LAND AND SEA AND HISTORY

PART ONE: SCHMITT’S SPATIAL REVOLUTION

This is the first in what’s anticipated to be a short series on Carl Schmitt’s analysis of what he coined as “the spatial revolution.” An index of the other installments of the series follow:

PART TWO: EXPLAINING THE SPATIAL MIND

PART THREE: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE EUROPEAN NOMOS

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Elsewhere I’ve considered the interesting, if sometimes dubiously relevant, context of Carl Schmitt’s turn to geopolitics – particularly as framed around the binary organizing principle of land vs sea. Readers can refer to those discussions – here, here, and here – so I won’t repeat them in this initial installment of a series on Schmitt’s spatial revolution. Ever the fertile (some might allege strategic) thinker, his framing of the discussion is strikingly fertile. It’s to be noted in advance though that in following these lines of inquiry he was heavily indebted to several thinkers – mostly of the geography and geopolitics kind – that preceded his examination.¹ We will have occasion in this broader exploration of the spatial revolution to look back at some of those contributors. We begin though with Schmitt, and will see where it leads us.

Schmitt’s first major, at least readily available in English, contribution to a history and theory of the spatial revolution came in his 1942 book, Land and Sea.² Below I’ll lay out the broad contours of his framing of the epochal developments of this spatial revolution as sketched out in that book. Later in this post, I’ll flesh out that framing a bit with reference to a later, 1955, essay less easily found in English translation.

To begin though, Schmitt takes on the then common tendency in geography, geopolitics, and international law, to construe the world as an existential conflict between land and sea. As per standard operating procedure hereabouts, we give Schmitt a long leash in setting out the intellectual underpinning.

The human is a land-being, a land-dweller. He stands and walks and moves upon the firmly grounded earth. This is his standpoint and his soil; through it he receives his viewpoint; this defines his impressions and his way of seeing the world. He receives not only his field of vision but also the form of his gait and his movements, his shape as a living being born and moving upon the earth. He consequently calls the planet on which he lives the “earth,” although, with respect to the extent of its surface, it is known to be almost three quarters water and only one quarter earth, and, indeed, the largest pieces of earth within it only swim like islands.

In the last century, the nineteenth century, it was, in particular, a German scholar in the grand style, Lorenz Oken, who explained human life, like all life, as emerging from the sea. In the family trees as well that were constructed by the Darwinian natural scientists, fish and land animals are found next to and following one another in different sequences. Here, animals of the sea figure as human ancestors. The originary and early history of humanity appears to confirm this oceanic origin. Important researchers have discovered that besides “autochthonal,” i.e., land-born peoples, there have also been “autothalassic,” i.e., peoples purely defined by the sea, who have never been land-dwellers, and who wished to know nothing of firm land, other than that it formed the boundaries of their purely maritime existence. On the isles of the South Sea, in the Polynesian seafarers, Canaks and Sawoiori, one recognizes still the last remnants of such fish-humans [Fischmenschen]. Their whole being, their conceptual world and language were related to the sea.

Therefore, it is a persistent question: what is our element? Are we children of the land or of the sea? This question does not allow itself to be answered with a simple either–or. Ancient myths, modern natural scientific hypotheses, and the results of research into early history leave both possibilities open.

In pondering the proper answer to that question, Schmitt, as he is prone to do (and doubles down on in the essay covered below) prefers a voluntarist explanation, which I consider unsustainable intellectually. But he is owed his due in positing it.

Now, however, the human is a being which is not completely taken up with its environment. The human has the strength to historically conquer his existence [Dasein] and consciousness.

As always with such statements much rides on exactly what one means. As a biological realist, I of course would not endorse the crude voluntarism potentially implied here. As I’ve pointed to in a recent post, there is not an incommensurate binary division between structuralism and historicity (see here). I think the same broad sentiment was captured in Marx's famous aphorism: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please." Though even there Marx limits himself to the constraints of history: "circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." As a biological realist I'd point to the evolved limits of biological selection, manifesting in the given nature of species and their phenotypes. But these are points made repeatedly on this Substack and in my other writings, so I won’t belabor them here.³

However concerned Schmitt is to maintain the transcendental optimism of radical voluntarism, he does find his way to the land vs sea analytical model for understanding recent history, and particularly the establishment of a nomos of the earth that arose from the spatial revolution. “World history is a history of the battle of sea powers against land powers and of land powers against sea powers.” And from there he explores the origins of this conflict which organized the world for centuries.

