomitant British plans to replace Spain as the hegemon in the region (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 29–30). The Monroe doctrine is explained by Schmitt as a precedent of Großraum in the sense that, on the basis of ideological difference and strategic enmity, the doctrine also advocated a different spacial conception within international law. The dominant conception of space in international law advanced by British jurisprudence, Schmitt claims, was one which saw space simply as a mathematically measurable dimension with no distinction between European and non-European soil, reflecting British ‘humanitarian-universalist’ ideological underpinnings, and above all perfectly fit for the legal justification of a global empire made up of lands without geographic continuity located at the four corners of the world. The Monroe doctrine intended to dispute this, according to Schmitt, by claiming for the American soil a different legal status, one which disrupted the unity of the world embedded in the British conception. The doctrine is not therefore a Großraum per se, but the principle of Großraum (Großraumprinzip) lies in the combination and mutually reinforcing triad linking ‘a politically awake nation, a political idea, and a great space [Großraum] which, dominated by such idea, excludes foreign intervention’ (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 30).

Interestingly, the United States turn towards the adoption of a humanitarian-universalistic ideological drive under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson will lead to the adoption of a correspondingly suited conception of space (undifferentiated, universally accessible) and largely borrowed from the British Empire, whereof the United States became the ideological prolongation, with the abandonment of the Monroe doctrine under the disguise of its planetary extension. This transition marked the ‘adulteration [Verfälschung] of a true Großraum-principle of non-intervention into an unlimited interventionism’ (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 41).

The real Großraum comes into play essentially with the rise of the Third Reich and the re-creation of the above mentioned triad, this time based on a politically awaken German nation (das deutsche Volk), the National-Socialist ideology, and a specific geographic space, namely Central and Eastern Europe (Mittel- und Osteuropa) where foreign intervention is excluded. The German Großraum arises in opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, its ideological underpinnings grounded in individualism, liberal-democracy, as well as the political use of ‘humanity’, and the spacial arrangement it created. Instead, the German Großraum is based on ‘our National-Socialist national idea’ (Volksgedanke) which includes the right for the Reich to protect German minorities (deutsche Volksgruppen) independently of their citizenship (see also Schwab, 1994: 187–188). Such national idea also implies ‘the rejection of any ideal of assimilation, absorption, and melting-pot’ (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 46), with different national groups living side by side. The ‘liberal-democratic, individualistic minority system of Versailles is thus overthrown and replaced by the idea of an order of national groups’ (Volksgruppenordnung) (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 48; see also Salzborn, 2008: 147–150).

Of the triad of factors enabling the emergence of a Großraum, the politically awaken nation is the most important one, immediately leading to the concept of Reich, from which the very idea of a Großraum-based legal international order depends (see Blindow, 1999). Reich is explained by Schmitt as a ‘specific legal international entity’, which needs to be introduced in legal international scientific discussions. His definition of this concept reads:

Reiche are [. . .] the leading and carrying powers, whose political idea is broadcasted in a specific Großraum, and which exclude for such Großraum the intervention of any Großraum-external power. (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 49)

In other words, the Reich is the legal entity representing the concrete, living nation, a nation powerful enough to emerge by means of its own strength and capability, to a leading historical force in a particular region, which is then shaped by its very presence. Such region is the geographic dimension of the Großraum. Großraum and Reich are therefore not the same territorial entity.

The concepts of Reich and its Großraum derivative are envisaged by Schmitt as those which will shape a new international law, finally leaving behind the fiction of an international order made of legally equal states, and adjusting instead to a new concrete order, the one being shaped by the events of the years 1938–1941. As not all nations are capable of the organisational, technical and industrial performance which is indispensable to the creation of a functioning state, and even fewer have the capability to conduct modern warfare operations in an autonomous fashion, a hierarchy of nations has inevitably taken shape (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 59).

