The Spatial Revolution - Carl Schmitt
This short essay is from 1940, an important development in the concept of spatial revolution in the age of total war and total peace. The European spatial revolution is considered in light of the development of public law, treaty decisions, neutralisation, and emigration.
From total war to total peace
Throughout the course of human history there have been many types of wars that characterise the meaning and aim of armed struggle: wars of unification and secession, wars of succession, constitutional wars, cabinet wars, and many others. Today’s war cannot be categorised in any of these conventional ways, even if, of course, there are similarities and parallels with the wars of the past. What is particularly new and incomparably relevant in today’s war is that it is being fought for and against a new spatial order.
The change in the concept of space that is taking place throughout the world and among all peoples is profound and the consequences incalculable. Everyone knows that our spatial size and scale is changing rapidly due to new technological means of transport and communication, that “the Earth has become smaller.” Unfortunately, the conclusions drawn from these observations are generally comparable to the impressions of passengers on high-speed trains, planes, and automobiles who realise that getting from one place to another is faster today than, for example, in Charlemagne’s time. These “pan-European” theories and programmes of Count Coudenhove and the pacifists of the League of Nations in Geneva, for whom the earth seemed almost like a single cosmopolitan hotel, were on the same level! Here I will not refer to the philosophy of sleeping and dining cars. The present change in our conception of the earth is infinitely deeper. In terms of its revolutionary and reorganising effect, it can be compared to at most one event in known history, namely the change of worldview that took place four centuries ago, when, after the discovery of America and other discoveries and inventions, the medieval worldview collapsed and the European state system of the period from 1648 to 1914 was formed. In fact, the revolutionary spatial power of new technological advances will change our view of the Earth even more than it did then. A true spatial revolution is now underway. It impacts both the scope of today’s global political events and modern warfare in its totality. As an inevitable consequence, the contours of continental space can already be discerned today.
I. The meaning of war: peace
The meaning of every war that is not senseless lies in the peace that ends the war. But the essence of peace is not merely that guns stop firing, aeroplanes stop dropping bombs, and that diplomats make the speeches familiar to us from the peace banquets in Geneva. Then peace is simply non-war, and we know what that means after the experience of the Treaty of Versailles and the twenty-year interim state between war and peace. What matters is not just a peace treaty, but the establishment of a new order that is decisive for current historical development. The fact that a liberal writer like Guglielmo Ferrero, in his recent book entitled “Reconstruction”, suddenly discovers the exemplary value of the Congress of Vienna and proposes to repeat today the peace efforts of 1814/15 does not help the cause of peace. Today’s war is new and unprecedented in every respect, in its spatial and temporal dimensions, in its totality and sharp turns. It cannot be understood as a repetition of previous armed hostilities. Nor can the world it will culminate in be a copy of an earlier peace. In the great history of mankind, every true peace is true only once. The peace which truly ends a war of spatial organisation can only be the peace of spatial organisation.
II. What the word “total” means
The peoples of the world have now realised that the expression “total war” is not an empty phrase. A war between highly industrialised modern peoples which becomes a struggle for existence - other wars are no longer real wars - is total in the most terrible sense of the word, regardless of whether it is waged totally from the outset or gradually escalates into totality through mutual action. What was understood by peace and international law in European international law from 1648 to 1914 also referred to war, but not to total war in the age of advanced industrialisation. The warfare of the past could occasionally be very bloody, but, as fundamentally partial and measured warfare, it was not a life-and-death struggle for existence, nor was it a simple war between combatants, but a war in which the vanquished found very effective protection in the functioning of the European equilibrium. France, twice utterly defeated, in 1814/15 and 1870/71, remained, even after defeat, a major European power and a full member of the concert of European superpowers. The intermediate state between these non-total wars can be called peace, and with some justification: the abandonment of the peace treaty did not lead to social or economic-structural problems. The fact of total war, by contrast, deepens the problem of peace to the same degree that it increases the intensity of war. Peace must now completely eliminate the danger of total war, at least in the vast territory it reorganises. As long as such a danger exists, there can be no real peace. In the shadow of the threat of total war there remains only the agonising intermediate state between war and peace known to us since Versailles.