Carl Schmitt's » Land and Sea « │ Alexander Dugin

In 1942, Schmitt published the most important work, Land and Sea. Together with the later text Planetary Tension between the East and the West and the Confrontation of the Land and the Sea, this constitutes the most important document of geopolitical science. 

 

Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Doré, 1865.

 » World history is a history of the battle of sea powers against land powers
and of land powers against sea powers. «
Carl Schmitt, 1942.

The meaning of opposing land and sea in Schmitt comes down to the fact that we are talking about two completely different, irreducible and hostile civilizations, and not about variants of a single civilization complex. This division almost exactly coincides with the picture drawn by Mackinder, but Schmitt gives its main elements of thalassocracy (sea forces) and tellurocracy (land forces) an in-depth philosophical interpretation related to basic legal and ethical systems. It is curious that Schmitt uses the name Behemoth for land forces, and Leviathan for forces of the sea, as a reminder of two Old Testament monsters, one of which embodies all land creatures, and the other all creatures of water, the sea.

 

 » The holy king of Gods and men I call, celestial law  (Nomos) the righteous seal of all. «

Orphic Hymns to Nomos 63 (2nd or 3rd century AD).

The Nomos of the Earth exists without alternative for most of human history. All varieties of this Nomos are characterized by the presence of a strict and stable legalizing (and ethical) form, which reflects the immobility and fixity of the land, the Earth. This connection with the Earth, the space which is easily amenable to structuralization (fixed borders, constancy of communication paths, invariable geographical and relief features), gives rise to essential conservatism in the social, cultural and technical spheres. The totality of the Earth’s Nomos constitutes what is commonly called the history of the traditional society. 

 

In such a situation, the water and the sea are only peripheral civilizational phenomena, without intruding on the ethical sphere (or intruding sporadically). Only with the discovery of the World Ocean at the end of the 16th century does the situation change radically. Mankind (and first of all, the island of England) begins to get used to the marine existence, begins to realize itself as an Island in the middle of the waters, a Ship. But the water area is very different from the land. It is impermanent, hostile, alienated, subject to constant change. The paths are not fixed in it, the differences in orientations are not obvious. The Nomos of the Sea entails a global transformation of consciousness. Social, legal, and ethical standards are becoming fluid. A new civilization is born. Schmitt believes that the New Time and the technical breakthrough that opened the era of industrialization owe their existence to the geopolitical phenomenon of the transition of mankind to the Nomos of the Sea. Thus, the geopolitical confrontation of the Anglo-Saxon world of the external crescent acquires a sociopolitical definition from Schmitt: 

 

» The Nomos of the Sea is a reality hostile to traditional society. « 

 

The geopolitical confrontation between land and sea powers acquires the most important historical, ideological and philosophical meaning.

Quoted from:
Alexander Dugin (1997) - Foundations of Geopolitics.

 

See also:

Carl Schmitt (1942) - Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation.

Carl Schmitt (1950) - The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum.

Carl Schmitt (1955) - The Planetary Tension between Orient and Occident and the Opposition between Land and Sea.

The Defeat of the West │ Emmanuel Todd

Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia. Todd was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale (The Final Fall), with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates [...] The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the 'aggression' by 'Tsar' Putin.

 

Behemoth, the land monster (land forces), and Leviathan, the sea monster (sea forces), killing each other.

Engraving by William Blake (1757–1827).

Todd focuses on the key reasons that have led to the West’s downfall. Among them: the end of the nation-state; de-industrialization (which explains NATO’s deficit in producing weapons for Ukraine); the “degree zero” of the West’s religious matrix, Protestantism; the sharp increase of mortality rates in the US (much higher than in Russia), along with suicides and homicides; and the supremacy of an imperial nihilism expressed by the obsession with Forever Wars. Todd methodically analyses, in sequence, Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia and finally The Empire. Let’s focus on what would be the 12 Greatest Hits of his remarkable exercise:

