teschke schmitt marx geopolitics political balakrishnan review

8/6/2019 Teschke Schmitt Marx Geopolitics Political Balakrishnan Review

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new left review 69may jun 201181

benno teschke

THE FETISH OF GEOPOLITICS

Reply to Gopal Balakrishnan

Gopal balakrishnan is one o the oremost experts in theAnglo-American world on the lie and work o Carl Schmitt,

and I am grateul or his response in nlr 68, The Geopolitics

o Separation, to my essay on the thinker, Decisions and

Indecisions, in nlr 67.1 Balakrishnans intellectual biography o

Schmitt, The Enemy, remains, according to one eminent voice in theeld, the best English-language study on the subject.2 For a critical

American scholar, the attraction o exploring and validating Schmitt as

a radical and insightul critic o American imperialism and its liberal-cosmopolitan apologists would seem unobjectionable. Schmitt deployed

a remorseless and uncompromising vocabulary to dissect the crisis o

the legal orm in the inter-war period, analysing the pathologies o liberal

international law and the relations between constitutionalism, democ-

racy and emergency powers, in order systematically to deconstruct the

practice and ideology o the liberal-capitalist zone o peaceand with

it, the incipient neutralization o inter-state relations.

Within this context, Balakrishnan not only regards Schmitt as a neces-

sary complement to Marx, but clearly as a superior analytical voice and

point o reerence in ully understanding the legal-political controversies

and geopolitics that marked the crisis-ridden transition rom the ius pub-licum europaeumthe classical European inter-state order, regulated byinternational lawto an apparently de-politicized legal-moral universal-

ism, codied in the Versailles Peace Treaty and institutionalized in the

League o Nations. Schmitt, Balakrishnan suggests, identied a politico-jurisprudential problematicand developed a corresponding categorial

registerthat Marx, in his own time, had never ully addressed or


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82nlr 69conceptualized. The systematic exploration o this register constitutes

the strength o Balakrishnans outstanding study.

Yet, given Balakrishnans Marxist credentials and background, the remit

and objective o what is, ater all, an intellectual portrait, remain curi-

ously restricted. The introduction to The Enemy rames his approachrom the angle o a diachronic contextualization and intertextual recon-

struction o Schmitts work, resulting in a provisional ramework or

the comprehensive and critical evaluation o his thought. The rst aim

conveys the nature o the work better than the second. For this promise

o critiquealready toned down by Balakrishnans preatory warning

that adopting the role o either prosecutor or deence attorney in dis-

cussing Schmitt presents a alse choiceremains unullled.3 Critiquein The Enemy hardly ever reaches beyond occasional and rhetorical re-erences to Schmitt as a deeply disturbing gure. In the process, the

studys emphasis on textual exposition and reconstruction relegates any

systematic critique o the intellectual architecture, analytical purchase

and political legacy o Schmitts thought to the sidelines, rendering the

work primarily a philological, exegetic and inormational exercisewith

greetings rom Germany to the us. In act, Schmittian categories now

seem to orm the strategic centre o Balakrishnans broader refectionson the grand contours o the post-Cold War international scene, encap-

sulated in the master-idea o neutralizations.4

More than a decade ater The Enemys date o publication, such proessedequidistance and equanimity, turning in the interim into embrace rather

than critique, can no longer be aorded (i it ever could). The growing

recognition and celebration o Schmitt in the wider social sciences

and, specically, in the eld o International Relations, the actuality o

1 Gopal Balakrishnan, The Geopolitics o Separation: Response to Teschkes

Decisions and Indecisions, nlr 68, MarchApril 2011; and Benno Teschke,Decisions and Indecisions: Political and Intellectual Receptions o Carl Schmitt,

nlr 67, JanuaryFebruary 2011. I would like to thank Frdrick Guillaume Duour,

Kees van der Pijl, Justin Rosenberg, Sam Knao, Kamran Matin, Stean Wyn-Jonesand the members o the Sussex pm Research Group or comments.2 Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait o Carl Schmitt, Londonand New York 2000. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer o Nations: The Riseand Fall o International Law 18701960, Cambridge 2001, p. 423.3 Balakrishnan, The Enemy, pp. 3, 1.4 Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age o War, London andNew York 2009, pp. iivxiv.


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teschke:Reply to Balakrishnan83Schmittian tropes in 21st-century American oreign-policy circles and

the current contestation o dictatorial states o exception across the

Middle East, rom Tunisia and Egypt via Syria to Bahrain, have sharply

re-politicized his signicance, reception and legacy.

Restating the argument

In this context, my intervention in nlr 67 was ormally organized

around ve axes o inquiry. The rst part provided an exposition o

Schmitts grand historical-conceptual narrative o the spatial revolutions

that punctuate the history o international law and order, rom the New

World Discoveries to Hitlers Groraumpolitik; ollowed by an outline

o current neo-Schmittian attempts to comprehend an altered con-temporary geopolitical constellation in comparable terms. The second

section, drawing on Reinhard Mehrings recent biography o Schmitt,

set out a compressed diachronic contextualization o his intellectual

and political trajectory.5 It concluded that Schmitts thought, ar rom

constituting the ad hoc, disconnected and conjunctural interventions oan intellectual bricoleurand ootloose adventurist, can be better under-stood as revolving around an organic and consistent set o intellectual

and political preoccupations, expressed in a recognizable problematic:the crisis o legal determinacy, the value o the state executive, German

autonomy, political and geopolitical order in times o extremes. In ace

o these, Schmitt developed a series o ever more radicalized solutions:

rom his proto-decisionist writings o the late Kaiserreich and deenceo the legality o Imperial Germanys war during the 1920s, via the

conception o the political in terms o the agonal riendenemy binary

in the late 1920s and advocacy o presidential emergency powers dur-

ing the crisis o the Weimar Republic (his denition o sovereignty), tothe ull-throated embrace o the total state, the Fhrer-principle andinsistence on territorial conquests as theons et origo o all internationallaw, as the Wehrmacht marched towards Moscow. Though his naturalintellectual maturation and political opportunism aorded conceptual

adjustments and theoretical shits that need to be registered, it is this

underlying Leitmotivrather than any uniying ascist logicthatorms Schmitts basso continuo, which any de-totalization o his thought

is likely to render invisible.

