ABSTRACT
In 1939, with Germany’s foreign policy becoming a major issue in European affairs, Carl Schmitt’s Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte was certainly noticed. Several German newspapers published long articles describing Schmitt’s Großraum-theory, and the foreign press also took notice of Schmitt’s lecture: two British newspapers presented Schmitt as the theorist behind Hitler’s expansion in Europe (Bendersky 1983: 237-242, 250-252). Though it is not often recognised as such, Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung is also an academic landmark: it anticipated a genre of International Relations (IR) theory that emerged in the 1940s, the subject of which was international order in the post-war era. Recurrent in all this speculation was an attempt to come up with new concepts to replace the traditional national state with something geographically bigger and more powerful. For Schmitt, this concept was of course Großraum1 (Schmitt 1991). In Schmitt’s Großraumordnung, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British and Japanese empires had their respective Großräume, with Central Europe fast becoming the backyard of the German Reich.
