In the speech he gave to the 2025 Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance apparently missed the point (video, transcript). According to immediate criticism, the format should be a platform for security policy exchange in international affairs, not a place where a high-ranking representative of a non-European government should be allowed to interfere in internal European politics, let alone criticize European states for undemocratic conduct. However, the surprise over the “internal” focus of the speech overlooks that the Vice President’s statement, in fact, negates the very distinction between “internal” and “external” politics and thus a core normative idea of the current international order. Vance’s behavior at the Munich Conference has not been a diplomatic faux pas, but the proclamation of a program for a transnational Bewegungsstaat (movement state)—i.e., a state in which a government acts as spearhead of a certain political movement. Ideologically, Vance arguably borrows from the Nazi-jurist Carl Schmitt, but he goes beyond Schmitt’s ideas by thinking a state project transnationally.

A Revolutionary Thinking of Order

What Vance presented in Munich was a list of alleged European misconduct (see here): the annulment of democratic elections, repressive restrictions on religious freedom, the exclusion of populist parties from a fair election campaign, even the systematic disregard and possibly disrespect for the population by their European governments. From a historical point of view, however, this skeptical view of Europe is not unusual but quite the opposite: an element of the U.S. American founding myth. A similar list can already be found in the 1776 Declaration of Independence where it turns to British colonial rule:

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world” (see here).

What follows in this document is a list that—similar to Vance’s—deals with restrictions, even enormous repression of the population by a European government. About 50 years after the independence from colonial power, in 1823, this attitude found a manifestation in the Monroe Doctrine, which expresses the foreign policy claim to the “Western Hemisphere”, that is, the exclusion of European powers from a sphere of U.S. interest (by the way, Greenland was also repeatedly located in this sphere of interest during the 19th century).

Then and now, the U.S. critique of European politics is embedded in a thinking of order that reaches beyond territorial borders. In this respect, the astonishment over the Vice President’s speech (here and here) testifies to a limited understanding of developments in global politics. The adherence to the distinction between domestic and foreign politics—the “internal” and “external”—remains in the thinking of an increasingly fragile international order, which is not only put into question by more and more significant actors but could soon be overcome in the course of the obviously exclusive great power negotiations on Ukraine. What outlook can we give on an international negotiation led by Putin, who sees Ukraine as a region of a “Russian world”, and Trump who somewhat revives the Monroe Doctrine by calling for the Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada? And is “international” negotiation still the adequate term to be used to precisely describe what is going on in the world?

Carl Schmitt’s Großraum

Perhaps Carl Schmitt’s work on the politics of international law provides insight in an order that emerges from such negotiations. Immediately before Schmitt joined the Nazi party in 1933, he developed a critique of the Monroe Doctrine which he saw as expression of a “modern imperialism”.[1] This new form of imperialism, Schmitt argued, not only focused on military strength but especially included a severe financial policy and remarkable discursive elements. “It is,” says Schmitt, “an expression of real and political power where a great people determines, of its own accord, other peoples’ language and even way of thinking, that is, the vocabulary, the terminology and the concepts”.[2] A correspondingly “great people” (Schmitt uses the term “Volk” in a specifically ethnic understanding) must be able to cope with the interference of “raumfremde Mächte” (alien powers, literally: powers alien to space), as Schmitt later adds.[3] In this respect, the draft from the 1930s is not only an anti-American type of criticism, but can also be understood as an attempt to appropriate a principle, and as a justification for what later became the Nazi’s claim to Lebensraum im Osten (living space in the East, i.e., settler colonialism in Eastern Europe, enslavement of Slavic peoples, and genocide).

From a today’s doctrinal point of view, the idea according to which great powers have a legitimate interest that extends beyond their territorial borders and concede to each other such spheres of interest of course breaks with the international legal principle of sovereign equality of states. Yet, Russia is already implementing a corresponding legal opinion in Ukraine through the practice of a war of aggression, and President Trump reveals a corresponding Großraumdenken (thinking in greater spaces) through his views on the Panama Canal and Greenland. Schmitt writes: “Caesar dominus et supra grammaticam: the emperor is master also over grammar”.[4] In this regard, by renaming the Gulf of Mexico to a “Gulf of America”, the U.S. is already attempting to unilaterally redefine, perhaps not yet the grammar, but the vocabulary of international geography.

