European Journal of Social Theory http://est.sagepub.com Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa in Some Debates of the Early Twentieth Century Patricia Chiantera-Stutte European Journal of Social Theory 2008; 11; 185 DOI: 10.1177/1368431007087473 The online version of this article can be found at: http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/185 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for European Journal of Social Theory can be found at: Email Alerts: http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://est.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. European Journal of Social Theory 11(2): 185–201 Copyright © 2008 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa in Some Debates of the Early Twentieth Century Patricia Chiantera-Stutte U N I V E R S I T Y O F B A R I , I TA LY Abstract The idea of Mitteleuropa began to gain momentum in the German geopolitical science of the beginning of the twentieth century. German geopolitics, which became famous through the works of Karl Haushofer, had set out a geographical and political notion of Mitteleuropa that supported a political project based on German expansion. As such, Mitteleuropa developed as both a political and scientific concept, a project and a ‘reality’. With an analysis of the core elements defining the term Mitteleuropa one can begin to appreciate the characteristics that differentiate it from other geographical concepts, as well as the features which some conservative authors have promoted following the geopolitical scientists. As a ‘geopolitical idea’, Mitteleuropa can be shown to designate a way of understanding politics, nature and culture, or more specifically, their relationship. Key words ■ conservative-revolution ■ geopolitics ■ Großraum ■ National Socialism ■ Reich Mitteleuropa as a Geographical and Geopolitical Concept By the mid-nineteenth century, the geographical sciences had begun to use spatial concepts like East and West, North and South and Middle in order to define the spaces and the States in geographical maps (Meyer, 1946, 1955; Schultz and Natter, 2003). Humboldt and Ritter had already divided Europe between Eastern and Western parts and in 1863, Ritter used the word ‘Mitteleuropa’ in one of his lectures in Berlin but without defining it (Wagner, 1915: 53–4). The introduction of space coordinates to define both natural and political spaces signifies the emergence of a new form of ‘topological ontological thinking’: ‘the new map was not merely an expedient construction; it was meant to demonstrate the ‘nature of things’: just as Länder appeared as given by nature, so too did their www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1368431007087473 Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 186 European Journal of Social Theory 11(2) assemblage into larger units appear to be a result of nature. This shift was the precondition for their politicization (Schultz and Natter, 2003: 275). This turning point conditioned the further elaboration of the idea of Mitteleuropa: spatial position – the fact of ‘being between’ two or more, opposite or/and different geographical spaces – characterizes this concept from its very origin, as exemplified in the interpretation given by Albrecht Penck, a völkisch geographer who described it as a German-oriented Zwischeneuropa, whose geographical position between the Western European civilization and the Eastern Russian world had a political and cultural meaning beyond the strictly descriptive one (Penck, 1906). In this sense, the concept of Mitteleuropa is characterized by its overlapping of geographical and political notions: the ‘position between’ refers to the interaction between natural and cultural features, and eventually the resulting project for the creation of a form of economic collaboration and political unity or confederation directed against the surrounding political and cultural powers (i.e. America and Russia). It is clear in the debates that accompanied and led to the 1848–9 National Assembly in Frankfurt that the political dimension of the related notion of Großdeutschland or ‘Great Germany’ which then surfaced was not envisaged as the mere union of some national states. The literature concerning this debate cannot be read as referring to the ‘category’ of the national state. The vision of a ‘Great Germany’ was in fact formulated in opposition to the constitution of national boundaries as they were conceived by the Western European nations: it found its legitimacy in an alternative form of political organization in association with a cultural sense of ‘mission’ or ‘vocation’. Politically the notion of ‘Great Germany’ referred to the universalistic tradition of the Old Empire, which is difficult to reconcile with the modern concept of nation. The Old Empire had a ‘mission’ to fulfil: it had to realize a German vocation, to represent and guarantee the interests of its constitutive parts with regards to law and military protection. In this sense, Germany was not understood as a national state, but rather as a culturally-based broader political entity that was bound to build a strong and powerful political system at the heart of Europe and, through it, to exercise its influence all over the world. In this respect, it must be pointed out that the debates surrounding the notion of Mitteleuropa did not first emerge in the geographical discipline and that the notion was only later linked to projects of expansion to the East (Drang nach Osten). It was nevertheless grounded ‘in a manner providing a conceptual foundation that political geography and geopolitics of the twentieth century would later built upon . . . Seas, coasts, river networks’ mouth areas, mountain plains were ascribed a role legitimising territorial divisions and zones of influence’ (Schultz and Natter, 2003: 278). For instance, in Konstantin Frantz’s thought and in Lorenz von Stein’s theory, Mitteleuropa does not exist as a specific and well-defined concept, with clear geographical or cultural characteristics. Despite this, the role Mitteleuropa was thought to have to play as a territory transcending any given national state, was