On The Agenda with Steve Paikin, Telos Associate Editor Adrian Pabst and others discuss the transformation of Germany since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place twenty-five years ago this month, as well as Germany’s future as a dominant political and economic force in Europe.
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Why has the international community failed to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapons capability? Why is Germany, even today, the mullahs’ biggest trading partner in the West? What underpins the strange friendship between Germany and Iran that goes back to the beginning of the last century and has survived every war, catastrophe, and revolution? Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold helps us to answer these questions. By unearthing new evidence from the National Archives in Washington, DC, and the German Foreign Office Archives in Berlin, Küntzel reveals that there has always been a hidden dispute between the White House and the German government over how to tackle Iran, and this dispute has deep historical roots. Telos Press Publishing is pleased to announce that Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold is now available for pre-order. The book will be released on November 1, 2014. Pre-order your copy today, and we will ship it as soon as it is in stock. Telos Press author Matthias Küntzel was recently interviewed by the Times of Israel regarding a planned trade mission by the German Near and Middle East Association, or NUMOV, to Iran in December. Küntzel’s forthcoming book, Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, will be published by Telos Press in November. As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Linas Jokubaitis looks at Carl Schmitt’s “The Legal World Revolution” from Telos 72 (Summer 1987). |
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As the first wars to be waged on European soil since the Second World War, the Balkan crises constituted a defining moment for post-Cold War Europe, and particularly for the newly united nation at its center: Germany. The political and humanitarian crises that ravaged the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999 had a significant impact on migration patterns to Germany; the BRD took in 48% of all refugees from the war-torn region, vastly more than any other European country. This was not just a test of whether or not Germany would welcome migrants, a large portion of whom were Muslims. It was also a test of how Germany, in light of its own genocidal past, would react to the Serbian policy of “ethnic cleansing” and how it would treat its position in NATO, a membership that would cause the first mobilization of German troops since World War II. When we consider these various factors and dilemmas, Germany’s role in the conflict is certainly fraught, especially when we recall that the German government under Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher exacerbated the Yugoslav crisis through its hasty recognition of Slovenia and then of its World War II ally Croatia as independent states. These decisions undermined the legitimacy of the Yugoslavian multiethnic state and set off a chain reaction that led first to the evacuation of Serbs from the new Croatian nation and eventually to the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs.[1] 
Carl Schmitt wrote “The Legal World Revolution” when he was ninety years old, and it turned out to have been his last publication. New political developments had forced him to restate some of his old positions, the most important of which was the relationship between legitimacy, legality, and super-legality. The guiding theme of Schmitt’s final publication was the one that had been of the highest importance during his whole career. It is best summarized in notes posthumously published as Glossarium, in a passage entitled “The Diagnostic and Prognostic of Max Weber,” where Schmitt quoted from Weber’s “Sociology of Law”: “As a result of technical and economic development, it is inevitable that current law is destined to be conceived more and more as a rational technical mechanism which can be modified at any time for functional purposes, and is lacking in any kind of sacred content. The destiny may be hidden by the suppleness of belief of the current law, but cannot be truly avoided.” 