He begins by speculating on whether that origin may be found in Venetian sea power over the Adriatic and Mediterranean. As intriguing and spectacular as he finds the Venetian legacy, though, Schmitt concludes this is the wrong place to seek the origins of the spatial revolution, of the re-imagining of the globe as a space of occupation and conquest.

If...we pose the question whether here lies before us a case of pure maritime existence and of real decision for the element of the sea, then we see immediately how confined a sea power restricted to the Adriatic and the Mediterranean basin is, once the unsurveyable spaces of the world oceans open themselves.

World history, for [Ernst Kapp, one of those previously mentioned forerunners], begins with the “potamic” period, i.e., with the river culture of the Orient in Mesopotamia, of the Euphrates and the Tigris and the Nile, in the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian empires of the East. It is followed by the so-called thalassic period of a culture of inland seas and of the sea basin of the Mediterranean, to which Greek and Roman antiquity and the medieval Mediterranean belong. With the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the earth the last and highest stage begins, the level of oceanic culture is attained…

As illustrative of his claim that those earlier transition periods did not rise to a truly new nomos, a genuine spatial revolution, he observes the contemporary failure to appreciate the possibilities of a sea-inspired revolution reflected in the methods of battle.

Parenthetically, in this context, it’s worth noting for those less familiar with Schmitt's work that he was very interested in war. This was not due to some primordial fixation on death or heroic violence as some of his more puerile critics suggest, but more the opposite: Schmitt was concerned to avoid or at least minimize war and its viciousness. Toward that end he paid a considerable amount of attention to the context of war and its situation within international law. Along these lines he observed some very important distinctions that emerged with the transition from land war to sea war. Despite the length of the following quotation, spelling out his analysis of this development is helpful in unpacking a larger point he makes about the gradual emergence of the spatial mind:

For land war, the states of the European continent have constructed certain forms since the sixteenth century, at the basis of which lies the thought that war is a relation between state and state. On both sides there is state-organized military power, and the armies carry out battle among one another on the open battlefield. Only the fighting hosts confront one another as enemies, while the non-fighting civilian population remains outside the hostilities. The civilian population is not an enemy and shall not be treated as an enemy, so long as it does not partake in battle. For sea war, on the contrary, at its basis lies the thought that the trade and economy of the enemy ought to be targeted. The enemy in such a war is not only the fighting opponent but also every member of an enemy state, and finally also the neutral party conducting trade with the enemy and who stands in an economic relation with the enemy. Land war has the tendency toward the decisive open battlefield. In sea war, it can also naturally come to a sea battle, but its typical means and methods are bombardment and blockade of enemy coasts and the seizure of enemy and neutral ships according to the right of capture. It is grounded in the essence of these typical means of sea war that they may be directed at combatants as well as non-combatants. In particular, a blockade aiming at starvation strikes, without distinction, the whole population of the blockaded domain, the military and civilian population, men and women, the elderly and children.

Back in my undergrad history courses, the professors — in keeping with the general thrust of the scholarship — identified the application of industrial force to war (particularly in WWI) as the beginning of “total war.” As two combatants’ total economies now went to war, the war actually being won through industrial strength, the new theory of war argued that anyone who contributed to such industrial production was a combatant and so legitimately subject to military action. Schmitt illustrates above, though that the origins of such total war lie elsewhere and are centuries older. However, also noteworthy, as will be seen below, for Schmitt the sea-orientation that led to sea-based total war and the industrial revolution were more than merely correlated.

In any event, it’s within that broader context that one should read Schmitt’s comments about the initial contemporary failure to appreciate the possibilities and implications of a sea-inspired transformation in methods of battle.

