The planetary tension between East and West and the opposition between Land and Sea (Carl Schmitt)

Revista de Estudios Políticos Issue 81, May/June 1955

I

In the tension between East and West, which is of such concern to us today, conflicts of various kinds are clearly intertwined: economic interests, sociological differences between elites, and spiritual hostilities. All these conflicts are mutually reinforcing. But this combination of economic, sociological and spiritual tensions has manifested itself in all the great wars of mankind. The special feature of the present conflict is that the tension has become global and involves the entire planet. This makes it all the more necessary to understand the true historical structure of this tension.

We are talking about a conflict between the East and the West. It is clear that we are not referring here to the geographical opposition as such. We shall deal later in the course of our controversy with the difference between a polar tension and a dialectical-historical tension. But the conflict between East and West is not a conflict of poles. The Earth has a North Pole and a South Pole but not an East Pole and a West Pole. For our globe, the geographical opposition East-West is fluid and indeterminate; it is only “the opposing flow of a bit of night and light”¹. In geographical relation to America, China and Russia are the West. In relation to China and Russia, Europe is in turn the West. From a purely geographical point of view, there is not even a polar tension here, let alone a reasonable explanation of a global hostility or the possibility of an understanding of its special structure.

One can undertake a historical, cultural, and moral inventory of today's East and today's West and thus arrive at a series of antitheses that are undoubtedly of great importance. I would here apply a concept introduced by the geographer Jean Cottmann in his brilliant work La politique des États et leur Géographie², that of “iconographie régionale.” The different images and representations of the world that come from the different traditions of the historical past and social organizations make up their own spaces. In this sense, the iconography of a given area includes, first and foremost of course, images and works of art, but also all visible forms of public and private life. Luis Díez del Corral has pointed out the essential importance of art in this respect in his book El rapto de Europa, a book that can be described as an encyclopaedia of European iconography³.

The different concepts of form, especially the forms of domination and the forms of state, have been clarified by Carlos Ollero⁴.

Apart from the various forms of public life, we can also include all the other typical forms in which human existence manifests itself in a “regional iconography;” all the abbreviations and signs of feeling and thinking as they prevail in particular areas and are characteristic of them. Images of historical memories, myths, sagas and legends are also part of this iconography, as well as all symbols and taboos which are topographically localized in a given area and which therefore acquire their historical reality. The same applies to all technomorphic or sociomorphic translations⁵. Gottmann speaks of a circulation of iconographies. Thus, alongside Pareto's famous circulation of elites, there is a no less important circulation of iconographies.

The word iconography seems to me to be more comprehensive and, by today's standards, more appropriate than the already widely used term ideology. The word and the concept of iconography are particularly useful and fruitful for our purposes, because it is necessary to determine the core of the opposition between East and West by understanding the East as hostile to the plastic arts, and the West, on the other hand, as a bastion of the cult of the plastic arts. When talking about iconoclasm, the educated European remembers, first of all, events in the history of Byzantium; the dispute over images under Emperor Leo (717-741) and the opposing recognition of the cult of images under Charlemagne. But we also remember the prohibition of images in the Old Testament and in Islam. Some researchers have gone so far as to recognize here a primitive conflict between word and image, which they reduced to the general conflict between hearing and sight, between the acoustic and the visual, attributing word and hearing to the East, and image and sight to the West.

A word like iconography, used in the broad sense we have mentioned, is appropriate for us so as to maintain a distance from such simplifications. There is no concrete historical localization without some kind of visibility. That is why everywhere there are icons and iconography and therefore everywhere there is also the possibility of iconoclasm. This is by no means limited to Byzantium or Islam. The West also knows various and very intense kinds and forms of aversion to images, of iconoclasm. Wycliffes and Hussites, Baptist and Puritan sectarians, religious reformers and rationalist simplifiers have behaved iconoclastically in the West. The great world political struggle which broke out at the time of the discoveries and the conquest of the New World, the first global controversy in world history, is commonly explained as a dispute of confessional dogmas, a struggle between Roman Catholicism and Nordic Protestantism, between Jesuitism and Calvinism.

The iconographic aspect leads us to deeper historical visions that we would like to point out briefly, with just a few words. That the Reconquest of Spain was a conquest for the cult of the images of the Virgin is not difficult to understand. But my remark that the conquest of the discoverers and conquerors of the New World carried with them, in the image of the Immaculate Virgin and Mother of God Mary, the sacred Image of their historical deeds⁶ does not seem to have been understood. At any rate, a German Catholic author has not hesitated to speak to me in this connection of “all sorts of Christian embellishments,” “which might mislead many readers”⁷. For me the image of Mary is not any kind of Christian ornament, and the above explanations concerning the word and the concept of iconography will perhaps help to better understand my statement about the historical importance of the image of Mary. I would also venture to assert that the confessional civil wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, including the Thirty Years' War of Intervention on German soil in 1618-1648, were in reality struggles for or against the image of Mary. Is the hostility to images of the English Puritans to be regarded as particularly oriental in comparison with the image worship of the Catholic Bavarians, the Spanish or the Poles?

The image dispute in Byzantium was directed in its theological first term at the Christian dogma of the Trinity, in its spiritual reality at the profound iconographic difference between the unfolded unity and the divine triplicity. Nor can it be said that the dogma of the Trinity was an essentially Western question and abstract monotheism an essentially Eastern question. Certainly it may have seemed so at certain historical moments. The Frankish monks imposed on the Western Christian creed the formula according to which the Spirit proceeds not only from the Father but also from the Son, and the resistance of the Greek patriarchs in Constantinople against this filioque led to the great schism between the Eastern and the Western Church. The immediate consequence is to have the filioque as a cause of the West against the East. But the fathers of the Syriac Church, on the other hand, advocated the doctrine of the Trinity and the Virgin Birth (criteria which do not fit in with this imputation), and on the other hand it was precisely the Germanic Arian peoples who absolutely denied the divinity of Christ.

