INTRODUCTION

It is painful to speak of the Rhineland as an object of international politics.' So began one of Carl Schmitt's earliest published forays in the field of Volkerrecht, ‘The Rhineland as an Object of International Politics'.^[361] Originally a speech delivered on April 14, 1925 to commemorate the thou­sandth anniversary of the Rhineland, Schmitt's admission of pain echoes the sentiments of humiliation and contempt experienced by German lawyers across the ideological spectrum during the post-war period of occupation.

This chapter situates Schmitt's writing on the Rhineland within the polit­ical and discursive context of contemporary debates about mixed occupation and the relationship between forms of occupation and state sovereignty in order to draw out the originality and polemical cast of Schmitt's own contri­bution. Schmitt dramatically rejected the idea of a ‘mixed' or ‘hermaphroditic' structure within which the French occupation of the Rhineland could be rendered legally compatible with the idea that Germany as a nation-state retained its political sovereignty. His focus on what he would elsewhere defend as a resolutely historicist form of ‘concrete order thinking' about both politics and law grounded this critique of the idea of mixed sovereignty. It did so by tying it to his wider sense that Germany had become merely an ‘object' of international politics, which in turn signaled something about the decline of a traditional and shared European space of public international law within which the laws of war had been established. That shared tradition of global partitioning, which justified colonialism in the name of civilization, had now boomeranged onto a defeated Germany in a strategic move by the victorious Allied powers. Or so he claimed. Using Schmitt's post-war history of the law of nations, Der Nomos der Erde, as a historical pivot, we show how Schmitt came to link his understanding of occupation and his rejection of the legal fiction of divided, mixed or suspended sovereignty, to his similar concerns with states of siege, dictatorship and exception from his earliest writings. Relocating Schmitt's writings on the law of nations within the domestic and international crises provoked by the occupation of the Rhineland thus offers a determinate historical perspective from which to see the original contours of his later and better-known approaches to the study of law and politics.

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