By Mathias Risse
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Forty years after his death, Carl Schmitt maintains an uneasy presence. Many consider his views odious because he supported National Socialism. Still, his perspectives on both domestic and international politics are the kind of view against which liberalism must be defended. Right now this means liberalism must be defended against an unexpected proponent of Schmitt’s views, the 47th President of the United States of America.
As far as international issues are concerned, current politics seems to vindicate Schmitt. He believed that “he who says humanity” always lies. Among other things it used to be American Exceptionalism that revealed how difficult it is to build a world where that is not so. Its impressive leadership in the human-rights domain notwithstanding, the U.S. also long was a propagator of global norms from which it often exempted itself. During the first Trump administration, economic nationalism guided by egotistical grandstanding threw many a wrench into international collaboration that had been built in response to calamitous breakdowns. American exceptionalism was replaced by economic nationalism. But it is the expansionist tendencies of his second administration, in combination with his now obvious willingness to let Russia pursue its own expansionist intentions with impunity, that make Trump the most potent democratically legitimated leader ever to seek to make Schmitt’s vision of world order a reality.
All of this is dramatically more radical than the economic nationalism of Trump’s own past. Given what we know about Schmitt, he would have little respect for Trump as a politician. But that should make supporters of human rights and pluralist democracy only more eager to oppose Trump as harbinger of a Schmittian world order – which is inhospitable to both human rights and pluralist democracy.
As developed in his main work on international affairs, the 1950 book the central notion of Schmitt’s thinking on the subject is that of Grossraum, Great Space. He envisages the world order of the near future as a constellation of ҰDzäܳ, relatively homogenous spaces organized around an empire (regional hegemon) that compete with each other. ҰDzäܳ accept the possibility of occasional warfare but limit warfare so no Grossraum collapses. Such a world would emerge, Schmitt predicts, because it brings a stability that had not been found otherwise after the breakdown of the last stable global order, colonialism.
In the modern age several European states dominated the earth, creating a nomos, an order, by domesticating war among each other as colonial powers. This order, the ius publicum Europaeum, European public law, originated when Europeans started to claim lands around the world and the British established supremacy on the oceans. These powers for the first time imposed a global nomos. Schmitt argues that global history is a history of conflict between land and sea powers. European public law was an equilibrium in this conflict. This order disintegrated in the late 19th century when “concrete order” was replaced “by an empty normativism.” By then, little space was left to absorb European aggression, and the rise of the U.S. undermined the rationale of the expiring order.
The “empty normativism” Schmitt opposes is liberalism, to him a shallow doctrine that highlights endless debate and monetary exchange as paradigmatic human activities. Liberalism overstates the importance of humanity and of individuals, as opposed to communities that alone can give meaning to individual lives. One opponent is Woodrow Wilson, who in his famously stated that his “desire is that America will come into the full light of the day when all know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.” Wilson has with liberals because of his racism. But his vision of world order as held together by international norms and institutions designed to facilitate cooperation has remained attractive. Human rights indeed have been central to it.
For Schmitt, liberalism exaggerates the importance of norms as compared to decisions and so fails to account for much of what matters in the way we live together. Since the collapse of the colonial system, or so Schmitt remained convinced until his death in 1985, no successor model has emerged that could curtail war equally well. That the colonial world operated at enormous cost to many millions of people around the world was no matter to him. What did matter was that this system prevented large-scale warfare among European empires, at least much of the time. To Schmitt an international order with global ambitions was illusionary. As he saw it, humanity naturally fell into smaller groups. Such groups worked best when they were relatively homogenous and driven by a sense of political friendship internally as well as by a sense of enmity towards other groups externally. This is the friend-enemy distinction Schmitt considers essential to politics and for which he is famous. Global institutions do violence to human nature and thus cannot endure. Schmitt thought the same of pluralistic (as opposed to homogenous) democracies. Schmitt is a champion of illiberal democracy.
Trump’s talk of reclaiming the Panama Canal and of annexing Canada and Greenland makes him an agent of Schmittian world order.
An order of ҰDzäܳ differs from the earlier ius in two ways. First, these imperial structures would not be exclusively organized around European countries. Secondly, there would be no open spaces left where aggressiveness can be discharged with impunity. But in this model too, order results from violent takings: empires impose their will on surrounding countries. We can see signs of such an order in the world. Russia’s regional ambitions, especially but not only in Ukraine, are symptomatic. China has long seemed sympathetic to something like Schmitt’s proposed world. As a regional power China seeks to increase its influence on neighboring countries and adjacent seas. Neither Russia nor China accept the premise of the human rights movement, that states are subject to international oversight and possibly suitable interference. The U.S. has always been highly ambivalent in this domain. For Schmitt, Trump’s “America-first” logic that replaced exceptionalism and advanced from economic nationalism in his first administration to an outright expansionist vision in the second would be a welcome step into the direction of a world of Great Spaces. Trump’s talk of reclaiming the Panama Canal and of annexing Canada and Greenland makes him an agent of Schmittian world order. The renaming of the Gulf of Mexico into Gulf of America by itself is comical and petty. But it is also a part of a much larger story, one of the parts easiest to accomplish.