5 Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: Austieg und Fall, Eine Biographie, Munich 2009.


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84nlr 69The third and central part o my essay perormed two tasks: rst, it

mounted an immanent critique o the gap between Schmitts core

theoretical axiomsdecisionism, concept o the political, concrete-

order-thinking, and their substantive analogues: state o emergency,

riendenemy distinction, nomosand the historical narrative con-structed on their premises, outlining deciencies in both. It was my

thesis that this triple axiomatic consistently suppressed social relations

as a relevant category o analysis or the history o international law,

while elevating the abstraction o antagonistic power, the etish o the

political (and geopolitical), to the neuralgic centre o Schmitts thought.

This theoretical orientation is actively consonant with the political

Schmitt as a counter-revolutionary tatist and, later, ascist thinker.

Furtherand against Schmitts own advice6the section probedwhether it was possible to extricate Schmitts conceptual apparatus as

a generic analytic to illuminate past and present geopolitical transor-

mations and congurations, as the neo-Schmittian literature seems to

suggest, answering in the negative. The essay then examined Schmitts

notion oGroraum, as the territorial unit or a new planetary region-alism and the central juridical category o the Nazi new international

order, along with his ex post attempts to sanitize this categorys political

complicity with Hitlers Groraumpolitik.

The nal section returned to Schmitts intellectual and political legacy,

indicatingcontra Mehrings thesis o his role as a quantit ngligeablein the Federal Republic o Germany and beyondSchmitts proound

impact within (West) German social sciences, his infuential role in

the American disciplines o politics and International Relations and,

more specically, in American neo-conservative thought, which pro-

vided the ideological backdrop to the oreign policy o the Bush iipresidency. Moral aversion was reserved or the epilogue; no aprior-

istic ideological condemnations should oreclose the analytical view

on Schmitts thought.

Case or the deence?

Balakrishnans response declines to engage with the ormal com-

position o my essay, which delineated precisely the relationship

6 All political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning. They are

ocused on a specic confict and are bound to a concrete situation. Carl Schmitt,

The Concept o the Political [1927], Chicago 1996, p. 30.


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teschke:Reply to Balakrishnan85between theoretical assumptions, ideological limitations and political

alignments that he demands. Instead, he couches his response in

terms o an overriding and, ultimately, banal summary judgement: my

intervention was tarnished by an ideological dismissal o Schmitt that

blocked a careul unscrambling o what is alive and what is dead in

his thoughta task that can only be perormed by (yet another) sober

diachronic contextualization and a critically inormed interrogation o

his entire oeuvre.

From this core message derive several relevant, but secondary charges:

that I misrepresent Schmitts awareness o the socio-economic pre-

conditions o emergency powers; confate Schmitts writings o the

Weimar and Nazi periods; misread Schmitts wider history o inter-national law and order; and overlook an inconvenient and possibly

embarrassing similarity between Schmitts ascist epic o the rise and

all o the Westphalian System and my own interpretation o Europes

long-term trajectory, leading to the objection that my conception o

capitalist geopoliticsthe alleged geopolitics o separationlooks

one-dimensional compared to Schmitts dialectical reading o the rela-

tion between geopolitics, statehood and capitalist development. The

response concludes with a nonchalant dismissal o the signicance oSchmitts infuence on neo-conservative oreign policy, suggested to be

in line with the structural continuity o Americas role in the world.

Throughout his response, Balakrishnan attempts to diuse my cri-

tique o Schmitt by composing a orilegium o citations gleaned romthe ephemera o Schmitts writings, rather than directly conronting hiscentral theoretical propositions, developed in the texts that dominate

the Schmitt reception and discussion.

In the ollowing, I will argue that any theoretical, rather than biographi-

cal, reading will disclose that a Schmittian sociology o sovereignty

or emergency is a contradiction in terms. I will urther clariy why

Schmitts history o international law and order, especially as outlined

in The Nomos, has to be understood in context-specic ideological terms,which render it deeply problematic on theoretical, logical and empirical

grounds. By contrast, I will remind Balakrishnan how my own attempts

to rethink this history rom the angle o Political Marxism lead to aundamentally dierent historical narrative, which Balakrishnan mis-

represents. Rather than implying that Schmitt and Marx can be read

as mutually supplementary critics o liberalism and capitalism, I will


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86nlr 69suggest that the ontological, epistemological and theoretical premises o

Marxism are diametrically opposed to Schmitts, orcing us to renew our

eorts to rethink the history o geopolitics in genuinely Marxian terms.

I will conclude by arguing that, rather than conceive o Schmitts theo-

retical apparatus as complementary to Marxs, there is more evidence

to suggest that Schmitt understood his own intellectual production in

terms o an anti-Marx or his own times.7

Sociology o the emergency?