In the ancient style of sea battle, the oar-hauled ships pushed up against one another and attempted to ram and to board each other. In this way, sea battle is always battle at close quarters. “Like pairs of wrestling men, the ships grapple with each other.” The Romans first boarded enemy ships in the Battle of Mylae, by throwing across boards and in such a way set up a bridge, upon which they could enter the enemy ship. Sea battle thereby became land battle aboard ships.

The Sea Battle of Lepanto was still fought with essentially the same means of naval technology with which the Battle of Actium had been fought a millennium and a half earlier. Elite Spanish foot soldiers, the famed Tercios, attacked the Janissaries, the elite troops of the Ottoman Empire, in a battle at close quarters fought upon the shipboards.

For Schmitt, the key player in realizing the implications and possibilities of sea warfare were the English:

England completed an elementary transformation in a wholly other historical moment and in a manner fully different from any other sea power. It really displaced its existence away from the land and into the element of the sea. It thereby won not only sea battles and wars but also something wholly other and infinitely greater, namely, a revolution, and, indeed, a revolution of the greatest kind, a planetary spatial revolution.

From there Schmitt enters into a lengthy discussion of the cultural, psychological, and institutional effects of such a planetary spatial revolution. We’ll address that though in the next post. For now, let’s jump ahead into a deeper examination of England’s pivotal place within Schmitt’s spatial revolution.

He starts off with an observation that, by the time of his writing, had become something of a platitude, and attempts to further unpack its deeper implications:

England is an island. However, only by first becoming the bearer and center of the elementary turn from the fixed land to the high sea, and only as the heiress of all the maritime energies released at that time, did it transform itself into the island, which is what one means when one ever and again intones that England is an island. And only in first becoming an island in a new, heretofore unknown sense did it complete the British maritime appropriation of the world oceans and complete the first phase of the planetary spatial revolution.

Obviously England is an island. But with the establishment of this geographic fact, not much has yet been said. There are many islands, the political destinies of which are entirely different. Sicily is an island, as are Ireland, Cuba, Madagascar, and Japan. How many contradictory world-historical developments are already bound up with these few names, all of which name islands!

[England] was an island when it was settled by the Celts and when it was conquered for Rome by Julius Caesar; it was an island with the Norman Conquest (1066) and at the time of the Virgin of Orleans (1431), when the English held the greater part of France under occupation.

So, Schmitt would insist, England’s eventual conquest of the open sea is hardly explained by the trite truism that it was an island.

Parenthetically, Schmitt’s line of reasoning up until this point seems strikingly consistent with my own phenotype wars model, insofar as it rejects geographical or technological determinism. Schmitt is saying much the same to his reader, here, as I said to him in an earlier post (see here): why, after all this time being an island, why suddenly in the 16^th century is England all of a sudden “an island,” fixated on the lure of the sea? My explanation of course is that the phenotype wars had shifted the ground of English society to a place at which spatials found themselves empowered in the culture and institutions. That of course is a matter for future elaboration, though.

From here, Schmitt expands upon the changes in geographic and geopolitical orientation of this turn-to-the-sea (or I’d say, following Innis, rising spatial bias):

England became lady of the sea and erected upon its dominion over all the seas a British world empire spread over all parts of the earth. The English world thought in terms of base points and transport lines. That which was soil and home for other peoples appeared to them as mere back country.

The island itself, however, the metropolis of such a world empire erected upon purely maritime existence, thereby became uprooted and deterritorialized.

Disraeli, the leading politician in the time of Queen Victoria, said in relation to India that the British Empire is more an Asiatic than a European power. It was also Disraeli who, in the year 1876, united the title of Queen of England with that of Empress of India.

Schmitt quotes Disraeli from his novel Tancred:

“The Queen should assemble a great fleet and with her whole court and the entire dominant class move out and remove the seat of her empire from London to Delhi. There she shall find a gigantic, finished empire, a first-class army, and great revenues.”

Schmitt assesses that Disraeli:

...knew what he said when he made such suggestions. He felt that the island was no longer a part of Europe. Its destiny was no longer necessarily bound up with that of Europe. It could break away and change its place as metropolis of a maritime world empire. The ship could lift anchor and lay anchor in another part of the earth. The great fish, the Leviathan, could set itself in motion and seek out other oceans.

