Reich, Empire, Imperium
Running parallel to Schmitt’s polemical genealogy of the state is a claim about the specifically German origins of the concept of the Reich: while the concept of the state is portrayed as inescapably French, the Reich in contrast was an intrinsically German concept, reflecting the coming age of German dominance in international politics.
However, for this concept to be truly German as Schmitt claims, he needed to distinguish the Reich from its standard translations in both English and Latin: empire and imperium. As Schmitt claims, ?Reich, Imperium, Empire are not the same and, viewed from within, are not comparable with one another’[1479] Indeed, for Schmitt, ?the designation “Deutsches Reich” is not translatable in its concrete character and majesty [Hoheit]’.[1480] More than merely a terminological squabble, Schmitt insists on maintaining this distinction because he sees political concepts as themselves products of ideological battles in history and formed by particular constellations of power: ?The victor wrote not only the history, but also defines the vocabulary and the terminology’.[1481] [1482] [1483]The essential Germanness of the concept of the Reich - in contrast to both empire and imperium - arises from four polemical distinctions. First, that the ability to insist on a unique designation is a marker of historical power, which proves that the German Reich had finally achieved parity with Anglo-American world empires. Second, that both empire and imperium carry with them the connotation of ?a universalistic construction, world and humanity encompassing, [and are] therefore supra-racial [ubervolkisch]’, in contrast to the German Reich, which is understood as ?essentially defined through the Volk, an essentially non-universal, legal order [rechtliche Ordnung] on the basis of respect for every Volkstum,44 Third, that imperium and empire are both linguistically linked to the concept of ?imperialism’ as a form of exploitation, whereas the term Reich avoids this negative association.
Fourth, that the term Reich is meant to separate German policies of expansionism from, on the one hand, ?the universalism of the powers of the liberal-democratic, racially assimilating West’ and, on the other hand, ?the universalism of the Bolshevist-world-revolutionary East’.45 For Schmitt, this racial distinction forms one of the defining characteristics of the Reich in contrast to the ?universalism’ and the ?assimilation’ of empires.For all that Schmitt insists upon preserving the distinction, he does little (in this period of his writings) to consider imperium as a separate legal or political concept from empire. Quite apart from how Ulpian or Bartolus came to the word - as a gradated power to offer authoritative commands that was embodied in the emperor and delegable to other offices - Schmitt appropriated it, along with empire, as an ethno-political construct. For Schmitt, both the Roman imperium and the Western empires were unified because they permitted the ?mixing of races’.[1484] Not until after the war would Schmitt author a longer commentary on the concept of imperium in the legal order of the Respublica Christiana, but by this time he was communicating in a somewhat different register and working in the context of vastly new geopolitical circumstances[1485] It was then no longer feasible, as it had been in Volkerrechtliche Groβraumord- nung, to highlight the polemical contrast between the racial concept of the German Reich as uniquely distinct from both empire and imperium.
Schmitt’s critique of empire through the lens of its purported universalism, its focus on humanity, and its relation to capitalist imperialism is a direct invocation of his earlier writings on specifically Anglo-American forms of ?modern imperialism’. These were prepared during the final months of the Weimar Re- public.[1486] In particular, in Volkerrechtliche Formen des modernen Imperialismus, Schmitt rails against a transformation in techniques of control that no longer required brute force or direct forms of coercion; instead, he claims that imperial powers found it to be advantageous to rely on economic means of control precisely to deny any corresponding political obligations[1487] Indeed, for Schmitt, the shift to ?economic imperialism’ allowed states to ?deny altogether the fact of imperialism’ by pointing to the absence of overt political mechanisms of control.
Relying on economic forms of imperialism thus perpetuated the illusion of the ?peaceful expansion’ of a world empire.[1488] This was a version of modern imperialism, veiled in the language of economics, which was essentially American in its origins: ?It is a typical American theory, a theory that belongs to a state whose imperialist expansion consists in the expansion of its possibilities of investment and exploitation’.[1489] [1490] [1491] [1492] There were glimmers in this of Schmitt's third characteristic of the concept of the Reich, which linked empires to an exploitative economic imperialism, in contrast to the Reich, which remained - to Schmitt and his National Socialist contemporaries - free of such a negative connotation.The first and essential expression of this American version of modern imperialism was ?the Monroe Doctrine of the year 1823’, which, as Schmitt explains in Volkerrechtliche Formen des modernen Imperialismus, ?stands at the center of all arguments which the United States has brought forward, defensively and offensively, over the last century in the law of nations and international politics for their justification’^2 The key aspect of Schmitt’s characterisation of the Monroe Doctrine as the beginning of modern imperialism lies in the juxtaposition here of the words ?defensively’ and ?offensively’. The ?defensive’ aspect of the Monroe Doctrine for Schmitt arises from its orientation towards European powers and the prohibition of their interference in the Western hemisphere. It defends from interference from outside its sphere of influence. The ?offensive’ portion in turn is a derivative of the defensive: ?one started with the general impermissibility of an intervention [...] and ends with finding in precisely the same doctrine the justification for the intervention of the United States in the matters of other American states’.53 Thus, non-intervention paradoxically laid the foundations for American imperial expansion.