grounded in its geographical position, in its ensuing role as mediator facilitating Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Chiantera-Stutte Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa union among nations (Frantz, 1848) or duty to prevent the Eastern and the Western European powers from exercising domination over the rest of Europe (von Stein, 1856). Starting with Kirchhoff (1896), Mitteleuropa begins to be defined not only as a political project, but as a geographical and geopolitical entity: the natural configuration of a land is thought to correspond to the culture shared by its inhabitants and thereby to legitimate a political project. It is necessary to say that in this context, the words ‘culture’ and ‘political project’ have different and changing meanings over the time. Culture came to be defined sometimes as a unity of language and traditions, sometimes as a moral, undetermined common trait and sometimes even as the uniformity of landscapes. The political projects anchored in the idea of a ‘Middle European’ common destiny are varied and assume a range of political forms, from centralized unification under German domination to a loose confederation of peoples. In this respect, Mommsen (1995) distinguishes between an ‘imperialistic’ and a federal-liberal Mitteleuropa. Moreover, Mitteleuropa can be German-oriented or centred on Austria. In the geopolitical perspective the term Mitteleuropa was used to designate a geographical space and at the same time a cultural and political idea. The Mitteleuropa concept was therefore ‘placed’ at the crossroads between a political, a cultural and a purely geographical definition. It became a very particular geographical expression. It did not correspond to a ‘reality’ existing per se on maps: it was not a chain of mountains; nor was it a politically determined State or nation. It could be described rather as a projected ‘empire’ or confederation legitimized through some ‘natural’ and ethnical-cultural features. It becomes evident that even if the diffusion of geopolitical thought and discussions of Mitteleuropa follow different periodizations, they are in fact strictly interrelated: in one way or another, the German geopoliticians all promoted the idea of Mitteleuropa. However, even if before the First World War the geopolitical thinkers already supported in different ways the reinforcement of political and economic relations in an area that was defined as ‘Mitteleuropa’, it was only after the beginning of the First World War that the project of German expansion towards the East, the idea of the creation of a ‘Middle European’ empire or of a liberal ‘Middle European’ confederation enjoyed wide success. One month after the beginning of the First World War, Kjellen’s work Die Großmächte der Gegenwart (1914), which had been given scant notice before, was translated and published in German and received great attention even among a public which did not belong to the geographical discipline. This publication was a real turning point for the diffusion of geopolitical thought in Germany: a wider public became acquainted with Ratzel’s, Penck’s and Hassinger’s works. Very soon, geopolitics began to be taught in schools: in the 1940s it was described in a popular handbook as ‘the doctrine of the relations between a race and a space, inscribed in the destiny of peoples’ (Folkers, 1942: 169). The success of geopolitics grew till the end of the Second World War and the geopolitical school under Haushofer was very close to National Socialism, even if it did not share all its objectives (Gallois, 1990; Korst, 1986, 1988; Losano, 2005; Weigert, 1942). Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 187 188 European Journal of Social Theory 11(2) The collaboration between the geopolitical school and the National Socialist regime lends itself to misunderstandings: it has been noted that geopolitical thought was diffused among a larger public well before the advent of National Socialism (Ebeling, 1994; Hipler, 1996; Jakobsen, 1979; Laack-Michel, 1974). Moreover, even if the representation of a geopolitical space ‘which burst the boundaries of the national State founded in 1871’ was a feature of the integral nationalism developed in Germany after the First World War, and even if Hitler gathered and radicalized the imperial, geopolitical and völkisch ideas that had already been spread in the Weimar Republic (Smith, 1986; Alter, 1994: 35; Baum, 2006), geopolitics did not simply coincide with radical nationalism. Its diffusion clearly went beyond the boundaries of a political party or position and those of any given political or natural science. It thus influenced many scholars, in particular the exponents of ‘conservative revolution’ – from Carl Schmitt to Wilhelm Stapel and Giselher Wirsing – and its pervasive character was also felt by Victor Klemperer, who wrote in his diary during the period of National Socialism: ‘There is . . . something unbounded about the notion of Raum itself, and it is this which makes it so seductive’ (Klemperer, 2000: 291). The geopolitical idea of Mitteleuropa will be reconstructed in what follows, in its different meanings and aspects, starting with the first interpretations elaborated by geographical and geopolitical science, i.e. by Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellen and by Karl Haushofer. I will try to outline the way it formulates a political project based on a ‘geographical’ description. This geographical concept will be analysed following the criteria that are normally used to define a geographical object: its boundaries, its space, its position, the definition of its territory and one of the scientific methods used to investigate it, i.e. geopolitics. Analysis of the principal elements that have been used to define Mitteleuropa will make it possible to point out the characteristics that make it different from other geographical concepts, and will shed light on some common traits of the geopolitical definition of Mitteleuropa later promoted by some young conservative authors. I will here concentrate on Carl Schmitt and his idea of the constitution of a Großraum in Europe to demonstrate the