This for Schmitt was what it entailed to truly shift to being a sea power, away from the earth-roots of a land power. Additionally, he saw a deep relation between the turning of the English imagination to the unbounded horizons, the unconstrained pathways, of the sea with the mindset that gave rise to England’s emergence as the industrial and technological engine of the world

The age of free trade was also the age of the free development of England’s industrial and economic superiority. Free sea and free world market were united in a notion of freedom, the bearer and guardian of which could only be England.

The transformation, however, which touched the essence of the Leviathan, was a direct consequence of the industrial revolution. This had set in with the invention of machines in England in the eighteenth century. The first coal furnace (1735), the first cast-iron steel (1740), the steam engine (1768), the spinning jenny (1770), the mechanical loom (1786), all first in England, are several examples of England’s great industrial advantage over all other peoples. The steamship and the iron rail followed in the nineteenth century. Here, too, England remained in the lead. The great sea power simultaneously became the great machine power.

I think it’s helpful here to turn our attention briefly to a later essay that Schmitt wrote in 1955 responding to Ernst Jünger. This is a fascinating essay in that it can be interpreted, at least, as Schmitt offering criticism of those who may have been overly simplistic in their read of Land and Sea.⁴ In any event, Schmitt adds some depth to the Land and Sea observations, which will be helpful to introduce, here. Before going into the question of the industrial revolution, we see him again reminding us not to confuse the river or inland sea civilizations with the fully fleshed out global sea-orientation of the spatial revolution:

...when East and West confront each other, a simple, elementary difference becomes visible today: the contrast between land and sea. What we call the East today is a contiguous mass of solid land: Russia, China, India, the most enormous island on earth, the heartland of the earth...

...what we call the West today is a hemisphere covered by the world's oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The contrast between a continental and a maritime world is the given global reality from which we must start in order to properly pose the question of the historical structure of the tensions of today's world dualism in the first place.

...despite the heuristic value of such historical parallels from the Thalassian horizon, we must keep in mind the structural difference that separates a mere inland sea culture from the oceanic-global horizon of the present. Today's world dualism and its opposition of land and sea has no historical parallel in its structural core.

With that reaffirmation we can move on to his observations on how mechanization and industrialization factor into this new horizon of the spatial revolution’s launching upon the sea:

Today, mechanization and industrialization are the fate of our planet. So let us look for the unique historical question, the great challenge, and the concrete answer from which the industrial-technical revolution of the last hundreds of years has emerged.

Let us therefore, in accordance with a concrete historical question-answer logic, first ask about the concrete historical challenge and the equally concrete response that historically explains and makes our current industrial-technical epoch recognizable.

So the industrial revolution originated in 18th century England. But what was the unique historical situation of this island in the 18th century? England was the island that had separated itself from the European continent since the end of the 16th century and had taken the step towards a purely maritime existence. That is the historical essence. Everything else is supra-structure. Whichever externally visible event one wants to accept here as the date or cut-off date for the decisive moment of this step towards a maritime existence – the occupation of Jamaica by Cromwell in 1655; or the final displacement of the Stuarts in 1688; or the European Peace of Utrecht in 1713 – is that a European nation no longer regarded the island it inhabited as a detached piece of the European mainland, but as the basis of a purely maritime existence and a dominion over the world's oceans built upon it. England had been involved in the great discoveries and land conquests of the Portuguese, Spanish, French and Dutch since the 16th century. It has outstripped all its European rivals, not by virtue of any moral or physical superiority, but by the fact that it has taken the step from solid land to free sea in all consistency.

...the Portuguese did not create a maritime world view. Even the heroic epic of their time of discovery, the Lusiades of Camoe, speaks of the Indian Ocean in the same way that Virgil's Aeneid speaks of the Mediterranean. The Dutch made a great start and were initially in the lead. But their base was ultimately too weak, their entanglement with the land powers was too strong, and after the Peace [of] Utrecht they ran aground. The French ventured into a two-hundred-year war with the English and ultimately lost.