According to Balakrishnan, my account missed Schmitts many attempts

to rame the problem o emergency powers in socio-political terms.8

Drawing a line rom Schmitts recognition o the rise o the proletariatto the nancial crisis o the Weimar state, set in train by the Versailles

reparations, Balakrishnan implies a deep awareness on Schmitts part

o the socio-economic determinants that produced the instrument o

the state o emergency. But this is not tantamount to the much more

demandingand implausibleproposition that Schmitt articulated

or understood his own history and theory o sovereignty in terms o a

historical sociology o constitutional developments. Balakrishnan ails

to distinguish between historical reerences and theoretical concepts.For no amount o localized commentary and exemplary illustration

can validate the suggestion that Schmitt systematically incorporated

the sociological as the strategic point o reerence or a reormulated

approach to the history o constitutional developments. Social relations

remained theoretically exterior to, and systematically excluded rom,

his conception o sovereignty, as ormalized in political decisionism.

Sovereign is he who decides over the state o exceptionan absolute

decision created out o nothingness.9

This denitional narrowinginact: erasureo the net o determinations o the decision to an unmedi-

ated subjective act is the essence o Schmitts idea o sovereignty. Quisiudicabit? Who will decide?

7 Charge twoBalakrishnans suggestion (nlr 68, pp. 634) that I confated

Schmitts Weimar and Nazi writingsseems disingenuous: see Decisions andIndecisions, pp. 707. I there was one decisive theoretical caesura, but not a hia-

tus, in Schmitts writings, I would locate it in The Three Types o Juristic Thought

(1934). Schmitts deep-seated and, at times, histrionic anti-Semitism is discussedin Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The Jewish Question, the Holocaust andGerman Legal Theory, Madison, wi 2007.8 Balakrishnan, Geopolitics o Separation, p. 61.9 Schmitt, Political Theology [1922], Cambridge, ma 1985, p. 66.


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teschke:Reply to Balakrishnan87Social orces do not enter Schmitts denition o the extra-normative

declaration o the state o emergency, which remained analytically a

supra-sociological, extra-constitutional (as well as ideologically anti-

social) devicea liminal conceptor the restoration o order. In this

context, it should be recalled that Schmitts decision to dene sover-

eignty in terms o the exception was not the result o a dispassionate

and scholarly enquiry into the ultimate locus o power, but a politicized

and normative intervention into the jurisprudential debates on the

interpretation o the Weimar Constitutions Article 48, on the scope o

presidential emergency powers and executive government by decree.

For Schmitt, sovereignty should reside in the authoritative decision,rendering it a non-relational concept, outside society and even outside

politicsanalogous to the miracle in theology. Balakrishnan surelyknows that Schmitt explicitly related his notion o the exception to politi-

cal theology, rather than a historical sociology o public law.

While Schmitts The Dictatorship advances a much richer history o statetheory and constitutional lawrom the classical Roman institution o

the dictator to Weimars Article 48than his Political Theology, socialrelations remain empirically acknowledged, but theoretically undi-

gested.10 Schmitt is not known or read as a theoretician o the inter-wareconomic downturn, revolutions and civil wars; and no neo-Schmittian

writer, as ar as I am aware, has actually reormulated Schmitts ultra-

narrow denition o the exception to develop a theoretical perspective on

sovereignty that would enlarge its scope to incorporate the historicity o

dierential social relations o power. Schmitt developed a legal-political

register, unsupported by sociological or political-economic analogues.

This does not per se invalidate this register, but leaves it suspended in

mid-air. Schmitt constructed legal-political concepts against the crisis othe Weimar state, rather than concepts o the crisis. That a historicalsociology o the exception remains a distinct possibilityand an ongo-

ing research desideratumrom an alternative Marxist perspective can

be learned rom the writings o Schmitts disciples, Franz Neumann and

Otto Kirchheimer, on the nexus between capitalist crisis, the dissolution o

10 Schmitt, Die Diktatur: Von den Anngen des Modernen Souvernittsgedanken biszum Proletarischen Klassenkamp[1921], 7th edn, Berlin 2006. For a brie statisticalsurvey that relates the declaration o states o emergency to strikes and class confict

(rather than to martial law) see Mark Neocleous, The Problem with Normality:Taking Exception to Permanent Emergency, Alternatives, vol. 31, no. 2, 2006,pp. 191213.


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88nlr 69the rule o law and the legal structure o Nazism.11 A distinctly Schmittian

sociology o power remains, however, a contradiction in terms.

Towards a Marxist geopolitics

Balakrishnan urther suggests that Schmitts work and my own share

common theoretical orientations, as what Schmitt wrote oten seems

to touch on the conceptual centre o [Teschkes] Marxist understanding

o modern statehood and geopolitics, which hinges on the historical

process o the separation o the political rom the economic, o coer-

cion rom the conditions o surplus appropriation.12 From this premise,

three consecutive moves ollow or Balakrishnan. First, that in my

reading this separation, once established, never becomes problem-atic in the subsequent history o capitalismthe alleged geopolitics

o separation. In contrast, Schmitts reading o the multi-level crisis

entailed by the collapse o the distinction between state and economy,

or inter-state system and capitalist world-market, generated a much

more dialectical interpretation. Second, that Schmitts historiography

o the rise and all o the Westphalian inter-state system, as set out in

The Nomos o the Earth (1950), constitutes a similar, iin toto superior,

narrative to my Myth o 1648; and, third, that Schmitts history demon-strates greater anities and parallels with Marxs original categories

than I would allow.

