Nomos of the Digital Earth

§21. First Deconstruction on the Contingency of Sovereignty

Earlier, we saw how the natural law tradition was challenged. For example, in the case of Hobbes and Rousseau, natural rights presented as ontological truths in the definition of the human were seen as derivatives of a fictional human, one that lives in the imagination of its authors. The imaginary state of nature finally leads to another fictional figure, the sovereign, which in Hobbes exchanges protection with its subjects for obedience and in Rousseau leads to the general will, which is presupposed in all forms of communal existence. For Rousseau, the sovereign is not the same as the general will; rather, the sovereign is the power controlled by the general will. The “general will” does not mean the majority but rather the “common interest that unites” the people,1 or sensus communis in the Kantian sense. Natural law under the siege of historicism2 and Neo-Kantianism is discredited as ahistorical rationalism that does violence to empirical reality.3 Does this mean the triumph of positive law, that man makes laws out of practical grounds, and positive rights have no ontological foundation? While this may sound paradoxical, it is precisely because the authority of positive law is exposed to constant doubt that we see the quest for the natural law as appeals to “that which is good intrinsically, to that which is good by nature.”4 We see a circular argument, insofar as because the ontological qua anthropological in natural law is questioned, one then seeks in positive laws the answer to the political and social life of human beings; however, since the foundation of positive law is an authority that does not have ontological truth, one returns to natural law to find a solid foundation from which all laws should be derived.

For Leo Strauss, this unresolvable problem stands as the crisis of modernity—the introduction of historicism and positivism have challenged the natural law tradition he traces from Socrates to Edmund Burke. In his Natural Right and History, Strauss argued against historicism, positivism, and conventionalism to show that they all risk becoming nihilism since they reject human access to ontological truths, especially history. Strauss targeted Max Weber to show that Weber is self-contradictory because he does not want a sociology loaded with value but one that sticks to facts. However, if sociology aims at a causal explanation of a social phenomenon, it should “see it as what it is.”5 Weber wants to see things from facts, a positivist epistemology, but he does not prioritize the ontological question. Strauss, on the contrary, believes in the philosophical tradition, which claims that the ontological is accessible to the human, and it is also the ontological that gives humans the legitimacy and power to revolt against ancestral authorities. However, the argument becomes circular again; the ancestors could also claim they know the ontological! Plato is portrayed as a premodern thinker of natural right; insofar as Plato’s Republic is perfect, it is based on natural right; it is “the city according to nature.”6 But did not Plato, in the words of Socrates in Book III of Republic, suggest multiple techniques for censoring Homer’s poetry and “brainwashing” the selected children who have the potential to become guardians of the city? Strauss’s criticism against historicism and positivism does not effectively resolve the objection that natural right is also historical, and indeed his recourse to Hobbes and Rousseau only shows that human nature is merely imaginary. The search for the foundation of law is also a quest for sovereignty. The questions then arise: What exactly is sovereignty? Where and who exactly is the sovereign? Is the sovereign the king or the people? Or maybe it is none of them? Political theorist Jens Bartelson in his Genealogy of Sovereignty suggests that sovereignty is, in fact, contingent: “To say that sovereignty is contingent is to say that it is not necessary or essential, but that its central and ambiguous place in modern political discourse is the outcome of prior accidents.”7

We often associate the term sovereignty with the Westphalian treatise; however, as Nicholas Onuf has noted, the word only appears six times in the treaties of Münster and Onasbrück, and the adjective sovereign, four times. And indeed, the term was already defined and discussed earlier by Bodin in 1576,8 the father of sovereignty. While Bodin is famous for arguing that sovereignty has to be unitary, the so-called Westphalian state arising from the Treaty of Westphalia is the idea that the state has a monopoly over its territory and the exclusive right to declare war.9 In this sense, we can understand the contingency of the concept of sovereignty since it emerged historically and was only theorized much later. The other meaning of the contingency of sovereignty is more philosophical, namely, that it is not necessary but was rendered necessary due to the demand for a power that maintains the consistency of political life, such as in Hobbes’s Leviathan, where the sovereign is demanded to exchange protection with the people for the latter’s obedience. The sovereign is, in this sense, mythical, as Schmitt claims. In the previous chapter, we presupposed the existence of the sovereign as a persona moralis, which we compared with the soul in the machine, an image we find in Schmitt’s reading of Hobbes, who, in turn, also characterizes the sovereign as a fictional person. We know there is no soul in the machine, there is no individual behind the curtain of sovereignty. Suppose one tries to open the curtain; one would be highly disappointed to find precisely nothing behind it. Schmitt calls sovereignty a borderline concept (Grenzbegriff), one pertaining to the outermost sphere (die äusserste Sphäre).10 William Rasch suggests translating it as boundary concept in the sense of Kant.11 Rasch’s formulation is more stimulating because what Kant means by the boundary concept is one that cannot be known but exerts on the knowable as a limit. In this sense, the boundary concept is first of all a negative concept. For example, the noumenon is a boundary concept because it constitutes the realm that sensible intuition cannot reach. Sensible intuition is limited to the realm of the phenomenon, which is the object of scientific knowledge. The thing-in-itself, which was a synonym for the noumenon in the A Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, is that which lies behind the phenomenon: “Appearances, insofar as they are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories, are called phenomenon. But if I assumed things that are objects merely of the understanding and that, as such, can nonetheless be given to an intuition—even if not to sensible intuition (but hence coram intuitu intellectuali)—then such things would be called noumena (intelligibilia).”12

As we know, the noumenon only ceases to be a negative concept if intellectual intuition is affirmed; since humans do not possess the capacity for intellectual intuition, such a boundary concept both constrains and establishes the foundation for knowledge.13 The same could also be said about the inexponible representation of the imagination (e.g., the beautiful) and the indemonstrable concept of reason (e.g., freedom).14 For example, the concept of freedom is demanded from a practical aim, without which morality would be inconceivable. Here we encounter a paradox: the sovereign is supposed to be the foundation of law, but it is almost impossible to identify what it is. It is a phantom. Laws are often compared to geometry, for example, in Grotius and Hobbes, the law carries a strong geometrical spirit; the former claims that “just as mathematicians treat geometrical figures as abstracted from material objects, so I have conceived of law in the absence of all particular circumstances,” and the latter states that geometry was the “only science that it hath hitherto pleased God to bestow on mankind.”15 In light of this comparison, one might question how geometry addresses this issue and whether it could offer insights into the phantom. We may want to refer to a relevant discussion in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, where the Scottish philosopher clearly distinguished between definition and demonstration concerning geometry. Hume’s incentive was to refuse the mathematical objection against the indivisibility of extension. If one defines a surface “to be length and breadth without depth, a line to be length without breadth or depth and point to be what has neither length, breadth nor depth,” and there is no corresponding demonstration, does it imply that they don’t exist at all? One of the objections that Hume wanted to refute runs like the following, and although Hume found it unsatisfactory, it is very relevant to our discussion here:

The objects of geometry, those surfaces, lines and points, whose proportions and positions it examines, are mere ideas in the mind; and not only never did, but never can exist in nature. They never did exist; for no one will pretend to draw a line or make a surface entirely conformable to the definition: They never can exist; for we may produce demonstrations from these very ideas to prove, that they are impossible.16

Hume finds this objection unsatisfactory and contradictory because every idea must have its correspondence in existence; the mathematician who claims that a point does not exist already has the idea of a point in his mind. If he already has an idea of the point and that which implies the existence of a point, the objection that a point does not exist is not valid. Before we move on, we will have to clarify several concepts. Definition, existence, and demonstration are not the same, for such definitions in geometry refer to the existence of idealities, which may not be demonstratable in a phenomenal world; however, it doesn’t, as such, imply that they do not exist, as without assuming their existence, no geometrical demonstration is possible. We can understand this by referring to the example of a point. Thus, a point has no dimension; when we imagine a point in front of us, it is no longer a point, but already a surface. These points “. . .” I am typing and you are reading are not points, but surfaces.17 The ideality of a point cannot be perceived as an existence like a glass of water, but this does not mean that it does not exist; it only means that it cannot be demonstrated as what it is. However, for ideality to be possible, idealization is necessary. This idealization is also externalization, meaning projecting the point as a figure on paper. Here, we encounter the first deconstruction: though ideality cannot be demonstrated, it can nonetheless be grasped through diagrammatical technical supplements—for example, drawing and writing. Commenting on a similar paradox (though without referring to Hume but rather to Plato and Husserl), Bernard Stiegler convincingly clarifies the logical cycle between definition, existence, and demonstration:

