Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
The year 2026 has begun with a coup: the abduction of Nicolás Maduro by US special forces unfolded along a playbook published only a few weeks earlier in the new National Security Strategy, which declared Latin America a sphere of influence and the highest priority of American foreign policy.
Liberals have a hard time with this. The nagging question about international law is one thing, the optics and rhetoric of the Trumpists the other. The same goes for the National Security Strategy. Its spirit corresponds to the thinking in Großräume that was developed by theorists like Carl Schmitt, Halford Mackinder, and Karl Haushofer in the first decades of the 20th century.
None of this is good news for those who care about limiting and balancing power, as liberals do. The new right finds it easier to read the situation: in response to the events in Venezuela, Maximilian Krah celebrated on X the transition from international law to the Großraum order and, following Schmitt, described Trump as Katechon. Martin Sellner declared that one had to read Schmitt precisely now.
But is it that simple? Is there really so clearly a line between the liberal view marked by separation of powers and an international legal order, and the new right?
Indeed: one answer to the challenges of our time negates this sharp separation. Argentina’s president Javier Milei celebrated Trump’s strike against Venezuela, and in Germany too some liberals voiced similar things. That is the position discussed for some time as „Dark Liberalism”. This way of thinking holds that liberalism has to take leave of some of its cherished convictions if it wants to face a „new time”. Such a „Dark Liberalism” could be justified as follows: since international politics is ruled by power and not by law, freedom too can only be enforced through power, with the consequence that liberal principles have to be broken in at least some situations.
This gives one a liberalism conscious of its own contradictions and so possibly better suited to a complex, contradictory world. The yardstick would then be less the means than the end: not how politics is conducted (by power and breach of law), but for what: to enforce a liberal order against authoritarian ones.
This raises the question what is actually new about our time, and how new the idea of a „Dark Liberalism” really is. A liberal engagement with Carl Schmitt already existed in his own lifetime. Recalling these debates of the Weimar Republic and the liberal underground during the Third Reich makes clear the advantages and disadvantages of a „Dark Liberalism”.
To put it up front: the question is not whether a new liberalism in the form of a „Dark Liberalism” is needed. It already exists, and one can engage with it to understand its advantages and disadvantages. In the process it emerges that liberalism, in its argument with the new right, sells itself short: some of the ideas that some liberals today want to take over from Schmitt, Schmitt himself took from the liberals of his time. Schmitt sat in the audience when, on 28 January 1919 at the Munich School of Economics, Max Weber held his famous lecture „Politik als Beruf”, in which he (as in so many other remarks and essays) described politics as a naked struggle for power. What today some want to claim back from Schmitt, liberals from the circles of the DDP (Weber, Friedrich Naumann, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch) and the DVP (Gerhard Ritter) had completely internalised in the interwar period. Schmitt supplemented these ideas with ideology (Großraum) and so watered them down.
One should not underestimate Schmitt intellectually: there is much in his work that takes one further intellectually (who has put the role of the state of exception in the question of sovereignty as sharply?). With Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, a liberal Schmittian made it onto the bench of the Federal Constitutional Court, probably not to the disadvantage of the Federal Republic (a side note: would Böckenförde’s appointment today have gone differently than that of Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf?).
Ignoring Schmitt’s intellectual status hands the new right a trump card it does not deserve. Schmitt appears fascinating and as a thinker on a level democrats and liberals cannot offer. But if one places Schmitt next to Weber, a quite different impression emerges.
After the lost First World War, German liberals too were in shock. The war and the fate of Germany had darkened their minds. When Weber stepped to the lectern of the Munich School of Economics on 28 January 1919, this was hardly different. At least the republic had just put down the Spartacist uprising (by violence!). The population had, in the elections to the National Assembly shortly after, given the democratic parties SPD, Centre Party, and DDP a wide majority. Weber made clear to his listeners (Schmitt included) what he understood by politics: he quoted Trotsky’s dictum „Jeder Staat wird auf Gewalt gegründet” approvingly at the outset and described violence as the means specific to the state. Politics, said Weber, was the „Streben nach Machtanteil oder nach Beeinflussung der Machtverteilung, sei es zwischen Staaten, sei es innerhalb eines Staates zwischen den Menschengruppen, die er umschließt.” What was clear to Schmitt and to the liberals of this time was, after the Second World War, seen differently by a majority in Germany. Weber’s influence on Schmitt also led to a more skeptical handling of the liberal sociologist: Jürgen Habermas’s 1964 description of Schmitt as Weber’s „legitime[r] Sohn”, uttered at the Soziologentag, was, despite all due respect for the work of the Heidelberg professor, telling of the mood of that time toward power politics.