way his attempt to overcome the national state was expressed in a geopolitical language. This will allow me to argue that the geopolitical conception of Mitteleuropa was not diffused only among some circles of geographers or supporters of National Socialism during the Second World War but that the ‘features’ or rather the ‘structures’ that characterize this concept, and that constitute it, were shared by a large numbers of thinkers. Mitteleuropa as a ‘geopolitical idea’ can therefore be used as a concept to designate a specific way of conceptualizing politics, nature and culture and their relationship. Mitteleuropa’s Main Geopolitical Dimensions The boundaries that delineate Mitteleuropa are characterized in the geopolitical works by their indeterminacy, their mobility and their expansion beyond the Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Chiantera-Stutte Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa national state. At the same time these boundaries are not at all seen as artificial: on the contrary, they are inscribed in a ‘natural’ state of things and they are interpreted as essentially linked to the nature, to the culture and to the ethnic groups that characterize a certain ‘Middle European’ area. The work of Schultz and Natter (2003: 274 ff.) shows the different geographical patterns according to which maps of Mitteleuropa were constructed: the North–South, the East– West and their diagonal structure. In these patterns Mitteleuropa was conceptualized as a strip, going from the North Cape to Sicily (North–South) or from the Atlantic to the Urals (East–West) and, finally, as a centre that irradiates its power to the periphery. Even once the model of centre–periphery had come to prevail over other models – that is, from the beginning of the twentieth century with the birth of the geopolitical school – the boundaries of Mitteleuropa remained unclear. This indeterminacy became a feature of the very concept. For the main exponents of geopolitical thinking, Mitteleuropa’s boundaries did not describe static lines and did not define a stable territory. Boundaries were much more mobile lines: they followed the movements of ethnic groups and demographic pressures. According to Ratzel (1903), they were real lines of battle between a movement and a countermovement. The statistics that were used by geopolitical science would indicate the overcrowded nations and localize the forces pushing at the boundaries: the demographic dynamics were therefore directly linked to the question of boundary expansion and an important character of the ‘Middle European’ population as well as of Mitteleuropa per se. Hassinger’s Mitteleuropa concept, among others, was characterized by its geopolitical dynamism: Germany, Poland, the Low Countries, Switzerland and Austria-Hungary constituted the well-developed core of the ‘Middle European’ area, while in the Save and valley of the lower Danube, a Mitteleuropa was emerging under the aegis of Germany (Hassinger, 1917). Not only was Mitteleuropa often thought to be an ‘expanding’ geographical territory; as a concept, it encouraged its inhabitants to begin abandoning the old political territorial categories they had used till then and to start thinking ‘differently’. Ratzel (1906: 411 ff.) aimed at changing the ‘measures’ that were used to think about territories in both science and public opinion: the way ordinary people and scientists considered space had to change from the consideration of small entities to the conceptualization of continental orders. The expansion of spaces was both a mental and an empirical development, originating in a natural political evolution. National politics belonged to the past: national differences, based on languages, had to be replaced by a territorial principle of organization that would lead to the creation of larger units. This expansion in the way of thinking about spaces was, according to Ratzel (1899: 85), directly linked to the evolution of cultures. The ‘law of expanding spaces’ (Gesetz der wachsenden Räume) (Ratzel, 1902: 640), which belonged to the mechanisms underlying modern power relations between nations, would lead to the construction of united continents: the Western and the Eastern powers (America and Asia) would very soon dominate the world, as soon as their population increased and they came to exercise their full territorial power (Ratzel, Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 189 190 European Journal of Social Theory 11(2) 1882: 174). Haushofer stated many years later that the goal of the geopolitical discipline was to teach people how to think of broader spaces (Weiträumigkeit des Denkens), i.e. to think in terms of continents. The necessity to consider Europe as one continent amongst others was one goal of this geopolitical ‘education’; another was to teach people to think that the national boundaries in Europe should be overcome and that fragmented Europe had to give birth to a continental power, whose centre was Germany. The boundaries of Mitteleuropa were not only characterized by their dynamism and expansive potential; in addition, they were defined by technical development and the progress of communication. On the one hand, technology accelerated the course of history, because it favoured the movement of people; on the other, it showed the transformation of fragmented spaces into larger units, eventually into a whole economic organism ‘in which the nations and folks . . . [would] only [be] subordinated organs’ (Ratzel, 1903: 22). Technological development joined political and natural evolution and harmonized with it. According to Ratzel and later to Haushofer, every evolution of civilization did not mean that the gap between society and nature grew; on the contrary, a higher civilization meant a better consciousness of spaces and therefore of nature. This interrelation between nature and culture was made possible by the Social Darwinism that underpinned Ratzel’s, Kjellen’s and later Haushofer’s works. The Lebensraum was an organic metaphor used by Ratzel to indicate the space necessary for a state to evolve:1 if a state did not search for new spaces, it was bound to decay. The new winning powers were those whose demographic, economic and cultural capacities were greater than their existing territorial limits. In Ratzel’s (1896: 351) Social Darwinistic view of international equilibrium, there was no place for a ‘stable’ state: the law that subjugated all living forms – and therefore also states – was the one dictating that they should move upwards or downwards, expand or decay. States, therefore, had the right and duty to grow: ‘The territory of a state is no definite area fixed for all time – for a state is a living organism and therefore cannot be contained within rigid limits.’ For him, Germany represented the new emerging power, whose frontiers were expanding into the East – ‘Drang nach Osten’. ‘Wherever we look around, we see space that is conquered and space that is lost’, affirmed Ratzel (1906: 377). Germany had to acknowledge this fact and choose whether it wanted to be a power that lost or gained. Karl Haushofer also shows the influence of Darwinism on geopolitics: he combined the division of colonized and imperial peoples with the maps of panregions. In Haushofer’s works, the nation was compared to a biological organism: the nation had to fight against the environment to survive and to expand in its natural Lebensraum. Haushofer, who distinguished the old decaying powers of Great Britain and France from the new ones, in particular, Germany, believed in the spiritual affinity between Germany and Russia, which had to unite their forces in order to build a Eurasian power, opposed to American capitalism (Haushofer, 1941).2 The pan-regions3 imagined by Haushofer reproduced the well-known maps elaborated by Ratzel, Kjellen, Penck and, before them, by Halford Mackinder. Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Chiantera-Stutte Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa Eurasia had its centre in Germany, whose weakness, i.e. its ‘position between’, was at the same time its strength. Germany represented the indispensable nexus between East and West, capitalism and communism. It had a civilizing and imperial key role to play in the rebirth of Europe’s civilization and power. The natural existence of pan-regions presupposed the world to be a ‘closed space’, in which every state had to gain hegemony and organize in order to increase its efficiency through imperial expansion and through its struggle or alliance with other states. The Monroe Doctrine, in this regard, was seen as the act of foundation of the American Pan-region and as legitimating the further constitution of other pan-regions (Haushofer, 1942). In geopolitical studies, the ‘Middle European’ territory was at the same time both a geographical territory and a cultural entity. This was clear in Penck’s description, which in turn exercised a strong influence on the circle around the journal Die Tat and on Giselher Wirsing. The völkisch geographer Albrecht Penck attacked the Western European state powers, guilty of having deprived Germany of its ‘natural’ territory after the First World War through the Treaty of Versailles. Penck, who was a member of the Stiftung für deutsche Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung, supported the project of a Großdeutschland and divided the German future Lebensraum (1925), as Ratzel had already suggested, into a Volksboden (a zone occupied by German-speaking people) and a Kulturboden (a zone where German culture was predominant, which was measured through the observation of cultural practices, building styles and landscape features). The concept of Kulturboden shows Penck’s strong belief in the German Volk’s rootedness in the landscape. According to this view, culture was expressed in a vague and at the same time pervasive way: ‘culture’ was the landscape, which carried traces of the German mentality and labour, even when its inhabitants did not speak German and had no direct link with German culture. Penck’s (1915) model of Central Europe was the Zwischeneuropa,4 which denoted the whole area from (and including) Scandinavia all the way to Italy and the Balkans that had to be dominated by Germany. Giselher Wirsing, himself, referred to Penck when he stated in his ‘Mitteleuropa und die deutsche Zukunft’ that the territory from Germany and Austria up to Estonia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, formed a spatial unity ‘whose physical reality had long been in effect well before political consciousness of its unity had awakened’ (Wirsing, 1932: 7–9, my translation). The nexus between soil, Volk and the political form of organization that corresponds to this territory represents one fundamental principle of both the geopolitical interpretations of Mitteleuropa and of the conservative revolution’s visions. Stefan Breuer, recalling a definition by Thomas Mann (1994: 129) has termed this specific aspect of conservative thinking ‘rationalised chtonismus’: ‘The aspiration to harmonise the natural sciences with the need to grasp the sense (Sinn) and the totality (Ganzheit) taken from the religious and philosophical tradition’ (Breuer, 2001: 28, my translation). Sinn and Ganzheit should here be interpreted in a very strict sense: they are a particular methodological device and, at the same time, a specific way of looking at the relation between individual, community, nature and culture, Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 191 192 European Journal of Social Theory 11(2) mostly developed by a current of German conservative scholars in the twentieth century. The representation of the soil as a subject with a soul, the depiction of the State as a ‘form of life’, of the people (Volk) as a fragment of nature, the representation of a spirit of the earth, a force of the earth and of a spirit of the locality are some of the metaphors that were used not only to indicate the interrelation between the organic and the inorganic; but also to describe the ‘method’ used in order to research natural, human and social phenomena. A conception of the ‘totality’ used to explain living organisms and their actions, can be identified in the work of one important exponent of the conservative revolution, Moeller van Der Bruck, who in his works ‘Die