THE OCCUPATION OF THE RUHR

When Schmitt arrived at the University of Bonn in 1923, having received his first permanent position after a brief exile in ‘limbo' at Greifswald, he returned to the Rhineland in the very moment of acute political crisis that shaped his writings on the law of nations for the decade to come.^[362] This crisis had its roots in the allied occupation of the Rhineland, which began as a result of the Armistice of November 11,1918.

The Treaty of Versailles put a formal end to the war, but it continued the allied occupation of the Rhineland. Indeed, the economic blockade con­tinued for several months following the Treaty, and has prompted a vigorous debate ever since about the relationship between military tactics and political ethics.^[366] But more pointedly still, Germany was to remain sovereign over the territory only in exchange for US and British assurances of defense against possible German aggression.^[367] Furthermore, the territory of the Rhineland was to remain occupied for up to fifteen years as a quasi-buffer-zone, with the gradual removal of occupying forces at five-year intervals.^[368] The costs of the occupation were to be paid by the German government, though these costs were not credited against the reparations debt.^[369] In addition, the occupation was envisioned as a form of bargaining for the fulfillment of Germany's end of the Versailles treaty obligations, and article 430 made clear that the Allied powers retained a punitive power over Germany:

In case either during the occupation or after the expiration of the fifteen years referred to above the Reparation Commission finds that Germany refuses to observe the whole or part of her obligations under the present Treaty with regard to reparation, the whole or part of the areas specified in Article 429 will be re-occupied immediately by the Allied and Associated forces.^[370]

The fate of the Rhineland thus became intimately linked to the international legal order established by the Treaty of Versailles.

John Maynard Keynes had signaled his awareness of the instability of the settlement, and even if his financial accounting has been challenged, his assessment of the political implications of an enforced peace remains presci­ent.^[371] More broadly, however, lawyers and politicians amplified the colonial and highly gendered dimensions of this occupation for their own ends. Propagandists like E.D. Morel stoked fears of a ‘black horror' on the Rhine in the form of French colonial troops occupying the territory, allegedly raping and pillaging as they went, thus allowing the ‘shame' of peace by Diktat to mirror the manufactured ‘shame' of a European power subdued by soldiers who, at least in the eyes of international law and its norms, had typically been seen as ‘barbarians' and should not have been fighting in a ‘white' and ‘European' war in the first place.^[372]

Within the broader context of this perceived national dishonor in the wake of Versailles, the Rhineland occupation also became an integral part of German efforts to undercut the legitimacy of the ‘Diktatfrieden'. Turning the principles laid out in the opening articles of the Treaty against the actual implementation of the treaty in the Rhineland, for example, was a popular strategy. Where Wilson had championed the right to self-determination, the High Commission proclaimed a right to ‘veto the appointment of any German official designated to serve in the occupied territories if in the opinion of the High Commission such action is necessary for the maintenance, safety, and requirements of the Allied and Associated forces'.^[373] This direct reference to article 3 of the Rheinlandabkommen was upheld in order to claim that the Allied forces were violating a sacred principle of German legal thought, the Rechtsstaat.^[374] Indeed, such interplay between domestic political and rhet­orical positioning alongside wider international legal argument structured much of German strategy during the 1920s.

For Schmitt, however, all of this paled in comparison to the events of the crisis that began on January 11, 1923, when columns of French and Belgian soldiers marched into the Ruhrgebiet to ensure that Germany would fulfill its reparation obligations. In turn, the German government called for passive resistance against the occupation, the only form of resistance left to a demili­tarized country, which included efforts ‘to impede the transport of merchan­dise and raw materials'.^[376] However, strikes by workers triggered an economic crisis in the region, as the national government no longer received tax revenue from the region in the same moment that it issued replacement wages for striking workers. As a result, the occupation created a crisis in the assertion of state territorial sovereignty, as well as instigated a more diffuse economic pressure that made passive resistance ultimately ineffective.^[377]

Consequently, on September 26,1923, Stresemann called for an end to the program of passive resistance, driven by the realization that it was draining state coffers and crippling the economy of the Ruhr.^[378] However, economic crisis had laid the conditions for a separatist movement in the Rhineland, which briefly succeeded in October 1923 in proclaiming a Rhenische Republik and plunging the region into further chaos. Although the movement eventu­ally collapsed, its legal recognition by Paul Tirard, the high commissioner of the Inter-Allied High Commission, only fueled suspicions of a wider inter­national attempt to separate the Rhineland from the German Reich. Amid this confusion and political upheaval, leading German lawyers moved to re­appropriate the language of occupation to try and reconcile the facts on the ground with the artifice of legalistic conceptual construction, in order to defend the idea that Germany, while nevertheless occupied, retained the formal marks of sovereignty.

6.3