It is however required to figure the point in order to conceptualise it as a mathematical ideality, it is required to intuitively project it to project reasonings, and it is also in this sense that externalising is necessary to the figure: this figure is an image that allows the projection of what Kant calls a schema, what allows the unification of the understanding and intuition. The thought of space as this a priori form supposes this capacity of projection that represents the figure. What is crucial for us is to note that this projection is an externalisation: it allows a projection for intuition, but more importantly it constitutes a retentional space. This space is a medium of memory that supports progressively the reasoning of the temporal flow (what reason is when it thinks).18

In this statement, Stiegler refers to the transcendental condition of schematization in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and deconstructs it by showing that transcendental apprehension depends on the technological supplement. If it is true that even geometry cannot demonstrate its foundation (line, point, and surface as defined in Euclidean geometry), then we may ask if it is also the case in law. If point, line, and surface, albeit their indemonstrability, are the foundation of geometry, the sovereign or any other juridical concept may occupy a similar position in law. In this sense, that authority was, from the beginning, ultimately unauthorized.19 The default of origin will have to be replaced with a fictional being, similar to Quentin Skinner’s argument in “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy”: “We scarcely hope to talk coherently about the nature of public power without making some reference to the idea of the state as a fictional or moral person distinct from both rulers and ruled.”20

In the General Theory of the State (Allgemeine Staatslehre), the public lawyer and legal positivist Georg Jellinek made a similar observation. Jellinek rejected that there is a sovereignty of the Rechtstaat. Instead, he suggests that the state is sovereignty.21 The people are fictional because we see only individuals, just as the “general will” is not the same as the assembly of all the individuals. Therefore, even though one might be tempted to claim that the people or the king is the de facto sovereign, none of them are the sovereign. However, the sovereign is not purely inexistent, not purely fictional, having no touch with reality; instead, its existence cannot be demonstrated as such, like how the definition of a point is not the same as its demonstration on paper. The juridical concept, as Schmitt says, is the “reaching from within the incomprehensible into the ungraspable [der Griff aus dem Unbegreifbaren in das Ungreifbare].”22 This definition is of an ultimate mystery, though it also shattered the illusory that attempts to grasp the juridical concept as substance. Unbegreifbar means something that cannot be grasped as a concept that possesses a certain autonomy in reality; by reducing it to a concept, one needs to impose a kind of violence on it, but it also actively overflows any container trying to seize it.

We may look into the implication of the Unbegreifbar in the debate on the question of sovereignty in Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt. In Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism, the basic norm (Grundnorm) is the most fundamental norm of any given legal system. In the legal system, a norm is validified by another norm, and so on and so forth. They constitute a chain of validity. For example, criminal law is authorized by constitutional law. By validity (Geltung), Kelsen means the binding power that obliges everyone to obey the norm.23 Among all the norms, the basic norm is the ground that validifies the rest of the norms. The basic norm is the only nonpositive law that is presupposed (and not created) and logically necessary.24 What is this presupposed basic norm that functions as the legal system’s transcendental logical condition? In Pure Theory of Law, Kelsen compares his inquiry with Kant’s. If Kant asks, “How is it possible to interpret without a metaphysical hypothesis, the facts perceived by our senses, in the laws of nature formulated by natural science?,” he asks, “How is it possible to interpret without recourse to meta-legal authorities, like God or nature, the subjective meaning of certain facts as a system of objectively valid legal norms?”25 In Kelsen’s neo-Kantian legal theory, the validity of a law is derived from a higher level, and the validity of all the laws has the origin in the basic norm; however, the basic norm does not exist as such, but it is presupposed “as if” it exists. Hermann Heller reproaches Kelsen in the same way that Hume refutes the mathematician:

It is the original norm that “is applied by the constituent authority”; the constitution gets its “legally relevant validity from the presupposed original norm, but its content from the constituent authority’s empirical act of will.” Thus, we first have a “constitution” that already has legally relevant validity, and only then a “constituent” authority—a feat of logic that I cannot follow!26

Validity grounded by the basic norm is analogical to the ideality of the geometrical elements; validity, like ideality, is already presupposed, while it can only be illuminated by means other than itself, such as through diagrams. The basic norm is not the constitution but something that is presupposed with validity. Where does this something with binding power originate? There is a default of origin in law when it is thought linearly. The logical formalism of positivism suffers from the fact that once linear reasoning is presupposed, it easily loses its legitimacy, because, in so doing, the basic norm thus presupposed cannot be positively found in the world as might an individual or an object.27 In his Constitutional Theory (1928), Schmitt targeted Kelsen’s basic norm and renounced it as tautology:

With Kelsen, by contrast, only positive norms are valid, in other words, those which are actually valid. Norms are not valid because they should properly be valid. They are valid, rather, without regard to qualities like reasonableness, justice, etc., only, therefore, because they are positive norms. The imperative abruptly ends here, and the normative element breaks down. In its place appears the tautology of a raw factualness: something is valid when it is valid and because it is valid.28

In Political Theology, Schmitt once again ridiculed Kelsen’s positivism, stating, “looked at normatively, the decision emanates from nothingness.”29 Schmitt replaces Kelsen’s basic norm with the power to decide upon exceptions. This single statement renews the broken links between the secular state and religion by equating sovereignty with divine power. Instead of pretending that there is a foundation, be that presupposed or demonstratable, Schmitt has recourse to the power of decision on exceptions or emergencies as the ultimate source of legitimacy. It is no longer a fact or a rule that defines the foundation of law but rather a power that suspends all norms for the sake of vitality. Sovereignty is thus the total power of decision. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Schmitt rejects mechanism and organism in favor of a vitalism, opening an immunology of sovereignty. This rejection is restaged here as the renouncement of the mechanist tendency and the organist origin of positivism. On the one hand, Kelsenian normativism functions as a mechanical formalism that must be rejected. On the other hand, the self-position of the basic norm and its genesis must also be rejected because it is a “fanciful [phantastisch] way of speaking.”30

§22. Second Deconstruction on the Contingency of Friend and Enemy

In Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Jacques Derrida follows Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty, but instead of fully embracing Schmitt’s definition, Derrida points out that the Schmittean definition is self-evident.31 Sovereignty, according to Derrida, is unconditional or absolute at the moment when it suspends all laws. It is paradoxical since that which prohibits the law is made possible by the law. This play between unconditionality and sovereignty is based on the logic that the limit always presupposes the unlimited, the calculable, the incalculable, and vice versa. Insofar as it is limited, calculative reason presupposes an unconditionality that always exceeds it; however, the conditional and the unconditional are only conceived as mere negations of one another. The sovereign is unconditional, or the absolute, because it exceeds or overflows any limit imposed by laws:

Calculative reason (ratio, intellect, understanding) would thus have to ally itself and submit itself to the principle of unconditionality that tends to exceed the calculation it founds. This inseparability or this alliance between sovereignty and unconditionality appears forever irreducible. Its resistance appears absolute and any separation impossible: for isn’t sovereignty, especially in its modern political forms, as understood by Bodin, Rousseau, or Schmitt, precisely unconditional, absolute, and especially, as a result, indivisible? Is it not exceptionally sovereign insofar as it retains the right to the exception? The right to decide on the exception and the right to suspend rights and law [le droit]?32

This brings us back to Rasch’s characterization of sovereignty as a boundary concept in the Kantian sense. Like the noumenon, the unconditionality of sovereignty sets the limit for the legal system; at the same time, it makes the legal system possible. Sovereignty, for Schmitt, is an unconditionality in the sense that, like divine power, it transcends all laws. It is the same way God, through providence, can perform miracles; sovereignty can decide upon the state of exception. The Virgin Mary is the incarnation of such a miracle, and as a miracle, she is central to Schmitt’s interpretation of Christian history and political theology. If we assert that sovereignty is unconditional, it does not follow that all instances of sovereignty are unconditional. By affirming the unconditionality of sovereignty, Derrida invites us to reflect on other unconditionalities, such as the incalculable. The unconditionality of the incalculable is that which opens a breach for thinking beyond sheer rationality. It is also the Unreachable, in the sense of philosopher and former mayor of Venice Massimo Cacciari. It is that which forces us to go beyond the “easily computable space of practical-economic action,”33 or in other words, beyond the “real politics” based on economic and military competition. The unconditionality of reason, as Derrida points out, and to which we will come back in the next chapters, demands the following condition: “It will have to require or postulate a universal beyond all relativism, culturalism, ethnocentrism, and especially nationalism, beyond what I propose naming, to refer to all the modern risks that these relativisms make reason run, irratio-nationalism or irratio-nation-state-ism—spell them as you will.”34