The point o departure o my wider work was to develop a research

programme that would incorporate the problematic o geopolitics,

theoretically and historically, into a revised Marxist ramework. The rela-

tive absence o geopolitics in Marxs and Engelss own works, and the

hitherto insucient attempts to resolve this challenge rom within theMarxist tradition, ormed the reerence point or my critique, inormed

by the premises o Political Marxism.13The Myth o 1648 built on andurther problematized the pathbreaking work by Robert Brenner, Ellen

11 Wolgang Luthard, ed., Von der Weimarer Republik zum Faschismus: Die Ausungder Demokratischen Rechtsordnung, Frankurt 1976; Franz Neumann, Behemoth: TheStructure and Practice o National Socialism, New York 1944; William Scheuerman,Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankurt School and the Rule o Law,

Cambridge, ma 1994; Scheuerman, ed., The Rule o Law under Siege: Selected Essayso Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, Berkeley 1996.12 Balakrishnan, Geopolitics o Separation, p. 62.13 For a critical survey on Marxism and International Relations see Teschke,

Marxism, in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds, The Oxord Handbooko International Relations, Oxord 2008, pp. 16387.


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teschke:Reply to Balakrishnan89Wood and George Comninel on the class conficts driving the transi-

tion towards agrarian-capitalist social property relations in late medieval

and early modern England.14 One o its aims was to show how the con-

ceptual assumption o a dierentiation between the economic and the

political in capitalism translates into a historical account o the contested

construction o a new orm o English 17th-century sovereignty, culmi-

nating in the 1688 ormula o the King-in-Parliament: a parliamentary,

constitutional monarchy that institutionalized, though in non-linear

ways, the ormal separation between a public, de-personalized state

and a privatized economic sphere. Post-1688 England also started to

develop new oreign-policy techniques, encapsulated in balancing

within the context o a pre-capitalist and predominantly absolutist

European inter-state system.

I capitalism is conceived not as a de-politicized and de-subjectied mar-

ket economy, governed by economic laws, but as a set o socio-politically

contested social relations, the implications o its rise cannot be conceived

in terms o abstract logical derivations, but demand a radical historiciza-

tion o its urther, inter-state development. For the separation-argument

is not conceived as an absolute, once-and-or-all insulation o spheres,

but as an internal relation between states and markets whose degreeso de-politicization and re-politicization depend on historically concrete

praxes. Capitalism is a relation o power. This also implies that capitalist

social relationsonce established in one countrydo not automatically

and transnationally replicate themselves across the components o the

international system. The articulation o their international eects and

implications requires a sharp move away rom teleology, rom a uni-

versalizing structural economism and a geopolitical unctionalism; it

demands a geopolitics as process, rather than superstructure.

These elementary ideas resulted in a novel research prospectus, explicitly

opposed to the Communist Maniestos cosmopolitan universalismthe expansion o a capitalist world-market as the mega-subject o

14 Teschke, The Myth o 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making o Modern InternationalRelations, London and New York 2003. See also T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin,eds, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in

Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge 1985; Ellen Wood, Democracy against Capitalism:Renewing Historical Materialism, Cambridge 1995; George Comninel, Rethinkingthe French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, London and New York1987. See also Heide Gerstenberger, Impersonal Power: History and Theory o theBourgeois State [1990], Leiden 2007.


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90nlr 69world history; curiously echoed in Schmitts long-term prognostics

o a spaceless universalism. The new geopolitical Marxism not only

demands a re-politicization o capitalist development, as a contested

and regionally dierentiated institutionalization o social relations, but

also a radical geopoliticization o its historical course, initially reracted

through the drive o pre-capitalist absolutist territorial polities towards

geopolitical accumulation. Contra Marx and Engels, The Myth o 1648argued that the expansion o capitalism was a political and, a ortiori,a geopolitical process, in which pre-capitalist ruling classes had to

design counter-strategies o reproduction to deend their position in an

international environment that put them at an economic and coercive

disadvantage:

More oten than not, it was heavy artillery that battered down pre-capitalistwalls, and the construction and reconstruction o these walls required new

state strategies o modernization. These . . . ranged rom the intensication

o domestic relations o exploitation and the build-up o an increasinglyrepressive state apparatus or military and scal mobilization, via enlight-

ened policies o neo-mercantilism and imperialism, to the adoption o

liberal economic policies.

While the initial impetus towards modernization and capitalist transor-mation was geopolitical, state responses to this pressure were reracted

through respective class relations in national contexts, including class

resistance. In this sense, the alignment o the provinces generated

nothing but national Sonderwege (special paths):

I Britain showed its neighbours the image o their uture, it did so in a

highly distorted way. Conversely, Britain never developed a pristine cultureo capitalism, since she was rom the rst dragged into an international

environment that infected her domestic politics and long-term develop-ment. The distortions were mutual. The transposition o capitalism to theContinent and the rest o the world was riddled with social conficts, civil

and international wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions.15

This perspective prompted my ongoing reconceptualization o politi-

cal Marxism into geopolitical Marxism, to problematize the orthodox

Marxist notion o bourgeois revolution.16 The historical substantia-

tion o these programmatic notes and the extension o the story oThe15 Teschke, The Myth o 1648, pp. 2656.16 Teschke, Bourgeois Revolution, State-Formation and the Absence o theInternational, Historical Materialism, vol. 13, no. 2, 2005, pp. 212.


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teschke:Reply to Balakrishnan91Myth o 1648 into the nineteenth century and beyond are yet to come.However, the idea that, once established, two logicsthe geopolitics

o the inter-state system and the transnationalizing economics o a

capitalist world-marketcan travel unproblematically and in unison

side by side is the exact opposite o my argument.17 Balakrishnans

ascription o a geopolitics o separation to my work thus represents a

substantial misreading.

