The Rhineland as an Object of International Politics - Carl Schmitt

Speech delivered on the occasion of the millennium celebration of the Rhineland, in Cologne on 14 April 1925.

It is painful to speak of the Rhineland as an object of international politics. But the danger of the Rhineland falling into such a state and of the Rhineland people being degraded into a mere annex of an object still exists, and in the course of our thousand-year history the shadow of this danger has fallen upon us more than once. The terrible separatist period and crisis of the autumn of 1923 are still fresh in everyone’s memory. It was at that time that not only the possibility of secession from Germany became obvious, but also the profound immorality of a condition that arises when the authority of the state breaks down and the people are driven to political despair. Today, fortunately, for many, the worst seems to be over. Other plans and combinations, the realisation of which would have made the Rhineland an object of foreign policy to no lesser extent, we can today regard as harmless, as empty projects; of which there are dozens in troubled times. But we must not abandon caution, we must keep an eye on these projects and intentions. We hear of attempts to separate the territory demilitarised by the Versailles Treaty, i.e., essentially the Rhineland, from the rest of Germany by means of special institutions and means of control, and the establishment of a distinction between them in international law; to create, by means of a system of permanent international commissions, a special regime with far-reaching powers of intervention and control, and which will more or less abolish German state power; to make the Rhineland a kind of extension of the Saarland, or, finally, to simply to turn the country and its population into a material by means of a limitless period of occupation. The coming months and years will show how many of these plans will be realised. It is worth recalling these plans here because they all have one feature: to make the Rhineland an object of international politics, to organise and legitimise the nature of the object when these lands have already become a kind of pledge-object as a result of the occupation.

It is a part of political consciousness that the history of a thousand-years obliges and enables us to realise the special, new, if I may say so, modern character of this danger. The forms and methods by which a country and a people are made the object of international politics have indeed evolved and are no longer the same as they were in the nineteenth century. Old words and old ways of thinking persist and can easily lead to the concealment of political reality. A well-meaning person today might think that no European country should feel more secure than it does now. After all, the long history of the struggle for the Rhine was the history of the struggle for the political annexation of the Rhine territories, just as the struggle for Alsace-Lorraine was a struggle for annexation. But today no one any longer speaks of annexation. In the name of freedom and the right to self-determination, even of small peoples and small States, the world went to war for four years. Many new states were created on the basis of the right to self-determination and the principle of nationality. This principle was used to justify alien partitions and displacements of natural boundaries and common property. In response to the German peace declaration, Wilson declared on 11 February 1918 that “peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game” and further “every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states.” In the proposals and drafts of the French delegates at the Paris Peace Conference in the spring of 1919, it is indeed demanded repeatedly that the western border of Germany should coincide with the Rhine, but at the same time it is always emphasised that in no way should the left bank of the Rhine be annexed. Public opinion throughout the world seems to resent the idea of annexation of any nation, and after hearing so many words about the right of nations to self-determination, it is easy to believe that today no nation can be a subject of international politics, since self-determination means that a nation itself determines its political and state existence as a subject, that is, the opposite of an object.

But let us not forget what our thousand-years history so clearly teaches us. If today a politically educated person learns that the great naval powers have organised a disarmament conference and decided to limit the construction of gigantic warships, the so-called “capital ships”, he will easily suspect that this disarmament, which is indeed to be welcomed, probably concerns only obsolete types, but unfortunately does not concern the really modern weapons that matter, namely the air fleet and submarines. Similarly, this cautious man, seeing how generously ideal principles are bestowed, will not be able to rid himself of the suspicion that the rejection of annexations is perhaps a rejection of a method which has lost its relevance because other, more efficient and more favourable methods have been found. In fact, the old European continental European method of political annexation, as exemplified by the struggle for Alsace-Lorraine, is rather unfashionable from the point of view of modern world politics. In the age of imperialism, other forms of domination have emerged which avoid open political subjugation and enable the dominated country to exist as a state or even, if necessary, to have a new independent state created whose freedom and sovereignty are explicitly proclaimed, so that apparently the opposite of what might be called the degradation of the nation as an object of foreign policy is at work.