Thus, this criterion taken from the doctrine of the Trinity, in so many ways surprising, also corresponds to an iconographic differentiation between East and West. It is undeniable that industrial technification leads to serious alterations in traditional iconography. Modern psychoanalysis can also be seen as an iconoclastic irruption. We all have to thank the master of psychosomatic science Juan José López Ibor for having continued his magnificent research on the subject of psychoanalysis from the point of view of the iconography we are using here⁸. Finally, modern painting — whether it is truly abstract or still shows traces of objectivity — also involves the destruction of an old world of images together with the search for a new creation. The three irruptions — industrial technology, psychoanalysis, and modern painting — are clearly connected. It would be a sensational topic to investigate this connection with regard to the current global dualism between East and West. But it does not seem to me possible to differentiate abstractly between images and aversion to images in such a way that one part is regionally attributed to the East and the other to the West. We must therefore start from another criterion in order to understand the structural core of this conflict.

II

Apart from the many peculiarities that appear in great abundance when a confrontation is made between East and West in the current of world history, a simple and elementary difference becomes visible today: the conflict between land and sea. That which today we call the East is a coherent mass of firm countries: Russia, China, India, the most powerful islands of the Earth, the Heartland of the Earth, as the great English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder has called them. And what we now call the West is a hemisphere covered by the great oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific. The opposition between a continental world and a maritime world is the global reality that we are given, and from which we must start in order to be able to pose the question about the structure of tensions of the current world dualism. Readers of the Revista de Estudios Políticos are familiar with this reduction of the East-West tension to the opposition between land and sea. A world-renowned Spanish iusinternationalist, Camilo Barcia Trelles, has supported it in numerous papers and in two extensive works⁹. One can also invoke a famous English geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder¹⁰. In Germany I have spoken on the subject in several publications¹¹.

A young German iusinternationalist, Serge Maiwald, who died early in 1952, made a magnificent attempt to study the opposition between the orders of life of the State and society¹². My critical restriction of both Mackinder's purely maritime image of the world and Serge Maiwald's optimistic interpretation will be deduced from what follows.

On the summits of universal history, the disputes of the fighting powers manifest themselves with a war of the elements land and sea. This was already seen by the historians of the wars between Sparta and Athens or between Rome and Carthage. However, they only had before their eyes the “thalassic” world of the Mediterranean and not the vast, essentially different world of the great oceans and of global controversy. But it is necessary to differentiate the “thalassic” horizon from the Mediterranean. Naturally, historical parallels can be found everywhere. Thus, in the year 1952, a statement taken from the “First Philippic” of Demosthenes (38.41) was often quoted. Nor could I identify myself with Plato's malicious warning that, as was known, his countrymen, the Greeks, were settled like frogs on the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet there is an essential difference between existence on a mere coast or inland sea and an oceanic maritime existence. The present world dualism and its opposition between land and sea has no structural parallel in history. Only after man has acquainted itself with the entire globe did his planet reach the universal historical tension, the dimension that is the determinant of our present time.

A global dimension of the struggle between land and sea appears for the first time in England's wars with revolutionary France and Napoleon. Certainly, the division between land and sea, between East and West, was not as clear-cut then as it is today. Napoleon was not finally defeated by England but by the territorial powers, Russia, Austria and Prussia. The Nomos of the Earth still existed in a balance between land and sea; the sea could not force any decision for itself. In the year 1812, when the dispute reached its peak, the United States had not declared war on Napoleon, but on England. A rapprochement between America and Russia was then advocated, by which both powers could hope to distance themselves from both Napoleon and England. France and England then appeared as “the two raging beasts of land and sea”¹³. The opposition between land and sea, between East and West had not yet crystallized into the clear opposition of the elements that was revealed in the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949.

In any case, the global horizon already existed in Napoleon's time, and it brought about the awareness of a world situation, determined by the opposition of the elements, in which a choice had to be made between land and sea. In July 1812, while Napoleon was advancing on Moscow, Goethe sent a panegyric poem to Empress Marie-Louise, which actually was a hymn to her husband, the Emperor of the French.

What was confused by thousands is solved by one (Napoleon).
That on which the centuries meditated obscurely.

In the global aspect of land and sea continues the poet:

He (Napoleon) encompasses it in the diaphanous light of the spirit.
All that is insignificant has been poured out.
Only sea and land have weight here

Goethe was on Napoleon's side. It was for him as much as to be on the side of the territory, of the Earth. But Napoleon was also the West. So the West was still the Earth and by no means the sea. The German poet hoped that the West would remain land and that Napoleon, like a new Alexander, would be gaining coast from the sea; and then would emerge:

“The mainland with all its rights.”

Thus Goethe, a typical representative of the West, opted in the summer of 1812 for the land and against the sea. In keeping with his spiritual position, of course, he regarded the opposition of land and sea as a polarity, not as the dialectical tension of an unrepeatable historical process. The difference between a polar tension and a historical dialectical tension is decisive for us.

