Carl Schmitt's Geopolitical Writings and Romania's Future

(Romanian version of this introduction here)
           
Until recently, the geopolitical theories of 20th century German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt have been neglected.  His early jurisprudential doctrine of decisionism, by which the sovereign is defined as “he who decides on the exception,” has been given plenty of attention.  So has his definition of “the political” as the potentially lethal distinction between friends and enemies.  Recently, however, his works on geopolitics have been recognized as equally worthy of attention.

            Schmitt’s concept of the land as the source of all true law is similar to the ideas expressed in the conversation between the Ottoman sultan and the Wallachian prince in Eminescu’s “Scrisoarea III.”  Like Eminescu, Schmitt often viewed bodies of water in sinister, demonic terms.  One common influence on their ideas about war may have been Clausewitz, whom Schmitt mentions as an influence in some of his other texts.  (Eminescu, remember, had studied in Bismarck’s Prussia.)

            Schmitt’s ideas on land and peoples are also somewhat similar to those argued in Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Pentru Legionari, and the German thinker’s ideas on land-appropriation influenced Schmitt’s acquaintance and admirer Mircea Eliade.  This is revealed clearly in Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth (1950).  However, Schmitt’s ideas about land-based nations and maritime nations developed before 1950, and can already be detected in his 1938 book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes.  In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt explains his theories about these subjects:

“In mythical language, the earth became known as the mother of law.  This signifies a threefold root of law and justice…  the earth is bound to law in three ways.  She contains law within herself, as a reward of labor; she manifests law upon herself, as fixed boundaries; and she sustains law above herself, as a public sign of order.  Law is bound to the earth and related to the earth… The sea knows no such apparent unity of space and law, of order and orientation… Ships that sail across the sea leave no trace…  The sea has no character, in the original sense of the word, which comes from the Greek charassein, meaning to scratch, to engrave, to imprint.  The sea is free…  Originally, before the birth of great sea powers, the axiom ‘freedom of the sea’ meant something very simple, that the sea was a zone free for booty.  Here, the pirate could ply his wicked trade with a clear conscience.”

            In his controversial early World War II essay Ordinea Grossraum (1939-1941), Schmitt mentions Romania more than once and appears to defend the infamous territorial rearrangements of 1940, but his cryptic boast in the July 1941 preliminary remark is ambiguous and may suggest implicit criticism of these land-appropriations.  In the preliminary remark, Schmitt subtly suggests that Operation Barbarossa proved him right all along (he doesn’t explain exactly how).  In any case, that is the only contemporary published remark he ever made about the war on the Eastern Front, a subject he disliked altogether.  Like Stephen the Great, Schmitt believed that any encircled country that wishes to be a respected power should instinctively avoid a war on more than one front, especially in opposite directions. 

            Ordinea Grossraum demonstrates that Schmitt had conceived many of his ideas on geopolitics and international law at least a decade before they would later be expanded upon and applied to the postwar world in The Nomos of the Earth.  His concept of a Grossraum (great space) protected by a powerful nation, which he calls a Reich, was partially influenced by the American Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century.  However, Schmitt criticized the United States for abandoning the original Monroe Doctrine in favor of a global empire in the 20th century.

            Romania has never been a Reich in the sense described in Ordinea Grossraum – that is, a subject and not just an object of a geopolitical great space.  There have been many great Romanian leaders, but only two who envisioned Romania as a Reich and not just a nation-state.  Michael the Brave was the first of these leaders; Codreanu was the second.  Both were murdered before they could achieve this goal.  Will there be a third leader with a vision of a Romanian Reich, and if so, will that leader live long enough to make that vision a reality?  Romania’s future depends on it.

            Nothing could be further from the point of producing this translation of Ordinea Grossraum than to encourage more lingering outrage over the territorial losses of 1940.  There are already far too many experts on the historic Romanian grievances against Russia and Hungary, and not nearly enough ideas for a non-usurious national bank, a feared weapons industry, and other new institutions that would bring the Romanian nation respect and self-sufficiency in a merciless world.  These things, along with the spiritual considerations, are the inner necessities of the nation and the state.  Schmitt’s writings hold the key to the outer necessities.

(Romanian version of this introduction here.  Other geopolitical writings by Schmitt here)