Some examples illustrate this development. First, in the nineteenth century the great powers gave new content to the so-called protectorate, dominating predominantly semi-civilised states whose populations they could not grant citizenship rights to, taking over the representation of the state in foreign policy matters, establishing a kind of protectorship, while leaving to the “protected” state a certain independent domestic political existence. It is enough to mention this method. It is applicable to states that are not civilised in the European sense, such as Tunisia, Morocco, the Malaysian protectorates. It should be added that events in the Balkans, especially after 1878, led to national independence through so-called protectorates. Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia thus became free states. In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been under Austro-Hungarian rule since 1878, open annexation took place in 1908. From these events in the Balkans, perhaps we can conclude that a European state must either retain its national independence or be openly annexed. Unfortunately, the question of whether such optimism about the form of the protectorate is justified can be left open, not only because the external representation of Gdansk was politically entrusted to Poland, which can only be called a true protectorate on the basis of superficial analogies, but above all for another reason: The form of the protectorate has already itself fallen into disuse and has been replaced by a new procedure that allows the state to dominate the capacity for action, even in foreign policy, explicitly recognising it as free and unconstrained. Today, despite the solemn abolition of the British protectorate in 1922 and the recognition of Egypt as a free and sovereign state, England’s domination was legally based on four reservations made at the time of recognition which gave England the right to intervene: the protection and safeguarding of the Suez Canal, the protection of foreign interests in Egypt, the defence of Egypt against foreign aggression, and the administration of the Sudan, i.e. the headwaters of the Nile. This was a sufficient legal basis for the transfer of the Anglo-Egyptian conflict into an internal British affair, as happened (in connection with the murder of an English officer) in November 1924. In March 1925, a parliament undesirable to the British was dissolved within 12 hours of its session. A term such as “protection of foreign interests”, because of its vagueness, is particularly capable of giving the right of intervention based on it the character of a real rule.

Mention should also be made of the so-called US control of Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Panama. In this case, the “controlled” state is described as free, independent, and sovereign, although its entire political existence is decisively determined by the United States. The four cases of American domination, in turn, are very different from each other. What distinguishes them is the development of a legal form of domination, which consists in combining the right of occupation with the right of intervention. The meaning of the right of intervention is that the intervening state decides some undefined concepts essential to the political existence of the other state, such as the defence of foreign interests, the protection of independence, public order and security, the observance of international treaties, etc. In all these intervention rights, the intervening state has the right to intervene in the territory of the other state. In all these rights of intervention, it must always be remembered that, due to the indeterminacy of these concepts, the acting power makes decisions at its discretion and thus maintains control over the political existence of the controlled state.

Finally, it must be remembered that the Treaty of Versailles did not allow the major Allied Powers to annex or seize the German colonies as colonies, but gave them the form of so-called mandates exercised on behalf of the League of Nations. With regard to the so-called “A” mandates (Syria, Palestine, Iraq) it was even said that these societies had reached such a degree of development “that they may be temporarily recognised in their existence as independent nations, provided that, with the advice and assistance of the Mandate, they shall be administered until they are able to govern themselves.” (Art. 22 of the Treaty of Versailles) Nevertheless, it must be said that England did govern Palestine and Iraq, and France did govern Syria, since the mandate itself determined the security and order of these territories, the degree of their independence, their capacity for self-government, etc.

To understand the significance of these new practices, which avoid overt political annexation, one must first ask what interests prevent those in power from carrying out annexation. The most immediate interest is very clear and simple: it is to ensure that the population of the dominated territory does not acquire the citizenship of the dominating state. This interest in preventing unwanted new citizens shows how much conditions changed in the nineteenth century. The old European politics was dominated by the notion that an increase in population was synonymous with an increase in power. This was possible in times of cabinet politics and absolute governments. But the democratic constitution compels states to be cautious in increasing population, for it is obvious that it is impossible to grant the same citizenship rights to every population. In states that honour the principle of citizenship and are pure nation-states, foreign populations are generally highly undesirable. The tendency to exclude foreigners is all the more obvious in an imperialist state, which sincerely seeks economic domination of the world, but is apparently unwilling to share the fruits of that domination. There are other reasons why open political annexation would be unfavourable. According to the doctrine of public international law known as state succession, i.e. the principles to be followed in changing the rule of a state over a territory, the population of the acquired territory must not only acquire the nationality of the acquiring state, but must also assume part of the obligations of the former state, assume all or part of the state’s debts, etc. This is why open political annexation appears to be disadvantageous. Again, the advantage of circumventing political annexation is that it avoids the legal consequences of state succession. Instead of succession, a system of intervening rights is created.

The consequence of this approach is that words such as independence, freedom, self-determination, and sovereignty lose their former meaning. The political power of the controlled state is to a greater or lesser extent deprived of its content. It no longer has the possibility to determine its own political fate in the event of a decisive conflict. It can no longer dispose of its economic wealth. What matters is not that the right to foreign intervention, if all goes well, is exercised only in exceptional cases. What is decisive is that the dominant or controlled state finds the norm of power in its political behaviour no longer in its own existence, but in the interests and decisions of a foreigner. The foreigner intervenes if it seems to him to be in his own political interest to maintain what he calls security and order, the protection of foreign interests and private property (i.e. his financial capital), compliance with international treaties, etc. He makes decisions on these undefined concepts on which his right to intervene is based, and because of their indeterminacy, he has unlimited power. The right of the people to self-determination thus loses its essence. The foreigner has what interests him and decides what is “order”; the rest, which does not interest him, he willingly leaves to the dominant people under the name of sovereignty and freedom. We must not forget that at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, during the discussion on the Saar, an expert from the United States - Dr Haskins is his name, and we do not want to forget him - held with the utmost clarity that the control of a people over its country’s natural resources was not part of its right to self-determination. This is how you can literally pull the rug out from under the feet of a nation, even if it still bears the name of a free and even sovereign people.