Schmitt’s new international legal order (legal here is the key point) should therefore acknowledge the existence of such hierarchy in the law: the Reich is the new centre of ordering forces, the Großraum is the field in which such ordering forces express themselves. In this fashion, the German jurist could imagine a world in which, had his nation prevailed or at least maintained the positions acquired before 22 June 1941, international law could have re-organised itself with the recognition, in due course, of several Reiche with their corresponding Großräume as legal entities (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 49). This of course implies that, as a consequence of Germany’s victory, it would have been German jurisprudence to produce the main doctrinal structure of a reformed international law, in German language (see also Chiantera-Stutte, 2008: 195–196).

Schmitt indicated furthermore that the underlying concept of space would then have to change, from one suiting the state (as emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century), namely an abstract conception which ignores the peculiarities of the relation between the soil and the nation which inhabits it (Volksboden), to a performative space (Leistungsraum). As nations are not equal, so different spaces cannot be legally equal, requiring a new international legal-spacial conception, a new Raumordnung. The legal status of a certain space shall be determined by the concrete political communities, conceptualised as those nations (Völker) capable of creating and sustaining a Reich, and their historical deeds, with each Reich bringing and bearing its own internal dimensions and borders (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 76–77). ³ In such scheme, Großraum presents itself polemically as the legal-spacial articulation an upside-down international humanitarian ideology: as the bearers of such ideology are defeated, so their enemy, previously regarded as ‘enemy of humanity’, hostis generis humani, and therefore non-human, elaborates a legal doctrine which supersedes the concept of humanity as a viable concept for the construction of legal international orders.

Reich and Großraum as provisional theoretical constructs

Schmitt explicitly recognised that the above summarised concepts of Reich and Großraum were simply initial reflections, early drafts of conceptual constructs which should have been refined and further elaborated by legal theorists in the years and decades to come, had Germany prevailed, in the broader context of an international law overhaul. Indeed he clearly stated that many essential elements for a complete Großraum theory remain underdeveloped, as also pointed out by some of the commentators reviewed above, particularly the relations within each Großraum between Reich and other entities, or between different Reiche, and between Reich and other non-Reich entities in other Großräume (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 62–63). He even indicated that Reich and Großraum may be ‘unavoidable bridges’ to new legal international spacial conceptions, but that those new conceptions, once the world will have found a secure and just new division in different Großräume, may well find in the end ‘other and more beautiful denominations’ (Schmitt 2009 [1941]: 75).

Following the end of Second World War, Schmitt’s references to Großraum dwindled to almost nothing. The concept appears in Der Nomos der Erde only marginally and certainly not with the theoretical breadth of the war period (Schmitt 1997 [1950]: 271). Some residues can be traced in later writings. Schmitt certainly imagined that the bipolar order of the Cold War would have changed in due course with the emergence of a multipolar arrangement, a world divided into several ‘Großräume’. These latter seem to have nothing in common with the idea of Großraum just illustrated, and all contextual elements point to an interpretation whereby Schmitt, as he used again the term Großraum in a 1962 brief article, meant little more than regional blocs (Schmitt, 1995 [1962]: 602; see also Anter, 2008: 61).

For the sake of clarity, it is worth to briefly summarise at this point the fundamental features characterising the concept of Großraum. First and foremost, Großraum is a polemical (counter-)concept advanced in the context of Schmitt’s engagement with the alleged misuse of ‘humanity’ advanced by the British Empire and the United States. Schmitt believed that the mobilisation of humanity in international affairs would mean the dehumanisation not only of the enemy (i.e. the German nation) but also of warfare. For Schmitt, humanity is not a political concept and as such should not enter discussions on international legal and political affairs. As there is no point in upholding humanity and its unity, international jurisprudence should transition to a spacial conception which removes the centrality of humanity, and accepts instead the fundamental division of mankind as the foundation of any legal-spacial arrangement.

Großraum is a legal concept, not primarily a geopolitical one, intended as a draft for an audience of international legal scholars, and practitioners. This very important fact seems to have been neglected by numerous commentators, particularly in the field of International Relations, even though in the book Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung, of merely 80 pages, the words Völkerrecht or völkerrechtlich appear hundreds of times. Schmitt was a jurist, and his work ought to be read primarily, albeit certainly not exclusively, through the lenses of legal scholarship.

