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Hegemony in a Multipolar World Order: Global Constitutionalism and the Großraum

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Abstract

Recent setbacks to international institutions and projects of global governance have been viewed as marking a resurgence of nation-state sovereignty. In fact, however, many of the major controversies and developments in contemporary international law and geopolitics concern the administration, autonomy, and internal hierarchy not of states, but of supra-state regions. The spatial logic of a world divided into such regions is best articulated in Carl Schmitt’s theory of the Großraum, which in various respects describes and explains key features of modern world order. Taking regional systems as self-constituting political units characterized by internal forms of dominance and legitimation aids in identifying the operation of hegemony in contemporary international law and institutions. It also makes possible a reinterpretation of global constitutionalist discourse as a democratizing project that finds its most important expressions in counter-hegemonic movements within the various “great spaces” constituting today’s world.

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Notes

  1. Schmitt 1955 at 354–355.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Triepel 1938 at 298–301.

  5. Schmitt 1955, 2006.

  6. Schmitt 1933.

  7. Schmitt 1963 at 8.

  8. Benoist 2013; Kahn 2011; Auer 2015; Liu 2001; Jiang 2018.

  9. Schmitt 2006.

  10. See, e.g., Dyzenhaus 2003.

  11. Müller 2003.

  12. Schmitt 1922.

  13. Schmitt 1933.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Schmitt 1939.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Schmitt 1933.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Cf. Anghie 2016; Rajagopal 2005.

  21. Drago and Nettles 1928.

  22. Anghie 2001.

  23. Schmitt 1933.

  24. Ikenberry 2018; Wertheim 2018.

  25. Cf. Kennedy 2018; Anghie 2007; Moyn 2012.

  26. Schmitt 1933, 1939.

  27. Bendersky 1983.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Mazower 2009.

  30. On the other hand, of course, Schmitt was obviously aware of the role racist and militarist ideas played in his society and in the Nazi Party specifically, and any reasonable ethical appraisal of his actions during the period must acknowledge the complicity resulting from his choice to engage with the regime.

  31. Schmitt 1939.

  32. Schmitt 1933, 1939.

  33. Krüger 1932; Grävell 1933; Massakas 1933; Hoffmann 1932 (noting as well that “such Großraum-autarky must at the same time be an enticing foreign policy goal.”).

  34. Takahashi 1975; Kamikawa 1975.

  35. Schmitt 1932.

  36. Schmitt 1933.

  37. Triepel 1938.

  38. Bulmer 2014. Of course, where Schmitt and Triepel advocated a more openly imperial version of hegemony than that exercised by the USA in the Western Hemisphere, today’s Germany instead exercises a form of hegemony that is considerably less imperial than America’s in its region (where, of course, unilateral military interventions remain an openly discussed policy option), and much more collaborative at least in form.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Reho 2014.

  41. Laruelle 2008.

  42. Comte 2017; Ette 2017.

  43. Schmitt 1933.

  44. Cf. “Senators Seek US Strategy to Stop China’s Maritime Reclamations,” Voice of America (Mar. 19, 2015).

  45. Mirski 2015.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Koh 2011; Roberts 2017.

  48. Kammerhofer 2010.

  49. UNCLOS Art. 121(3).

  50. Jiang 2018.

  51. Siddiqui 2018.

  52. Kaplan 2005.

  53. Schmitt 1970.

  54. Schmitt 1922.

  55. Kennedy 2018.

  56. Cox 1983.

  57. Gramsci 1971.

  58. Iida 1988.

  59. Gramsci 1971.

  60. Gramsci 1971.

  61. Triepel 1938.

  62. Schmitt 2008.

  63. Jiang 2018.

  64. Wright 1930.

  65. UDHR Article 2 (“Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.”)

  66. Kay 1967; Turner 2013.

  67. Ibid.

  68. Habermas 2007.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Ibid.

  71. Habermas 2008.

  72. Ibid.

  73. Benhabib 2016.

  74. Kadi and Al Barakaat International Foundation v Council and Commission (2008) C-402/05.

  75. Kumm 2011.

  76. Varoufakis and Brown 2016.

  77. Habermas 2004.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Claudio Corradetti, Mattias Kumm, and all of the conveners and participants of the workshop on Hegemony in the International Order co-sponsored by the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, and held at the Luigi Sturzo Institute in Rome, 11–12 June 2018, for which this paper was originally developed and presented. He would also like to thank Seyla Benhabib and Paul Kahn for conversations contributing to the development of this paper’s argument.

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  1. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, NT, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Ryan Mitchell

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Mitchell, R. Hegemony in a Multipolar World Order: Global Constitutionalism and the Großraum. Jus Cogens 1, 129–150 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42439-019-00005-x

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