Between Federation and Großraum: Carl Schmitt and the European Union

Having long been relegated to the margins of respectable academic discourse, the work of the German philosopher and legal theorist Carl Schmitt is today being reconsidered by a broad audience. The attention is long overdue. Previously, the main works widely available in translation were highly polemical: The Concept of the Political, Political Theology, and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. What might be called his more academically rigorous writings (namely, The Nomos of the Earth and Constitutional Theory) received comparatively little attention. This neglect has consequences; when one considers that Schmitt’s polemical work is still prone to oversimplification and even caricature, the danger of ignoring his more scholarly contributions becomes quite real.

This paper seeks to remedy this neglect by examining the development of the European Union through the lens of Schmitt. I suggest that Constitutional Theory can be used to illuminate the current internal state of European politics, including questions of legitimacy, democracy, and identity. The Nomos of the Earth, in contrast, speaks to the external factors around European integration, including questions of geopolitics and the international legal order.

In the context of the lively methodological debates of EU studies, Schmitt brings keen interdisciplinary ingenuity and independence. I argue that, in contrast to much of the literature on Schmitt, which fails to seriously and rigorously apply his thought to the European Union, the EU largely fulfills Schmitt’s vision of post-war politics. Indeed, Schmitt’s work, taken together, ultimately forms a methodologically original and historically underappreciated contribution to EU studies.