This breach to a new universal also exceeds the friend and enemy dichotomy. It moves toward another figure of the unconditionality Derrida elaborated on in Politics of Friendship, the unconditionality of hospitality without sovereignty.35 This juxtaposition, as well as the interplay between unconditionality and sovereignty, opens up new avenues outside Schmitt’s notion of the political. In other words, Derrida did not reject Schmitt, but, on the contrary, in “The Force of Law” he maintains the unconditionality of the sovereign that Bodin, Hobbes, and Schmitt assert, as well as the necessity of exception as a phenomenological epochē.36 This, however, should not be interpreted as Derrida’s admiration for Schmitt because he also seeks to find other figures of unconditionality as those that exceed sovereignty. Unconditional hospitality is that which “exposes itself without limit to the coming of the other, beyond rights and laws, beyond a hospitality conditioned by the right of asylum, by the right to immigration, by citizenship, and even by the right to universal hospitality”; it also “exceeds juridical, political, or economic calculation. But no thing and no one happens or arrives without it.”37 However, even though sovereignty is deconstructed, it is not yet overcome. Deconstruction is also a deconstruction of linearity, but it does not yet, at least not fully, elucidate the question of recursivity. As a result, the unconditionality that results from deconstruction remained to be thought of according to the history of the supplement, namely, the history of technology—this encapsulates Stiegler’s critique of Derrida.38

The above analysis shows that sovereignty is contingent and arbitrary; however, as the legal system’s foundation and guarantee, it is simultaneously necessary. The sovereign or the state can declare states of exception at any moment. Once an exception becomes the norm, it ceases to be an exception, or, to put it another way, the only exception would be the absence of an exception. Given the instability of the political system or an enemy’s threat of attack, a state of exception is justifiable. The irreducibility of enmity is the basis of Schmitt’s ontological argument regarding the political and justifies the necessity of sovereignty. Therefore, political vitalism also implies political immunology. Ignoring enmity is neutralizing, depoliticizing, and making oneself vulnerable to the Other. In this perspective, we could probably say that Schmitt goes further than Hegel in the understanding of sovereignty because, for Schmitt, sovereignty coexists with various sovereignties capable of destroying one another.

The question of enmity is central to political theology, and we can see the persistence of it in European psychology. Schmitt wrote, “Europe was lost without the idea of a katechon,”39 for the katechon presupposes the anti-Christ, the enemy; the katechon is that which withholds the arrival of the anti-Christ. Those who don’t notice the enemy are exposed to the danger of annihilation. This returns us to the necessity of enmity, which conditions the vitalist or existentialist reading developed in the last chapter. In his excellent article “Europe and New World Order,” Robert Howse suggests that “Schmitt’s problem was that he stuck to a faith in, and hope for, a new division of the world that would allow the kind of enmity that for him constituted the ‘political.’”40 It is probably incorrect that there is no question of enmity under economic imperialism, but rather the question of enmity is undermined in favor of the circulation of capital, energy, and commercial products. However, such imperialism is also the condition of enmity and reaction since imperialism is an expression of the state form that seeks to turn what was partial into universal; it thus necessarily elicits resistance and pleas for pluralism.41 Many on the left may welcome this argument for pluralism,42 though it remains to be examined what kind of pluralism Schmitt was proposing. However, instead of showing the impossibility of undermining enmity, Schmitt starts with enmity as the absolute beginning, the archē of politics.

Stepping back, we should ask what the essence of an enemy consists of. In juridical terms, especially post–Second World War, the enemy has been equated with the aggressor. An aggressor “declares war, transgresses a limit, does not follow a certain procedure and deadlines, etc.”43 Schmitt disputes this definition since it is overly mechanical. The original meaning of the German term for friend, Freund, was related to blood relationships, such as family. Feind, the term for an enemy, has a less clear etymological meaning, referring to someone despised and against whom a feud is started. Derrida deconstructed the opposition between friend and enemy by demonstrating that there is no such thing as pure friendship and enmity. This is because enmity is an existential question. We find a rather interesting remark in Schmitt’s “Wisdom of the Cell” (Weisheit der Zellen), written during his imprisonment during 1945–1947:

Whom in the world can I acknowledge as my enemy? Clearly only him who can call me into question. By recognizing him as enemy I acknowledge that he can call me into question. And who can really call me into question? Only I myself. Or my brother. The other proves to be my brother, and the brother proves to be my enemy. . . . One categorizes oneself through one’s enemy. One grades oneself through what one recognizes as hostility.44

An enemy is someone who calls “me” into question. This enemy is either me or the other, who is a brother. The “I” here is a person and an individual. In the Theory of the Partisan (1963), we find a similar statement: “The enemy is the configuration of our own question” (Der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt).45 The definition of an enemy is existential and fundamentally different from the definition of an aggressor cited above. But to what extent is this enemy not arbitrary? The enemy could be an aggressor, it could be someone who looks down on me, it could be my brother, and it could also be myself! Who, then, is not an enemy?

The question of enmity opens two cases: one is an immune resistance against an intruder who is threatening my life, and the other is an autoimmune event, which, though intending to protect me, actually destroys me from the inside. It is autoimmune because it is not the Other outside of me that calls me into question, but the Other in me that calls me into question. Who is this Other in me? Toward the end of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel suggests respecting other sovereign states and not intervening in their internal affairs. However, this respect is subject to mutual recognition; therefore, paradoxically, they cannot be indifferent to each other’s internal affairs.46 Mutual recognition implies interfering in another state’s internal affairs and involves not only imposing a particular order but also calling oneself into question. Following 9/11, which Derrida called an autoimmune event of global capitalism,47 the state of emergency became applicable to anything labelled terrorism. In chapter 6, we will see further how the problem of autoimmunity constitutes the major problem of planetary politics today. Autoimmunity is not strictly a symptom of globalization; globalization only renders it more visible. Autoimmunity is fundamental to politics because the enemy is the Other in me; globalization escalates the body and integrates the Other outside of me as the Other in me. Today the United States cannot treat China as the Other just as China cannot treat the United States as the Other; the exaggeration of the immune system will lead to the destruction of individuality.

Returning to where we ended in the previous section, we see that the manifestation of sovereignty depends on the supplement. Like geometry, which depends on the diagram (drawing and sketching), sovereignty is demonstrated by something other than itself, first by territorial borders and second by its power to offend and destroy its enemy—in this sense, enmity is essential when sovereignty is identified with the individuality of a state. Derrida makes a very powerful remark when he says, “There is no sovereignty without force, without the force of the strongest, whose reason—the reason of the strongest—is to win out over [avoir raison de] everything.”48 This translation does not fully reflect Derrida’s meaning because avoir raison also means to be right about something. Similar in German, to be right is Recht haben, literally to have right. Recht and raison are identifiable in the claim of being right or correct. Moreover, to have reason also means to have the right over something. How can one be right about something and have the right over something without it being an act of power? Indeed, what exactly is this power—a power about or over life and death?

Before we proceed, we summarize the above discussions in three rubrics:

1. Sovereignty as boundary concept limits but also makes possible what is limited; the sovereign as he who decides on the exception resolves the metaphysical problem of the foundation of law by recourse to an immanent vital force. However, insofar as it is a boundary concept, it is nondemonstratable; like geometric idealities, though nondemonstratable, it can be made sensible through the externalization of the idea. The externalized is the supplement that is essential to the process of idealization (in contrast to ideation).
2. Sovereignty, conceived as the power that decides on the exception, is contingent; albeit being contingent in nature, it becomes necessary by choosing its friend and enemy. This necessity is conditioned by the absolute fear against its own annihilation, without which it would be nothing; the sovereign resists neutralization through politicization, that is to say, by identifying friend and enemy. This vital aspect of sovereignty forces itself to constantly identify enemies.
3. The concept of the enemy in Schmitt is more nuanced than what has been understood. The enemy is the result of an existential and psychological crisis. The planetary condition makes explicit the problematic of the concept of the enemy. The enemy as the Other in myself shifts from the individual state’s self to the planetary self. Global confrontations are increasingly autoimmune attacks.

Sovereignty as a vital force does not exist as such; law, in its written form, makes sovereignty visible; but what makes it powerful is technology. Schmitt, the true Christian Epimetheus, the modern Abel, made the concept of sovereignty explicit by turning the default into what is necessary.49 After all, Schmitt’s elucidation of sovereignty is indeed not “self-evident,” as Derrida contends. Even though the term sovereignty only became popular after Jean Bodin, it was already presupposed in the development of the nomos. The nomos that underlies all political forms is not only subject to history, nations, and people, as the historicists believe, but is also more fundamentally subject to technological conditions. Therefore, Schmitt’s project is to understand sovereignty by thinking with the Other and to conceive the history of law by placing Europe in the history of technology. We should deviate from the uncritical formulation of Schmitt’s thinking as that which identifies technology with liberalism. Instead, we will attempt to show that technology is fundamental to Schmitt’s thought and necessary to understand where we are, and where we could and should go.