Italienische Schönheit’ (1913) and ‘Der Preußische Stil’ (1916) retraced the origins of the ‘style’ of a national culture back to the spirit of the land. Before him, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl had attempted in his Land und Leute (1854) to point out the existence of an organic nexus between a people and its land: every people took its power from the nature of the landscape where it lived and from this raw material it created its history. At the same time, the individual could be explained only referring to his relationship to the Volk and the soil. The organic conception of social and political developments and the attempt to grasp the totality (Ganzheit) of physical and spiritual phenomena led to the theorization of the doctrine of the totality (Ganzheitlehre) by the organic school of thought headed by Othmar Spann in Vienna. The form of political organization promoted by the whole organic school is the ‘Middle European’ empire, whose mission was to revive European traditions and conduct a ‘civilizational’ war against the world powers of America and Russia. The perspective of the totality led to a peculiar interpretation of nature when it was applied to a natural science like geography, with three distinct outcomes. First of all, it produced an overlapping of natural/physical and cultural/spiritual and political phenomena. The naturalization of political entities was intertwined with the politicization of natural entities. Ratzel, referring to Fechner’s idea that the physical and the spiritual processes were interconnected and that nature had a soul, stated that man is a creature bound to the soil and that his political will had to be oriented to natural development. At the same time, he depicted the movement of peoples as that of organisms trying to grow and bound to decay. The identity of a people is explained in this context as a part of a whole, i.e. linked to the forces of the soil which mould culture and language. This antiindividualistic and organic idea of human history and evolution is linked to the belief in the specific ‘point of view’ of the researcher (the geopolitician) who intuitively knows the totality of history. Second, the use of an approach geared to the totality meant that the philosophy of nature and the natural sciences were not only reconciled but fused, so to speak. Geopoliticians would take into account physical geography, population and government data, as well as psychological descriptions, understood as interrelated parts of a whole. The ‘all inclusive and hence realistic political science’ that resulted from this approach would ‘comprise all the social sciences upon a geographical foundation and in their political aspects’ (Cahnman, 1942: 149). Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Chiantera-Stutte Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa While the ‘geographic position [was] instrumental in bringing about the adoption of a socio-psychological outlook, psychological devices penetrate[d] into geographic presentation’ (Cahnman, 1942: 151). Geopoliticians were not to follow the traditional methods used by ‘natural sciences’: they would not discover any general causal nexus because a ‘unique complex of causes had brought forth a unique complex of facts in a unique field situation’ (Cahnman, 1942: 149). The individuality of a regional or of a social situation could not be ascertained by means of a logical definition: it could be investigated only by a descriptive and comparative evaluation. One further example of the specific status that geopolitics was thought to possess was its way of conceiving maps: the synthetic maps elaborated by Otto Maull (1925: 325) were not ‘typical’ geographical maps; they ‘represent[ed] the State as a whole, as a living and expanding geographic unit’. The analytical method was therefore refused by geopolitics, which implicitly rejected the positivistic and even rationalist approach to the social and natural phenomena in favour of the ‘organic method’ that starts its investigation from complex entities (ethnies, folk, nature, soil) in order to explain individuals and simple phenomena. A new relationship between science and politics is the third specific outcome of the use by geopolitical science of a holistic orientation privileging the whole (Ganzheit). Geopolitics was a ‘political science’: the liberal paradigm of the division between, on the one hand, culture and science, and, on the other, politics, was dismissed. Carl Schmitt and the New International Order Carl Schmitt’s theory incorporates some of the main themes of the spiritualistic and metaphysic thought of the conservative revolution and those of the geopolitical description of states’ international politics to re-elaborate them. Carl Schmitt, who was a member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wehrpolitik und Wehrwissenschaft, a geopolitical association, shared with the geopoliticians the belief both in the essential meaning of space as the key to understanding the movements of geopolitical states and in the Darwinistic view, which considered the states as organisms struggling for survival and territory in a world divided into continents. Schmitt, like Haushofer and Penck, supported the notion of a Drang nach Osten. Even if Schmitt shared with ‘geojurisprudence’5 its opposition to every theory that disentangled the state from the soil and from any ethnic bound – in particular that of Kelsen – he did not belong to that stream; according to him, the state could not be exclusively defined through its geographical position and its power could not be explained according to the division of the world shown by the geopolitical maps. The state depended upon political decision: this was the idea developed in his political analyses (Schmitt, 1963). Mitteleuropa – a unity of Volk – was defined in Schmitt and in the writings of the conservative revolution through its geopolitical ‘position between’, its Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 193 194 European Journal of Social Theory 11(2) Zwischenlage. In 1929 Carl Schmitt wrote in ‘Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen’ that Central Europe