III

Goethe thought in polarities. Polar tension is different from historical dialectical tension. A polar tension encloses a simultaneity in which polar oppositions remain always the same in structure and are endlessly repeated in ever new and ever equal forms. This is a kind of eternal return. Historical speculation, on the other hand, seeks a series of concrete questions and concrete answers. Questions and answers result in the dialectic of the historical concrete and determine the structure of historical situations and epochs. Such a historical dialectic need not be a Hegelian logic of concepts and can be understood as a general legislation of the nature of the temporal course.

What matters here is the knowledge of the structure of world, present-day dualism and not a general theory of history. Historical thought is a mode of thinking of unique situations, and therefore of unique truths. All historical parallels do not reasonably serve either but the clearest understanding of that particular unique character; otherwise they irremediably become principles of general laws of a functional course which do not exist in history. Hence also the absurdity of those unreal conditionals with the help of which some dare to ask what would have happened if this or that event had happened differently, as, for example, if the Saracens had won at Tours and Poitiers or if Napoleon had not lost the battle of Waterloo or if the winter of 1941-42 had not been terribly cold; such absurdities, which are found even in the most celebrated historians, are absurd for this reason alone, because they forget the unique and irrevocable character of the historical event. The truth of polar oppositions is eternally true, eternal in the sense of an eternal return. A historical truth, on the other hand, is only true once, and how many times would it have to be true, if it cannot be eternally true because this would be contradictory to its historicity? The uniqueness of all historical truth is the primordial arcane of ontology as Walter Warnach has called it¹⁴. The dialectical structure of question and concrete answer, of which we speak here for the clarification of the historical, must not weaken or annul the uniqueness, but only increase it, because a historical situation is only conceived when we have conceived it as a unique, concrete answer to the call of an equally unique and concrete situation.

If land and sea in the present world dualism were only a polar difference established on equilibrium and eternal return, it would be no more than a piece of nature. The elements in the sense of mere nature separate and unite again, mix and unmix. They shift and transform themselves in an incessant circular movement of metamorphosis that always proposes new forms and manifestations to a polar tension that is basically always the same. The current opposition between East and West would thus be the manifestation of an eternal circulation of elites, problems and iconographies. The spectacle of the eternal change, of the eternal return does not know any specific truth of the unique situation and of the historical hour. It lacks the polar opposition of hysterical unrepeatability. In universal history, in certain epochs there appear peoples and groups capable of action and history, who, in periods of friendship or enmity, take the earth and divide it and feed and trade in the part that corresponds to them. From this arises the Nomos of the earth. It will be deprived of its own here and now when the elements land and sea, of which we speak, signify only a piece of nature and a natural tension.

As of nature, neither these elements themselves nor their corresponding living beings are capable of any tension in the sense of historical enmity. The living beings of the land are not natural enemies of the inhabitants of the sea or vice versa. It happens that land animals feed on fish and a fish devours a land animal, but it would be childish to speak of enmity here. The fish devour each other, especially, as is well known, the big ones devour the small ones, and the land animals do the same to each other. Nor can it really be said that there is a natural hostility between land and sea. Rather, it could be said that land and sea are strangers to each other and even that they have no relationship with each other, to the point that the very thought of such a relationship or of a possible enmity would be absurd. It naturally happens that each living being remains in its element, that is to say, in its environment. The bear will not go to war with the whale and the whale will not seek war with the bear. Even prey animals belonging to the same element know how to distinguish their natural limits and their hunting grounds. The bear does not seek the lion or the tiger in its den; even these great hunters of the animal kingdom know their jurisdiction and avoid superfluous encounters. Whoever sees the relationship between dog and cat as an example of a natural enmity has already declared that the enmity between animals is different from the enmity between men. When the dog barks at the cat or the cat snorts at the dog, these animals do not do like men who are capable of denying their enemy the quality of man. The dog does not question the nature of the cat, neither spiritually nor morally, nor does the cat question the nature of the dog.

On the other hand, it is true that animal fables illustrate and clarify political situations and political relations between people in a specific way. But the problem of animal fables is an interesting subject in itself. By transferring them to the animal level, political situations and modes of behavior are revealed, which are thus stripped of their ideological veil, precisely because the behavior of animals is fundamentally differentiated from that of humans. A particularly effective artistic device can be to uncover the behavior of humans by masking it, by making a human speak like an animal and an animal like a human. Masking in animal terms is strange, but this strange method makes the conduct of men all the more obvious. Herein lies the political meaning of the animal fables, which we shall not go into here at any length.

Transposed to mankind, the clear separation between land and sea should lead to maritime wars taking place only between maritime peoples, and terrestrial wars only between terrestrial peoples. But, curiously enough, when universal-historical tensions have reached a certain degree of intensity, the opposite happens. Not animals but rather men, and only men, wage land and sea wars against each other. Always, when the enmity between great powers has reached a high point, warfare develops in both domains equally, and the war becomes a land and sea war on both sides.

Each power is forced to follow the adversary into the other element. If air is added as a third dimension, war on both sides will also become air war. That is why it seems sensible to me to continue to speak here of the elements of land and sea when a great world-historical conflict is approaching its peak and all material, mental and spiritual forces are brought to bear on both sides to an extreme degree. The struggle then spreads to the whole area of the participating powers. And the elementary conflict of land and sea is also included in the debate. The war then appears as a war of land against the sea and vice versa. In other words: as a war of the elements against each other.