Friedrich Meinecke saw it in Die Idee der Staatsräson (1924) similarly to Weber. In the book, which sounds more realistic (or more pessimistic?) than his pre-war publications, he argued that international politics cannot be ethicised: he described the League of Nations as a not very promising attempt of this kind. What distinguished Meinecke from conservative and right-wing voices was that he saw this as a flaw. The state, he thought, must sin. To him it mattered above all for what the power of the state was used. And he saw a role for morality and ethics in the assessment of politics from the outside, even if statesmen (as they almost exclusively were back then) often had under the pressure of necessity to set them aside. In the end, Meinecke’s understanding of Staatsräson was that it consists of ethos and power, and that politicians acting on it sometimes better, sometimes worse, build the bridge between them.
Schmitt in turn published a sharp critique of the book in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (co-founded by Weber) and took offence precisely at Meinecke’s bringing together of „Kratos und Ethos” in this way.
It is no coincidence that Machiavelli (who also played a large role with Meinecke) became the figure of fascination for the liberals of this time. René König published in 1941, in Swiss exile, a monograph on the Italian state theorist. A year earlier Gerhard Ritter had finished Machtstaat und Utopie (renamed after the Nazi period as Dämonie der Macht), in which he compared Thomas More, the author of Utopia, with Machiavelli. From Ritter’s shifting sympathy for both it became clear that he, like Meinecke, saw power and ethics in a field of tension and did not, in international politics, with all his consciousness of power, want to side exclusively with one. Like Schmitt he drew a sharp contrast between land and sea. Machiavelli as a thinker of power was the representative of the continental peoples, while the utopian More spoke for the „Meervolk” of England. But unlike Schmitt, Ritter did not elevate continental thinking over that of the English. The liberal impulse was still there, showing itself in the argument that neither extreme accurately describes the reality of international politics. But one could not do without some demonism. About Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, Ritter judged after the war that in him „ein Stück dämonischen Machtwillens und Herrentums steckte”. Without this will to power, „die Widerstandbewegung wirklich in Gefahr [gewesen wäre], in lauter Vorbereitungen und Planungen stecken zu bleiben.”
A realistic view of the world is the advantage of this liberalism that has clarified its relation to power and violence. That Germany, because of its geographical middle position, was in a particular security-political situation was clear to the liberals of the interwar period. But did they draw the right political conclusions from it? Not least the skeptical assessment of the League of Nations by interwar liberals often seems questionable. While the theologian Ernst Troeltsch, often cited by Schmitt (and who sat for the DDP in the Prussian Landesversammlung), saw the League in Geneva as a haven of French influence and so an instrument of French striving for hegemony on the European continent, the institution was judged differently by French liberals. In his 1941 history of the interwar period, whose second volume bore the apt title La décomposition de l’Europe libérale, the later co-founder of the Mont Pèlerin Society Bertrand de Jouvenel described the League and the Cartel des gauches that ruled in France from 1924 as an obstacle to conducting an assertive foreign policy unafraid of imposing French dominance in Europe. The constant striving of the liberal to clear his own mind of the clouding by national (and other) prejudices was, in this case, not kept up by at least one of them (probably both).
For all its advantages, realism also remains a danger for liberals. It can lead to a false assessment of the situation, tip into cynicism, and, as happened between the wars, push the moral desensitisation of society further. One of the hardest questions for liberals in dark times is how, in all striving for militant defence and the imposition of freedom against its enemies, not to betray oneself. Anyone who trivialises this dilemma has not understood politics.
For despite all this, it is striking: those liberals who themselves lived through two world wars and were fully aware of the tension between ethics and power did not, in all their affirmation of power, entirely discard law and morality. More than that: that they tended to hold these for ever more important with each year that passed between 1919 and 1945 should give us pause. That also applies to Ritter, who in a letter to the DVP chairman Eduard Dingeldey on 5 February 1933 counted himself among the „rechte[r] Flügel der Liberalen” and, despite the events of those days, protested that it was an „Irrtum […] zu glauben, daß die liberale Idee ‘tot’ sei”.