1. At the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, the combined GDP of Russia and Belarus was only 3.3% of the combined West (in this case the NATO sphere plus Japan and South Korea). Todd is amazed how these 3.3% capable of producing more weapons than the whole Western colossus not only are winning the war but reducing dominant notions of the “neoliberal political economy” to shambles.
2. The “ideological solitude” and “ideological narcissism” of the West – incapable of understanding, for instance, how “the whole Muslim world seems to consider Russia as a partner rather than an adversary”.
3. Todd eschews the notion of “Weberian states” – evoking a delicious compatibility of vision between Putin and US realpolitik practitioner John Mearsheimer. Because they are forced to survive in an environment where only power relations matters, states are now acting as “Hobbesian agents.” And that brings us to the Russian notion of a nation-state, focused on “sovereignty”: the capacity of a state to independently define its internal and external policies, with no foreign interference whatsoever.
4. The implosion, step by step, of WASP culture, which led, “since the 1960s”, to “an empire deprived of a center and a project, an essentially military organism managed by a group without culture (in the anthropological sense)”. This is Todd defining the US neocons.
5. The US as a “post-imperial” entity: just a shell of military machinery deprived of an intelligence-driven culture, leading to “accentuated military expansion in a phase of massive contraction of its industrial base”. As Todd stresses, “modern war without industry is an oxymoron”.
6. The demographic trap: Todd shows how Washington strategists “forgot that a state whose population enjoys a high educational and technological level, even if it is decreasing, does not lose its military power”. That’s exactly the case of Russia during the Putin years.
7. Here we reach the crux of Todd’s argument: his post-Max Weber reinterpretation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published a little over a century ago, in 1904/1905: “If Protestantism was the matrix for the ascension of the West, its death, today, is the cause of the disintegration and defeat.” Todd clearly defines how the 1688 English 'Glorious Revolution', the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Revolution were the true pillars of the liberal West. Consequently, an expanded 'West' is not historically 'liberal', because it also engineered “Italian fascism, German Nazism and Japanese militarism”. In a nutshell, Todd shows how Protestantism imposed universal literacy on the populations it controlled, “because all faithful must directly access the Holy Scriptures. A literate population is capable of economic and technological development. The Protestant religion modeled, by accident, a superior, efficient workforce.” And it is in this sense that Germany was “at the heart of Western development”, even if the Industrial Revolution took place in England. Todd’s key formulation is undisputable: “The crucial factor of the ascension of the West was Protestantism’s attachment to alphabetization.” Moreover Protestantism, Todd stresses, is twice at the heart of the history of the West: via the educational and economic drive - with fear of damnation and the need to feel chosen by God engendering a work ethic and a strong, collective morality - and via the idea that Men are unequal (remember the White Man’s Burden). The collapse of Protestantism could not but destroy the work ethic to the benefit of mass greed: that is, neoliberalism.
8. Todd’s sharp critique of the spirit of 1968 would merit a whole new book. He refers to “one of the great illusions of the 1960s – between Anglo-American sexual revolution and May 68 in France”; “to believe that the individual would be greater if freed from the collective”. That led to an inevitable debacle: “Now that we are free, en masse, from metaphysical beliefs, foundational and derived, communist, socialist or nationalist, we live the experience of the void.” And that’s how we became “a multitude of mimetic midgets who do not dare to think by themselves – but reveal themselves as capable of intolerance as the believers of ancient times.”
9. Todd’s brief analysis of the deeper meaning of transgenderism completely shatters the Church of Woke – from New York to the EU sphere, and will provoke serial fits of rage. He shows how transgenderism is “one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy, not just things and humans but reality.” And there’s an added analytical bonus: “The transgender ideology says that a man may become a woman, and a woman may become a man. This is a false affirmation, and in this sense, close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism.” It gets worse, when it comes to the geopolitical ramifications. Todd establishes a playful mental and social connection between this cult of the fake and the Hegemon’s wobbly behavior in international relations. Example: the Iranian nuclear deal clinched under Obama becoming a hardcore sanctions regime under Trump. Todd: “American foreign policy is, in its own way, gender fluid.”
10. Europe’s “assisted suicide”. Todd reminds us how Europe at the start was the Franco-German couple. Then after the 2007/2008 financial crisis, that turned into “a patriarchic marriage, with Germany as a dominant spouse not listening to his companion anymore”. The EU abandoned any pretention of defending Europe’s interests - cutting itself off from energy and trade with its partner Russia and sanctioning itself. Todd identifies, correctly, the Paris-Berlin axis replaced by the London-Warsaw-Kiev axis: that was “the end of Europe as an autonomous geopolitical actor”. And that happened only 20 years after the joint opposition by France-Germany to the neocon war on Iraq.
11. Todd correctly defines NATO by plunging into “their unconscious”: “We note that its military, ideological and psychological mechanism does not exist to protect Western Europe, but to control it.”
12. In tandem with several analysts in Russia, China, Iran and among independents in Europe, Todd is sure that the US obsession – since the 1990s - to cut off Germany from Russia will lead to failure: “Sooner or later, they will collaborate”, as “their economic specializations define them as complementary”. The defeat in Ukraine will open the path, as a “gravitational force” reciprocally seduces Germany and Russia.