Aporias o concrete-order thought

Does Schmitt provide a geopolitics o non-separation, possibly even a

dialectical one, which keeps geopolitics and geo-economics internally

related? To ascertain this, Schmitts substantive writings on law andhistory would need to be re-anchored in the reormulated theoretical

premises announced in his 1934 paradigm shit rom decisionism to

concrete-order-thinking. He rst deployed this to replace the liberal

and universalist idea o the rule o lawand its increasingly threat-

ened principles o generality and predictabilityby a situation-bound

de-ormalization o law, upheld by and encased in dierent nationally

homogeneous legal cultures.18 As Schmitts preoccupations moved rom

constitutional to international law during the mid-1930s, he realizedthat political decisionism was insucient to capture the politics and

geopolitics o land-appropriations and spatial revolution, which he now

privileged as oundational, constitutive acts o world-ordering, so as to

write the history o international law as an anti-liberal, anti-normative

tract. The subsequent shit to concrete-order-thinking was meant to rem-

edy this explanatory vacuum. It is premised on a single and axiomatic

thesis: that all legal orders are concrete, territorial orders, ounded by an

original, constitutive act o land-capture. This establishes a primary andradical title to land: a nomosa unity o space, power and law.19

Given this turn to the concrete, how could Schmitt theoretically account

or his otherwise perceptive remarks on the separation o the economic

17 This argument is urther developed in Teschke, Debating The Myth o 1648:

State-Formation, the Interstate System and the Rise o CapitalismA Rejoinder,

International Politics, vol. 43, no. 5, 2006, pp. 53173; and Teschke and Hannes

Lacher, The Many Logics o Capitalist Competition, Cambridge Review oInternational Aairs, vol. 20, no. 4, 2007, pp. 56580.18 Schmitt, On the Three Types o Juristic Thought, Westport, ct 2004.19 Schmitt, The Nomos o the Earth in the International Law o the Ius PublicumEuropaeum, New York 2003, pp. 447.


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92nlr 69and political, the world market and inter-state system, which ormed the

historical condition o possibility or a transnationalizing us imperial-

ism, without negating his axiomatics? Even to begin to grasp this double

separation, Schmitt had to have recourse to the Hegelian-Marxist gure

o thought o the separation between society and the state, which he duly

acknowledged in a ootnote. Balakrishnan might be right that the multi-

level crisis o this constitutive dierence is, in act, the central problem

cutting across nearly all o Schmitts writings on the inter-war disorder.20

But Schmitts turn to international political economy imperilled the core

o his geopolitical axiomatic: a retraction rom concrete-order-thinking

and a move towards a transnational economism, reserved or Anglo-

American liberal imperialism but bracketed or inter-war Germany.

For Schmitts theoretical excursion into the eld o international politi-

cal economy orced him to change theoretical registersa volte ace notlicensed by his method o concrete-order-thinking. Where Schmitt exca-

vates the roots o the new universal order, he is pressed into an analysis

o the international political economy o American rulean analysis that

contradicts his premise that every international legal order is grounded

in an original and constitutive act o land appropriation. For Wilhelmine

Germany was not invaded, occupied or annexed. Capitalisms border-cancelling tendency also cancels the core thesis o his ascist period.

What ultimately emerges is less a dialectical reading o geopolitics and

geo-economics, but rather the etishization o a German ormal empire

against an inormal us imperialism, insulated rom any enquiry into the

domestic political economy o ascist imperialism. The ormer arises

like a deus ex machina rom the purely political invocation o the riendenemy distinction to counter the abstract Western notion o a spaceless

universalism with the German concrete-order, a ascist Groraum.21

A Nomos or Das Kapital?

Having suggested that my text gives scant consideration to Schmitts

Weimar writings, i.e. the texts or which he is best known and orm

the basis o almost all o the contemporary reception o his work,

Balakrishnan nally turns to Schmitts ascist literature, The Leviathan

20 Balakrishnan, Geopolitics o Separation, p. 62.21 For the policy-impact and widespread circulation o the terms Groraum andGroraumwirtschat in 193345, see the documents collected in Reinhard Opitz, ed.,Europastrategien des Deutschen Kapitals, 19001945, Cologne 1977, parts iii and iv.


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teschke:Reply to Balakrishnan93in the State Theory o Thomas Hobbes (1938), Land and Sea (1942) andThe Nomos o the Earththe central text or the current Schmittophiliain the discipline o International Relationswhile ignoring Schmitts

Vlkerrechtliche Groraumordnung (1939): the intellectual blueprint orhis conception o the new ascist greater territorial order. According

to Balakrishnan, The Nomos was a piece o saturnine melancholia,written when the contours o German deeat in the East were already

visible ater Stalingrad. This is a misrepresentation o its conception

and intention, though its execution had to square the divergence o

unolding historical reality with its core thesis: land-appropriations.

Rather than a coda and lamenta conservative retrospect on the ori-

gins o an inter-state civilization that had arisen out o the ery chaos

o war and primitive appropriations, which now seemed to be return-ing to it, as Balakrishnan suggestsThe Nomos was designed as theocial celebration and justication o Hitlers Groraumpolitik, whichSchmitt reconnected with pre-liberal nomos-constituting acts o land-appropriations, legitimizing both.22 What had come to an end was not

the inter-state civilization o the ius publicum europaeum (terminated atVersailles, 1919), but rather the new Germanic vision o intra-regional

law and order, revolving around a pluriverse o co-existing pan-regions,

that was Schmitts counter-programme to liberal capitalisms spacelessuniversalism. The Red Army had not only put an end to the Wehrmacht,it had also decapitated the cap-stone oThe Nomosthe unnished nalchapter and the missing Conclusionorcing it into an abrupt and

speculative ending. This was evidenced by the absence o the three cor-

ollaries which were added to the 2003 English translation, written by

Schmitt in the 1950s, rom the German original.

