How resurgent Nazi Schmitt shapes Russia, China goals

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping share more than sheer authoritarian brute force. The views of Hitler’s one-time ‘Crown Jurist’ are also bonding the world’s belligerent superpowers.

While Vladimir Putin’s party would probably crumble without its leader, the Chinese Communist Party retains massive and sustainable power. Xi Jinping, for all his manifest authority, remains a sincerely devout servant of his party. Picture: AFP

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping share more than being “best, most intimate” friends, as Xi has boasted, and more than sheer authoritarian, brute-force common cause.

They also, to a degree, think alike, for their world views and those of their coteries are driven significantly by the same, resurgent thinker – the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt, who was the “Crown Jurist” of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party, which he joined and helped guide. Schmitt, who was born in Prussia in 1888 and died in 1985, elevated the primacy of the state to a theological level and detested representative democracy, liberalism and the rule of law. He would have applauded the invasion of Ukraine, and supported the seizure by Beijing of Taiwan.

One of the most influential Russian figures to have urged Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is Aleksandr Dugin, a leading member of Putin’s United Russia Party and author of Foundations of Geopolitics, which has become an official text book of the Russian military’s General Staff Academy, on Putin’s insistence. Schmitt has deeply influenced Dugin, who has written a much-cited essay on Carl Schmitt’s Five Lessons for Russia.

Schmitt believed that the world’s future lay in the hands of “large geopolitical entities, each of which should be governed by a flexible super state” – justifying their seizing more lebensraum, living space needed for a state’s “natural development”. Like Russia needing Ukraine.

In China, leading academics have become infected with “Schmitt Fever”, with hundreds of papers written approvingly about the Nazi thinker. His influence is clear on Wang Huning, who is now, alongside Xi Jinping, one of the seven members of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, and who has played a leading role – if not the leading role – in steering Chinese Communist Party thinking for the last 20 years.

Ryan Mitchell, assistant law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has written that China’s era of economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping while the state retained “dictatorial powers as to political matters”, fitted more neatly within Schmitt’s framework of the strong state than that of classic Marxist thought. Mitchell added: “The course that China has taken during Wang Huning’s rise to theoretical prominence has often echoed this model.”

Schmitt backed Hitler’s suspension of democracy and the Nazis’ burning of books by Jewish authors. Hermann Goering appointed him to the Prussian State Council, and he became president of the Association of National Socialist German Jurists, and editor-in-chief of the Nazi newspaper for lawyers, in which he championed the political assassinations of the “Night of the Long Knives”.

He never recanted following the war.

Chinese politician Deng Xiaoping at Beidaihe beach in 1986. Picture: Getty

Schmitt opposed what he viewed as liberal values including the separation of powers, and asserted that democracy should only be viewed as truly legitimate when it worked through acclamation, through group voices being raised at, for instance, public rallies, and not through ballot box elections.

He viewed liberalism and his version of democracy as incompatible, and disdained cosmopolitanism. The state, for Schmitt, was sovereign in his political theory in a similar way to God being sovereign in theology. Whoever held sovereign power and who identified a danger to their state’s existence, he wrote, could declare a “state of exception” exempting them from restraint by rule of law.

Politics including party ideology, he asserted, must be privileged over all other areas of life including the economy, and must identify groups of people as either friends or enemies, proclaiming approvingly as the Nazis took power that “the idea of ethnic identity will pervade and dominate all our public law” to ensure “cultural security”.

And his international theory, echoed by others, was dominated by his view of Eurasia as the central fulcrum of world power, a concept that fits naturally with Russian thinking but also increasingly attractive in China, taking in concepts like the Silk Road, and the role of the Mongolian Empire as an Asian archetype for global power, of which Beijing covets its own version including through its Belt and Road Initiative.

In contrast, the power of the US, Britain and their allies is viewed as deriving chiefly from maritime strength, which is associated with liberalism and open trade, which Schmitt’s thinking denigrates – a view reinforced by the manner of the US departure from Afghanistan.

Schmitt’s views regained traction globally over the past 25 years, within the West ironically in some areas of leftist thinking, with the ascendancy in academe of “Critical Studies” and of “postcolonial” antipathy to liberalism. His positions have been espoused especially eagerly by new-generation power elites, champions of autocracy, in Russia and China.

It would however be wrong to conclude that despite the extent of the Schmitt imprint on thinkers in both countries, they align on everything. The Russian and Chinese political regimes have many obvious differences. While Putin’s party would probably crumble without its leader, the Chinese Communist Party retains massive and sustainable power. Xi, for all his manifest authority, remains a sincerely devout servant of his party and needs to ensure it backs him fully, especially this year as he needs its five-yearly congress to reappoint him by acclaim for a further five years as general secretary, his key role.

German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt.

A war, even one halfway across the world, is not helpful for the stability Xi needs for his smooth reappointment in November. Nor is the economic disruption resulting from the Ukraine invasion and the sanctions.

The two economies contrast strikingly, China’s being 10 times the size of Russia’s, with even its per person GDP now larger. China is economically enmeshed with every country in the world, while Russia’s global engagement hinges overwhelmingly and narrowly off energy and defence exports. Although many commentators have said that only Xi has the standing with his bestie Putin to intercede for peace, he almost certainly won’t do so.

The same was said amid the international angst over the successful push of North Korea, China’s only formal ally, towards becoming nuclear armed. However, Xi refrained from intervening with Kim Jong-un.

Nor will Xi walk away from the 5000-word “no limits” pact that he signed with Putin at the start of the Winter Olympics. This agreement reads like a Beijing-drafted document. Its overall thrust aligns with Schmitt’s statist theology and belief in the centrality of Eurasia, insisting on “the protection of (Russia and China’s) core interests, state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and opposition to interference by external forces”, including such forces’ attempts “to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions.”

This might be interpreted as attacking NATO involvement in Ukraine, or Quad support for Taiwan. In Russia, others besides Dugin who are influential with Putin’s circle also promote Schmitt’s world view, including the New Conservatives led by 43-year-old political scientist and strategist Mikhail Remizov.

In China, the embrace by Xi’s circle of “New Left” thinkers formerly held at arm’s length, has accelerated the surge in Schmitt’s influence and the elevation of “national security” as a key policy driver.

The blaming on “foreign forces” of young Hong Kongers’ now-crushed campaign for democracy, and the imposition of the all-encompassing National Security Law there are perceived as classic takes from the “neo-authoritarian” Schmitt playbook, promoted by Peking University law professor Chen Duanhong.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on February 4.

Chen’s colleague and fellow Schmittian, Jiang Shigong, attacking the “colour revolutions” that scared the CCP, said: “If you do not submit to political authority, then if I say you’re wrong, you’re wrong, even if you’re right.” He praised Xi Jinping Thought for “perfecting the party’s leadership of the state.”

Griffith University government and international relations professor Haig Patapan has explained that Schmitt is helping frame the CCP’s legitimacy around nationalism and external enemies rather than class struggle – which is no longer available since party members themselves have become palpably China’s privileged elite.

Schmitt envisaged an anti-Western, anti-liberal world order of “great spaces”, spheres of influence, controlled by great powers.

Thus Schmitt Thought is playing a crucial role in helping the authoritarian instincts of the Russian and Chinese regimes cohere conceptually, and also anchoring their crucial mutual connection.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi underlined this in stressing 10 days after Putin launched the Ukraine invasion: “The China-Russia relationship is grounded in a clear logic of history and driven by strong internal dynamics.” Their connection is “rock solid,” Wang said. Schmitt-solid.

Rowan Callick is an Industry Fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.