The U.S., for Schmitt, was the wild card in international affairs all along. Its rise in the late 19th century undermined the world European colonial powers had created. Certain colonial tendencies of its own notwithstanding, the U.S. was a different (and new) kind of empire that did not fit with the system of European public law. The U.S. had to find its place in global politics, also in response to the various calamities of the 20th century (world wars and the Great Depression). It did so for some decades by building global institutions as a projection of its own. But as far as Schmitt was concerned, this could not last. The crooked timber of humanity would not be straightened out this way.
To be clear, there is more to Schmitt’s view of world order than ugly expansionism. Otherwise, his ideas would not have persevered for so long. His main concern about a rules-based international order is that it would just not manage to constrain violence sufficiently. It is not so much that he was personally hoping for an end of the kind of order liberals envisaged (though that is also true), but that he thought such an order could not bring stability. An order of Great Spaces would be organized around a version of the cuius-regio-eius-religio principle of the 1555 Augsburg Religious Peace (those who rule a territory get to determine its religion). This principle would now cover the whole globe, and the religio could be any kind of regional homogeneity. While in this manner Schmitt engages with figures (Wilson) and themes (Augsburg) that are currently not much discussed, he takes the long view on world order. Engaging with this kind of perspective is relevant at this stage. The long view is changing as we speak.
ٳ’s&Բ; distinguishes absolute from real enemies. A real enemy settles for territorial division. Absolute enmity, by contrast, exists wherever a conflict is not amenable to territorial settlement, such as a desire for world revolution or a global Islamist regime. “The enemy,” Schmitt writes, “stands at my level. For this reason I must engage him in a fight, to obtain my own measure, my own limitations, my own shape.” It is “only the denial of real enmity that clears the path for the destructive work of absolute enmity.” There is likely always going to be warfare. We can keep it at the level of real warfare or open the gates for the harsher reality of absolute warfare, in particular by criminalizing the enemy, as in institutions like the International Criminal Court. Those who are real but not absolute enemies need to find ways of dividing the world and control forces that reject territorialization of conflict. Schmitt’s Nomos, accordingly, portrayed appropriation of the globe by mutually non-intervening Great Spaces as true foundation of legitimate order (though large parts of the world would be outside of territories where warfare was minimized).
As far as Schmitt is concerned, humanity as such cannot wage war since it has no enemy on this planet. War waged on behalf of humanity is no war of humanity but one where one party hijacks certain notions to the detriment of their opponent. In his best-known work, he mentions peace, civilization, justice, progress, and humanity as notions whose usefulness lies in their applicability as fighting words. For want of an enemy humanity as such cannot engage in any meaningful shared project but can only ever be an association for production and distribution. A de-politicized world offers no higher purpose than consumption and entertainment.
These are serious challenges to a liberal world order where international institutions coordinate political, economic, public-health-related, environmental, and other activities, where human rights norms capture common standards of achievement for human flourishing, where institutions like the International Criminal Court sanction violators, and where combating climate change, human trafficking, and other international crimes as well as a shared management of technological disruptions like the arrival of Artificial Intelligence are shared priorities. The reasons for working towards such an order are familiar and remain profoundly attractive even though they are under siege right now. The first half of the twentieth century still harbors lessons as to what can happen in the absence of global collaboration (world wars and Great Depression). And every autocratic regime is a case study of a country where one group of humans is simply left to their own devices. A world order safe for and driven by human rights and pluralist democracies is the best option for human thriving (the kind available to everyone) and is very much worth fighting for.
The flow of history and current developments in the world, especially in the U.S., show how hard it is to build and maintain global collaboration. Schmitt offers what must be one of the strongest arguments as to why building such an order cannot and should not succeed: that there could not be a stable world-order that does not make sovereign nations with their ambitions the anchor of political order. But whether that is true depends on global political trends that are of human making. What Trump is currently doing illustrates how creating a world of Great Spaces will always be tempting to people in certain positions of power. I have argued elsewhere that his current foreign policy is approaching moral bankruptcy and commented on how major figures in this administration are pursuing their goals. I am bringing in Carl Schmitt here to create historical and philosophical context that highlights the magnitude of what is going on.
[For Schmitt,] Dictatorship is compatible with democratic principles, but not with liberal ideas of rule of law.
Let me conclude by drawing attention to some of Schmitt’s ideas about domestic democracy given their obvious relevance to Trump. In his 1928 , Schmitt defines democracy – a distinctly non-pluralist understanding of democracy – as “identity between the rulers and the ruled.” Substantial homogeneity rather than liberal pluralism creates democratic legitimacy. A large franchise becomes desirable, unanimity being the ideal. Dictatorship is compatible with democratic principles, but not with liberal ideas of rule of law. If the dictator has the people’s confidence even harsh rule may be appropriate, counting as self-castigation for moral improvement. Schmitt sees liberalism in tension with democracy whereas a dictatorship might embody the people’s will and thus be democratic. Trump certainly would want to see himself this way and accuse dissenters as being divisive. He is a champion of illiberal democracy and supports other champions of illiberal democracy elsewhere.
Thirty years ago, legal scholar Stephen Holmes could point out that the very existence of the U.S. served as a rebuttal of Schmitt’s theory of democracy (The Anatomy of Liberalism, 1993). That is no longer obvious, and it might come to a point where it is no longer true. It should be clear that any politician who supports a global order consisting of Schmittian Great Spaces will also favor a Schmittian version of illiberal democracy. Trump obviously does. Strengthening our own pluralist democracy and human rights commitments is the best way to prevent this from happening.
Mathias Risse, Faculty Director, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
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