§23. Sovereignty and the Elementary Philosophy of Space

Perhaps we can say, and this is precisely what we are attempting to demonstrate, that sovereignty is tantamount to the history of the nomos of the Earth, which becomes visible in its technological mode of existence. Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth was a historical account of how a Eurocentric nomos of the Earth came to pass and of the possible new configuration of the Earth’s nomos given the planetary becoming of the Earth and the then antagonistic confrontation of the two world powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Schmitt used a rather different typology to understand space compared to geopolitics textbooks. Instead of dividing lands into functional spaces such as national territories, colonies, dependencies, and protectorates, Schmitt aimed to develop a new understanding of sovereignty as spatial order.50 This specific way of analyzing space allows Schmitt to formulate a genetic notion of sovereignty. The earth, the soil, was first a subject of division. Nomos, for Schmitt, means not only to take (nehmen) but also to divide or distribute (teilen) space. Man is the animal of land, and therefore the primary implication of the nomos is the measure and division of land and wars between lands. Politics and its juridical systems are grounded on the division of land. The question of the division of soil immediately implies the question of allocation and possession, and, later, what is called sovereignty.51 The nomos is at once Ordnung (order) and Ortung (place or orientation).52 Space is situated in the world; in other words, it is the world that gives meaning to space. Without the world, space would only be geometrical dimensions. Schmitt’s interpretation of space is largely Heideggerian in meaning; indeed, he obscurely refers to a “German philosopher” in Land and Sea:

Today, by space we no longer understand a mere dimension of depth, empty of every conceivable content. For us, space has become a force field of human energy, activity, and achievement. Today, a thought first becomes possible for us that would have been impossible in any other epoch and which a contemporary German philosopher has articulated: The world is not in space, rather space is in the world.53

Space belongs to the world, and the world is nothing other than that of the spiritual Volk. When the Ortung changes, then the Ordnung will also have to change. The change in Ortung is not only due to the discovery of new spaces but also the transformation of the vital energy of the people following a new Ortung. For example, both the discovery of the Americas and the Moon landing renewed European and global spatial consciousness, respectively, and therefore, an order that could adequately address this new configuration emerged. The Eurocentric nomos originating from the Ortung of Europe confronts its limit as Ordnung under the planetary condition of Schmitt’s time. This Eurocentric nomos, as Schmitt defended in various places, is not unilateral or hegemonic, rather he argues that it is fundamentally heterogeneous: “In the Jus Publicum Europaeum there was also a unity of the world. It was Eurocentric, but it was not the central power of a single master of the world. Its structure was pluralistic and allowed for the coexistence of several political greats who could regard each other not as criminals but as bearers of autonomous orders.”54

The Eurocentric nomos of the Earth allows coexistence between different sovereign states, in the sense that it maintains a strict separation between its interiority and exteriority: each state is autonomous and does not intervene in the affairs of another sovereign state, thus also the contemporary understanding of sovereignty. It is Eurocentric because it affirms the agency of the state, namely, the state as the basic unit of internal and external politics. This political concept is foreign to non-European territories: “Continental European international law since the sixteenth century, the jus publicum Europaeum originally and essentially was a law among states, among European sovereigns. This European core determined the nomos of the rest of the earth. ‘Statehood’ is not a universal concept, valid for all times and all peoples.”55 Here Schmitt also affirms Hegel’s state “as a ‘realm of objective reason and morality’” and that “Hegel’s high-flown metaphysical formulations signify that the state was the spatially concrete, historical, organizational form of this epoch which, at least on European soil, had become the agency.”56 However, this monadology of sovereign states remains a beautiful fiction. States are not monads if we understand what Hegel is saying here, because they have windows that allow them to aim and shoot the enemy. Instead, there is also a demand for mutual recognition between states, and such mutual recognition does not happen automatically; rather, it is the consequence of power struggles and wars.

We do not intend to show that Schmitt’s defense of the European system as heterogeneous is hypocritical, though one should certainly question him on this point. Rather, we want to point out that the question of heterogeneity still haunts us today. Technological advancement implies a difference in political power, and heterogeneity results from a constant negotiation between the technological difference of the sovereign states. What we have been trying to do is to show how the concept of sovereignty has been technological since its origin, in the same way that we attempted to demonstrate in chapter 1 through Hegel that the sovereign state is a technological phenomenon. If in Hegel we find the justification of the political state, then in the postwar Schmitt we find the attempt of a justification of the Großraum—a term, according to Schmitt, that has its origin in the “technological-industrial-economical-organizational domain [Bereich]” during the turn of the century when energy and electricity supply unified the Kleinräume into a Großraumwirtschaft.57 From this perspective, we can also say that Schmitt’s philosophy of the state is also a philosophy of technology. Schmitt was reluctant to reduce the concept of the Großraum to a “techno-industry-economic” one because he is more concerned with the significance of this concept for international law.58 He was too cautious to allow this point to expand. Thus, he also missed it; and as a result, his interpretation of technology is incomplete.

According to Schmitt, the spatial order based on land was radically changed about six hundred years ago when the sea was added to the subject of international laws. This may appear absurd because Greece is made up of several islands and is surrounded by the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, but Schmitt answers that, for the Greeks, the “sea has no character, in the original sense of the word, which comes from the Greek charassein, meaning to engrave, to scratch, to imprint.”59 Therefore, territorial order, instead of an oceanic order, was central to their understanding of spatial order in general. The Ortung implies the Ordung. Land and sea demand two different international laws. This periodization is crucial for Schmitt because the sea is also the way to discover the earth as a globe, and it also exposes the limit of the European international laws, which were valid only on land. The shift of domination from one element to another indicates a spatial revolution, which fundamentally changes the consciousness of space:

Every time when new lands and seas enter the field of vision of human collective consciousness by a new thrust of historical forces, by an unleashing of new energies, the spaces of historical existence also change. Then there emerge new measures and directions of political-historical activity, new sciences, new orders, new life for new or reborn peoples. The expansion can be so deep and so surprising that not only quantities and measurements, not only the outermost human horizon, but even the structure of the concept of space itself is altered. Then one may speak of a spatial revolution.60

Ernst Kapp’s geographical thinking influenced Schmitt’s elementary philosophy of international order. Kapp suggested a reading of the evolution of empires according to the element of water. As we have already seen, Kapp was a Hegelian who read the history of civilization from a specific point of view, most notably from the perspective of organ projection. According to Kapp, the Middle East’s initial Potamian or river cultures (Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile) were followed by the thalassic age (closed sea and Mediterranean basin). These were, in turn, then followed by what he calls “oceanic civilizations.”61 As an element, water stood out as the lens through which the history of civilization could be reconstructed. Schmitt adopts this strategy by making the sea element a middle term between land and air. At the same time, Schmitt twisted Kapp’s first two stages by emphasizing that, despite the thalassic culture’s close contact with the water, it is nevertheless defined by the concept of the coast as a limit. Schmitt gave the example of Venice: though a medieval thalassic culture, “all of the ceremonial and symbolic acts of Venetian life point toward a culture of coasts and camps, rather than a maritime existence.”62 The elements, land, sea, and air, constitute the foundation of planetary politics—something that Schmitt wanted to systematize after writing Land and Sea.63 Since the end of the seventeenth century, whoever led in sea navigation dominated the world. And it was England, after transforming from a country of shepherds to a country of mariners, that became the dominant force on the sea. The Scientific Revolution occurred in Europe, in both the continent and British Isles, but the Industrial Revolution only occurred first in England. Schmitt argued that seafaring was inextricably linked to and fueled technological and scientific advancement. The rise of sea power and the international laws that regulate sea wars and piracy, such as rayas (Spanish-Portuguese) and amity lines (French-English), reconfigured the nomos of the Earth: “The change that affected the nature of the leviathan was, however, the consequence of the industrial revolution. It had begun in England, in the eighteenth century. The first blast furnace in 1735; cast iron in 1740; steam engine in 1768; spinning mill in 1770, and mechanical loom in 1786. All saw the light of day in Britain.”64

The revival of the sea monster first saw its light in England, allowing England to develop its sea power against the land power of continental European states. This was the second milestone of reestablishing the spatial order, succeeding the end of the first spatial order based on land. Technology, as nomos (appropriation and division), corresponds to a legitimacy that is prior to legality65 in the sense that rationality is thus strongly tied to science and technology. It violates legality in its clash with the church, but it also transcends legality because it embodies legitimacy: “The second nomos of the earth arose from such discoveries of land and sea. The discoveries were not invited. They were made without visas issued by the discovered people.”66 The second nomos of the Earth remains Eurocentric because the form of power and the laws of spatial division come from Europe, maintaining the continuation of the res publica Christiana.67 First and foremost, it is unilateral in the name of a universality based on the universalization of European values, which allowed the European forces to appropriate the “free soil” inhabited by the indigenous people. The colonizers did not have to apply for visas. Instead, their legitimacy derives not directly from their religion and aesthetics but from their technological strength. This second nomos of the Earth is also the extension of the European nomos of the land to the nomos of the sea, which integrates the more recently discovered land into its juridical system: “The Eurocentric nomos of the earth lasted until World War I (1914–18). It was based on a dual balance; first, the balance of land and sea. England alone dominated the sea and allowed no balance of sea power. By contrast, on the European continent there existed a balance of land power.”68

