The conflict at the heart of German foreign policy

Hitler's favourite theorist envisioned a world in which great powers dominated smaller neighbours. His ideas are still surprisingly popular today.

Photo by Dave Photoz on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

I came across an article in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit recently, which charted the re-emergence of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt as an influence on 21st-century international politics.

I had never heard of Schmitt before. So I’ll give you a summary of what the article says about him.

A professor at Berlin's Humboldt University in the 1930s, Schmitt was deeply suspicious of both Britain and the US, which he saw as maritime powers that sought to impose their values on the entire world.

Land powers like Germany, he believed, never had such world-beating ambitions.

He was particularly resentful of the occupation of the Rhineland, which he saw as an extension of Britain's humiliation of countries like Egypt and India.

Anglo-Saxon "universalism" were, in reality, a front for naked imperial ambition, he believed. (He also despised Jews, whom he saw as proponents of the same universalism as the English.)

His solution to this Anglo dominance was a concept he called the Großraumordnung, a system in which big countries were allowed to dominate their wider environment while not interfering in the affairs of other major powers. What defined a Großraum? Things like a common language and common culture.

In the context of Nazi Germany, Schmitt believed this gave Berlin the right to dominate its near abroad without Britain or France butting in.

These days, his ideas have been taken up by intellectuals in Russia and China. The Kremlin’s house intellectual, Alexander Dugin, has cited Schmitt as an influence since the early 1990s. Jiang Shigong, a political scientist at the University of Beijing, has also written about his relevance to Chinese foreign policy.

The application is obvious. Due to cultural and linguistic links, Taiwan and Ukraine are natural parts of the Chinese and Russian Großräume. As such, their internationally recognised sovereignty doesn't apply. This leads to an inevitable clash with the West, which set up the current system of sovereign nation states, both big and small, and sees it as non-negotiable.

That is the argument put forward compellingly in Die Zeit.

If you ask me, though, this analysis masks some of the tensions in the West that have bubbled up between the Anglo Saxon realm and Berlin in recent years.

In the post-1945 world, Germany committed itself to adopting Anglo-Saxon universalism - that was a condition for being brought back into the West. At the same time, though, Germany is a land power and still thinks in the more provincial terms of a land power.

That is most obvious in German policy towards Russia throughout this century, which has involved the implicit recognition of its right to interfere in its near abroad.

During the Merkel era, Berlin opposed sanctioning the Kremlin over its 2008 invasion of Georgia, it blocked Ukraine's pathway towards NATO, gave Putin a seat at the negotiating table on the status of the Donbas, and pre-2022 refused to deliver the arms that could have acted as a deterrent to invasion.

On China too, Merkel stayed largely silent during the clampdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The Leitfaden of her China policy was Annäherung durch Handel: the idea that countries that trade don’t go to war. It expressly was not an attempt to use trade to influence Chinese domestic policy.

We still know precious little about how Merkel saw the world. But I recently stumbled across a fascinating clue into how her inner circle thought.

Her top military advisor between the years 2006 and 2013, was a soldier called Erich Vad.

Three years before she appointed him, Vad published an article on how Germany should act in the 21st century. The article’s title… “Friend or foe: on the relevance of Carl Schmitt.”

The article praised Schmitt's theory of the Großraum as "an insight that has not lost its importance today.”

“States whose political, military, and economic potential allows them to do so can still establish their own spheres of influence and protect them through appropriate geopolitical and geostrategic measures,” Vad wrote, before saying that Europe should pursue a policy of defining its own Großraum.

Vad's skepticism about universalism meanwhile drips off the text. Sanctions and peacekeeping are weapons of war that “do not remove the violence, they only hide it,” he claims after quoting Schmitt’s critique of western justification for war: “The most terrible wars are carried out only in the name of peace, the most terrible oppression only in the name of freedom, and the most terrible inhumanity only in the name of humanity."

Ironically, Vad has come to public prominence after his retirement.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has become a figurehead of Germany's “peace movement” (i.e., the people who want immediate negotiations with Russia.) His public predictions that Ukraine would capitulate within days, or that it had no chance of retaking Kharkiv, proved reliably wrong. Still, his warning that weapons supplies into Russia’s shpoere of influence will cause a dangerous escalation chime with Berlin’s establishment thinking.

Famously, the Chancellor struggles with this question himself. Olaf Scholz constantly vexes about where exactly on the Ukrainian map Moscow has drawn its red line. This is a concern he clearly places above upholding international law.

At the same time, universalism has a strong voice in German policy making. Today, it is most vocal advocates are found in the smaller coalition parties, the Greens and the Free Democrats.

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) has been Germany’s moral voice on the international stage. She isn’t afraid to describe Xi Jinping as a “dictator” and has ditched her party's pacifism in favour of tanks and Taurus missiles for the Ukrainian army.

At the start of this year, Baerbock bounced Scholz into supplying Leopard tanks to Kyiv by secretly teaming up with the Brits to build a coalition of smaller countries that were prepared to supply their own tanks.

This clash in world views has led to constant tension behind the scenes. Baerbock’s side accuse Scholz of time wasting. He is said to see her as reckless.

Carl Schmitt, no doubt, would argue that raumfremde states like Germany should have no say in what happens in Ukraine at all. Forced to choose, though, he would surely be on the side of the chancellor.

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