These modern methods, which avoid the word “domination” and prefer the word “control”, differ in one essential respect from the political annexation of earlier times. Political annexation made it possible to incorporate the annexed people. It was not a defence of an ideal, but it at least had the virtues of transparency and visibility. The victor assumed political responsibility and representation with the country and its population. The annexed territory even had the opportunity to become part of the new state, to merge with it and thus escape the humiliating position of mere object. All this is absent in modern methods. The controlling state receives all the military and economic benefits of annexation without suffering any hardship. The English jurist Baty articulates a particularly interesting consequence of modern methods: the people of these territories have neither real citizenship rights nor the protections enjoyed by foreigners and outsiders. What appears to be state power in a controlled country is more or less dependent on the decisions of the foreigner and is nothing more than a facade of his domination made invisible in a system of treaties.

The preceding examples did not refer to European nations. Protectorates and mandates are even officially regarded as forms of domination over semi-civilised or uncivilised peoples. Article 22 of the Charter of the League of Nations, just mentioned, outlines with edifying words how a people “who are not yet capable of governing themselves under the particularly difficult conditions of the modern world” should therefore be “placed under the guardianship of a mandatary.” But the world is a small place and, above all, the old concept that dominated the application of international law back in the nineteenth century - the division of humanity into Christian and non-Christian peoples, the assimilation of Christianity and civilisation, and hence the basis of respect for the peoples of Europe - has disappeared. A gap separates us from the time when international law textbooks still spoke of Christian international law and the law of Christian nations. The greatest step towards the dethroning of Europe was the Treaty of Versailles. I do not mean to say that it abolished German sovereignty. But if this is not the case, if Germany can still pursue a German policy within modest limits, this is partly due to the number of opponents to whom she is subjected in this treaty and partly to the events of recent years, but not to the treaty itself. This is not a criticism of the document. It is only to draw attention to the fact that the treaty contains several dangerous and vague conceptions which may become the basis for permanent intervention if they are not immediately recognised in full. They could turn the whole of Germany into a political object. They particularly concern the Rhineland, which is the immediate object and obvious theatre for any such attempt.

Here the oft-quoted terms come into play, each of which may contain the possible fate of Germany: reparations, sanctions, investigation, and occupation. After the Treaty of Versailles, reparations were so unlimited that they meant the eternal enslavement of Germany. It was only after long and hard efforts that the Dawes Plan, which is still in force today and gives at least a rough idea of the extent of the obligations, was drawn up. The right of sanctions, if unilaterally and arbitrarily interpreted, could also lead to the complete and permanently renewable subjugation of Germany if any Allied Power, invoking either §18 of Annex 2, Section 1, Part VIII of the Treaty of Versailles, or the general right of unlimited reprisal, could militarily occupy German territory and confiscate German industry. The right of enquiry granted by Article 213 to the League of Nations against Germany during the period of the Treaty of Versailles, the so-called right of enquiry, which can be exercised by a majority decision of the Council of the League of Nations, also gives rise to unpredictable interpretations, if we take into account that modern warfare is not only waged by military means in the strict sense of the word, but affects the entire industry and economy of a country. In the case of the occupation of German territory, the real site of which was the Rhineland, the strength of the occupation troops was uncertain and the power of the occupation authorities extremely great. Although they had the right to do what they considered necessary for the “safety and dignity of the occupying troops,” it was another of those undefined concepts, such as the protection of foreign interests, etc., which can undermine the state power of the occupied territory, and in critical periods, as in the autumn of 1923, destroy it altogether. The periods of occupation are also circumscribed in such a way as to suggest the possibility of unilateral interpretation. If, for example, the Cologne Zone was to be evacuated after five years on condition of the ‘faithful fulfillment’ of the treaty (Art. 429), the first question that naturally arises is who decides on the faithful fulfillment and whether the innumerable pretexts and ambiguities generated by such derogations are left to the political discretion of the contracting party. Poincaré’s famous thesis that the terms of an occupation, even a fifteen-year occupation, have not yet begun is mentioned here in a single word. This reveals the whole abyss of uncertainty into which Germany could fall under this treaty. But the consequences of this systematic uncertainty are terrible. For the peace treaty has as its raison d’etre and aim the cessation of war and the establishment of a state of peace. But as a result of this uncertainty, the boundary between war and peace itself remains undefined, and such elementary concepts as war and peace, without a clear distinction between which it is impossible for nations to exist together, lose their simple meaning and dissolve into an agonising intermediate state.