Balakrishnans attempt to dissociate The Nomos, as a post-ascist ater-thought, rom Schmitts pro-ascist writings is ultimately grounded in

his inattention to concrete-order-thinking as the uniying theoretical per-

spective in Schmitts writings in and or the Third Reich.23 This unity o

22 For the genesis o The Nomos see Peter Haggenmachers introduction to theFrench edition. Schmitt, Le Nomos de la Terre dans le Droit des Gens du Jus PublicumEuropaeum, Paris 2001, pp. 144.23 The concepts oGroraum and nomos were foated in 1928 and remained cen-

tral organizing terms thereater. Carl Schmitt, Vlkerrechtliche Probleme imRheingebiet, in Positionen und Begrie im Kamp mit Weimar-Gen-Versailles, 19231939 [1940], Berlin 1988, pp. 97108. See also Schmitt, Staat, Groraum, Nomos:Arbeiten aus den Jahren 19161969, ed. Gnther Maschke, Berlin 1995.


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94nlr 69Schmitts Nazi texts, theoretically secured by The Three Types o JuristicThought, is expressed in the trilogy oThe Order o Greater Spaces, Landand Sea and The Nomos, each illuminating the idea o land-appropriationsthrough a dierent registerthe legal structure o Nazi inter-regional

law, the geo-mythology o the elementary distinction between land and

sea, and the history o international law rom the New World Discoveries

onwards. How could The Nomos o the Earth, written between 1942 and1945, and Land and Sea, published in 1942, not have been conceivedas long historico-legal detours to accumulate the intellectual resources

and arguments to legitimize Hitlers Raumrevolutiona re-writing ohistory by one o the leading intellectuals o the ascendant Axis power?

In a passage on the legal innovations and conceptual neologisms that

accompany modern American imperialism, Schmitt notes that hewho has real power is also capable o determining concepts and words;

Caesar dominus est supra grammaticam: Caesar is lord over grammar.24A German legal-political counter-vocabulary was required to regain exis-

tential autonomy in the geopolitical struggle or survival. This was the

task o Schmitts ascist writings on international law.

Land grabs

But ideological purpose need not nulliy their message. Balakrishnan

nds much to admire in The Nomos, detecting an analogy betweenMarxs account o the primitive accumulation o capital in great land

grabs and colonial conquests and Schmitts account o the Westphalian

order, premised on the division between the civilized denizens o the

Old World and the uncivilized barbarians o the New. This opposition

expressed a world-historical expropriation o non-European peoples and

territories. But this quasi-equation o the Marxist category o primitiveaccumulation with Schmitts notion o land appropriation leads astray,

as the ormer depicts a qualitative transormation o social property rela-

tions, antithetical to a quantitative, territorial notion o land grabs. Not

every orm o conquest, booty and plunder can be vaguely associated

with the idea o the dispossession o direct producers rom their means

o reproduction and their transormation into abstract labour. The

Discoveries did not introduce capitalism to the New World; nor were the

gains rom plunder overseas, which greased the wheels o mercantile

24 Schmitt, Vlkerrechtliche Formen des Modernen Imperialismus, in Positionenund Begrie, p. 202.


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teschke:Reply to Balakrishnan95and colonial commerce, o importance or the rise o capitalism in the

Luso-Hispanic parts o Europe, or a sucient precondition or the ori-

gins o agrarian capitalism in England.

Balakrishnan claims that the nomos arising out o early-modern state-ormation and overseas conquests divided the world into two zones, with

two laws o war and appropriation, concurring with Schmitts account

o the early-modern inter-state system, and the notion o bracketed

warare within the civilized zone. But any closer reading oThe Nomosshows that Schmitt was not only deeply ambivalent in his explanation

o the European systemvacillating between the Conquista (1492), therise o the Absolutist state (1648) and English balancing (1713) as the

ormative momentbut that he explicitly excluded the conquests o theAmericas rom the constitution o early-modern Europe. His discussion

o the rationalizationjurisprudential and materialo the colonization

process by Spain and Portugal reveals, paradoxically, that the Conquests

did not precipitate the spatial revolution and the subsequent rise o the

new European inter-state nomos that he generically associated with theenclosure processes overseas.

This is most clearly expressed in his dierentiation between the rayas andthe amity-lines. The rst repartition o the oceans ater the Discoveries in

the orm o the rayas (divisional lines) was laid down in the 1494 Treatyo Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal, establishing a dividing line

a hundred miles west o the Azores and Cape Verde: all the land west

o the line should go to Spain; all the land east o it to Portugal. 25 This

meant the conditional territorialization o both the seas and the newly

discovered lands, as required by eudal land-holding patterns and social-

property relations.26

The Americas, the Atlantic and the Pacic remainedrmly within the reach o the late-medieval law-governed cosmoso theres publica Christiana, including the papal-missionary mandate and thejust-war doctrine against non-Christians. The later antithesis o rm

land and ree sea, decisive or spatial ordering in international law

rom 17131939, was completely oreign to these divisional lines.27 All

land and sea remained jurisprudentially rm. At least ormally, the

Vatican was still the central supra-territorial source o adjudication in

25 Schmitt, Land and Sea, Washington, dc 1997, p. 41; Nomos o the Earth, pp. 889.26 See Teschke, Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages: History and

Theory, International Organization, vol. 52, no. 2, 1998, pp. 32558.27 Schmitt, The Nomos o the Earth, p. 89.