[...] Whatever the deadline, inbuilt in all this is a total Russia victory – with the winner dictating all terms. No negotiations, no ceasefire, no frozen conflict – as the Hegemon is now desperate spinning.

Quoted from:
Pepe Escobar (January 18, 2024) - How the West Was Defeated.

 

 

See also:
Emmanuel Todd (January 11, 2024) - La Défaite de l'Occident. 

 Serge Bernard (2016) - From Conquest To Affluence To Collapse: The 250 Year Empire Life Cycle.

John Mearsheimer (2001) - The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

William Strauss & Neil Howe (1997) - The Fourth Turning.  

 Alexander Dugin (1997) - Foundations of Geopolitics.

Samuel P. Huntington (1993) - The Clash of Civilizations.

John Bagot Glubb (1978) - The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival.

Carl Schmitt (1942) - Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation. 

The Time of the Civilisational States │ Alain de Benoist

The way in which, since the 1990s, the Chinese authorities, claiming to have ‘Asian values’, have rejected criticism in the name of the human rights ideology is significant. In January 2021, at the Davos Forum, Xi Jinping said, ‘Just as no two leaves in the world are the same, no two histories, no two cultures, no two social systems are the same. Each country is unique in all these areas, and no country is superior to another. There is no need to worry about differences, but rather about attempts to impose a hierarchy between civilisations or to force some of them to align themselves with another in terms of history, culture or social system.’

 » The logic of great spaces does not have a universalist scope. The paradigm is no longer national, but spatial.’ «

Carl Schmitt, 1941.

The recognition of the crisis of universalism and Western hegemonism thus goes hand in hand with the feeling that the era of the international order based on the conflicting balance of nation-states has ended, as Carl Schmitt foresaw as early as the 1930s. The rise of civilisational states signals the entry into an era in which the world order is no longer reduced to the unstable equilibrium of nation-states. As civilisational norms become a pivotal point in geopolitics, the main competition is no longer the traditional one between nation-states but the one between civilisations. Civilisational states give rise to a new mode of sovereignty that is no longer that of nation-states. 

 

[...] The notion of the civilisational state is even more reminiscent of the ‘great space’ (Großraum) theorised by Carl Schmitt to rethink international relations beyond the codification of relations between nation-states. A ‘great space’, Schmitt says, requires a ‘great people’, a vast territory and an autonomous political will. ‘Empires’, he writes, ‘are those ruling powers that carry a political idea radiating out into a determined great space from which they exclude, as a matter of principle, the interventions of foreign powers.’ And he adds this essential reminder: ‘The empire is more than an enlarged state, just as the great space is not just an enlarged micro-space.’ ‘The logic of great spaces does not have a universalist scope. It only integrates the historical evolution of the great territorial powers influencing third countries. The paradigm is therefore no longer national, but spatial.’

Quoted from:
Alain de Benoist (Apr 26, 2023) - The Time of the Civilisational States.

 

See also:

Carl Schmitt (1941) - Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte. Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff im Völkerrecht. (Great Space International Law with a ban on intervention by powers alien to the area. A contribution to the concept of empire in international law.)
Carl Schmitt (1940) - Großraum gegen Universalismus. (Great Space vs. Universalism.) 

