Großraum, Monroe Doctrine and spheres of influence: Their relations and overlapping meanings in some authors at the end of the Second World War

Abstract

My contribution starts from the consideration of the differences and overlapping meanings of three concepts that seem to have been used in the political and geopolitical literature in similar ways: the theory of Monroe Doctrine, the Grossraum Theory by Carl Schmitt (1939) and the first ideas of “sphere of influence” as it was defined by Walter Lippmann in his Good Neghbour policy and by E.H. Carr. The theories that I am considering have been all developed in a period of trasition in the International order, from the Second World war (Schmitt and Carr) to the phase imediately after the war (Lippmann).

I will first of all read Schmitt 1939 conference text about the Grossraum in relation to his reconstruction of the role of the Monroe Doctrine in International relations. Indeed Schmitt anchors his new view on the political international order on five dimensions: on Hitler’s mere act of the seizure of power; on the Monroe Doctrine seen as a political “leading case”; on a historical development – the creation of a central European network of Großraumwirtschaft; on the unsolved issues of German minorities scattered in Mitteleuropa; and, last but not least, on a new, geographical and political view of planetary politics. I will show both his attempt to found the origin and the legitimation of his Grossraum theory in the Monroe doctrine, as well as the main differences that he states between his idea of a global order based on Grossräume and the Monroe doctrine.

E.H. Carr in his “Twenty years crisis” (1939) develops a theory that tries to overcome nationalism and to conceive an international order based on the hegemonic powers, concentrating and expanding their power. In the Second World War, Carr sees the beginning of a new possible political trend “ towards the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of six or seven highly organised units, round which lesser satellite units revolved without any appreciable independent motion of their own. (Carr The twenty years crisis 2001, 212). Walter Lippmann, one of the most famous American Journalists, in “Some Notes on War and Peace” (1940) sees Europe as an entity in itself, which would not flourish as a diversity of nation-states; but instead as a union, which required a centre of order: “If this is correct – he writes - then the great question of the war is whether there will be established a new and durable center of civilized union and authority, capable of repulsing attack, large enough and strong enough to exhaust the aggressors,and able in the end to admit and absorb into its unity the civilized peoples of the Western world (Lippmann 1940, 45−6).

I will therefore read the three authors in order to trace back their concepts, that define the emergence of s