The collapse of the Eurocentric nomos was largely because the jus publicum Europaeum failed to keep the balance of the planetary order. At the turn of the twentieth century, a rather paradoxical situation occurred. On the one hand, the sovereign state or, more precisely, the nation-state became a fundamental political concept beyond Europe (though Schmitt lamented the failure of the jus publicum Europaeum); on the other hand, the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union and their international politics displaced European empires as the guarantee of the spatial division. The sea power of the British Empire gave way to U.S. Marine power; the land power of the continental European countries gave way to the army of Soviet tanks. This antagonistic duality appears to call for a sublation that allows history to progress toward a certain rational unity. However, hidden in this unity is imperialism posing as a universalism. Such imperialism can be found in twentieth-century American foreign policy, which in Schmitt’s eyes, destroyed the novelty of the United States as the new Europe:

Equally profound as this world-historical shift from West to East was the fact that the old belief in the New World was changed from within—from internal American development. When the United States embarked upon a foreign policy of imperialism, its domestic situation changed, as the era of its newness ended. The presupposition and foundation of everything that one could call the novelty of the Western Hemisphere disappeared both ideologically and in reality.69

Schmitt referred to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson’s reframing (Umdeutung) of the Monroe Doctrine (1823) as tools for imperialism and universalism.70 The Monroe Doctrine affirms the independence of the American states, and rejects colonization and intervention of foreign countries in the internal affairs of the United States (especially Russia and the Holy Alliance) and vice versa. The Monroe Doctrine, for Schmitt, stands as the counter doctrine of the “monarchic-Christian-dynastic” principle of legitimacy.71 Wilson replaced the Monroe Doctrine with a “suprastatic and supranational world ideology” (überstaatliche und übervölkische Weltideologie).72 Imperialism is accompanied by a global universalism, which undermines the complexity of space, or more precisely, its domination of space eliminates all heterogeneities; in other words, spatial conquest ensures frictionless movements of capital, which overcome spatial rigidities. Schmitt saw Roosevelt’s proposal to Japan to construct what is now known as the Asian Monroe Doctrine to avoid European colonization in the Far East as a pretext to aid the economic development of Anglo-Saxon capital in East Asia, particularly in China, by making it a colony.73 We might say that what Schmitt calls global universalism or hegemonic liberalism is what we know today as globalization. Globalization has transgressed all boundaries by establishing free channels of circulation and exchange. It is, however, difficult to solely associate the United States with imperialism, as if European colonialism were not imperialism. Since the Enlightenment, European imperialism was already at work through its technological advancement. The universalism of the Enlightenment was also a homogenization of space, one that enforced a homogeneity as the possibility of plurality, or a monism as the foundation of a pseudo-pluralism in the sense that differences are based on the same. In the nineteenth century, British marine power was the guarantee of this smooth plane of the free world trade and free world market, as Schmitt remarked:

The prevailing concept of a global universalism lacking any spatial sense certainly expressed a reality in the economy distinct from the state—an economy of free world trade and a free world market, with the free movement of money, capital and labor. . . . A strong guarantee for such a worldview lay in the dominant position of English and in the English interest in global free trade and freedom of the sea.74

Today we see the continuation of this order via American marine power, from the Gulf War to the war in Iraq and now the current intervention in the Indo-Pacific Ocean.75 In an article titled “The New Nomos of the Earth,” as one of three world-political scenarios, Schmitt saw that American strength would replace British power as the guarantee of world order. This is precisely what took place during globalization in the twentieth century. Space has become something less significant today, both domestically and globally, largely due to the well-developed logistic systems. But it was not until the global pandemic that we began to understand that global logistics cannot be taken for granted; it is rather fragile. A port can delay the supply of one element, leading to the shortage of many products throughout the globe. At the same time, we also observe the rapid growth of domestic logistics in some parts of the world; for example, in China, fresh lychee can be transported from the southern part of the country to the northern within one day. Though we may argue that globalization, or more precisely the current phase of globalization, has ended due to rising tensions between antagonistic countries, the mastery of elemental power has also expanded rapidly, which may provide the means to conceive a different phase of planetarization. In Hegelian terms, we may argue that globalization remains an abstract universal and that the contradiction revealed over the previous century prepares us for a concrete universal.

§24. Großräume as Post-Static Political Form and the Problem of Pluralism

We can conclude that for Schmitt, the divide between East and West is a matter of technology rather than culture. In “Die Einheit der Welt (1952),” Schmitt questioned the political trend in favor of the unity of the world, pleading for pluralism. The political conflict between the East and the West is the primary cause of global unity. This consists of one of the three scenarios of the “New Nomos of the Earth,” in contrast to the preservation of the present order by American imperialism and the construction of the Großraum, which we will discuss later. Second, the unity of the world is also brought about by technological advancement, especially the electric and telecommunication networks. However, this form of unity remains abstract and homogenous. Schmitt mocked the fact that industrial capitalism and Lenin’s communism both sought to build an electrified earth.76 Communist countries ironically seem to have had the same goal as the capitalist West: “The East, in particular, took hold of Hegel’s philosophy of history in the same way it took hold of the atomic bomb and other products of the Western intelligentsia in order to realize the unity of the world in accordance with its plans.”77

World history appears to be moving in the direction predicted by Hegel: technical rationality, masquerading as the world spirit, is the driving force of world history, from which no country within the planetary schema can escape. Schmitt already saw that the East took Hegel’s philosophy of history and Western intelligentsia to develop its own world plan. When we look at the competition between the United States and China today, it is not astonishing to see that Schmitt had already anticipated it, though he was referring more to the Soviet Union than China in his writings. The competition between China or Russia and the Western world, at least at the moment, is situated on the ground of Western technology, but whether it is moving toward the Hegelian absolute is a difficult question to answer. The United States’ most effective strategy to weaken Chinese sovereign power is not its defense of Taiwan but to block China’s access to certain technologies for national security reasons. The antagonism between the West and the East, seen from the perspective of technology, is only one form of homogenization.

As historian Arnold Toynbee pointed out in his Reith Lecture, which Schmitt read and commented with fierce criticism, technology is the key to the new world order of the East and West. We recall that in his Reith Lecture, Toynbee raised why in the sixteenth century, the people of the Far East had closed their doors to European visitors after first contact but, in the nineteenth century, opened their doors to them. Toynbee explains that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Europeans wanted to export religion and technology to the Far East. Thus, immediately recognizing that the Europeans wanted to change their beliefs and ways of life, the people of the Far East threw the visitors out of their lands. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, an important event happened in Europe. According to Toynbee, technology is detached from religion. In the nineteenth century, the Europeans would only export technology instead of religion to the Far East. Consequently, the people of the Far East believed that technology was instrumental and that they could master the technology with their own thought. In China, we find the slogan “Chinese thought as mind and Western thought as instrument,” in Japan “Japanese soul and Western instrument,” and in Korea “Eastern Dao and Western Qi [utensil].” Referring to Toynbee’s lecture, Schmitt claims, “But today’s communist revolution in the East consists in the East taking possession of a European technique that has been detached from Christian religiosity.”78 Even though later Schmitt added that what happened toward the end of the seventeenth century was not necessarily the detachment of technology from religion, but rather the detachment of the British Isles from the European continent that created opposition and balance between sea power and land power.79 Schmitt does not deny the centrality of technology; on the contrary, he acknowledges it. However, he fails to understand how technology was perceived in the East because Toynbee was not mistaken, and as evidenced by the slogans stated in China, Japan, and Korea, technology is seen to be divorced from religion and regarded as one of the most secular of knowledges due to its rationality and universality.

Furthermore, Lenin’s electrified earth here does not only represent a communist dream but also the homogenizing tendency of technology, which in turn defines the order of globalization. The human being is primarily a technical being. Thus, technology is fundamental to the evolution of humanity. The evolutionary process initially manifested as divergence, and then battles and conquests brought about varying degrees of convergence of space and time. The conquest of space is also the reorganization of a spatial order regulated by technological means ranging from transportation networks to telecommunication networks, which in turn become a medium of time synchronization. The current industrialized world was not the utopia that Saint Simon dreamed of. The increase in productivity and the development of transportation networks did not lead to a more even distribution of goods and wealth or the realization of socialism. Instead, the spatial order became integrated into smooth planes, which only facilitated the circulation of all forms of energy (fossil fuels, libidinal, sexual, etc.) for capitalism’s profit making. Sovereignty, defined by boundaries and opposition to foreign intervention gradually, gave way to new protocols developed by the industrial world and capitalist market; therefore, we find the nation-state-capital trinity.