lived ‘under the eyes’ of Russia (Schmitt, 1993). Russia – and its atheistic socialism – was for the young Schmitt (1996) the ‘seductive’ threat menacing specific European values and the Catholic idea of humanity. The idea of a mission assigned to Germany – that of saving European civilization from capitalism and communism and reversing a historical cycle of decadence – was shared by many intellectuals, both liberal and conservative, like Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergy, Hans Zeher and Giselher Wirsing, Karl Anton Rohan, the Vienna organic school (Othmar Spann and Walter Heinrich), Osvald Spengler and Ernst Jünger. Schmitt’s geopolitical inspiration is clear in particular in relation to his idea of Großraum. In this respect, Ratzel is one the few authors he quoted directly in one clear formulation of his ideas of Großraumordnung: the text ‘Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung’ of 1939. Like Ratzel, Schmitt sees in the Großraum, depicted as ‘something bigger, . . . creative’ (Schmitt, 1941: 76), the possibility of laying the foundations for a new international order and of coping with the technological and political trends of contemporary society. In this respect, it is possible to distinguish in Schmitt’s writings an ‘ontological’, as well as a historical argumentation. The first deals with his conception of space and soil: according to him, space is not only geographical data, but the fundamental dimension needed to localize objects of perception (Verorten) and to put them in relation to one another. Therefore, different space perceptions have a tremendous impact on society and law. This is evident in the effects of the power shift from the rule of land powers to the domination of sea powers, a shift that was first formulated by the founders of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder (1904), Ratzel (1900) and Haushofer (1937). This ‘spatial revolution’ depends on the characteristics of the land powers and the sea powers. The typical characteristics of the land are its order, its boundaries, the inscription on it of the signs of human work, its division following the history and the life of the ethnies that live in it. The land clearly shows the constitution of the human order (Ordnung) and the ‘localization’ (Ortung) of human coexistence: the land shows the measures and the signs of this order, while, on the contrary, the sea is endless and has no measures and no boundaries (Schmitt, 1942). Accordingly, land powers and sea powers represent different principles of law and order. The discovery of America led to a spatial revolution, that was bound to provoke a political-cultural revolution. The shift of domination from land to sea powers (England in particular), was almost contemporary with the process of neutralization of political organization. The passage from the control by Christian theological tradition of all spheres of life to the development of the scientific mentality meant a shift from a society based on religion to one dominated by the belief in technique as the means to solve all social and political questions. One effect of these changes was the growing neutralism of the State – its independence from any Weltanschauung and from any moral judgement and spiritual value – and the de-politicization of political categories. In the field of international law, this process became clear with the separation of law from any specific Weltanschauung and with the ensuing division of state Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Chiantera-Stutte Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa law from international law: the two used to work together when they referred to a common framework, i.e. the one created by European civilization. When extra European powers and sea powers were introduced in international state relations and came to dominate them, traditional international law declined: it was no more ‘located’; it was dis-located (entortet).6 Nevertheless, Schmitt was not resigned to this situation, as he stated in 1939: From the point of view of the international law sciences, one cannot divide space from political ideas. For us, there are neither political ideas without space, nor, on the contrary, spaces and principles of spaces without ideas . . . a well-defined political idea must have the following character: it must be represented by a determined/welldefined Volk and be formulated with a well-defined adversary in sight. Only in this case can an idea be said to possess the quality of belonging to the political. (1941: 29, my translation) Accordingly, international law is for Schmitt Völkerrrecht, i.e. jus gentium, linked to a personal concrete order (konkrete Ordnung) and determined by belonging to a definite national and ethnic group. At the same time, the völkisch element joins the territorial component to the consideration of international law: any order that rules peoples (Völker), who are settled, live with each other and respect each other, is not only determined individually but at the same time it is a territorial concrete space order (Schmitt, 1941: 11). In this respect, the general abstract concept of State cannot ‘translate’ the interrelation between a people and a concrete order which underlies the people’s culture and way of living, because the old concept of the State has been neutralized and has been deprived of its ‘political’ quality. The necessity of Kat-echon which was accomplished by the State becomes the reason for the creation of Großräume. The concrete Großraum and the related Großraumprinzip in international law would mirror and cope with the transformations that have already occurred in the representations of the earth space (Erdraumvorstellung) and of its dimensions. According to Schmitt, the concept of concrete order could allow jurisprudence to go beyond the limits of law in order to grasp the political foundations of a community: from this perspective a concrete order is ‘the substance of choice on which the community’s identity depends’ (Koskenniemi, 2004: 496). With regards to international law, the concrete order could be conceptualized as the fundamental relationship