On the relevance of Carl Schmitt’s concept of Großraum in contemporary international politics
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219874431 |
| Author | Roberto Orsi |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219874431
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(3) 295 –315
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219874431
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On the relevance of Carl
Schmitt’s concept of
Großraum in contemporary
international politics
Roberto Orsi
The University of Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
Since the end of the Cold War, a number of authors have affirmed the relevance
of Carl Schmitt’s concept of Großraum for contemporary international politics. This
article reviews those claims and argues that Großraum has little to offer in analytical
terms to enhance our understanding of the international political situation in this early
twenty-first century. Those authors who wish to revive Großraum for the sake of their
theoretical work overlook vitally important components of this concept. Furthermore,
their claims fail to meet the criteria of Reinhart Koselleck’s structural iterability.
Keywords
Carl Schmitt, geopolitics, Großraum, international political theory
Introduction
International political theory scholars have systematically explored Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre,
often seeking useful theoretical ideas to be employed in their own work. Schmitt’s friend
and enemy dialectic, political theology, the katechon, the nomos of the Earth and his
political-spacial concepts have all found their way in international political discussions
with a varying degree of success. Among those concepts is the idea of Großraum.1 In
assessing the use of Großraum within international political theory, this article, on one
hand, offers an analysis of Großraum’s structural components and of the context in which
it was envisaged, while, on the other hand, evaluating the chances of its iterability in the
largely different circumstances of the present time, by employing the theory of asym-
metrical counterconcepts developed by Reinhart Koselleck (1989: 211–259). In contrast
Corresponding author:
Roberto Orsi, Graduate School of Public Policy, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo
113-0033, Japan.
Email: orsi@pp.u-tokyo.ac.jp
874431IPT0010.1177/1755088219874431Journal of International Political TheoryOrsi
research-article2019
Article
296 Journal of International Political Theory 17(3)
to those authors who claim that Großraum can enhance our understanding of contempo-
rary international politics and geopolitics, this article argues that this is not the case.
Carl Schmitt famously argued in his Der Begriff des Politischen that all political
concepts have a polemical sense (Schmitt, 2009 [1932]: 29). As the political is struc-
tured around the friend-enemy dialectic, political concepts both enhance, and are
shaped by, relations of enmity. While the friend-enemy dialectic in the definition of the
political presents a symmetric structure, and the political is not per se polemical, the
historical operationalisation of enmity invariably requires the creation of political con-
cepts, which Schmitt defined as inherently polemical, being introduced as bearers of
particular interests by specific actors, explicitly or implicitly in opposition to the inter-
ests of other actors.
Reinhart Koselleck, whose work on the history of political concepts is openly
acknowledging Schmitt’s influence, offered in his Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik
geschichtlicher Zeiten (Futures Past: On the Semantic of Historical Time) a theoretical
framework for the exploration of how asymmetric concepts shape the self-other dialec-
tic, which is the engine of identity production. He particularly addressed concepts which
he indicated as ‘asymmetric counterconcepts’ (asymmetrische Gegenbegriffe): concep-
tual pairs where one term of the relation is engaged (angesprochen) but not fully recog-
nised (anerkannt) as equal (Koselleck, 1989: 211). The relation between concept and
counterconcept is constantly changing, and so the ethical value attached to its terms. For
instance, in the Greek/barbarian dichotomy, initially to be understood from the perspec-
tive of the Greeks who envisaged it, a negative connotation was attached to the barbar-
ian. However, this was later overhauled in a number of ways. Stoic philosophers, partially
anticipating the Pauline unity of mankind in Christ, already saw the non-Greek primarily
as a fellow cosmopolitan citizen of the oikoumene. For others, for instance Tacitus, the
barbarians of the North possessed superior moral qualities unfortunately lost by his fel-
low Romans as a consequence of corruption (anticipating the myth of the bon sauvage).
The ethical value attached to the terms of an asymmetric conceptual pair can shift to the
point of being reversed, and asymmetric counterconcepts may be iterated with modifica-
tions, sometimes substantial, throughout the history of (political) ideas. Yet, the condi-
tions of their successful iterability are not always available.
In the case of Großraum, this article argues that, as a polemical concept, Großraum
should be situated within the horizon of the asymmetric conceptual pair of human/non-
human. The reproduction of this human/non-human dialectic is the key to the problem of
Großraum’s structural iterability, as already alluded to by Martti Koskenniemi (2002:
434–435). In other words, as it will be explained below, Großraum assumes meaningful-
ness as the territorial-spacial articulation of a response to the problem of ‘humanity’ in a
transient phase of Schmitt’s work.
Schmitt initially approached the problem of humanity from the perspective of interna-
tional law in his effort to attack the Treaty of Versailles, and the political-ideological
(Wilsonian) structure underneath, which constituted the object of his polemical engage-
ment. In his Die Wendung zum diskiminierenden Kriegsbegriff (Schmitt, 2005 [1937]:
518–566), he described President Wilson’s declaration of war on Germany, pronounced on
2 April 1917, as the beginning of an effort to dehumanise the enemy in the name of human-
ity, as the US President declared that ‘[t]he present German submarine warfare against
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