Schmitt did not live in the time of the internet, nor did he have the chance to observe how the unity of the world was virtually realized after the fall of the Berlin Wall; Francis Fukuyama was able to write his The End of History and the Last Man, which honored Kojève’s “universal homogeneous state” and the free market.80 The digitalized world replaced the electrified world and became the reality that we are now living in. However, as we know, digitization does not bring about global unity; like the “free market,” it is fragmented according to different commercial interests and ideological manipulations. Today, countries are increasingly realizing the necessity to resist the planetarization of platforms such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, ranging from standard court proceedings for invasion of privacy and monopoly to extreme measures such as barring them from the market and users. The homogenization of technology also defines a new form of universality: access to technologies. Unlike Teilhard de Chardin or the transhumanists discussed in chapter 3, Schmitt was not fascinated by the electrified earth, nor would the digital earth absorb him if he were still alive today. For Schmitt, such unity is more of a problem than a solution. An electrified earth or digital earth can be used to maintain the hegemony of a neoliberal economy, but they do not necessarily enable pluralism.

In Derrida’s reading, Schmitt’s attempt to retrieve pluralism through the redefinition of sovereignty becomes pharmacological. For readers familiar with Derrida’s theory on Plato’s pharmacy or the pharmakon, writing—or technology in general—is neither good nor bad, but remedy and poison at the same time. Writing is that which allows humans to remember everything. Yet, it is also that which makes them forget, for they no longer need to remember anymore, their memory now being externalized in and through technology. The pharmacology of sovereignty could be interpreted in two ways. First, nation-state-sovereignty, on the one hand, can lead to absolute power, namely, the suspension of all laws, including international laws—the sovereign is that which enables a state to become a rogue state. On the other hand, the sovereign is also that which resists certain unilateral “universal” forces because, in certain circumstances, it can “become an indispensable bulwark against certain international powers, certain ideological, religious, or capitalist, indeed linguistic, hegemonies that, under the cover of liberalism or universalism, would still represent, in a world that would be little more than a marketplace, a rationalization in the service of particular interests.”81 It is not surprising that the “rogue states,” which are named as such by the U.S. government, speak about resistance against American imperialism. The unity of the East and the West through the realization of technology and the suppression of sovereignty in the eyes of Schmitt is no less the triumph of imperial universalism. For Schmitt, a true unity exists in the form of the spirit, but not necessarily in the material form like an electrified earth; in other words, technology demands an orientation (Ortung) so that it will not be a blind force. Schmitt distinguished spiritual unity from material unity, claiming that, in Hegel, one can also find a unity of the world spirit, an idea we already explored in chapter 1. Schmitt recognized that Hegel did not mean material unity; in other words, a material unity does not mean a spiritual unity in the Hegelian sense: “Now this Hegelian philosophy is apparently idealistic; it sees the goal of humanity in the unity of the self-returning spirit and the absolute idea, not in the material unity of an electrified earth.”82

While it is certainly too polemical to claim that Hegel separated the spiritual from the material, it is not less polemical to claim that there is no relation between Hegel’s concept of unity and an electrified earth. As we have tried to show, the spirit does not purely exist in the mind; the spirit is at the same time externalization (alienation) and internalization (recollection)—it is the recursive process of externalization and internalization that defines the “self-returning spirit.” Hegel’s indecisiveness toward the end of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right concerning a world order based on nation-states does not mean that Hegel already saw the end of history, as Kojève and Fukuyama claim after him. The unification of the East and the West has not happened yet, but perhaps it will come into being once another world war breaks out; such a war is also something we should hope for the least. Schmitt is not in favor of unity; he condemned it as being loaded with the ideology of imperialism, as he had questioned in “The Unity of the World” why “unity” is necessary good.83 What Schmitt pleads for is pluralism. This pluralism is no longer limited to individual nation-states, which he saw as having already failed after the Second World War. Rather, it finds its new political form in what he calls the Großraum. In this sense, we may understand that technological strategy underpins the Großraum, and its coalition depends on it: “Which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground.”84 After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was the atomic bomb that created the postwar grouping; today, this scenario is best illustrated by the groupings that center on artificial intelligence.

This is the last scenario out of the three that Schmitt described in “The New Nomos of the Earth,” namely, the coalition or grouping of different territories forming clusters of administrative units that extend the Monroe Doctrine from one state to a cluster of states. Due to the new planetary condition, the decline of the sovereign state has become inevitable, according to Schmitt: on the one hand, American imperialism has abandoned the Monroe Doctrine and is ceaselessly opening new markets for its capital; on the other hand, the East due to its technological acceleration is imposing new plans within the same logic of the game. The Großraum is Schmitt’s response to the new nomos of the Earth as a resistance against Anglo-Saxon economic imperialism, and at the same time, as an attempt to rescue the Monroe Doctrine and to reactivate the European order of the planet in the name of heterogeneity and autonomy. The Großraum could be said to be a compromise between the planetarization, which undermines individual states’ sovereignty, and the heterogeneity Schmitt believes to be the foundation of European public law.

Like the political state, the Großraum is a historical and technological product. Schmitt wants to theorize it as such, similar to what Hegel did to the state in his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. If it is true that toward the seventeenth century, the division between sea power and land power was tantamount to a confrontation between ships and farms, meaning two forms of existence exemplified by England and Continental Europe, then the confrontation between land and sea explains the European international politics of that time. However, this configuration nevertheless came to be challenged when the electrified earth progressed toward its concretization (in the sense of Gilbert Simondon). The Second World War made another element even more dominant, that of air. Air is the third element after land and sea; it introduced different types of warfare, including the dropping of atomic bombs, and now more and more drones.85 It englobes both the land and sea and enables the imagination of the Großraum. Schmitt repeatedly talked about the air, the new element, in The Nomos of the Earth, Land and Sea and other texts. Today, the air element is expressed not so much by the air force and its military domination but also in the possibility of destroying the enemy from outer space and more long-term goals, such as creating new territorial sovereignty through the colonization of Mars and the Moon. This exploration of outer space is still beyond the imagination of ordinary people because the earth, despite its wear, is still the only place to live:

The invention of the airplane marked the conquest of the third element, after those of land and sea. Man was lifting himself high above the plains and the waves, and in the process, acquired a new means of transportation, as well as a new weapon. Standards and criteria undertook further changes. Hence, man’s possibilities to dominate nature and his fellow man were given the widest scope.86

Land, sea, and air correspond to three different kinds of technology that aim to control each element. It would be incorrect to think that the elements are discovered chronologically. It was technology that allowed these elements to become dominant in the understanding of the spatial order of the planet—in the sense that they are no longer elements to be governed but rather spaces of “human domination and effective power expansion” (menschlicher Herrschaft und effektiver Machtentfaltung).87 Every spatial revolution indicates the Ordnung’s interruption and the Ortung’s reconfiguration. Suppose we read Schmitt’s theory of spatial revolution systematically. In that case, technology is that which defines the sovereign as well as that which transforms the sovereign’s power—always exceeding it and empowering. At the same time, in order not to be fully determined by technology, the sovereign has to reinvent itself as a vital force, a force that could suspend other norms, including technological ones.

Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty does not set its priority on economic domination but rather on autonomy and decision, a political vitalism that we have already explored. Schmitt’s theory covered the deep sea and outer space in terms of sea and air, but due to his death in 1985, the subject of cyberspace was obviously beyond his conception. Schmitt never ceases to mock the unity of an electrified world;88 however, it is also evident to him, or he would be contradicting himself, that technology is crucial to comprehending spatial order and that technological progress renders past political and legal doctrines obsolete. The electrified earth has become the digital earth today. As Peter Thiel claims, the future spaces in the Schmittean sense are the deep sea, outer space, and cyberspace. If we follow Schmitt’s philosophy of space, as many theorists have attempted, it is crucial to add cyberspace and outer space as new elements after land, sea, and air.89 Cyberspace has already become a battlefield between the states, and outer space is being prepared as such under the name of scientific research.

