When I started writing on Carl Schmitt in the 1990s, the reaction in U.S. academia was often that you could treat a Nazi jurist with extraordinary capacities as a historical figure but not as a theorist to be invoked in present debates. Little could I have imagined that a quarter century later, a soon-to-be U.S. vice president would do precisely that: Last summer, J.D. Vance charged liberals with having learned from Schmitt how to hide political warfare behind a legal facade.
Since then, the tables have been turned. Schmitt is regularly brought up by critics of the second Trump administration. They charge President Donald Trump with declaring emergencies to grab ever more power, referencing Schmitt’s notion that a state of exception reveals who is truly sovereign. Schmitt further held that the true sovereign could claim unlimited power—even declare a dictatorship—to defeat a political community’s enemies. No less relevant in populist times: Schmitt taught that a dictator like Benito Mussolini, if he enjoyed sufficient public support, could claim to embody democracy while pluralistic liberal institutions, such as parliaments, trying to work out compromises threatened to undermine it.
But Trumpism isn’t only concerned with constructing an authoritarian order at home, of course. Schmitt’s Nazi-era thinking on international law and global order may likewise illuminate Trump’s actions in ways that haven’t received nearly enough attention. U.S. foreign policy today has disconcerting parallels with not just Schmitt’s advocacy of a pluralistic, multipolar world but also his insistence that lasting legal orders need to be literally rooted in the appropriation of territory. Schmitt potentially offers a legal-theoretical justification for Trump’s seeming preference for spheres of influence dominated by great powers.
Schmitt claimed that the resulting “pluriversum” would be more stable and peaceful than liberalism’s approach to international order. It’s an argument that is belied by the incomparably destructive outcome of the Nazi era but one that today nevertheless can prove attractive not just for Trump supporters but also for some on the left.
Schmitt wrote his major book on international law during World War II but only published it in 1950. Bearing the somewhat mysterious title The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, the treatise advanced an idea of global order that chimed with Schmitt’s general jurisprudence. Domestic law, for Schmitt, did not consist of abstract norms but was always an expression of what Schmitt called a “concrete order” established by a sovereign (a contrast charged with antisemitism: It was the rootless Jews, in his view, who were advocating for an abstract, location-less universalism). Similarly, every genuine international order, or nomos, began with an appropriation and apportioning of land by great powers.
Schmitt lamented that, with the world wars, a particular system of international law was coming to an end. For centuries, the jus publicum Europaeum had helped contain wars within Europe: Nation-states recognized one another as legitimate belligerents; something like respectful dueling among sovereigns replaced the previous horrors of religious civil wars. But the system depended on a clear demarcation between inside and outside. On the inside—in Europe, that is—wars became civilized. Meanwhile, what Schmitt called the areas “beyond the line”—in essence, the colonies—saw unrestrained conflict.
The system started to be put in question when former colonies dared to draw their own lines: The U.S. declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 was a major obsession for Schmitt. Even worse than Europe’s loss of power was the replacement of a nonjudgmental notion of war with what Schmitt called a “discriminating,” moralistic concept of violent conflict characteristic of liberalism, in which the other side was effectively treated as a criminal, potentially subject to “police bombing.”
Schmitt’s alternative to what he viewed as hypocritical liberalism was a scheme he first elaborated in 1939 (giving rise to the suspicion that he was simply trying to provide a learned veneer for Nazi expansion). He advocated a pluri-versum of “great spaces,” with a dominant Reich at the center and a ban on interventions by what Schmitt called raumfremde Mächte—powers alien to a particular great space.
Critics charged that Schmitt had simply delivered a Monroe Doctrine for the Nazis; they also pointed out that his insistence on a categorical difference between his ideas and Nazi racial conceptions of Lebensraum was untenable. Still, Schmitt stuck with his vision after the war; in his 1963 book, Theory of the Partisan, he approvingly quoted Mao Zedong’s notion that peace would be ensured by giving equal power to the United States, Europe, and China.
