Schmittian Moments 10
Carl Schmitt’s political theory has regained disturbing relevance in today’s geopolitical landscape. His core concepts, the Großraum, or greater spatial order, and the friend–enemy distinction, were originally developed to critique liberal universalism and to defend sovereign authority in times of existential danger. These ideas now provide a lens through which to interpret the global resurgence of authoritarian governance eager to escape the constrictions of that same liberal universalism. Across regimes as ideologically diverse as China, Russia, India, and now the United States under Donald Trump, Schmitt’s logic of spatial domination and identity through exclusion increasingly defines how state power is exercised and legitimized.
The concept of Großraum rejects the liberal ideal of a single global order governed by abstract legal norms. Instead, it envisions a world divided into regional spheres of influence, each anchored by a dominant political power that determines the moral and legal coordinates of the region. Schmitt conceived of this as a counter to the homogenizing tendencies of liberal internationalism. So if we look at the four major players proposing an alternative to the universalist liberal legal geopolitical order we can see how the concept of Großraum alongside the 'friend/enemy' distinction is being developed.
Today, China’s geopolitical strategy under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) increasingly reflects the structural logic of both Carl Schmitt’s Großraum theory and the friend–enemy distinction. Schmitt envisioned the Großraum not merely as a geographic bloc, but as a political–civilizational sphere dominated by a hegemon that determines the rules within its domain and excludes external normative interference. China’s regional and global posture increasingly follows this blueprint: projecting a Sinocentric order in East Asia and Africa, while casting liberal-democratic states, particularly the United States, Japan, and Taiwan, as existential threats to that vision.
The Taiwan question lies at the heart of this strategy. The CCP treats Taiwan not as a sovereign entity with a democratically elected government, but as a rebellious province destined for reintegration under the “One China” principle. This is not simply a territorial claim, it is an existential and symbolic one, just as the issue of Hong Kong was. The very existence of a Chinese-speaking liberal democracy on its periphery undermines the CCP’s claim to historical legitimacy, socialist continuity, and national unity. Schmitt’s friend–enemy logic thus operates at full intensity: Taiwan is framed as both an internal rupture and an external pawn of hostile Western forces. The frequent military drills, airspace incursions, and rhetorical threats signal a suspended legal and diplomatic order, a permanent “state of exception” regarding cross-Strait relations, in which normal rules of international recognition or peaceful dispute resolution are overridden by a higher imperative of reunification.
Japan, too, is recast within this Schmittian imaginary. Though economic ties between China and Japan remain substantial, political relations are frequently strained by historical grievances, territorial disputes (such as over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands), and Japan’s close alliance with the United States. In Chinese state media and diplomatic discourse, Japan is increasingly depicted not merely as a rival power, but as a regional proxy of American containment. The friend–enemy distinction becomes spatialized: China’s East Asian Großraum is imagined as being disrupted by external liberal–capitalist norms and military alliances encroaching on what Beijing claims as its sphere of rightful influence.
Africa occupies a different but equally important role in China’s emerging Großraum logic. Through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China has made deep infrastructural, financial, and diplomatic inroads into multiple African nations. These partnerships are framed as “South–South cooperation,” deliberately contrasting with Western forms of conditional aid, democracy promotion, or human rights discourse. China presents itself as a non-interfering partner, offering development and investment without ideological demands. Yet this ostensibly neutral stance conceals a more strategic logic: China is carving out a parallel legal–economic order that displaces liberal norms with a post-Westphalian model of sovereignty defined by regime stability and market cooperation under authoritarian guidance. This is a form of Großraum projection, an alternative global space under Chinese leadership, where Western universalisms are suspended in favour of pragmatic alignment with Chinese state interests.
The friend–enemy logic extends here as well. African nations that align too closely with the West, or criticize Chinese practices (on labour, debt, or surveillance), risk being excluded from diplomatic favour or investment flows. Conversely, those that support Beijing’s line on Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang are rewarded with infrastructure deals, strategic partnerships, and rhetorical elevation. What emerges is a conditional sphere of belonging, not governed by law or mutual recognition in the liberal sense, but by a moral economy of loyalty and shared threat perception, one that mirrors Schmitt’s vision of spatial ordering through exclusion and obedience to a regional hegemon.
Across these theatres, Taiwan, Japan, and Africa, China’s foreign policy reveals an increasingly Schmittian structure. The world is not treated as a universal legal community, but as a multipolar conflict of civilizational zones, each legitimating its sovereign exception in the name of security, survival, and historical destiny. Liberalism is not simply a different regime type, it is framed as an existential contaminant, one that must be pushed out of the Chinese Großraum through a mixture of economic leverage, military threat, and narrative warfare. The friend–enemy distinction, in this context, is not a dramatic declaration but an everyday operation of statecraft: structuring trade, diplomacy, and war-readiness as tools of moral geography and ideological hygiene.
