Großraum from Carl Schmitt to Aleksandr Dugin: Unpacking the persistence of a classical geopolitical trope

Abstract

This paper is in two parts. The first part considers the origins of the term Großraum, which was formulated by conservative and radical-conservative circles in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s and would ultimately become one of the most popular and effective keywords of the Nazi regime. Although the term was understood in different ways and with different emphases, it was always characterized by an inherent contrast, arguably a contradiction, between two different qualities. Internally, a Grosssraum was conceived as an imperial or neo-imperial entity: a continental super-state in which multiple countries and peoples were combined into a single political entity under the hegemony of a single “leading” nation. In this sense, the Großraum model was useful above all for the purposes of imagining options for the creation and organization of a united European political space under German control. At the same time, however, Großraum was presented as a universal model for how continental spaces across the globe could be consolidated. Effectively, the idea was that global politics could be reconstructed as a community of these super-states. On this planetary scale, neo-imperial principles of internal hegemonic domination were subsumed under the expectation that such a “community of equals” could exist in harmony and peaceful co-existence.

The second part of this paper considers how in the 1990s, the collapse of the Cold War order brought the Großraum concept, in its original sense, back into political discourse. Its reemergence was associated with a broad renaissance of interest in the work of Carl Schmitt, a radical-conservative legal philosopher, prominent supporter of the Nazi regime, and an important—if by no means the most significant or influential—theoretician of Großraum. One of the most enthusiastic of Schmitt’s new-found acolytes was the Russian radical-conservative nationalist Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin deployed the concepts of classical geopolitics as the basis of his neo-fascist critique of post-Soviet Russia, and was fascinated above all by Schmitt’s concept of Großraum. The original model of a dynamic and powerful continental state assuming control of the weaker states that surrounded spoke precisely to the concerns of Dugin and other Russian nationalist-revanchists in the 1990s, who aspired for Russia to re-establish it authority and “leadership” over the former Soviet republics that had broken away to form independent states. But Dugin was also attracted by the potential of Großraum as a generic model for global politics; indeed he paid much more attention to this dimension than Schmitt himself. In a series of articles and books, he developed a so-called teoriia mnogopoliarnogo mira (theory of a multipolar world), which calls for a world divided harmoniously into continental macro-entitles that—like Eurasia itself—are Schmittian Grossräume.