Return To The Past
In early June, Xi Jinping made a visit to China’s national archives. While there he was struck by a Ming dynasty-era manuscript describing China’s ancient ties with its tributary, the Ryukyu Kingdom. Today, the territory is a part of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa, but after watching a few hours of Chinese news on the subject, one would be forgiven for believing that its archaic lordship over a long-gone kingdom entitles China to Japanese land.
Although constructing a territorial claim using ancient maps may seem like a medieval anachronism, a closer look reveals it remains fashionable in despotic circles. Xi is not unique among autocrats in his fascination with foregone history. On July 12, 2021, Vladimir Putin published an article entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” proclaiming the indivisibility of the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as a nation, drawing on ninth-century history.
If only these two despots’ newfound antiquarianism could be dismissed as a mere pastime. Unfortunately, these claims about centuries past are at the front of their minds and affect the world today. Putin authorized the invasion of Ukraine a little over half a year after publishing his extraordinary “scholarship,” only to discover the Ukrainians have been reading more contemporary histories and were unwilling to entertain his Peter the Great roleplay.
For Westerners familiar with post-WWII concepts of international law, dusting up ancient claims might just seem like another confounding eccentricism of tyranny. More baffling are claims from illiberal-leaning commentators in the West who attempt to support these epoch-bending crusades by shoddily rationalizing their actions, such as Tucker Carlson, who proclaimed that Ukraine is a “one-party police state” and “client state of the United States State Department.”
In order to understand why the distant past holds so much promise for the present, we must turn to a character from a relatively recent and exceptionally dark period of human history, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was a Nazi legal theorist and philosopher whose work focused on criticizing cosmopolitan liberalism and building a new, authoritarian, and nationalist framework of statehood.
Although connecting contemporary illiberal foreign policy to Schmittian theories may seem like an offense of Godwin’s Law, it is important to note that after WWII authoritarian ideologies from across the political spectrum drew from Schmitt’s legal and philosophical theories, including many left-wingers. Moreover, although he is little known and softly reviled throughout the West, Schmitt is bedside reading for policymakers in China and Russia.
In an essay entitled “The Großraum Order of International Law with a Ban on Intervention for Spatiality Foreign Powers,” Schmitt establishes an alternative model of international law. Written when Nazi Germany was scrambling the European balance of power unopposed, it lays the theoretical basis for an illiberal international law based on great power’s organic relationship with the land surrounding it.
Schmitt’s primary point is that liberal international law based on the concept of independent nation-states is fallacious and that it should be replaced by a system where great powers have unlimited power in their organic sphere of influence or Großraum. Schmitt points to the United States’ Monroe Doctrine as the perfect case study of Großraum in action.
New readers of Schmitt should know he loves to point out liberal hypocrisy and demonstrate how the Western system of rights and norms is just a shame cloaking a mere lust for power. Schmitt contends that the Monroe Doctrine was revolutionary because it thought “of the planet in spatial terms” by proclaiming that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits for European empires.
However flawed Schmitt’s reading of the Monroe Doctrine may be, he admires it because it roots foreign policy in a great power’s connection to its land. Schmitt contends that the liberal alternative to this model can be found in the British Empire and its “universalism.”
By universalism, Schmitt refers not only to Britain’s world-trotting ambitions but the values and political ideas it brings with it. Schmitt denounces the British Empire as “a collection that is not spatially coherent,” meaning that it is a polity that stretched across world regions, totally defying Schmitt’s Großraum model.
Schmitt attaches a specific case study of Britain’s role in the Mediterranean. Through its dominant navy and controlling the Suez and Gibraltar, Britain kept the world’s sea lanes open for trade and connected to its far-flung colonies. This desire for worldwide free trade and far-flung imperial adventures annoyed Schmitt, who saw the Mediterranean as the rightful “living space” of Italy.
Schmitt goes further than asserting a great power’s right to dictate the fate of nations within its natural Großraum. He claims that the unique histories and geographies of each Großraum mean that each Großraum has its own systems of morals and laws. Ultimately, this means that Western conceptions of human rights do not apply to great powers and the nations under their boots. Schmitt goes further, claiming that the morality of German’s Großraum is actually superior to the West because it respects the völkish racial purity of each nation, as opposed to America’s melting pot model.
This framing of traditional, nationalist values fighting for survival against homogenizing liberalism persists in contemporary autocratic rhetoric. Putin has framed his war as a struggle against importing Western degeneracy not just to Russia but the whole world. Although they have not revived its Teutonic wording, the concept of Großraum is at the heart of these revisionist powers’ foreign policy. When Vladimir Putin describes Ukraine and Russia as being a part of the same “spiritual space,” or Xi considers conquering Taiwan as a means of “national rejuvenation,” they are applying the same fundamental concept as Schmitt’s Großraum.
These autocrats are constructing a narrative where they are fighting to maintain the traditional values of their civilizational homeland from the encroachment of an evangelical and degenerate Western moral order. But it is not enough to stop liberalism, its universalist claim must be thoroughly crushed.
Democracy and liberalism’s legitimacy fundamentally derives from the claim that all persons are created equal. If the West surrenders this axiom, it concedes that these cherished values are only rooted in the geographies that their societies emerged from: they must not only surrender their claims of human rights but must surrender the core of their governance structure.
This is why despots so gleefully highlight every time liberal societies fail to live up to their own ideals at home or abroad. It is why Putin denounces Western intervention in Iraq and the Chinese UN representatives accuse America of failing to address racial discrimination and police brutality when the subject of the Uyghurs is brought up. It is also why illiberal isolationists within the West are so eager to undermine American support for Ukraine and why Glenn Greenwald contends that the USA’s objective in Ukraine is to “sacrifice Ukraine... to bleed Russia.” It is why Noam Chomsky asserts that Russia is fighting more humanely in Ukraine than the USA did in Iraq. All of these phenomena are explained by the fact that counter-intellectuals of all sorts want to break liberalism’s spell and replace it with their own politics.
Enemies of liberalism outside of the West wish to see its moral universe shatter so that they can comfortably enforce their values and hegemony within their Großraums. Enemies from within wish to see the Western establishment’s enlightened rhetoric exposed as a lie abroad so that they can establish a new regime.
No doubt, America and the rest of the Western bloc must be conscious of the many egregious and hypocritical mistakes which have undermined the aspiration of freedom, equality, and dignity for all people. But falling for the revival of Schmitt’s sloppy philosophy will only serve to undermine that aspiration.
A central claim of Schmitt’s Großraum concept is that liberal ideals are geographically limited to the West and that nations within other Großraum have incompatible political values. This claim is even more explicitly argued by Alexander Dugin, the Putin regime’s philosopher-in-chief and a student of Schmitt.
However, a brief glance at the world today will reveal nations with shared geographies, cultures, and histories with radically divergent political systems. Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, these nations share deep cultural similarities yet have proceeded along separate paths of political development.
Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence for liberalism’s invasive ability to thrive across all alleged Großraum is the fate of Schmitt’s own Großraum. Schmitt claimed that much of Central and Eastern Europe was a part of Germany’s fundamental illiberal and authoritarian Großraum but now Germany and these European nations are NATO and EU members and are aiding Ukraine in its struggle towards developing liberalism.
Understanding contemporary Russia and China’s obsession with the past through Schmitt’s philosophy will be essential to countering their ambitions. By ensuring the liberal model of international law continues to persist, the West can ensure that medieval tales of bloodied heroes fall deeper and deeper into the past.