Russia’s geopolitical strategy under Vladimir Putin also displays a sustained application of Carl Schmitt’s concepts. In this model, Russia is imagined not merely as a sovereign state among others, but as the organizing pole of a Eurasian Großraum, a culturally and historically unified space whose coherence must be defended from both internal dissent and external liberal encroachment.
The annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war in Ukraine are clear examples of this logic in action. The claim that Ukraine belongs within Russia’s natural geopolitical sphere, justified in terms of cultural, linguistic, and (bogus) historical unity, establishes a spatial order in which national boundaries are secondary to civilisational allegiance. The Ukrainian government and population are cast not as legitimate counterparts but as proxies of a hostile West. The friend–enemy distinction thus operates not only at the level of foreign policy but within the moral construction of national identity: those who identify with the liberal West are framed as traitors or infiltrators of a deeper Russian essence.
This Schmittian logic is not limited to Ukraine. The 2008 war in Georgia, and Russia’s continued occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, similarly reflects a view of the region as part of a natural Russian Großraum. Georgian efforts to align more closely with NATO and the EU are interpreted not as sovereign choices but as existential threats to Russian unity. Here again, sovereignty is claimed not through universal law but through the defence of a spatial and spiritual order, one where Russia is the guarantor of regional stability, even if that requires military intervention and permanent territorial revision.
Putin’s use of Orthodox Christianity as a cultural anchor further solidifies this logic. The Russian state positions itself as the protector of traditional values against the supposed decadence of Western liberalism, casting the geopolitical struggle in moral and civilisational terms in very much the way nineteenth century Russiafiles like Dostoyevsky and Lermontov and more recent ones like Solzhenitsyn did. Whether in Georgia, Ukraine, or even in Russia’s posturing in the Arctic and Central Asia, the boundaries of inclusion are drawn through faulty historical memory, religious identity, and strategic necessity.
The friend–enemy distinction becomes the structural grammar of this order. Opposition figures, NGOs, independent journalists, and ethnic or religious minorities are not merely dissenters but “foreign agents,” a legal category that formalizes their exclusion from the body politic. Externally, NATO, the EU, and liberal democracies are constructed as enemies not merely because of conflicting interests, but because they threaten the unity of the Russian Großraum by offering alternative models of sovereignty and life.
This mode of governance and expansion cannot be fully understood through realist geopolitics alone. Schmitt’s conceptual framework reveals how Putin’s Russia grounds its legitimacy in a spatial mythos and an existential politics of exclusion. The Großraum is not only a territorial ambition but a moral geography, and the enemy is not just a military threat but a symbolic contaminant. This allows for the perpetual state of exception: law is suspended or rewritten in order to preserve the deeper unity of a civilizational order imagined to be under siege.
India under Narendra Modi is tragically also moving decisively toward a Schmittian spatial and political logic, framed not by liberal proceduralism but by the consolidation of a civilisational identity rooted in Hindu majoritarianism. The ruling ideology of Hindutva reimagines India as a unified, spiritually homogenous rashtra, a Hindu nation that precedes and overrides the secular, pluralistic foundations of the postcolonial state. This conception of civilisational sovereignty draws heavily on a spatial imaginary akin to Schmitt’s Großraum idea: India is not merely a modern republic, but the cultural and religious centre of a broader Hindu world, extending across South Asia and into the diaspora. Within this logic, the internal and external enemies of the nation are increasingly conflated.
The long-standing repression in Kashmir has intensified under Modi’s rule, most notably with the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, which revoked the region’s limited autonomy and imposed direct central control. The move was celebrated domestically as an assertion of national unity and sovereignty but widely condemned internationally as a form of legal and political exception. The region has since seen extended curfews, internet shutdowns, and mass detentions, techniques that reflect a state of permanent emergency justified through the language of internal threat.
Schmittian friend–enemy logic has been deployed to frame Muslims as internal enemies of the Hindu nation, transforming a religious minority into a perceived existential threat. This is evident in the political rhetoric of Hindutva ideologues, who portray Muslims as historically subversive, demographically dangerous, and culturally alien. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which offers fast-tracked citizenship to non-Muslim refugees, institutionalizes this logic by legally excluding Muslims from the imagined national community. Similarly, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in Assam has rendered countless Muslims stateless under the guise of identifying "illegal immigrants." Mob lynchings, vigilante violence under the banner of cow protection, and hate speech by elected officials are not aberrations but symptoms of a broader political theology that casts Muslims as enemies to be contained, punished, or purged.
This Schmittian friend–enemy distinction becomes especially stark in the treatment of Sikh separatist movements. Though the violent conflict of the 1980s and 1990s—including Operation Blue Star and the Delhi pogroms—has faded from public memory, the Indian state has recently revived the spectre of Sikh separatism in both domestic and international arenas. The assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and pro-Khalistan activist, on Canadian soil in 2023, was linked by Canadian intelligence to Indian state actors. This extraterritorial act of sovereign violence recalls Schmitt’s notion that the sovereign decides not only within, but across, borders when core identity and survival are perceived to be at stake. The international fallout, including diplomatic expulsions and a public rupture in Canada–India relations, further illustrates how the logic of civilisational exception extends into the global sphere.