between Ordnung and Ortung, that is, between order/law and localization/territory. Therefore, the Großraum is justified and legitimized on two levels: (1) as the acknowledgement of a dato de facto; and (2) as a project, i.e. as the way of getting out of the contradictions that characterize contemporary international law, of reviving European traditions and reinforcing their power in the world. The theory of Großraum represented the attempt to cope with the contemporary historical trend, that is, the development of human planning, organization and activity that led to the building of continental powers through political and technical developments. At the same time, it gave the possibility of dominating contemporary events and of subjugating technical development, and therefore transforming Germany into a Raumüberwindende Macht (a power capable of overcoming Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 195 196 European Journal of Social Theory 11(2) and conquering space). According to Ratzel’s definition, quoted in Schmitt (1995: 237), the trend in modern history, and therefore the trend in higher civilizations, is to become ‘more geographical and more territorial’. The adoption of the Großraum thinking would change European law, because it would overcome the positivistic juridical mentality and the ‘empty concept of space’, and would introduce again the ‘everlasting togetherness of order and localization’ (Ordung und Ortung) that are the basis for every concrete order (Schmitt, 1995: 82, my translation). Building a Großraum meant letting the ‘political’ reemerge. It offered the possibility of overcoming, on the one hand, the abstract positivistic paradigm that postulated an empty concept of law and state, and, on the other, the political hegemony of market universalism, led by the interests of sea powers. The universalism that had spread thanks to the Anglo-Saxon hegemony, was leading to the dissolution of European international law: the concrete order of the ‘home society’ (Hausgenossenschaft) of European states and nations has but disappeared. On the juridical level, international law had disintegrated into different norms that were put side by side and did not create a system; on the political level Europe was replaced by a variety of small nations that had no ethnic or territorial foundations (Schmitt, 1995: 337). The Großraumprinzip could successfully oppose the rule of universalism, a power instrument elaborated by Anglo-Saxon imperialism: it could be defined in this sense by Schmitt as the ‘link between politically awakened peoples, dominated by the political idea and by a particular political idea, i.e. the idea of a Großraum that excludes interferences from outside powers’ (Schmitt, 1941: 30). On the organizational level, the Reich would be composed of a Staatsgebiet (the area of the State) and a Volksboden (the area of the Volk): the Großraum had to dominate over both areas (Schmitt, 1941: 67).7 The overlap between a völkisch and a territorial principle of organization becomes clear in this regard: the Staatsgebiet could be thought of as the ‘traditional’ state, while the Volksgebiet, that reproduced Penck’s idea of Volksboden, was ruled by an ethnic principle. It is necessary to notice that the text of 1939 was written after Hitler’s declaration on 20 February 1938, that was called by Schmitt an ‘epochal act’, and that postulated the right to ‘protect’ German minorities outside the German boundaries. The dato de facto that justified Schmitt’s theory was identified in the Monroe Doctrine that was affirmed in America in 1823 and forbade any ‘interposition’ of European powers in the affairs of the American continent.8 According to Schmitt, although the Monroe Doctrine had not been acknowledged as a juridical principle in international law, it had been effective and had divided the world into different spheres of influence. Moreover, exactly because it was not a juridical norm, it showed the real political trend of the international order, that is, its evolution towards an international imperialistic and capitalistic order and to the division of the world into Großräume (Schmitt, 1941: 32–3). In summary, some of Schmitt’s main works on the international order during the 1930s clearly show his use of geopolitical categories in order to legitimize and construct a new political and legal theory that tries to overcome juridical positivism and justify a new political order. Schmitt ‘jumps’ from geopolitical Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Chiantera-Stutte Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa ideas he takes for granted – like the people’s bond to a territory, the division of the world in continents, the application of a Social Darwinistic model to the study of the state relations, the idea of dynamic boundaries – to juridical argumentations: more precisely, he uses the geopolitical data de facto in order to change dramatically the conception of law and to reconceptualize the system of the international law. Analysis of the ‘geopolitical’ aspect of Schmitt’s thought and of the conservative revolution demonstrates the penetration of geopolitical categories in the reasoning of authors who were at the crossroads of many currents of thought and many disciplines. Schmitt, like many other authors that have been quoted in this contribution, is an intellectual figure who elaborated geopolitical visions, as well as ideas of the conservative revolution and translated them into his disciplinary field. His critical approach to modernity and his analysis of the crises of modern political thought can be considered as belonging to the voices of the large choir of thinkers who radically criticized Positivism and the Enlightement. For this reason he can partly be inscribed in the current of the conservative revolution, even if his intellectual work cannot be understood only as the product of this tradition. Geopolitical ‘science’, conservative currents and the complex constellation of the ‘conservative revolution’ were interrelated, as one can see in Carl Schmitt: the geopolitical science could legitimize some conservative political views and give a ‘scientific’ basis