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96nlr 69Catholic Europe. Against Schmitts express purposethe centrality o

land-appropriations or the constitution o the law-governed European

inter-state civilizationhe himsel shows that this line was much more

crooked than Balakrishnan assumes.

The quantum leap to the ius inter gentes is not precipitated by theSalamanca School, but by Dutch and English secular jurisprudence,

notably Grotius and Selden, in the SpanishDutch/English debate on

mare clausum versus mare liberum. The initial post-Conquest partitiono the world between the Catholic powers along the rayas was only chal-lenged by the SpanishFrench Treaty o Cateau-Cambrsis (1559) and

the subsequent seventeenth-century Anglo-French and Anglo-Spanish

treaties that xed the amity-lines, dividing the world into a civilizedlaw-governedzone within these lines and an anarchic zone, a state

o nature, beyond the line. This designated not only the land but also

the sea beyond the line as ree and lawless.28 Res nullius is also resomniumup or grabs by the strongest taker. Schmitt thereore locatesthe decisive break rom medieval-Christian to early-modern practices o

spatial ordering not in the act o the Discoveriesper se, but in the tran-sition rom the SpanishPortuguese rayas-system to the Anglo-centric

amity-lines. This initiated Americas re-denition rom an integratedappendix o the Euro-centric Old World to a distinct New World to be

re-appropriated and divided in a morally neutral agonal contest accord-

ing to the law o the stronger.

Flaws o the Westphalian system

O the amous Westphalian peace treaties, Schmitt hardly says any-

thing.29

Absolutism or him reerred to a state strong enough to

28 It should be understood that the arguments or mare liberum had nothing to dowith ree capitalist competition, as Schmitt obscured the distinction between ree

and open seas. The notion o ree sea simply reerred to its non-law-governed sta-

tus and implied permanent military rivalry over the control o trading and shippingroutes, as states tried unilaterally to territorialize the seas, rather than declaring them

multilaterally open. Free trade across open seas had to wait until the 19th century.29 Three passing reerences can be ound in Schmitt, The Nomos o the Earth, p.145; Raum und Groraum im Vlkerrecht [1940], in Schmitt, Staat, Groraum,Nomos, p. 241; Vlkerrechtliche Groraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot rRaumremde Mchte, in Staat, Groraum, Nomos, p. 311. Throughout the courseo The Nomos, Schmitt progressively shortens the duration o the ius publicum,describing it as lasting or 400 years, or 300 years, and nally or more thantwo centuries. The Nomos o the Earth, pp. 49, 140, 181.


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teschke:Reply to Balakrishnan97de-politicize and neutralize civil wars domestically. Its historical achieve-

ment was to have carried through and institutionalized the separation

between the privatethe world o clashing ultimate validity-claims

and the public, the sphere o a morally neutered raison dtat, whoseoverriding interest resided in the security o the state itsel, the right to

make war and peace. Since the Absolutist state was pre-representational

or pre-parliamentarian, conceiving o itsel as legibus solutus, it providedthe ideal-type or Schmitts theory o the modern state, encapsulated in

its decisionist nature, absolved rom law. Correlatively, as the domestic

sphere was rationalized, its international fipside led to the rationalization

o inter-state confict by means o a non-discriminatory concept o war.

The rise o the ius publicum was premised on the concrete order o this

state-centric spatio-political revolution.

I have already expressed my disagreement with this story. Balakrishnan is

nevertheless right to suggest that casualty gures in early-modern wars do

not by themselves discredit the category o bracketed warare. That, how-

ever, was only one part o my argument. Since Schmitt articulates only a

legal category, he is unable to decipher the social sources o the requency,

magnitude, intensity and duration o old-regime warare, powered by the

requirements o pre-capitalist geopolitical accumulation. Equally, militarypraxes render Schmitts claim o its civilized, rationalized and human-

ized character implausible, given the non-compliance with the nominal

conventions o war (ius in bello), the customs o recruitment, the lack o adistinction between combatants and non-combatants, and the problems

o provisioning.30 It remains to be claried how the notion o limited war

can be squared with the standard historical argument that old-regime

permanent-war states succumbed to their military expenses, leading to

scal crises, bankruptcies and state collapse. And I am still in search oan answer as to how Schmitts generic legal anti-positivism can be recon-

ciled with his celebration o the ecacy and civilizing mission o the iuspublicum europaeum, while Absolutist states, according to Schmitts ownreasoning, were simultaneously absolved rom lawdecisionist poli-

ties. The idea o non-discriminatory warare regulated by the ius publicumremains a ction, designed to promote the early-modern epoch as the

paragon o civilized warare against which the subsequent descent to the

liberal era o total war can only appear as a de-civilizing perversion.

30 Bernhard Kroener, The Modern State and Military Society in the Eighteenth

Century, in Philippe Contamine, War and Competition between States, Oxord2000, pp. 195220.