But what does that mean for us today? The ideas of the interwar period are back. The suspicion arises, however, that today we are again dealing with ideology dressed up as Realpolitik (although Realpolitik, after all, claims to overcome ideology). The idea of the Großraum order is not realism, at least no liberal one: a liberal world (including free trade and assistance in the case of external attacks) presupposes a power politics that crosses the boundaries of spaces. Hermetically sealed spaces in which no contradiction of the hegemon is possible lead to authoritarianism.
Even for non-liberals, however, the thinking in Großräume carries the danger of ending up on ideological tracks that have little to do with reality. The National Socialists too foundered on this: their thinking of „Lebensraum im Osten” resembled the thinking of Haushofer and Schmitt. In Weimar times, what fascinated National Socialist thinking in this respect were in particular the Soviet Union and Turkey, which as the only powers had defended themselves against the postwar order of the Paris suburban treaties and the Allied intervention against the Soviets. Both states had moved their capitals from the sea inland (from Petrograd to Moscow and from Constantinople to Ankara) in order to defend themselves against interventions by „Seemächten”. The Turkish national movement had, from Ankara, fought against the Treaty of Sèvres and in 1923 negotiated better conditions in Lausanne. For the Nazis a model in the struggle against Versailles.
Even during the Second World War, Hitler associated the „Seemächte” Britain and the United States with liberalism and democracy. Repeatedly during the Second World War he made clear his low estimation of the navy and its supposedly lacking will to fight, as after the loss of the Admiral Graf Spee in December 1939 or with Admiral Erich Raeder’s retirement on 30 January 1943 after his time as commander-in-chief of the navy. The sea was no priority in his strategic thinking, as already became clear in Mein Kampf. But in the end the Third Reich bled out economically and in terms of resources because of Allied control of the seas, and lost the war partly for this reason too. Großraum-thinking, like historical materialism, fails in its monocausality. Geography matters, but not necessarily in the way the Großraum ideology postulates.
Today the representatives of the Großraum order argue that it preserves peace by excluding interventions by „raumfremden Mächten”. That is a misunderstanding: the Großraum order is itself deeply disruptive. Since it does not exist, force has to be used for its realisation. No matter whether hundreds of thousands of people die in the process (Ukraine) or military coups have to be carried out (Venezuela) whose consequences for regional security and stability are hard to foresee.
The ideology of Großräume must not be confused with the idea of an international balance of power, found for example in Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored (1957) on the order created by the Congress of Vienna. There too it is about pacification through internationally agreed order by great powers (and the marking out of spheres of influence). The decisive difference between this idea (which includes a negative view of disruption in both foreign and domestic politics) and the right-wing idea of the Großraum order is its, in the very sense of the word, conservative character. It is about a balance of power in the sense of securing peace, not about creating a new order through violence. That also has its drawbacks, but it is vastly superior to the ideology of the new right.
International law and the United Nations (think of the UN Security Council) too know this idea of the balance of power. To dismiss international law and today’s existing order as left-wing (as is widely done in the debate after Venezuela) misses the mark. The important role of sovereignty in international law is, above all, one thing: a conservative idea.
Disruption is no virtue in international politics. But this does not mean having to capitulate before the enemies of freedom. The order of the Congress of Vienna too could only be built after Napoleon was defeated.
Learning to handle power in international politics therefore does not mean, for liberals, taking over the ideas of the new right. A Realpolitik liberalism needs a dash of conservatism that knows exactly why international law matters to it and nonetheless, or precisely for that reason, keeps an eye on the role of power in international politics. Such a liberalism has to be aware of the demonism of power and grasp it as a means of defending freedom without losing consciousness of its danger. Liberals too need a will to power, as long as they do not forget that they use it to defend freedom, law, democracy, and human dignity. The decisive question remains: who is friend and who is foe of freedom, and thus comes into question as an ally? A „Dark Liberalism” that, in the style of Musk and Milei, seeks shoulder-to-shoulder with the new right is, precisely for this reason, the wrong answer.