India’s political landscape under Modi is not simply authoritarian in the traditional sense, but increasingly organized around a civilisational order in which the state assumes the role of defender of a metaphysical unity. Muslims, secular liberals, left-wing student groups, and international human rights organizations are routinely cast as enemies of the nation. This is not incidental to the regime's strategy but foundational to it: the friend–enemy distinction structures legal, social, and international decisions alike.
In this emerging order, dissent is not disagreement but disloyalty; the law does not mediate between citizens, but expresses the will of a cultural nation. The Indian state increasingly behaves as the sole interpreter of what constitutes national interest, unity, and threat, redefining sovereignty not as a procedural authority under law, but as a mystical expression of a Hindu collective will. In this, Schmitt’s framework proves disturbingly apt: the legal order is suspended not in the absence of norms, but in the defence of a higher, quasi-theological norm of identity. India thus joins a growing list of states where the language of crisis, purity, and exception is no longer the rhetoric of the fringe, but of government itself.
Sadly, under Donald Trump’s presidency, the United States has increasingly exhibited a Schmittian logic of Großraum. Trump’s America First doctrine, often dismissed as mere populist rhetoric, in fact marked a structural shift toward a geopolitical worldview in which legal norms are subordinated to the will of a sovereign power claiming to defend the “true” cultural essence of America. Trump’s open suggestion that Canada could be annexed as a future U.S. state , framed as a joke but repeated with enough frequency and seriousness to generate diplomatic concern, fits neatly within this Großraum logic. Canada, in this imaginary, is not a sovereign partner but a culturally subordinate territory whose liberal policies, immigration stance, and climate commitments are seen as threats to an American-led continental order.
The revival of manifest destiny rhetoric here is not nostalgic but strategic: it envisions a U.S.-dominated North America in which cultural and political alignment with American values becomes the precondition for legitimate sovereignty. This logic extends southward as well. Trump’s immigration policies did not merely criminalize border crossings, they recoded entire populations as existential threats to the American homeland. The deportation of asylum seekers to countries like El Salvador, including transfers of vulnerable migrants into what is effectively a carceral zone, the now-infamous mega-prison for alleged gang members, exemplifies a politics of exception where legality is nullified in the name of security. These are not deportations in the traditional sense; they are spatial expulsions into zones marked by lawlessness and violence, reinforcing the friend–enemy distinction at the border of empire.
Trump’s Middle East policy also reflects Schmittian dynamics. Unwavering support for Israel, particularly during moments of extreme violence against Palestinians, was justified not through appeals to international law or human rights but as a matter of American civilisational loyalty. Israel became, in Trump’s words and policy actions, a frontline state in the global war of American civilization against Islamic radicalism. The 12 day war against Iran, rhetorically escalated through assassinations and sanctions, was not framed as a tragic last resort, but as a potential purification of global disorder. In this geopolitical theatre, enemies are not adversaries with whom negotiation is possible; they are existential threats to be eliminated. Under this frame, Trump's America sees itself not as one actor among others in a multipolar world governed by rules, but as a sovereign exception whose role is to determine the normative shape of its spatial order, North America, the Middle East, and parts of Latin America included. The state becomes a moral arbiter, and its executive leader the interpreter of who belongs and who must be excluded.
This is Schmitt's theory applied in the conditions of 21st-century geopolitics, where legality is redefined in the name of survival, loyalty, and a purified collective identity. The American Großraum thus takes on continental and even planetary dimensions, rationalized through narratives of border security, cultural survival, and religious solidarity. What appears on the surface as populist bravado or diplomatic disruption is better understood as a deep structural reordering of geopolitical imagination, where the sovereign not only decides on the exception but redraws the boundaries of what counts as lawful existence itself.
Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, grounded in the power to decide, to define space, and to name the enemy, thus shapes the political grammar of the 21st century. His ideas no longer belong to the margins of reactionary thought; they have been absorbed into the practical strategies of global governance. In a world increasingly structured by multipolar competition, civilisational exceptionalism, and permanent crisis, Schmitt offers a dangerous clarity: not because his vision is coherent or humane, but because it provides states with a powerful language to justify the erosion of law in the name of order, and the suspension of norms in the name of survival. The global appeal of Schmitt lies in this capacity to convert chaos into meaning, and exception into legitimacy. He allows regimes to reframe repression as realism, hierarchy as harmony, and war as necessary defence of a civilisational space.
His Großraum and friend–enemy concepts have become the tacit coordinates of our post-liberal geopolitical moment—a moment in which sovereignty is no longer accountable to law, but to the imagined identity of a people besieged. Which when you think about it is a very sick joke.