The enmity between people implies, in comparison with the relationship between animals, a tension that goes far beyond the natural. The transcendent, be it transcendent or transcendental, always beats between people. One can call this supplement or plus “spiritual” and, if one wishes, illustrate it with Rimbaud's phrase: “Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d'hommes” [the spiritual battle is as brutal as the battle of men]. In any case, the enmity between men is capable of special degrees and increases. It reaches its boiling point in civil wars with the prescription of moral and ideological legal principles, i.e. with the accusation of criminality and the position “hors la loi” [outlaw] of the adversary. Here it is not nature, but something specifically human that transcends its natural character that provokes the tension and enmity and increases the natural polarity by turning it into a concrete historical dialectic. The word “dialectic” expresses here a specific difference from all polar oppositions. The word “dialectic” expresses the question and answer structure of all historical situations and events. A historical situation is incomprehensible as long as it is not understood as a call made by men and at the same time as a response of men to this call. Every historical action of a human being is the answer to a question posed by History. Every human word is an answer, every answer receives its meaning from the question it answers and is meaningless to anyone who does not know the question. The meaning of the question in turn lies in the concrete situation in which it is posed.

All this is reminiscent of R. G. Collingwood's “Question-Answer-Logic” and has a lot to do with it. Collingwood sought with the help of this mental question-answer scheme to find the specifically historical. He formulated it rigorously, because this was for him the way he had to go in order to overcome his origin in the a-historicism of naturalistic positivism¹⁵. The principle was excellent, but the English philosopher was too much within the 19th century concept of science to be able to go beyond a psychological-individualistic interpretation of the question-answer problem. Otherwise, the morbid attacks of tendentious anti-Germanism with which his latest work, The New Leviathan, has been affronted would be inexplicable. But the great merit of his Question-Answer-Logic remains undisputed. It is only a matter of seeing that it is not that a single man or a sum of isolated men poses a question, still less that any ex post historian approaches the past with any questions, but that history itself consists of concrete questions and answers. The same question is a historical event from which other historical events develop through the concrete answer of men. When men perceive the question and the call of history and try to answer it by their conduct and deeds, they venture into the great test of historical capacity and are marked by a tribunal. In a word: they pass from the state of nature to the state of historicity.

Arnold Toynbee has elevated the Question-Answer-Logic to a Challenge-Response structure of cultural history. The question becomes a challenge, the answer becomes a response. This is at the same time an important increase of the historical sense and allows us to recognize a dialectical and no longer only polar tension which leaves behind all psychological-individualistic a-historicity of naturalistic thinking. This is the origin of Toynbee's higher cultures or civilizations, more than twenty in number, in which the question must always be asked about the concrete historical challenge, about the call to history, about the equally concrete human response or reply. In the case of Egyptian culture, for example, the position of the Nile valley, with its dependence on the river and the permanent threat of external enemies, signifies the challenge. The regulation and organization of the Nile valley, its defense against foreign, barbarian invasions, and the Egyptian civilization that arose from it, with its divine cult, its dynasties, its pyramids and its art, is the concrete response to that challenge.

What is gained by this mode of consideration is extraordinary, because it affects the dialectical structure of every historical situation. But even Toynbee has not escaped a typical danger that immediately threatens his specifically historical way of thinking. By setting in motion, one after the other, his more than twenty superior cultures or civilizations, he erases the nuclear uniqueness of all that is historical, and with it the very structure of the historical. We do not care about general laws of universal history. This would be nothing more than submission to the laws or statistical probabilities of a functional current. What matters to us is the unique and concrete situation, i.e. our own present epoch in which a global world dualism between East and West has arisen. If we ask here for a dialectical tension, it is not that we are looking for a general law or a statistical probability, still less for the general logic of a dialectic of concepts in a systematic sense.

It is necessary to insist on this again. Whoever speaks of dialectics today runs the risk of being summarily and automatically classified and branded as a Hegelian. Hegel's dialectic of history has a good chance of attaining the true uniqueness of historical events. This can already be inferred from his assertion that the incarnation of the Son of God is the pivot of world history. It can also be deduced from this that for him historical knowledge is not a pure judgement, but also progress. But in the great systematics the uniqueness is easily lost again, and historical events are transformed into a purely rational process. In our exposition, it is enough to recall this danger of a word so that our use of the word “dialectics” does not immediately fall under that kind of automatism which results in considering a technified epoch as a scientific way of thinking.

Even more than against the Hegelian misunderstanding of a general dialectic of concepts, we must guard against the legalistic illusion of the 19th century into which the greatest present-day Western sociologists and historians, with the exception of Alexis de Tocqueville, have fallen.

The need to make of every concrete historical examination a general law of the historical current has enveloped even the best and most accurate knowledge of the 19th century in a dense fog of generalizations. The swelling of concrete historical knowledge into a general law of humanity was the tribute of a century guilty of naturalistic positivism. One was incapable of understanding and asserting a truth if it was not understood as a general functional course, foreseeable and in a certain way calculable. Thus Auguste Comte, a brilliantly intuitive historian of his own times, grasped his own epoch and saw in it three degrees of development: from theology, through metaphysics, to scientific positivism. This was a remarkably accurate observation that concerned the single step, verified in three moments, that European thought took from the 13th to the 19th century. But the positivist and scientist Auguste Comte would not have believed in his historical thought, in itself correct, if he had not transported it to an absolute plane by converting it into the general law of the three stages of humanity as a whole. The partly accurate diagnoses of the situation in Central and Western Europe in the second stage of the Industrial Revolution towards the middle of the 19th century were elevated by Karl Marx to a general, universal historical concentration and centralization, converted into the last, elementary class struggle of humanity, when in reality it was only a concrete and determined phase of the technical-industrial revolution, in relation to the railroads, the telegraph and the steam engine. Still in the twentieth century Oswald Spengler with his general doctrine of the cultural cycles of all human history has neutralized — and thus killed the very historical nerve — a correct conception, which is expressed in the great historical parallel that exists between our present, on the one hand, and the epoch of civil wars and Caesarism, on the other hand.