Großraum is part of a broader theoretical effort by which Schmitt, from the late 1930s onwards, attempted to create a legal theory, or better a legal-sociological metatheory, explaining how the legal conceptualisation of space was historically born out of both material and ideological settings largely steered by the dominant political powers, and how such conceptualisation has changed overtime, especially in the transition from the jus publicum Europaeum towards a liberal-humanitarian universalistic concept (championed by the Anglo-Saxon powers), which he regarded as the ideological enemy of his own particularistic and pluralistic view, as well as of the German nation. Ultimately his main theoretical explanans facing such questions rests with the idea of nomos, further developed and consolidated in the famous Der Nomos der Erde. Großraum should be read in continuity with the nomos as a legal concept to be employed in a particular case of land division and partitioning of the Earth (among the various historical experiences of land division), a case of Raumordnung, of spacial order in international law.

Großraum is inherently and inextricably linked to the concept of Reich (as in the definition already provided). There is no Großraum without Reich, and the whole work by Schmitt on Großraum is nothing more than, in his words, ‘a contribution to the concept of Reich’, as illustrated above. In turn the Reich rests on the idea that nations, conceptualised as ethnic groups (Völker), are the primary actors of politics and history, and that international law eventually captures the ways in which dominant nations shape the world and the rules through which they are supposed to govern it (see also Hell, 2009: 294–295).

Finally, Großraum was envisaged by Schmitt as a draft, as a theoretical proposal, somehow an academic bet, but never attained the status of a fully developed legal concept, as such outcome was tied to a victory of Germany in Second World War, or at least the conservation of its position as a great power, which the country lost in the aftermath of its catastrophic defeat (for a reconstruction of the political context in which Schmitt operated at the time, see the still relevant Stirk, 1999: 369–374).

Evaluating Großraum in twenty-first century international politics

In the light of what has been illustrated so far, it is now possible to reconsider the initial matter of whether Großraum is a useful concept for explaining and understanding contemporary international politics, and the question of its iterability. It must be noticed that all authors advocating some kind of recovery of such concept openly recognise that it needs to be adapted, modified and merged with others in order to become a truly employable theoretical tool. Two questions then arise: what kind of modifications are acceptable, without transforming Großraum in something it never was and was never intended to be? Have the conditions of its iterability been met?

Those who have indicated some usefulness in Großraum for contemporary international politics have done so essentially to find a theoretical concept which can help with the elegant formulation of a multipolar view, and to a certain extent, certainly for Habermas, of regionalism. This operation entails however a transposition of Großraum in the domain of international political discussions and geopolitics, which were not the primary target of Schmitt’s work, and requires above all its hollowing-out with the elimination of all those substantial features which made Großraum worth envisaging in the mind of its very creator, namely: the polemical engagement against the concept of humanity and its use in international law and politics, the construction of a polemical spacial concept operating within such polemical horizon, the overhaul of the state as the primary actor in international law, the recognition of the legal inequality of nations and of the political arrangements they create and a new legal conception of space which attributes a different status to different performative spaces. Through such hollowing-out, Großraum simply becomes a label pretending to be genealogically linked to Schmitt’s work, while it is in reality only linked to a general preference for pluralism (political and possibly territorial), which Schmitt certainly shared (Salter, 2012b: 15), but it is not the distinguishing, original feature of his position. It is hardly a sufficient reason to re-introduce Großraum as a concept in IR debates. Even if the world is apparently transitioning towards some sort of multipolarism, as argued by Ulmen, Voigt, Luoma-Aho and others, or should re-organise itself in integrated regional blocs, as in Habermas’ neo-Kantian vision, this does not necessarily have to be theorised under the heading of the Schmittian Großraum (see also Mouffe, 2005). Indeed the invocation of Großraum in these cases seems, at closer scrutiny, rather unjustified.