Legality and Legitimacy | Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt ranks among the most original and controversial political thinkers of the twentieth century. His incisive criticisms of Enlightenment political thought and liberal political practice remain as shocking and significant today as when they first appeared in Weimar Germany.

 

Carl Schmitt (1888 — 1985), » among the most original « , e.g.:

 » The emptiness of mere majority calculus deprives legality of all persuasive power. «

 

Legality and Legitimacy was composed in 1932, in the midst of the crisis that would lead to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and only a matter of months before Schmitt’s collaboration with the Nazis. Schmitt questions the political viability of liberal constitutionalism, parliamentary government, and the rule of law. Liberal governments, he argues, cannot respond effectively to challenges by radical groups like the Nazis or Communists. Only a presidential regime subject to few, if any, can ensure domestic security in a highly pluralistic society.

Quoted from the introduction to the 2004 first English translation of

Carl Schmitt (1932) - Legality and Legitimacy.

 

November 24, 2023 - In the People's Republic of China, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is linked to citizens' mandatory digital ID. If somebody drives over the speed limit, the speed camera system automatically deducts a fine from their digital wallet.

 

November 24, 2023 - President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, announces the launch of the European CBDC — the digital euro — which will enable unelected technocrats at the ECB to program how, when, where, on what and by whom it can be spent, including the imposition of social credit, carbon allowance and vaccine passport systems. And despite the lie that 'cash is here to stay', you can be absolutely certain that megalomaniac technocrats such as Lagarde have every intention of gradually phasing out cash altogether, so eventually people will be forced to use CBDCs. European Union citizens already face imprisonment or fines for engaging in cash transactions above €1000, but the introduction of the digital euro will facilitate financial totalitarianism on a scale that would make even George Orwell wince.

 

November 24, 2023 - Christine Anderson, German Member of the European Parliament, explains how CBDCs, in conjunction with digital ID, will be used to exert absolute control over the population: » If you don't comply, they will just shut down your bank account. And it's not like it hasn't happened before. Look to Canada ... There were people standing up for their freedom, for their right not to get some unknown substance injected into their arms. They shut down their bank accounts. So if there was no cash, what are you going to do? They can just eliminate you with a flip of a switch. It's as simple as that. «

 

 

» This would imply to castrate humankind and to degrade it down to the pitiful level of the Chinese. «

Friedrich Nietzsche (1888) answering to Immanuel Kant's 'eternal peace' ideas in his Ecce Homo. Why I am a destiny.

The Liberal Political Theology | Neema Parvini

Neema Parvini (2022) - From the realist perspective of [Carl] Schmitt, there is no structural difference between the liberal state, the communist state, and the fascist state — or indeed any other state. The only difference is the extent to which a regime may obscure the nature of its power or else genuinely buy into myths of neutrality. Viewed in this way, a state wedded to liberal democracy is as ‘totalitarian’ as any other since, by its very nature, it will be unable to tolerate any leaders who are not always already liberal democrats. 

 

"Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy." — Ernst Jünger, 1977

 

Should such leaders rise, the stalwarts of liberal democracy will perceive them as ‘populists’, ‘fascists’, ‘threats to democracy’, and so on. The extent of free speech, free inquiry, free thought, and so on is a liberal delusion. In fact, the range of ‘allowable opinion’ is always exceedingly narrow and the liberal democratic state is marked by its intolerance and spectacular inability to imagine any worldview that is not its own. The dominance of liberal political theology is total. Schmitt would not have disagreed with Oswald Spengler who wrote in The Decline of the West:

"England, too, discovered the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread ‘free’ opinion — it generates it. […] Without the reader’s observing it, the paper, and himself with it, changes masters. Here also money triumphs and forces the free spirits into its service. No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will become quiet and go home. The Press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty."

As Edward Bernays would go on to say these ‘are the invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. […] In some department of our daily lives, in which we imagine ourselves as free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power.’ The point is that viewed from the outside, liberal democracy looks just as ‘totalitarian’ as any other regime even if it relies more on subtle persuasion, nudge techniques, and other psychological tricks than coercion to obtain its results.

Quoted from:
Neema Parvini (2022) - The Populist Delusion