IV

Technification and industrialization are today the destiny of our earth. Let us therefore look for the unique historical question, the great challenge and the concrete answer from which the technical revolution of the last few centuries has arisen. Let us renounce the easy possibilities provided by the procedure of unreal conditionals. The dialectical tension, which we oppose to the polar one, must not lead us to Hegelian, natural-scientific or in any way normativist generalities. Nor should Toynbee's formula of “Challenge” and “Response” serve us as anything other than a handle to understand the question of the unique and present reality of the present world dualism between East and West.

Here we immediately come across a work by Arnold Toynbee from 1953 with a provocative title: The World and the West¹⁶. The work has given rise to violent criticism and a polemic against its author, in which we do not take part because what interests us is our subject, the opposition between land and sea. Toynbee speaks of our present age and gives a concrete diagnosis. He consciously and deliberately speaks of “the West” and contrasts it with the rest of the world. For him, the West is the aggressor, whose industrial technology has caught the East unaware in four and a half centuries of four encounters: with Russia, Islam, India, and East Asia. What is essential for Toynbee is that the West has undertaken its aggressions with the help of a technique detached from the Christian religion. By taking possession of this technology today, the East, according to Toynbee, is defending itself against secular aggression. In the 15th century, on the other hand, the Jesuits tried to preach the Christian religion to the Indians and Chinese, not as a religion of the West, but as a universal religion that affects all people in the same way. According to Toynbee the attempt failed because unfortunately there was a dogmatic dispute between the Catholic missionary orders which caused the Jesuits' grandiose mission to fail. The present communist revolution in the East, however, consists, according to Toynbee, in its appropriation of a European technique stripped of the Christian religion. Toynbee calls this technique a “splinter detached from our culture around the end of the 17th century.” This is an important and decisive formulation that we want to underline.

Let us now ask ourselves, in accordance with a logical question, first of all about the concrete historical “Challenge” and the concrete “Response” which our present technical-industrial epoch explains and enables us to recognize historically. Where does the industrial revolution come from, what does it respond to, what is its origin and its homeland, its beginning and its impetus? It comes from the island of England and precisely from England in the 18th century. The many dates, often quoted and generally known — first coal furnace, 1735, steel foundry, 1740, steam engine, 1768, first modern Nottingham factory, 1769, spinning machine, 1770, power loom, 1786, steam locomotive, 1825 — need not be repeated. The great revolution came from the island of England, which in the course of the 19th century was the first industrial country on earth. The historical phenomenon that we must not lose sight of was pointed out by the first German sociologist Lorenz von Stein as early as 1842 in the following sentences:

“Thus were born suddenly in England and, it is curious, at the same time as the ideas of freedom and equality were occupying France, the first machines. With them, for the life of goods throughout the world, for production, consumption and traffic, an entirely new epoch began. They are the true revolutionary force in this material world, and from this world, which they dominate, they reach deeply into all parts of the spiritual world”.

Suddenly and precisely in England! One can perceive the astonishment of the young German to whom the awareness of his historical situation opens up, filled with knowledge, and who learns in the Paris of the reign of Louis Philippe's bourgeoisie, that the political revolution which has been taking place on the European continent since 1789 is only an ideological epiphenomenon compared with the industrial revolution which comes from the island of England and which is the true revolutionary force. This is how he wrote those remarkable sentences we have just quoted, and precisely in a chapter entitled “The Proletariat.” This was the first scientifically conscious introduction into the European discussion of the problem of the separation of the forces of labour and property.

The industrial revolution also came from 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 at the end of the 16th century and had taken the step towards a purely maritime existence. This is what is historically essential. The rest is supra-structure. Whatever external visible event is taken as the date or ephemeris for the decisive moment of that passage to a maritime existence — the occupation of Jamaica by Cromwell, 1655; or the final expulsion of the Stuarts, 1688; or the European peace of Utrecht, 1713 — the essential thing is that a European people should regard the island it inhabits no longer, as it had hitherto done, as a piece torn from the European continent, but as the basis of a purely maritime existence and of an oceanic dominion erected on it. England had, since the 16th century, been involved in the great discoveries and conquests of the Portuguese, Spanish, French and Dutch. In this it surpassed all its European rivals, not by virtue of any higher moral or physical quality, but solely and exclusively because it made the transition from the land to the free sea with all its consequences, and placed alongside the great territorial conquest, a great maritime conquest.

This was a unique and unrepeatable response to the equally unique and unrepeatable historical challenge, to the great call of the age of European discovery. For the first time in the history of mankind as we know it, there was a challenge that did not concern these or those rivers, coasts, or inland seas. For the first time it was the global challenge. Most European peoples understood this call on the land side. The Spaniards founded a great overseas empire; but they nevertheless remained essentially tied to the land and exhausted themselves in the great territorial conquest. The Russians burst in from Moscow and conquered a gigantic territory: Siberia. The Portuguese, despite their astonishing navigations, did not achieve a purely maritime existence. The epic of their age of discovery, Os Lusíadas by Camões, speaks of the Indian Ocean in the same fundamental way as Virgil's Aeneid spoke of the Mediterranean. The Dutch had a great oceanic attempt and led the way at first, but their base proved too weak in the end, their entanglement in the politics of the territorial powers was too strong, and after the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 they became territorial. The French ventured a two-hundred-year war with the English and lost it in the end. England was “the least hampered by the continent” and made the consequent transition to maritime existence. This created the precondition for the Industrial Revolution.