For this earlier set of Schmitt’s claims, the Monroe Doctrine appears representative of all types of imperialism.
?This extraordinary elasticity and stretchability, this keeping open of all possibilities, this keeping open of all things even in the alternative between law and politics, is in my opinion typical of every genuine and great imperialism’. 54 For Schmitt, there was a number of paradigmatic cases where the United States exercised ?control’ over states such as Cuba, Haiti, San Domingo, and Panama through recourse to the ambiguous phrasing of ?the right of intervention'. Imposing a right of intervention meant that while states were nominally free from foreign control and thus could not demand the benefits associated with direct annexation, the intervening imperial state could still ?decide on vague, yet essential concepts for the political existence of another state, like the protection of foreign interests, protection of independence, public order and security, and the observance of international treaties'.[1493] [1494] [1495] In short, the American model of modern imperialism is characterised by the ability to exercise political control over states through defining political and legal concepts advantageously to establish American imperialism as veiled or indirect in militarily or economically strategic loci.By 1939, Schmitt came to revise his analysis of the Monroe Doctrine in order to differentiate two distinct stages of the American policy. The version Schmitt had described in his Weimar work as characteristic of all forms of modern imperialism is considered to be the later incarnation of the Monroe Doctrine, begun under Theodore Roosevelt's ?dollar diplomacy' and carried to its logical conclusion under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, one of Schmitt's repeated polemical targets.56 For Schmitt, Roosevelt's policy marked the beginning of a ?liberal-capitalist' turn in the interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, one that erased its previous ?defensive character' in favour of promoting American values abroad - a turn to the ?offensive'.
Such a drastic reversal meant entirely negating the first phase of the doctrine, as ?the original American Monroe doctrine has nothing to do with the policies and methods of modern liberalcapitalist imperialism'^7 Thus, it was only once the Monroe Doctrine went from a defensive sphere of influence to the promotion of liberal capitalism abroad that it took on an imperial character.This second phase of the Monroe Doctrine is further split into two distinct periods in Schmitt's analysis: if it was Theodore Roosevelt who transformed the Monroe Doctrine into a form of ?liberal capitalist imperialism', it was Wilson who ?announced on 22 January, 1917 [...] that the Monroe doctrine must become a world doctrine'.[1496] For Schmitt, this amounted to nothing less than a complete ?falsification' of the central tenants of the policy. Wilson did not seek to extend the principle of non-intervention onto other spaces, ?but, on the contrary, [he sought] the spaceless and borderless extension of liberal-democratic principles onto the entire earth and the whole of humanity'.5[1497] As a result, a doctrine based on the defensive principle of non-intervention transformed into ?spaceless general system of intervention' of imperial expansion in the name of promoting free markets and liberal-democracy abroad.[1498] [1499] Such a transformation only serves to underscore that, in Schmitt's understanding, both empire and imperialism in the twentieth century are linked to economic forces serving as veiled forms of controlling other states. By dividing the Monroe Doctrine into two distinct phases, Schmitt is pursuing a three-fold rhetorical strategy intended for his contemporary moment. First, the division allows for Schmitt to dismiss Wilsonian universalism as an illegitimate appropriation and expansion of the Monroe Doctrine, a negation of the very principles which the doctrine was supposedly meant to espouse. Indeed, it is this earlier version of the Monroe Doctrine that Schmitt sees as delivering the principles for the establishment of a Groβdeutsches Reich. But, ?we are not simply mimicking an American precedent', Schmitt cautions; ?[...] we are merely uncovering the sound essence of a Groβraum principle in the law of nations and bringing it to its logical development for our European Groβraum'.6[1501] Schmitt's turn towards an authentic version of the Monroe Doctrine illuminates two characteristics of empire and imperialism in the twentieth century that are not present in his understanding of the concept of ?Reich': empires mobilise economic forms of control and they operate on principles of free trade, even if only nominally; such empires are universal and not confined to a specific geographical Groβraum. Indeed, Schmitt's understanding of the Reich must be read as a polemical counter-concept to American modern imperialism, one that Schmitt thought would ultimately triumph over other forms of political organisation: ?Even the German Volk had to cross through the bottleneck of state sovereignty, before it would be possible for a new German Reich to win back for Germany leadership [Fuhrung] in Europe'[1502] 3
More on the topic Reich, Empire, Imperium:
- Reich, Empire, Imperium
- The Reich in the Law of Nations
- Cavanagh Edward (ed.). Empire and Legal Thought: Ideas and Institutions from Antiquity to Modernity. Brill,2020. — 634 p., 2020
- Contents
- Law and Empire
- Select Bibliography
- 5.2 The crisis of Roman law
- Index
- INDEX