War the School of Space

The Space of War and the War for Space

Bibliographic Data

ID12596296
AuthorsE Mendieta (0000-0003-0903-885X, University of San Francisco, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume9
Issue2
Pages207-229
Publication date2006-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthics Place & Environment (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1366-879X • E-ISSN: 1469-6703
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13668790600694519
OpenAlexW1981756559
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited48

This essay seeks to show that military strategists have not only been acute philosophers of space but also philosophers of world history. The works of Albert Speer (Nazi Minister of Armaments), Friedrich Ratzel (father of geopolitics), A. T. Mahan (Admiral), Halford Mackinder (Geographer and Historian of England), Carl Schmitt (Nazi Jurist and military philosopher), Guilio Duohet (father of ‘strategic bombing’), and Harlan K. Ullman (father of ‘Shock and Awe’) are considered in terms of the ways in which space has been militarized, or rather how war spatializes world history. The geography of world history has been the topos of war. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Chris Connery and Gail Hershatter, directors of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz Center, for their generous hospitality. The research for this article was conducted while the author was the Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the Center. Notes Notes 1 For a rich overview see Benko and Strohmayer (1997). 2 For a discussion of Paul Virilio as a thinker of war see Sylvère Lotringer's introduction in Virilio and Lotringer's Crepuscular Dawn (Citation2002). See also Redhead (Citation2004) and the Paul Virilio interview in Der Derian (Citation1998). 3 See the very useful essay on Lefebvre by Andy Merrifield (Citation2000). See also Merrifield's short chapter on Lefebvre in his wonderful book Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City (Merrifield, Citation2002, pp. 71–92). 4 An excellent and brief exemplification by Lefebvre of the way in which space is political and the political in turn is affected by its spatiality is to be found in ‘Space and the State’ in the edited book State/Space (Lefebvre, Citation2003). 5 For a discussion of these projects, see chapter 20: ‘Remodeling Germany’, in Spotts (Citation2002). 6 Speer discusses some of these projects in his memoirs, see Chapters 10 and 11 (Speer, Citation1970, pp. 132–159). 7 Also see Schmidt (Citation1984, p. 20). Schmidt discusses how these numbers disappeared from the Speer's Official Journal, which Wolters kept and later cleaned up to save his superior. 8 See Albert Speer (Citation1979), endnotes 5 and 6 to part I for a discussion of the ruinenwerttheorie. On the ‘Theory of the Value of Ruins’ see Fest (Citation2002, p. 92). See also Fest (Citation1970, p. 203, note 26). See on p. 363, no. 26: ‘Speer had developed a theory of the value of ruins (Ruinenwertheorie), as he called it. Stated briefly, this was that the emotional effect of a ruin depended on the material used’. Fest, clearly, is being disingenuous. Speer gave great importance to this theory (see Speer, Citation1970, p. 56). 9 I cannot resist the urge to quote from a note left by Patrick Dillon, a Vietnam Vet in Iraq to Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for The New Yorker, who was in Baghdad before and through the 2003 US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Patrick left Jon his copy of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with a note that went: ‘Jon: Kurtz is yours. Beware! There is a notion that if one isn’t crying hysterically or laughing one's balls off when laying down the words, then it had better be done again, deeper. I’ve been shooting my eyeballs out, the underworld of sewage streets and feral packs of nigh children who remind me of me, and always on the verge of tears because of what Curtis “Bombs Away” Le May invented in Japan, evolved in the valleys of N. Korea and perfected in Vietnam, the firebomb, which is about to erase whatever is left of Iraqi life as it was known and lived and celebrated for what, four or five thousand years? But what's one or two or a hundred cultures or ethnicities tossed into the dustbin of history, among friends, right? If they can’t compete, if they aren’t viable, fuck’em, right? Right?’ (Anderson, Citation2004, p. 78). For a superb scholarly treatment of the centrality of air power in US American military power, see Sherry (Citation1987). 10 See Weigert (Citation1942), especially chapter 4, ‘Pioneers of Geopolitics’ where Weigert provides a sympathetic and synoptic overview of Ratzel's work and its influence on Haushofer. 11 For discussion of Ratzel, Kjellén, and Haushofer, see Kasperson and Mighhi (1969), part I: ‘Heritage’, pp. 6–9. 12 The following analysis has been guided by Christopher L. Connery's outstanding studies into what he calls elemental thinking and geomythology (see Connery, Citation1996, Citation2001). 13 For a fair but critical synopsis see Sprout (Citation1941). 14 For the story of the publication of this book, see Robert Seager II (Citation1978), chapter 8. 15 See also the discussion of these conditions in Seager (Citation1978, pp. 206–207). 16 Schmitt's most explicit and synthetic presentation of his understanding of Nomos is to be found in the essay ‘Appropriation/Distribution/Production: Toward a Proper Formulation of Basic Questions of any Social and Economic Order (1953)’ (Schmitt, Citation1993). See also the translators introduction (Ulmen, Citation1993). 17 Ulmen's translation is an amazing scholarly accomplishment not just because of the annotations and faithful translation, but also because Ulmen has appended a series of shorter essays by Schmitt that contributed to the book's overall argument. 18 Schmitt may be translating and interpreting Heraclitus’ famous fragments 53 and 80. The former says, according to Diels: ‘Krieg is aller Dinge Vater, aller Dinge König. Die einen erweist er als Götter, die anderen als Menschen, die iene macht er zu Sklaven, die anderen zu Freien’ (Diels, Citation1966, p. 162). This is translated by Kathleen Freeman as ‘War is both king of all and father of all, and it has revealed some as gods, others as men; some it has made slaves, others free’ (Freeman, Citation1966, p. 28). Fragment 80 reads in German: ‘Man soll aber wissen, daß der Krieg gemeinsam (allgemein) is und das Recht der Zwist und daß alles geschieht auf Grund von Zwist und Schuldigkeit’ (Diels, Citation1966, p. 169), which is translated as ‘One should know that war is general (universal) and jurisdiction is strife, and everything comes about by way of strife and necessity’ (Freeman, Citation1966, p. 30). 19 Carl Schmitt could have quoted in this context Heraclitus’ fragment 44: ‘The people should fight for the Law (Nomos) as if for their city wall’ (Freeman, Citation1966, p. 27). 20 In The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Schmitt discusses three such nomoi: the first is before the sixteenth century, and it is entirely terrestrial. It corresponds to the medieval period. Its concept of space was closed and finite. The second, and perhaps most important, was the Nomos that emerged in the sixteenth century because of the discovery and land taking of the New World. This Nomos is truly global, although Eurocentric, and it is based on a dual balance: the balance of sea and land power, and balance within Europe. This second Nomos began to crumble during World War I, and was decisively destroyed during WWII. A third Nomos has not yet emerged, but Schmitt is adamant that this new Nomos should not be based on either unipolarity or the dominion of one power over all the other countries. Only during the second Nomos was war constrained and bracketed. War was a legal and legitimate affair. It was a legitimate affair among nations. The Jus Publicum Europaeum began to collapse, in fact, when war became criminalized. This criminalization of war led to the moralization and theologization of war, precisely what the second Nomos had disaggregated and differentiated. For a discussion of Schmitt's different nomoi, see Palaver (Citation1996); for a discussion of Schmitt's views on the criminalization of war, see Ulmen (Citation1996b) and Schmitt (Citation2003, pp. 121, 187 and passim). 21 See Heidegger (Citation2000), Division One, Chapter III: ‘The Worldhood of the World’, paragraphs 14–24. 22 Compare with Heidegger's discussion of fragments 50 and 16 in Heidegger (Citation1975), a collection of lectures and articles written during the 1940s. 23 See Harlan Ullman, ‘Introduction to Rapid Dominance’, available at www.shockandawe.com; see p. 4 of shockintro.html. 24 Ibid

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