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98nlr 69Does Balakrishnans tentative endorsement o Schmitts protocols o

land war and their alleged neutralization o the religious and civil wars

stand up to historical scrutiny? Since early-modern states were not

rationalized public apparatuses, but conessional dynastic-composite

constructs claiming a sacralized orm o sovereignty, public power was

not de-theologized and neutralized. While the age o Absolutism did

break with the trans-territorial theological absolutism o the Vatican, it

simultaneously ragmented the unitary conessional papal claims and

re-assembled them across the spectrum o a pluriverse o creedal mini-

absolutisms, ater 1555 and again ater 1648. The Westphalian ormula,

cuius regio, eius religio, did not endorse religious toleration or private sub-jects, but sanctioned the right o regional rulers to determine and enorce

the aith o the land. In the French case, the nascent Absolutist statedidnot simply guard over the de-politicized and neutral character o domes-

tic politics and religion, but actively established during the Reormation

and the Wars o Religion (156298) its Catholic Absolutism in violent,

directly politicized, century-long campaigns, culminating in the repres-

sion and expulsion o the Huguenots with the Revocation o the Edict

o Nantes (1685). Absolutism did not rise above the warring civil parties,

but repressed one o them, giving rise to mono-conessionalized, even

sacralized states. Balakrishnans acceptance o the Schmittian idea thatthe separation o sovereign power rom the promotion o partisan reli-

gious causes led to a rationalization-neutralization o public order and,

concomitantly, a religiously and morally neutered orm o civilized war,

remains within the Schmittian world. Schmitts whole account o the

Westphalian system is deeply fawed, empirically and theoretically.

Balakrishnan concludes that my historical sociology replicates the

exact orm o Schmitts ascist epic, underscoring the utility o [my]attempted demolition.31 Setting aside the distinction between theoreti-

cally inormed explanation and quasi-mythical narrationwhich seems

to play a subordinate role in Balakrishnans viewthis is not even mini-

mally true on a straightorward empirical level. As sketched, my account

o the rise, nature and all o the continental system o Old Regimes

pre-modern, personalized, conessionalized, non-rationalized and

constantly at war with each otheris diametrically opposed to Schmitts.

We do converge, however, in the specicity o England. But whereSchmitt senses intuitively Britains uniqueness, this is entirely reduced

to geo-elemental categories.

31 Balakrishnan, Geopolitics o Separation, p. 11.


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teschke:Reply to Balakrishnan99England alone took the step rom a medieval eudal and terrestrial exist-

ence to a purely maritime existence that balanced the whole terrestrial

world . . . England thereby became the representative o the universalmaritime sphere o a Eurocentric global order, the guardian o the other

side o the ius publicum europaeum, the sovereign o the balance o landand seao an equilibrium comprising the spatially ordered thinkingo international law.32

How was that possible? England turned her collective existence sea-

wards and centred it on the sea element, turning into a big sha

leviathan.33 The problem with Schmitts ascist epic is precisely thatit

is ascist and it is an epic.

Reifcation o the geopolitical

Schmitt concludes The Nomos o the Earthin its English editionbyreturning to his opening philosophical question: what is the nomos?The Greek etymological derivation o the meaning o the term produces

a tripartite distinction: to take, to divide, to pastureappropriation,

distribution, production (cultivation). It is their interrelation that struc-

tures any concrete historical nomos. The question or Schmitt is how

they should be ordered: Their sequence and evaluation have ollowedchanges in historical situations and world history as a whole, but all

known and amous appropriations in history, all great conquests

wars and occupations, colonizations, migrations and discoverieshave

evidenced the undamental precedence o appropriation beore distribu-

tion and production, establishing radical title to land.34 Appropriation,

whether vertical or horizontal, is timeless and primary. This held,

Schmitt qualies, until the Industrial Revolution. Thereater, liberalism

and socialism attempted to reverse this sequence by assigning primacyto production. Liberalism claimed to transcend appropriation by the

promise o the production o plenty, constructing a utopia o production

and consumption cruelly defated by world history. Socialism grounded

re-distribution in a revolutionary act o re-appropriation: the expropria-

tion o the appropriators at home and abroad.

Schmitt concludes that the horizontal relations o land-appropriations

geopoliticsprecede the vertical relations o production and

32 Schmitt, The Nomos o the Earth, p. 173.33 Schmitt, Land and Sea, p. 28.34 Schmitt, The Nomos o the Earth, p. 3278.


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100nlr 69distributionpolitical economy. In close syntactical analogy to Marx and

Engelss amous dictum that the history o all hitherto existing society

is the history o class struggles, Schmitt argues that world history is

the history o the wars waged by maritime powers against land or con-

tinental powers, and by land powers against sea or maritime powers.35

History is conceived as a lateral eld o geopolitical appropriations, un-

reconciled to the vertical dynamics o surplus appropriation. Schmitts

international history is a deliberately anti-sociological project, seeking to

validate the autonomy o political and geopolitical order over and against

social conficts and dislocations. Schmitts mythologically essentialized

ontology overwhelms his historicism and regresses into the reication

o geopolitics as such.

In the end, Schmitt ailed to answer his own research-organizing ques-

tion: what processes drive land-appropriationwhat establishes a

nomos? The answer does not reside in a simple reversal o Schmittssequence o appropriation, distribution and production, but in a hist-

orical examination o the politically constituted and contested property

relations that generate dierential constellations o authority, sover-

eignty and geopolitics. I the concluding section oThe Nomos reveals

Schmitts ulterior reerence point and motivation, an anti-Marx or histimes, then the uture does not consist in a acile turning o the tables:

an anti-Schmitt or our times. Rather, it orces us to meet the Schmittian

challenge and to develop a theoretical programme that pursues a radical

historicization and socialization o geopoliticstheoretically outside o,

but empirically incorporating, that mega-abstraction o concrete-order-

thinking: land-appropriation.

35 Schmitt, Land and Sea, p. 5.

teschke schmitt marx geopolitics political balakrishnan review

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