Europe and the New World Order: Lessons from Alexandre Kojève's Engagement with Schmitt's ‘Nomos der Erde’

Abstract

The received wisdom of the times is that a wide gulf has opened up between ‘Europe’ and ‘America’ – or at least has finally become visible. A commitment to a certain vision of international law is presented as a European trait that divides Europe from the United States. ‘European’ international law premises perpetual peace on rules that protect state sovereignty and sustain a world divided into territorial states, and it is at odds with the US preparedness to wage ‘total war’ in the name of some purportedly universal ideal, such as ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’. This conception of ‘European’, territorially based international law versus US (or Anglo-Saxon) universalism is articulated most forcefully by the extreme-right legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt in his 1950 work, Der Nomos der Erde, and related essays; Schmitt, realizing that the state had met its demise with the fall of the Nazi project that he supported, now conceived of a world divided into Grossraume rather than states. Schmitt's conception was challenged by the Marxist-Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, both in correspondence with Schmitt and in a public lecture that Kojève gave in Düsseldorf at Schmitt's invitation in the 1950s. Kojève articulated an alternative view of global order and Europe's place in it – a view that accepted global Anglo-American military supremacy while advocating a distinctive place for Latin or continental Europe in the building of global justice and prosperity through economic and legal integration and the construction of a just relationship in trade and finance with the developing world. This essay evaluates the debate between Schmitt and Kojève and draws lessons for contemporary discussion of the place of Europe in a one-superpower world.