It is worth repeating that the attractive idea behind Schmitt’s criticism of unity is his aspiration for pluralism. The new orientation (Ortung), the planetary viewed from three spatial elements, has interrupted the order (Ordnung). Is the Großraum a real response to the spatial revolution of the twenty-first century? The image of the blue marble (1972) and those lower-quality photographs of the earth taken from outer space in the 1960s have already conferred a completely new spatial consciousness to the planet, namely, the ability to grasp the earth as a whole from above. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, considered the launch of Sputnik (1957) as an event not second to any other scientific events, including the splitting of the atom.90 The Großraum, often presented as the late Schmitt’s planetary thinking, is in tension with the planetary we intend to propose concerning plurality, democracy, and liberty. To understand this, we will need to go further into Schmitt’s concept of the Großraum. Before the Second World War, the Großraum was justified as a response to the decline of the sovereign state and the threat of American imperialism and Soviet technological acceleration and as a necessity for the Reich. The Reich is that which unifies different people in the Großraum. Is then the Reich an enlarged state and the Großraum an enlarged Kleinraum? Schmitt answers: “The Reich is not simply an enlarged state, just as little as the Großraum is an enlarged Kleinraum. Nor is the Reich identical with the Großraum, but every Reich has a Großraum and thereby rises as much above the state spatially characterized by the exclusiveness of its national territory as it does above the national soil of an individual people.”91

The Reich and the Großraum, as concepts similar to the state, are both historical and concrete. The Reich extends beyond the border of the individual states and the soil of a particular people. One could see that Schmitt was pleading for the German Reich as the only option for the post-Westphalian international order. The Reich does not negate the people and the state; instead, it pretends to provide a new framework to conceive an international political order under the planetary condition:

In it [the concept of the Reich] we have the core of a new way of thinking in international law, which starts from the concept of the people and allows the elements of order contained in the concept of the state to remain, but which at the same time is able to do justice to today’s spatial concepts and the real political vital forces; that can be “planetary,” i.e. earthy [erdraumhaft], without destroying the peoples and the states and without, like the imperialist international law of Western democracies, steering out of the inevitable overcoming of the old concept of the state into a universalistic-imperialistic world law.92

We can observe here that the Reich and the Großraum remain volkliche concepts and are contemporary to the new planetary representation of space, i.e., air. For Schmitt, only the Reich, and not the state, is sufficient to be a political vital force after the new space revolution. Großraum and Reich are positioned as a quest for heterogeneity and plurality—a strategy that resists the imperialist international law of Western liberal democracy. We can see that this quest for plurality resonates with the sentiment today from the left and the right, making Schmitt’s theory appealing again. However, we have yet to ask what kind of pluralism is at stake and if it is not just a camouflage for domination. Pluralism shouldn’t only mean plurality or multipolarity of power, as it can simply be a pluralism based on monism. In the imagination of Schmitt, the new order could be schematically analyzed as first inter-Großräume relations, second inter-Reich relations of different Großräume, and last, both inside and outside the Großraum, international relations (zwischen-völkische Beziehungen).93 Hooker in his Schmitt’s International Thought, much like how Marx reproached Hegel on the organic state, argued that Schmitt’s idea of the Großraum is nothing substantial:

The idea of Großraum is almost totally without substance beyond its status as a critique of the status quo. Whilst certainly of interest in its assertion of the need for a new basis for political uniqueness, the conclusions it reaches are inadequate. Why is a continental form of politics better as an assertion of a thorough and anti-universal appreciation of territory? Why can’t the state-form be revived as genuinely particular? What distinguished the “political idea” of a Großraum from the bare sense of existential collectivity that defined the political community in The Concept of the Political? Schmitt wholly fails to address these foundational questions, and offers no thorough justification of his position.94

This comment is valid in many senses. Hooker argues, after 1945, Schmitt’s eulogy of the Reich present in his earlier writings became almost taboo. However, the Großraum remains in Nomos of the Earth as a proposal for future geopolitics—or, in other words, the geopolitics of the Großraum after Reich. Again, according to Schmitt, what makes the Großraum more preferable to the sovereign state is that the Großräume are internally homogenous but externally differentiated from each other. Heterogeneity is maintained as inter-Großräume relations, but internally, the Großraum could be homogenous like a state. The Großräume means also a new kind of grouping, which is not necessarily the same as the nation-state. Technology, for example, becomes the basis of the grouping of the people: according to the Schmitt of 1929, it will be the new ground of politics in the coming century, all depending on which “type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology” and “which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings [Freund- und Feind-Gruppierungen] can develop on this new ground [Boden].”

§25. Giving Colonialism, New Großräume, and Digital Sovereignty

We may wonder whether the Großraum, after the state, constitutes a higher degree of reconciliation between the universal and the particular, and if so, in what way? For example, suppose a certain ethnic group dominates the political state, defining the official language, calendar, and rhythm of life; the other ethnic groups can maintain their obvious differences, but they must submit to the state administrative machine defined by the dominant people. Is this already the pluralist logic of the Großraum? The Kyoto School philosophers were troubled by the same problem when they had to justify the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They also called the Co-Prosperity Sphere a Großraum by following Schmitt.95 Their justification is that all different Asian people could be united by the Japanese moralische Energie, and it was only the Japanese who were capable of demonstrating such a moralische Energie that overcomes the decadence of Western modernity.96 If the Großraum possesses some theoretical advancements since Hegel’s philosophical justification of the political state, then one should expect that it resolves the Volk Staat correlation and the domination of the Germanic people that Hegel concluded at the end of his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right.

Schmitt left no clear answer to these questions. The pluralism he proposes at times seems to paradoxically align with the technological and economic rationality that he aims to undermine. Schmitt’s anticipation that technology is the new ground on which friend and enemy grouping can develop seems obvious today when microchips became a watershed separating the U.S.-led coalition (including Japan, the Netherlands, and other members of the coalition) and China. Any non-Chinese enterprise that violates the U.S. sanction is an indicator of enmity, and vice versa. This principle is also applied in the use of software and online platforms. Those countries that censor American platforms are often considered to belong to the same group: North Korea, China, and Russia. However, when we look at the substitutes of these Western platforms, we see that they are actually very similar services, using similar or exactly the same technology.

The grouping of friends and enemies based on technology is therefore dynamic, but the most significant development has been cross-state and cross-continental infrastructures. It is not simply an exercise of hegemony, which belongs to the so-called colonialism of taking.97 Such colonialism of taking has dominated since the beginning of the history of colonization itself. Indeed, the constitutive act of taking is the European nomos. The enmity of Schmitt supposes appropriation of land and sea in both civil wars and wars against other countries, which also operates as the justification of colonization from the perspective of the European nomos. After the Second World War, colonialism takes a different form since we have entered a post-European era. The Eurocentric nomos has to be largely modified in the planetary condition, or in Kojève’s words, it can no longer be a taking (nehmen) but becomes a giving (geben). In 1957, Carl Schmitt invited Kojève to give a lecture in the private Rhein-Ruhr-Club in Cologne; the talk was titled “Colonialism from a European Perspective.” Contrary to Schmitt’s notion of nomos as taking and appropriation, Kojève proposed considering giving as a new form of colonialism. Instead of taking from the colonized countries, Europe now gave to these countries in the form of financial, material, and technological support and more than they were taking. Kojève’s rationale is that for a business to remain good, it should have good clients, not poor and bad ones. The giving colonialism (gebender Kolonialismus) is compatible with the new form of capitalism. In Marx’s analysis of industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, capitalists take the maximum from the workers without improving the latter’s quality of life—this remains an error of Marxists when they essentialize capitalism in the form Marx described, for, according to them, capitalists are unbelievably naive and blind.98 Post-Marxian capitalism, exemplified by Henry Ford, changed the strategy by redistributing what they took from the workers. Since Ford, there has been a general improvement in employees’ working conditions and quality of life, as documented by sociologists such as Georges Friedman in France and Daniel Bell in the United States. According to Kojève, the new type of colonialism should not merely take whatever it wants as in the past, but rather provide the emerging and underdeveloped nations more than it has taken. Kojève named France and the UK as the only Western countries with a politics of giving at that time. Today, we see that many of the developed countries, but also developing countries, are giving in this sense. The United States, Germany, and Japan have topped France in donations in the past years.

This seemly “anticolonialist” act is, for Kojève, a new form of colonialism that Europe should exercise,99 such as the “anti-imperialist” act of Schmitt was a justification for the German Reich. Writing in 1957, Kojève had to avoid the Reich in favor of a less hegemonic coalition. Insofar as the territories of land, sea, and air are defined, market and infrastructure become the other means through which the Reich’s sovereignty can extend to other countries so that the internal affairs of other countries can become part of foreign policy. Market and infrastructure consist of two major components for assuring capital and commercial goods circulation. Or, maybe we can say, they are means of creating postwar Großräume. In 1957, Kojève saw China as the receiving country of the giving colonialism of the Soviet Union; however, he also noticed the “spectacular” transformation of China’s technological ground. Sixty-five years have passed, and Kojève’s proposal of a “giving colonialism” has spread beyond the West and takes a much more materialist gesture. The giving colonialism is key to the formation of Großräume. China stands as one of the leading countries in this regard. To recall: China’s One Belt One Road Initiative (BRI) in the past decade (up to 2022) has signed more than 170 cooperation agreements with 125 countries and 29 international organizations across Asia and Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the South Pacific. China constructed a Großraum by imposing not only its economic protocols but also its technological ones. As a response, in the summer of 2022, the G7 launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment with US$600 billion, claiming to be the “true alternative” to China’s BRI. We can anticipate that there will be more and more of such initiatives in the future.