A European island separated itself from the traditional, purely terrestrial world picture and consequently began to view the world from the free sea. The continent, the natural habitable space of mankind, became a mere coastline with hinterland, “backland.” Even in the 15th century, in the time of the Maid of Orleans, the English knights in France had obtained great booty, as had the knights of other lands. Until the 16th century the English were a sheep-breeding people who sold their wool in Flanders, where cloth was made. And this people became a people of passionate seafarers and founded an oceanic — no longer “thalassic” — empire. The island ceased to be a detached piece of the continent and became a ship anchored in front of it. In place of the old, purely terrestrial Nomos of the Earth, a new Nomos appears, which includes the oceans in its order, but differentiates the world of the free sea from that of the mainland and counterbalances the two in order to control, with the help of this balance, the continent from the sea.

What broke away towards the end of the 17th century is not, as Arnold Toynbee thinks, a “technical shard,” but something else: a European island broke away from the European continent and a new maritime world, whose support was that island, was placed in front of the continental world. It formed a counterweight to the terrestrial world and held the balance of the earth in its hands and thus the peace of the world in its balance. Such was the result of a concrete response to the call of the opening oceans. On this island of England, which had followed the call and had made the transition to maritime existence, the first machines suddenly appeared.

V

The boat is the core of a people's maritime existence as the house is the core of their terrestrial existence. Ship and house are not antitheses in the sense of a polar tension, but different answers to a different call of history. Both are built with technical means, but unlike the house, the boat is itself a technical vehicle and applied to a necessary human mastery of nature. For the sea is nature in a different sense than the continent. It is stranger and more hostile. When land and sea were separated according to the biblical creation story, man was assigned the land as a habitable space. The sea was left as something dangerous and evil. We refer here to the commentary on the first chapter of Genesis in Karl Barth's Dogmatics, Volume 3, I, and content ourselves with the fact that the ancient religious fear of the sea needed a special impulse to be overcome. The technical impulse that overcame this fear was different from any other technical impulse. The man who risked the sea – the word pirate designates the one who takes this risk upon himself — had, as the poet says:

“a breast enclosed by triple brass”

“aes triplex circa pectus”. The retreat from the barrier of nature that man achieves through his work in culture and civilisation is therefore very different, depending on whether it is carried out on the ship and through the ship or as grazing and cultivation on dry land.

The nucleus and centre of earthly existence with all its concrete orders: house and property, marriage, family and inheritance, is the house. All these concrete orders are born and grow on the ground and within the framework of an earthly existence, especially agriculture. The fundamental institution of law, property — dominium — is named after the house, domus. This is self-evident. But it is also not well known among jurists that the German word “Bauer” (farmer) does not come immediately from the activity of farmers, but from Bau, Gebau (from building); it designates, therefore, first of all, the man who has a house. At the core of terrestrial existence is therefore the house. At the core of maritime existence, on the other hand, is the ship. The house is rest, the ship is movement. The space in which the boat moves is a different space from the region in which the house is. The boat consequently has a different environment and a different horizon¹⁷. On the boat, people have a different kind of social relationship with each other and with the outside world. They have, above all, a different relationship to nature, and especially to animals. The land man breaks and tames animals, elephants, camels, horses, dogs, cats, oxen, asses, and makes them domestic animals. Fish, on the other hand, do not become domesticated. They cannot become domestic animals, they are fished and eaten because the house is alien to the sea.

We recall here these simple cultural-historical examples to remind us of the profound difference between terrestrial and maritime existence. We are looking for an answer to the question of why the Industrial Revolution, with its unleashed technology, is subordinated to a maritime existence. A terrestrial arrangement, at the centre of which is the house, necessarily has a fundamentally different relationship to technology than a kind of existence at the centre of which is a ship. The absolutization of technique and technical progress, the equating of technical progress with progress in general, everything that is meant to be understood under the slogan “unleashed technique” develops only on the assumption of the nourishing soil and in the climate of a maritime existence. The island of England, by following the call of the opening oceans and by making the transition to a maritime existence, gave a magnificent historical response to the historical call of the Age of Discovery. In doing so, he created both the prerequisites for the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the epoch whose problems we are experiencing today.

We are talking specifically about the Industrial Revolution, which is our present destiny. It could not have originated anywhere else than in 18th century England. An Industrial Revolution means the unleashing of technical progress and the unleashing of technical progress is only comprehensible from a maritime existence; within it it is even, to a certain degree, logical. Technical inventions have been made everywhere and at all times. The technical skills of the English were no greater than those of other peoples. It is always a question of what is made of the technical invention, and this depends on the framework in which the invention falls, i.e. in what specific order. Within a maritime existence, technical inventions develop more freely and unhindered than when they fall into the fixed organs of a terrestrial existence and are encompassed and adjusted within them. The Chinese discovered gunpowder; they were by no means clumsier than the Europeans, who discovered it as well. But in the fixed framework of the purely terrestrial order of China of that time the discovery of gunpowder led only to its use as a game and firework. In Europe it led to the discoveries of Alfred Nobel and his followers. The English, who in the 18th century made all the discoveries which led to the Industrial Revolution, coke oven, steel foundry, steam engine, spinning machine, etc., were by no means more brilliant than the men of other times and of other countries which remained territorial and who had already, likewise, realized many of those inventions of the 18th century. Technical inventions are not the discoveries of a mysterious higher spirit. They fall within their time. They decay or develop according to the concrete human existence into which they fall. I mean to say, then, that the inventions with which the Industrial Revolution began could only become the beginning of an industrial revolution where the transition to a maritime existence had taken place.