And here Schmitt puts the cherry on top, providing us a clear expression of the logic he has been grappling toward:

The unconditional belief in progress is a sign that the step towards a maritime existence has been taken. The invention of gunpowder, for example, only led to its utilization as a game of fireworks in the fixed order of [the] Chinese. In the historically, socially and morally seemingly infinite space of maritime existence, it led to the chain reactions of boundless further invention. This is not about the difference between sedentary and nomadic peoples, but about the contrast between land and sea as fundamentally different possibilities of human existence.

How I read these observations of Schmitt is that while certainly the shift from a land to a sea based society was fundamental to the ultimate rise of the British empire and its historic role as the world’s workshop, that telling of the story is insufficient. Insofar as “the island” became “the island,” a maritime power increasingly focused on dominion over the sea, it created the sources of raw material and consumer markets that economically underpinned England’s industrial revolution.

From Schmitt’s perspective, such a characterization may not be strictly wrong, but it is certainly an insufficient explanation. What it is misses is the role of the sea-oriented mind; the mind not subject to the constraints of land life with all its barriers and contours (see here) Only the mind of a sea-orientation, comfortable and inspired by the endless expanse of oceanic horizons, likewise has the imagination of unconstrained possibilities which was able to turn the technical novelties of scientific discovery into the pulsing machine of the industrial revolution. So, yes, England’s shift to being a sea oriented society was essential to its eventual emergence as the industrial workshop of the world. However, for Schmitt, this was not merely a question of economics and transportation, but probably more deeply one of culture and psychology.

And that interpretation, of course, dovetails rather elegantly with my own phenotype wars model of what was unfolding amid this historical period. While I’d of course steer clear of any implication that it was the sea-orientation that gave rise to the new psychology – in contrast to what one might at times suspect of Schmitt – I’d certainly agree that it was a new psychology informing England: spatials increasingly gaining power and influence, laying the cultural foundations for both the launching of the sea empire and the engineering innovation of the industrial revolution.

In this way, I’d argue that the dynamics of land and sea emphasized by Schmitt are structured through the dynamics of the phenotype wars. Sea is made sea, island is made island, through appeal to and occupation by spatials. Fleshing out the details of that of course is a different and more nuanced task that lays ahead for another day. The observations in this post, though, are important in framing a proper understanding of Schmitt’s conception of the spatial revolution. As much as it is material and tactile, for land and sea are very different media for wrestling a livelihood from nature, it too is profoundly cultural and psychological.

For Schmitt, those changes of psychology may be rooted in a deterministic interpretation of the material experience of life within each of the elements, while for me both are in fact the result of a shifting social terrain in response to the dynamics of the phenotype wars. But Schmitt’s observations on the nature and form of those psychological and cultural changes is of some considerable interest. And further unpacking them is where we’ll turn next, in the second installment of this series on Schmitt’s interpretation of the spatial revolution. So, if you want to see that analysis soon as it hits the presses, and haven’t yet, please…

And as ever, if you know of others who’d enjoy joining for this intellectual journey, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. David T. Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990).

2. Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, ed. Russell A. Berman, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2015).

3. A nice, accessible introduction to such a biological realist position is Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). See also my books: Michael McConkey, Darwinian Liberalism (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2018); Michael McConkey, Biological Realism: Foundations and Applications (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2020).

4. See the essay translatable as “The historical structure of today’s world opposition between East and West,” in Carl Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos: Arbeiten Aus Den Jahren 1916-1969, ed. Gunter Maschke, 2nd edition (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot Gmbh, 2021). My translation of this essay is AI generated and though surprisingly good, there are places where words seem to have been lost in translation. In the quotations I correct for such with square brackets. Also, I probably should reiterate here that as intriguing as I find this essay (and indeed many of the essays in this collection), I also think there’s much wrong with it. First, Schmitrt lapses in the kind of evolutionary biology strawmanning which was typical among pre-21st century scholars. For more on this topic see the final parts of my book, McConkey, Biological Realism: Foundations and Applications. Also, he again resorts to the false dichotomy between structuralism and historicism. As I’ve demonstrated in an early post, on this Substack, these positions are perfectly capable of being conceptually melded (see here), as I did in my most recent book: Michael McConkey, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2023).