It is hardly an accident that Schmitt’s international thought was rediscovered after the end of the Cold War. Rhetoric during the unipolar moment appeared all too similar to the liberal refrains of the interwar period. Liberals, Schmitt had insisted, promised to dissolve all conflicts into questions of economics, subject to rational negotiation over material interests, and of ethics, subject to rational deliberation about morality. But when faced with genuine challenges, liberalism would either prove impotent or hyper-aggressive.
Behind the high-minded talk of human rights and globalization, according to those taking cues from Schmitt in the 1990s, stood naked U.S. power. When possible, such power would seek the cover of U.N. resolutions—but in their absence, “police bombing” in the name of humanitarian morality would still proceed, with the NATO-led attacks on Belgrade in 1999 the most egregious instance. No wonder that some anti-liberals on the left argued that a Schmitt-inspired multi-polar order would be more peaceful than a globe governed under the principles of a hypocritical liberal universalism.
It is no small irony that a figure like Trump might be moving in precisely the direction of dividing the world into great spaces or, with more familiar language, spheres of influence. Trump already lauded the Monroe Doctrine during his first term; more recently, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, called the Western Hemisphere a “common home.” Critics of “forever wars” fought in the name of liberal humanitarianism may also see something positive in his supposed attempt to make international relations more transactional (and less moral).
Russian President Vladimir Putin has already blessed a U.S. annexation of Greenland; Trump may well end up handing Ukraine to Russia. And even more interesting for those who like Schmitt’s theory, Trump’s claims on Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal would appear to suggest that land appropriation could indeed establish the ground for a new, lasting, and firmly located order. A largely failed real estate investor might not resemble Solon or other great legislators of the past, but he sure has his eye on land.
The fatal liberal objection to Schmitt’s framework is not hard to formulate: The blatant disregard for even the most minimal notion of self-determination is not only morally unacceptable—it is also doubtful that policies such as grabbing Greenland and somehow forcing Canada to become the 51st U.S. state would result in a more peaceful world. Even if great spaces were somehow established, great-power competition would not just disappear.
Schmitt devotees also have to contend with his idea that civilizing wars among states requires an “outside,” a firmly located realm of uncontained conflict and ruthless exploitation—and it is an awkward question what that outside should be today. Schmitt himself, in the preface to his seminal book, had speculated about a “new, unidentified object” that humanity might discover on the way to the moon—and that it could then exploit and make a site of conflict. Of course, there have been extensive discussions of astropolitics and space warfare since at least the 1940s (and the latter happens to be a Trump obsession). But it is hard to see how a Schmittian notion of “peace on earth, wars in the sky” would be realized (never mind whether it should be realized); why would one not spill over into the other?
More generally, the Schmittian endorsement of ideology-free conflict itself seems obviously hypocritical. In theory, great powers overseeing spheres of influence might understand themselves merely to be holding back a totalitarian left-wing deluge of wokeness. But would such claims to having a civilizational mission not simply increase belligerence? Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has justified his country’s imperialist aggression in terms of restraining Ukrainians’ supposed move toward becoming “collective transgenders.” But would Putin have refrained from attacking Ukraine if it had had a deeply conservative society but still refused to be subservient to Moscow?
Leftist adherents to Schmitt thought should ask themselves whether abandoning people fighting for human rights and democracy in supposedly alien great spaces really serves the ideals about which they claim to care. The same goes for conservatives hoping that a transactional Trumpism dividing the world into spheres of influence will produce a new toleration of supposed civilizational differences. After all, while announcing a policy of “live and let live” in Saudi Arabia, Trump still felt compelled to lecture South Africa’s president in the White House. Schmitt himself conceded—perhaps thinking of the Nazi regime’s own record—that those looking for a restrainer might pick the wrong candidate.
The post How a Nazi Jurist Captured Imaginations on the U.S. Left and Right appeared first on Foreign Policy.