The transition to a purely maritime existence results in itself and in its broadest and most intimate consequence in the unleashing of technology as an autonomous force. With all that had previously developed in technology within an essentially terrestrial existence, an absolute technology had not been produced. Here it must be noted that the newly Thalassic culture, limited to the coast and the inland sea, does not yet signify a definitive step towards a maritime existence. Only in the ocean does the ship become the counter-image of the house. Faith in absolute progress is a sign that the step towards maritime existence has been taken. The chain reactions of a continuous and limitless invention were born in the historical, social and morally infinite space of maritime existence. It is not a question here of the difference between sedentary and nomadic peoples, but of the opposition between land and sea as elementally different possibilities of existence for man. It is therefore also wrong to speak of boat nomads and to name them in series with horse nomads, camel nomads or other nomads of the mainland. This is only one of many incorrect translations from land to sea. The space in which historical human existence is located is both in its horizon and in its deepest foundation different between land and sea and depending on whether it is seen from land to sea or from sea to land there is a change of forces, essentially different; a change of human culture or civilization, where culture is determined more by the terrestrial and civilization by the maritime and the maritime image of the world is technomorphic rather than sociomorphic¹⁸.

Thanks to the knowledge of the maritime relationship, two important phenomena of the 19th century, the classical economics of the late 15th and 19th centuries, which adheres to it, and Marxism, gain a new light for the first time from the point of view of the history of the spirit. The Industrial Revolution brought about ever more numerous and rapid advances in the mastery of the unlimited, which led to the unleashing of technology. The so-called classical economy is an ideal superstructure on the first stage of the industrial revolution. Marxism builds its construction entirely on classical economics. It thus directed it and became a superstructure on the second stage of the industrial revolution. In this way, it was able to provide an adequate inventory of ideas to an elite of professional Russian revolutionaries who succeeded in seizing the Russian empire in the October Revolution of 1917 and in transferring the framework of this double superstructure to an agrarian country. Historically speaking, this was something completely different from the realization of a pure doctrine or the fulfillment of the laws of the historical current. It was a question of enabling an industrially backward agrarian empire to seize industrial technology, without which it was easy prey for any industrially armed conqueror. Marxism has been transformed from an ideological superstructure on the second stage of the Industrial Revolution into a practical instrument to overcome an undefended industrial technical stage and to dissolve an old elite which was not up to its mission. But doing away with classical economics was only part of Marxist doctrine. Its roots remained Hegelian. In a passage from Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, sections 243 et seq. we find its germ. This passage is famous. He develops the dialectic of a bourgeois society which is in free efficacy and conceives itself “within itself in progressive population and industry.” Of this bourgeois society, Hegel says, “it is not rich enough for the excess of wealth, i.e. it does not possess enough in its own fortune to pay for the excess of poverty and the growth of the plebs”. He expressly refers to England at that time as a suitable example. And then in section 246 continues:

“By this dialectic, bourgeois society is driven beyond itself, in the first place that society is determined to seek outside itself, in other peoples who are inferior to it in the resources it abounds in or in artistic ability, etc., the necessary consumers and means of subsistence.”

Such are the famous sections 243-246 of Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, which have found their deployment in Marxism. But I do not know that the paragraph that immediately follows, section 247, has so far been recognized in its equally great scope. It deals precisely with the contrast between land and sea, and its development could not be less fruitful and less rich in consequences than the development by Marxism of the preceding sections 243-246. It is the subordination of industrial development to maritime existence. This section 247 contains the decisive sentence:

“Just as for the beginning of family life the earth, the firm foundation and soil, is a condition, so for industry it is the natural element which animates it outwards, the sea”.

I pause here and ask the attentive reader to recognize in these explanations the beginning of an attempt to develop this section 247 of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in the same way as sections 243- 246 have been developed in Marxism.

With our interpretation, on the other hand, a new question immediately arises, and with this question a new danger. The question is: what is the current “Challenge” of history today? The danger is that today's new challenge is reacted to with an old answer, because it has proved to be correct and effective for an earlier epoch. People stick to what has already proved to be accurate and effective in the past. They do not want to know that the answer to a new “Challenge” in history, seen from man's point of view, may be only a pre-mandate, and even more often than not, like Columbus' departure, a blind pre-mandate. Man has an almost irresistible need to perpetuate his historical experience. When we Germans entered France in 1914, we believed that it should happen again as in 1870-71, in our last victory. When the besieged French, in the winter of 1870-71, made an attack from Paris, they believed that it should happen again as in the victorious Revolution of 1792. When the American Secretary of State Stimson, in 1932, proclaimed his famous Stimson Doctrine, he believed that the situation would return, in greater proportions, to what it was in 1861 at the beginning of the Civil War.

Our historical sense can preserve us from such repetitions. Paradoxically, in the countries where technology has been unleashed, the opinion is widespread that with the help of new technical means, a breakthrough into new infinite spaces of the cosmos is now beginning. Compared to this breakthrough into the cosmos, the breakthrough of the age of discovery five hundred years ago would have been a small thing. Men are planning interventions in the stratosphere and trips to the moon. Earth itself, our planet, is to be transformed into a space-ship that bursts into the cosmos.