Kalpokas’ position appears here as the most problematic. It presupposes that Großraum can be separated from Reich, as in the case of the EU. It presupposes that Reiche can be conceptualised independently from the nations building them, and that each Großraum is centred in ‘some core states possessing a common identity’. However, this article has shown that Großraum is inseparable from Reich: there is no Großraum without a Reich, and there is no Großraum based on states, precisely because Großraum speaks of a new way of looking at the world which dethrones the state, and intends to institute new categories of thought. Arguing whether the EU is a Großraum, ⁴ or Russia is a Reich hegemonising his periphery as a Großraum, or whether China is a Großraum on its own, makes little sense. One does not need Großraum to envisage a core-periphery dynamic to explain the way in which political violence appears to be geographically distributed. Kalpokas’ statement according to which ‘Großraum is increasingly becoming a crucial analytical category for approaching international security’ (Kalpokas, 2017: 166) seems unwarranted: not only Großraum is far from being a crucial analytical category for international security but also, as shown above, its reception in the IR and geopolitical literature is mostly critical and certainly not unproblematic.

Similarly, Salter’s article on Großraum in East Asia, although more nuanced and explicitly aware of the context in which this concept was envisaged, eventually underplays the relation between Reich and Großraum (Reich is not even mentioned in the body of the article), conflates ‘the people’ with the nation (Volk) (Salter, 2012a: 419) to an extent that makes Großraum no longer what Schmitt intended it to be. Salter claims in a footnote that ‘there are some very occasional and probably inessential references to volk-nationalistic ideology of “blood and soil” [. . .] but which are contradicted by the main cultural and anti-essentialist thrust of the remainder’ (Salter, 2012a: 423, footnote 71). This research has however demonstrated that the relation between Volk, Reich, ideology and space (Raumordnung) is the very essence of the idea of Großraum.

Critics of Großraum such as Hooker and Minca have articulated a thorough analysis of the concept and correctly pointed to a number of important, possibly insurmountable problems. However, their critical remarks on Großraum’s obsolescence, confusion, imprecision, while justified if the target is Großraum’s attempted use in the current international political landscape, do not entirely make justice (with the partial exception of Minca’s position) of the pioneering nature of Schmitt’s work on the topic, which, as all pioneering work, was venturing into uncharted waters, taking a number of risks, as it aimed at the production of a draft or sketch for future, further elaboration, and quite explicitly so, as it has been shown.

The basic condition for the structural iterability of Großraum seems to be missing. In none of the authors reviewed above, the recovery of Großraum appears to be linked to a polemical thrust against the idea of humanity and its unity, in any updated fashion. At best, one may find that their target is the rhetorical use of humanity for the pursuit of advancing particular agendas, but not genuinely the very idea of humanity (as in Schmitt), which seems in fact to remain unchallenged. This is true even in the case of Salter’s explicit polemical engagement with US imperialism, and his wish to advance a multipolar world order in the (alleged) interest of all. This move indirectly recovers the idea of humanity.

It is nothing new that the preference for regionalism can be explained, at least in some cases, as stemming from the hostility to the US global hegemony, as it manifested itself after the end of the Cold War, and during the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. Indeed, the recovery of Schmitt’s works on the partisan or the pirate in their connection to the study of contemporary insurgency, counterinsurgency, terrorism, migration, as well as of those practices of exclusion and dehumanisation thereto associated, has occurred within such polemical context.

At a deeper level, philosophical reflections on the nature of sovereignty and its spacial implications in the same period, in IR as much as in international law, fundamentally theorise the divisions of mankind as the degeneration of a higher ideal of humanity whose upholding is still possible and worth pursuing with an adequate critique of current (bio)political theories and practices, but they do not drop humanity altogether. For instance, in direct relation to Schmitt’s recovery, Giorgio Agamben, with regard to his extensive study of biopolitics in the twentieth century and his genealogy of the modern state’s spacial-political articulation, advocates in his Homo Sacer some re-formulation of the political space, which ought to start from the awareness that traditional conceptual structures, such as those inherited from antiquity, are no longer viable, but, at the same time, he gestures towards the possibility of theorising a different kind of politics (for all), namely one which abandons the concept of sovereignty, if that possibility existed (Agamben, 1995: 209–211). On a similar note, R.B.J. Walker has famously put forth a radical critique of sovereignty and its spacial articulations, coming to the conclusion that,

the difficulty of thinking about contemporary political identities comes not only from the profusion of struggles and uncertainties that has become even more obvious with the thawing of Cold War structures, but from an increasingly widespread sense that the metaphysical achievements of the principle of sovereignty have less and less political relevance. (Walker, 1993: 178; see also Walker, 2006)