The gift of investment, offered as a gesture of friendship, can easily become that of enmity; giving and taking are two sides of the same coin. The investing country can legally drive another country into bankruptcy or illegally, in the case of conflicts, disrupt the daily operation of other countries through the control of technology and resources, similar to how Russia cut the gas supply to Europe. The friend and enemy demarcation line becomes blurred in these cases through market creation and infrastructure construction because the development of market and infrastructure is a new form of colonialism, as Kojève attempted to clarify. The decision of friend and enemy is nakedly Machiavellian. Today, this is no longer an insight but almost a truism. However, the most ironic thing lies in the denial of this truism when articulated by diplomats. It is also due to this mutual penetration that it is nearly impossible to adhere to the Monroe Doctrine because the interests of each state readily clash with those of the others, even though they are connected on several levels. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been some thirty years of happy mutual penetration, though in almost all cases, from developed countries to developing countries and from developing countries to underdeveloped countries, in the name of globalization. It has come to the point that globalization, which might equally be termed American imperialism, produces an autoimmune effect, similar to what Derrida announced after the 9/11 event and what Peter Thiel describes as the West’s Achilles’s heel since the Enlightenment.100 China, Russia, and the Middle East could all be understood as symptoms of the autoimmune attack of American imperialism. Hearing the United States, the very imperialist driving force behind globalization, suddenly turn against it under Donald Trump’s presidency was almost unbelievable, and China, the world’s so-called strongest communist country, defended globalization and free markets.

This gift, however, is not restricted to international aid. International aid remains only one of the three gift forms, alongside soft power and digital platforms. Soft power belongs to the realm of culture, which can directly affect the psychosocial life of the people of another country. For example, American consumerism has popularized the world and brought about a “liquidation of regional and national culture,” as described by authors such as Jonathan Crary.101 Or, as Stiegler puts it, consumerism induces disindividuation, as its addictive nature creates psychic obstacles that impede the pursuit of a higher meaning of existence.102 In a certain sense, one may say that the United States has already won because it has succeeded in spreading consumerist culture globally. In other words, the United States has already prevailed in its rivalry with China since the Chinese economy is highly dependent on the consumerism of both cheap and luxury goods. This could be said to be the triumph of the thermodynamic ideology—according to which economic freedom is more fundamental than political freedom; in this case, a citizen is first of all a consumer. The thermodynamic ideology has been challenged in the past decades, especially after the financial crisis in 2008, but it continues to exert its power. Trade wars happen when rules of the thermodynamic ideology are violated; for example, we often read in the newspaper that a state is accused by others of having subsidized a particular industry to participate in the global market. This same rhetoric is now used by both capitalist and communist countries.

We have witnessed the formation of a global “community” via technological globalization, and within this community, immunological attacks and autoimmune attacks are the new norm—the ecological mutations (in the sense of Latour) and trade wars could also be seen as these kinds. Concerning the digital earth in process, we see that the sovereign extends its power beyond territories via digital platforms; paradoxically, it also means that the sovereign may lose control, that it fails to suspend the law completely and that the state of exception is only localized. Despite what many diplomats say, it is naive today to ask other states not to intervene in their internal affairs since they are under their sovereignty. It is equally naive when European countries expected Russia to not respond to their sanctions by cutting the energy supply. We can take censorship as an example. When the state censors a platform, it only blocks its people from accessing the server; other people outside of the territory can still access it. The server is not within the legal territory of the former, and according to the latter’s law, its existence is illegal. The centralized form of power, analogical to monotheism, risks failing in a world of decentralized infrastructure. In this sense, decentralization and decentralized technology are often opposed to sovereignty, or even considered as a form of anarchism, because the state of exception can only be executed when the territory can be effectively enclosed.

As Benjamin Bratton has rightly pointed out, digital platforms are a part of sovereign power, and for this reason, he claims that “clouds” are a new element. Clouds do not have a fixed location because the server could be in any of the countries that provide the service; clouds store data, mostly personal data, which is supposed to be the private property of the individuals. Since Edward Snowdon revealed the gigantic surveillance program of the NSA in June 2013, many countries have started different attempts to localize data: the Russian State Duma in 2014 adopted the legislation of data localization to retain the data of Russian users within the Russian territory;103 the European Union introduced General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 and revealed in 2019 the European cloud project GAIA-X.104 This might correspond to what Bratton characterizes as the Monroe Doctrine of the cloud, which defines the digital territories and protocols of access, which he calls Stacks.105 A more detailed historical account of the socioeconomic development of cloud computing is beyond our scope here; what interests us is how platforms, with their decentralized infrastructure, constitute an extension of sovereign power, which inevitably comes into conflict with other sovereign powers. The recent conflicts between the United States and China over digital platforms, especially the case of TikTok, made it visible how the control of user data is vital for political power. TikTok is a company based in the United States, but it is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, of which the Chinese state is a shareholder, and the state, by right, has the ultimate power to access the data of the foreign users of the platform. It underscores the Schmittian concept of the sovereign, as evidenced by Chinese digital giants like the ride-hailing behemoth Didi Global, along with other high-tech and energy companies, voluntarily withdrawing from the New York Stock Exchange.106 It is further exemplified by the recently approved “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” which empowers the U.S. government to compel ByteDance to either shut down or sell TikTok.107

Google is a more important illustration compared to TikTok since it provides far more comprehensive services than the latter. It is presented as a gift, a free service if one remains in the limited amounts of cloud storage, which ensures that no matter how rich or poor, whoever has an internet connection can access such services. For this reason, the volume of user data that Google retains is huge and increases constantly. Imagine Google deleting this information one day (for example, due to an accident), the level to which people would suffer involves not only specific memories but also how lives are organized. Digital platforms have created a new scenario of the operation of sovereign power, which theoretically has no territorial limits. Even though platforms comply to local legal systems, they parallelly extend sovereign power in the way that Google extends American sovereign power. In other words, a Monroe Doctrine of the cloud is in itself contradictory. The future competition will be based on the speed and robustness of computational power and its infrastructure, as well as strategies to block others from having access to advanced technologies and from entering into one’s digital territories. Therefore we will see more and more regulations imposed within both domestic and international frameworks.

However, the discourse of digital sovereignty doesn’t take us beyond that of the nation-state, as it primarily indicates new forms of governmentality and information warfare. The global pandemic that began in 2020 and the shift of geopolitical center toward the Asia Pacific have triggered a global immunological defense. States of emergency were declared in most countries and forced the reorganization of logistics inside and outside the individual countries as well as the surveillance society through data collection, such as reporting on infection and vaccination. During the pandemic, the imposition of border control reversed the spatial consciousness of globalization—the possibility of flying from Asia to Europe for a meeting in the morning and the next day from Europe to North America for a conference. Such a consciousness of borders was also reflected in the discourse of digital sovereignty. Digital sovereignty shrinks to a virtual border sustained by firewalls and ideologies. It risks becoming reactionary and banal; it pretends to find new planetary configurations by subordinating to “real politics” in the name of national security. It falls back to a state-authorized digital extractivism, which now gains more value after the recent success of large language models. Schmitt’s idea of the Großraum as a new spatial order was intended to overcome individual sovereign states’ vulnerability and create a multipolar international order. Is it conceivable to envision a Großraum in the context of the digital realm? The problem is, Schmitt’s Großraum appears to have only extended the political form of the state, even though his quest for pluralist politics remains a central question to twenty-first-century politics. Given the intimate relationship between sovereignty and technology, one is tempted to ponder whether a nuanced concept of technology could provide new insights into the future of political thought—a task we aim to explore in the remaining chapters.

Digital technology was meant to be the means of deterritorialization. This new spatial revolution did not give us a new order but rather returned us to an intuitive immunology often referred to as the Second Cold War. The discourse on digital sovereignty reinforces the surveillance society and politics of data harvesting. That is to say, the state wants to have a monopoly over the data of its people and use it effectively against them and the intervention of foreign powers. It is also in this sense that the media has been talking about a digital Leviathan, which is composed of the data of its people. This remains one of the most superficial images read in newspapers almost daily. If we return to our discussion on the Leviathan in chapter 4, we might see that a Leviathan is not only that which maintains the automation of its algorithm as part of the state administration but also that which is capable of suspending the megamachine, interrupting the recursive computational process and starting a program anew. Maybe we can conclude here with a Derridian question: Could this power—as power of epoch opening—give us a true pluralism in the age of the planetary?108