Writing in 1939, Carl Schmitt declared the coming �dawn of the concept of the Reich' in the law of nations.[1439]
It was to mark the beginning of a new age of inÂternational law and politics. Amounting to more than just a larger, more exÂpansive version of the state, this new political concept was meant to reflect both the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the formation of a Groβ- deutsches Reich in Europe.
For Schmitt, these dual events had fundamentally altered the structure of international politics and pointed to the beginnings of a new alternative to the state-based system, one that he would attempt to eluÂcidate in his Volkerrechtliche Groβraumordnung as both an overcoming of the state and a challenge to distinctively Anglo-American forms of empire and modern imperialism.This chapter responds to two previous historiographical interpretations of Schmitt's work on empire and international politics: on the one hand, the atÂtempt to construct a â€?Schmittian' theory of international politics by rendering his concepts ahistorical and universally valid,[1440] a view that overlooks Schmitt's own dictum that â€?an historical truth is only true once'[1441] and the radical historiÂcism underlying Schmitt's work; on the other hand, the attempt to rescue Schmitt by retroactively transforming him into a forerunner of â€?anticolonial
Koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:io.ii63/9789004431249_021
Edward Cavanagh - 978-90-04-43124-9
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and postcolonial thinkers’,[1442] an oversimplification of the polemical function and historical context of Schmitt’s writing under National Socialism. Rather, by reading Schmitt’s work through the lens of â€?historicity’, a methodological apÂproach Schmitt himself developed for the study of political concepts,[1443] this paÂper reconstructs three aspects of Schmitt’s concepts of the Reich and empire in international law and politics between 1938 and 1941: first, Schmitt’s rejection of the state as an essentially foreign and subversive concept for German politiÂcal aspirations; second, the concepts of empire and imperialism that underÂgirded Anglo-American efforts to assert indirect and economic forms of conÂtrol over other states, which would reach their apotheosis in Woodrow Wilson’s interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine; and third, the concept of the Reich as a new ordering principle for Europe, one based on political leadership or â€?Fuhrung’.
This chapter focuses upon an iteration of Schmitt’s thought that receded just as quickly as it emerged, a version corresponding to the brief period beÂtween 1938 and 1941.
Taken together, Schmitt’s texts from this period proclaim the end of the state and the beginning of a new spatial and legal order based on the National Socialist concept of the â€?Reich’. The year of 1938 a transformaÂtive in this analysis as it corresponds to the Anschluβ of Austria in March and the incorporation of the Sudetenland in October as clear expressions of estabÂlishing a concrete Groβdeutsches Reich through expanding into neighbouring territories.[1444] Concluding this analysis with 1941 coincides with Hitler’s violation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Schmitt’s immediate realisation that HitÂler’s strategic miscalculation could only mean the end of the Third Reich.[1445] With the imminent end of the Third Reich came an end to Schmitt’s writings on the Reich as a political concept and a return to his writings on the state, even while retaining the vocabulary of the Groβraum, which also coincided with a reinvigoration of his attacks upon legal positivism as a problem not just for Germany, but for European jurisprudence more generally: problems that he insisted had been developing since the revolutions of 1848 and threatened after World War ιι to cripple the continent. Recognising these contributions - startÂing with his attacks on Weimar positivism and culminating in multiple variaÂtions of his lecture on Die Lage der europaischen RechtswissenschaJi between 1943 and 1958 - as crucial to the history and historiography of European legal thought, this chapter cannot explore this material here.[1446] What instead will be revealed is the level of commitment shown by Schmitt towards a global frameÂwork of understanding empire, and the place of a distinctly German Reich within that framework.1