More recently, international law theorist Hans Lindahl, reflecting on a theory of human rights in the context of a world with increasingly disputed borders and bordering practices, has argued that ‘[h]umanity is first and foremost this anonymous and pre-reflective stratum of sociality and socialization, the background of whence a legal collective wrests loose to emerge into the foreground’ (Lindahl, 2013: 247). Lindahl advances the idea that humanity is some kind of primordial condition from which any political community has to distance itself if it wishes to attain autonomous existence and continuity, but at the same time, it cannot be thoroughly discarded and expunged from international politics and law, because, ‘even though there can be no return to this anonymous and pre-reflexive whole of humanity [. . .]’, the political community ‘can never fully justify the closure which excludes a range of practical possibilities as incompossible with its own realm of practical possibilities’ (Lindahl, 2013: 247). In other words, humanity remains in such formulation as the realm of those practices which go beyond the scope of the political community’s joint efforts.

In the current theoretical landscape, the polemical thrust which characterises and informs Schmitt’s work on the Großraum in its structural link to the human/non-human dialectic cannot be found. At various levels, a positive idea of humanity, or even, at the very minimum, a certain cosmopolitan flavour, remains in the background, whether of the various proposals of regional blocs, or of resistance against US-unipolarism and hegemony. Gary Ulmen comes the closest to Schmitt’s position with his critique of Wilsonianism: in a 1994 article, he argued that ‘[p]olitical universalism is as much a fiction as is the concept of “humanity” as a political subject’ (Ulmen, 1994: 33) and advocated that the United States should return to the Monroe doctrine, praising

the consciously pluralist thinking of William James, who rejected the notion of the unity of the world as inconsistent with modernity and saw in the multiplicity of possible world views, even in the multiplicity of truths and loyalties, the true modern philosophy. (Ulmen, 1994: 35)

Ulmen’s stance remains however underdeveloped, and confines itself largely to an interpretive work on Schmitt’s texts.

Conclusion

Should Großraum be simply confined to the graveyard of ideas? What would be the conditions of its recovery for international law and International Relations? A true recovery of Großraum should be premised on an historical phase in which a renewed polemical engagement with the idea of humanity and its unity leads to a reconsideration of the human/non-human dialectic that privileges the non-human over the human (and not the dehumanised in the face of unaccomplished ideals of humanity). It should be a phase in which nations as ethnic groups are widely recognised as the driving force of political events as well as the key subjects of international law. There should be a situation where nations are explicitly recognised as fundamentally unequal, and ranked on the basis of their power or performance in relation to a comparative scale. Furthermore, such inequality should extend to the legal status of the territory controlled by each nation, following a new conception of space in international law (Raumprinzip). Finally, Großraum can only come into play when one nation rises above the others in power terms under the banner of a certain ideology, which is then broadcasted onto a certain area (the territorial dimension of the Großraum), with the exclusion of all other most powerful nations, each with its own Reich and Großraum, and hence with the breakdown of liberal, cosmopolitan ideologies at global level (see Diner, 1989). In short, an upfront structural iteration of Großraum would imply a re-discussion of the post-1945 legal international order, and certainly of the UN Charter.

Such set of circumstances is currently unavailable. One may argue that nationalism is resurgent, but hardly so among intellectual elites, especially in the West, where it is usually frowned upon. Even ‘illiberal powers’ such as Russia and China are not articulating any explicit legal principle of inequality among nations, nor the dismantling of the currently dominant tenets of international law with regard to fundamental spacial principles. The dominant ideology in international political discourses remains basically liberal and cosmopolitan, as also mirrored by the nearly absolute, unchallenged supremacy of the English language. It remains to be seen whether and how the perceived crisis of liberal world order will open the way to a world of radical political pluralism and a corresponding spacial ordering in the next future.