Empires of Land, Empires of Sea: Writing World History in Weimar and Nazi Germany

The contest between land empires and sea empires, the historian David Armitage has observed, “is at once among the most basic yet also least investigated themes in western historiography and political thought.” It is a theme that deeply preoccupied scholars in Weimar and Nazi Germany, most famously the jurist Carl Schmitt. In recent years Schmitt’s texts have attracted renewed attention from historians and theorists of empire. This paper argues that Schmitt’s conjectures about land and sea empires, for all their evocative insights, do not constitute a coherent historiographical program but rather a shifting field of ideological positions in search of theoretical support.

During World War I, German jurists argued that the Allied blockade of Germany was underpinned by a nefarious, peculiarly maritime conception of international law—one that permitted economic warfare, effaced distinctions between combatants and civilians, and eliminated the possibility of neutrality. This argument persisted even after Germany initiated a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare. In the eyes of many German academics, the war between the Allied and Central Powers represented an epochal conflict between incommensurable forms of legal order, and thus opposing world-historical formations. With the outbreak of World War II and the expansion of the Nazi empire, Carl Schmitt appropriated this discourse to articulate a vision of international law grounded in continental “great spaces,” and to justify a war waged against peoples deemed racially “foreign” to the soil: Anglo-Saxons and Jews.

In the aftermath of World War II, Schmitt revised his Nazi-era theories to efface his anti-Semitism and address new geopolitical concerns. When Germany no longer faced strangulation at the hands of a maritime power, but rather the prospect of being crushed between the USA and the USSR, Schmitt depicted the relationship between land and sea empires in a strikingly different and much more benign light.