And all this is but the repetition of an old response, the desperate continuation of the earlier response to the “Challenge” of the oceans opening up. People imagine the current “Challenge” as an enlarged edition of the discovery of America. This is, as has been said, psychologically understandable. Then, new continents and oceans of the Earth were opening up. But today I don't see any cosmos opening up and I don't hear a cosmic call or “Challenge”. Let us now dispense with flying saucers. However violently the technique unleashed may affect the cosmos, this does not yet provide a historical “Challenge” or even a historical response to such “Challenge”. It is true that the technique unleashed produces an immense potential of impulses and surplus of impulses. But impulse and call are not the same. It is also true that modern technology always generates new artificial needs. But this only means that it could at most produce a response to an artificially produced “Challenge” by itself and in an equally artificial way.

Precisely the more modern-looking continuation of the old answer is revealed, for historical consideration, as well as ahistorical and anachronistic. It is quite natural that the victor of the past epoch does not get the new call of history right. For how should the victor understand that even his victory was true only once? And who would instruct him in this? I think we have already gained something if we do not respond to new questions with old answers. We have achieved much if we do not build the present new world on the new world’s blueprint of yesterday. I personally assume the new call not beyond the stratosphere. I see that the unleashing of technique before encases men, opening up new spaces for them. Modern technology is useful and necessary. But it is still far from being the answer to a call. It meets ever new needs, partly caused by itself. Otherwise it is itself in doubt and is not therefore an answer. Everyone talks about how modern technology has made our Earth ridiculously small. The new spaces, from which comes the new call, must therefore be sought in our Earth and not outside, in the cosmos. He who succeeds in grasping the technique unleashed to master it and insert it into a concrete order will have given an answer to the current call before he who tries, with the resources of a triggered technique, to land on the Moon or on Mars. To tame the technique unleashed would be, for example, the work of a new Hercules. In this direction I hope for the new call, the “Challenge” of today.

1. Der Nomos der Erde, 1950, Greven Verlag, Cologne, pp. 260-261.

2. Paris, 1952, Librairie Armand Colin, p. 220.

3. Luis Díez del Corral: El rapto de Europa. Una interpretación histórica de nuestro tiempo, “Revista de Occidente”, Madrid, 1954, especially chapter VII: La enajenación del arte, pp. 205-42.

4. Carlos Ollero: Estudios de ciencia política, Editorial Nacional, Madrid, 1955. Specially on «La forma política», pp. 61-86.

5. On the importance of technomorphic or sociomorphic representations, see note 19 below.

6. Carl Schmitt: Der Nomos der Erde, p. 75, in the Spanish translation of this work by Antonio Truyol y Serra, Revista Española de Derecho Internacional, vol. II p. 20.

7. Professor Dr. Friedrich August Freiherr Von Der Heyte, in his article ‘Francisco de Vitoria und die Geschichte seines Ruhmes’, in the Rev. Die Friedenswarte, XLIX, 1949, p. 192

8. Juan José López Ibor: Estilos de vivir y modos de enfermar. Ateneo, April 1954. This author's great work La angustia vital, Patología general psicosomática, Editorial Paz Montalvo, Madrid, 1950, also contains material for the problem of an iconography in a general, cultural and historical sense.

9. Camilo Barcia Trelles: El Pacto del Atlántico, la tierra y el mar frente a frente, Madrid, Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1950; El problema de la unidad del mundo postbélico, translated by the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Sao Paulo, 1953. Also in his regular contributions to the REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS POLÍTICOS: “El ayer, el hoy y el mañana internacionales.”

10. Mackinder: Democratic ideals and reality, 1919.

11. Carl Schmitt: Tierra y mar, consideraciones sobre la Historia Universal, translated by Rafael Fernández Quintanilla, Colección Cívitas, Madrid, 1952.

12. Serge Maiwald in several articles in the then edited Universitas Magazine, Tucbingen, 1949-1951, especially in the article “Das Atlantische System im permanentem Ausnahmezustand”, also in the “Zeitschrift für Geopolitik”, Hamburg, December 1951.

13. Erwin Hölzle: Russland und Amerika, Aufbruch und Begegung Zweier Weltmachte; München (Oldenbourg), 1953, p. 69.

14. Walter Warnach, Abstrakte Kunts ah Zeitausdruk, lecture at Wazburger Hochschulwochen, 1953 (Otto Mueller, Salzburg).

15. R. G. Collingwood: An Autobiography, Oxford University Press, 1939, pp. 29 ff. Another book by Collingwood, quoted below, The New Leviathan, or Man, Society, Civilisation and Barbarism, appeared in 1942, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

16. Arnold J. Toynbee: The World and The West, Oxford University Press, 1933. A German translation by Dr. H. J. Alexander has been published under the title “Die Welt un der Westen”, in W. Kohlhammer, Verlag, Stuttgart.

17. Enrique Tierno Galván has highlighted in a remarkable article: “Benito Cereño o el Mito de Europa”, Cuadernos hispano-americanos, 36, Madrid, December 1952, the specific spatial relations of the ship. When jurists designate a ship as “floating territory” as “territoire flottant”, this is nothing but a convenient fiction, coming from the terrestrial world, one of the innumerable transpositions from land to sea.

18. On the difference between the images of the world and the empire, depending on whether they are determined by primary technical images (e.g. the potter as demiurge) or social images (e.g. the father as universal lord). Ernst Topitsch: “Kosmos und Herrschaft”, in the journal Wort und Wehrheit I, 1955, pp. 19 ff; 5.