to some ideas spread in the conservative revolutionary milieus. Mitteleuropa was one of the ‘core’ conceptions and visions, that cut across these different and interrelated traditions of thought. It was theorized as a reality and at the same time, as a new project, a utopia. It had to represent the ‘scientific’ description of an ‘already existing’ territory linked to a people and a culture in a way that made it into a ‘living organism’; at the same time, as it was not yet an existing reality, it was seen as a ‘solution’ to political decadence and a way out of European crises. Mitteleuropa was linked to empirical political projects, but also to complex political and cultural theories, as well as to the renewal of the European traditions that could overcome the limits of Enlightenment thinking. Was Schmitt thinking of a ‘Middle European’ area and culture, when he constructed his idea of a Großraum? What is the relation between his idea of Großraum, the Reich and Europe? Schmitt did not define the boundaries of a Großraum, but according to some interpreters (Maschke, in Schmitt, 1995: XXI–XXII), the Großraum overlapped with Mitteleuropa. This idea of a ‘Middle European’ Großraum and therefore the ‘limitation’ of German expansion within the ‘Middle European’ area provoked the controversy that developed between Schmitt and the ‘orthodox’ lawyers of the Reich, i.e. Best and Höhn. The dream of a united European Großraum revealed in Carl Schmitt’s thinking and in the thought of many young conservative the ‘original’ ambivalence of these projects: the tension between the attempt to preserve plurality and the defence of a particular exclusive identity; the tension between the acceptance of modernity and the eschatological view of its overcoming. In general, Mitteleuropa is historically constructed in an ambiguous way: its possibility of being an inclusive Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 197 198 European Journal of Social Theory 11(2) and an exclusive concept, its use in an ‘aggressive’ colonial politics or as a cosmopolitan idea can be already detected in its genesis. The ‘archaeological’ analysis of the German interpretation of Mitteleuropa in the geopolitical disciplines and in the works of many representatives of the conservative revolution could therefore shed light on the contemporary debates in order to look at some continuities and discontinuities with the old Mitteleuropa models and to point out the internal complexities of this idea and its ‘darker’ legacies. Notes 1 Lebensraum is a word created by Oscar Peschel (1877). 2 Although he supported Hitler, his vision of a Central Europe federation (with Germany as the dominant power), was not ethnically homogenous and he imagined the future Eurasian pan-region as a transcultural and transracial zone, founded on alliances between equal partners. 3 Pan-regions are ‘large functional areas linking core states to resource peripheries and cutting across latitudinally distributed environmental zones’ (O’Loughlin and van der Wusten, 1990: 2) and pan-ideas are ‘principles for organizing the world system or basic ideologies for many units’ (O’Loughlin and van der Wusten, 1990: 4). 4 ‘Zwischeneuropa’ came from a book of that name by Giselher Wirsing (1932), who supported with Moeller van der Bruck and the journal Die Tat the Eastern orientation of Germany away from the democratic West towards Bolshevik Russia. 5 Geojurisprudenz was defined in the first handbook of this discipline as ‘the sector of the juridical science that tries to explain or to illustrate the results of juridical research through a cartographic and geographic argumentation’ (Manfred Langhans-Ratzenburg, 1928: 9). 6 It is very interesting to see that the English translation of the word Verortung as ‘localization’ stresses a more ‘geopolitical’ meaning of the word, while the original expression Verortung has a more ambivalent meaning: it could be also easily translated as ‘orientation’. I would like to thank Carlo Galli for this observation. See contra Portinaro’s (1982) Italian translation of this concept. 7 Schmitt (1941: 67). The ambivalence of the word Reich is underlined by Losano (2005: 43ff.): Reich means at the same time the ‘imperialistic way’ to European unity, which was opposed to Kelsen’s federalistic way, and the Third Reich. 8 The use of the Monroe Doctrine by the American government is normally divided into three phases: between 1823 and 1890, when it was used in order to prevent the external political interventions; from 1890 to the 1920s, when North America began to exert hegemony on Latin America; from the 1920s, when America claimed its right to intervene whenever and wherever its national interest was in danger (Perkins, 1955). References Alter, P. (1994) Nationalism. London: Edward Arnold. Baum, R.K. (2006) ‘Deconstruction of the National Identity in the Third Reich: Nazisprache und Geopolitik’, National Identities 8(2): 95–112. Breuer, S. 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Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Chiantera-Stutte Space, Großraum and Mitteleuropa ■ Patricia Chiantera-Stutte teaches History of Political Thought at the University of Bari, Italy. She was Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (2000–1). She has published in reviews of history and political thought. Her research themes are: fascism, extreme-right and global movements and geopolitics. Her publications include: Julius Evola: Dal dadaismo alla rivoluzione conservatrice (Aracne, 2001); Von der Avantgarde zum Traditionalismus. Die radikalen Futuristen im italienischen Faschismus (1919–1933) (Campus, 2002); ‘The Ambiguous Heritage of Mitteleuropa’, Law and Critique Journal, 2003, 14(3): 325–53; Res nostra agitur. Il pensiero di Delio Cantimori (1928–1935) (Palomar, 2005) and with R. Brandimarte et al. (eds), Lessico di biopolitica (Manifestolibri, 2006). Address: Dipartimento di scienze storiche e sociali, Universitá degli Studi di Bari, 70121 Bari, Italy. [email: chianterastutte@email.it] ■ Downloaded from http://est.sagepub.com at University of Sussex Library on May 15, 2008 © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 201