Where Vance moves beyond Schmitt

But more interesting than the presumed historical parallels are the differences between Schmitt’s thinking in greater spaces, on the one hand, and the current drafts for international, and perhaps better, transnational politics, on the other. Schmitt’s idea of the international division of space was based on the assumption of mutually alien and thus not only rival, but enemy ideologies. Yet, in times of transnationally organized New Right networks, increasingly with direct access to governments, the Newspeak of J.D. Vance—himself a reader of Schmitt—does not express a concept of society alien to Europe. Rather, it is the vocabulary, perhaps the grammar of a discourse that has long been speaking (in) Europe.

In his speech, the Vice President made himself the spokesman for this discourse and thus for a people supposedly not heard by their government(s). That he indeed meant to talk about security, he underlined by locating a substantial threat and thus a decisive security policy challenge within Europe. Such challenge, for Vance, consists of state institutions that systematically disregard the democratic values of the people. There could be no security where governments fear and obstruct the voices that lead their own people.

In fact, one of these supposedly muted voices had already received a remarkable virtual support prior to the German election by Elon Musk who had publicly spoken to Alice Weidel, head of the German far-right party AfD (Alternative for Germany), via “X” and suggested that “AfD is the only hope for Germany” (here). This could be understood as evidence of an already increasingly dense, transnational network of New Right agitation. Of course, such relationships were already established and maintained during Trump’s first presidency, for example by Steve Bannon. But what was demonstrated in Munich goes beyond previous metapolitical attempts at a New Right or Fascist International since the authority of the office of a U.S. Vice President is now used to openly take sides with the European sections of such a transnational movement. The conversation between Vance and Weidel directly after the speech is therefore only a logical continuation of these attempts.

The Movement State

Now it is debatable whether the term fascism, and consequently talk of a “Fascist International”, is analytically and politically helpful. With regard to the U.S., the historian Robert Paxton long rejected the use of the term, but then changed his mind in view of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. For Paxton, the decisive factor was Trump’s alleged involvement in the attack. Today, the crucial point is the close relation between the new administration and the MAGA movement, which became manifest in the pardons of the January 6 insurgents. The implication is a new constellation of the state and the people, which indeed plays a crucial role, say, in Umberto Eco’s attempt to characterize fascism. The presidential proclamation granting the pardons implies a previous struggle of a disenfranchised society and a new government that now ends these disenfranchisements and releases the unjustly imprisoned into freedom. What comes to the fore is an administration that puts itself in a vanguard position—as the spearhead of a previously suppressed movement. This movement character of the new U.S. administration is indeed expressed in the Munich speech. In speaking for the people in Europe, Vance suggests a similarity of those suppressed by European governments and the European Commission with the protagonists of the MAGA movement that had been suppressed by the former U.S. government. And there is a remarkable sense of mission at work where the implicit message is that the latter have now been liberated whereas the former are still to be liberated.

By way of such fake emancipation the U.S. government merges with the people’s movement. The state adopts a movement character, it makes itself the organizational center not of the society, but of the society as movement. As a result, a liberal distinction between the state and the people is no longer possible. The state becomes a “movement state”, which internally governs (at times restrictively) “in the name of the people”, and externally claims a position as spearhead of a now transnational movement.

Transnational Disruption

It is this movement character of the state that does not stop at the territorial borders of the U.S. political system. Taking this stance at the Munich Conference may not be in accordance with the diplomatic protocol, and it may be “unacceptable” as German minister of Defense Pistorius had it (here). However, a criticism that focuses on the inadequacy of the speech does not capture what is likely to determine the global political processes in the time to come. The movement state, especially where it reaches out transnationally, tends to abolish the traditional distinction between “the internal” and “the external”, between international security policy statements and interferences in domestic affairs. The movement state is internationally unwilling, insofar as it withdraws from international institutions and, in so doing, may even give the impression of isolationism; but as an advocate of certain democratic but, at the same time, explicitly not liberal values, it is transnationally interventionist.

The transnational movement state parallels Schmitt’s theory of greater spaces only insofar as the principles of state territoriality and sovereign equality are put into question. However, its disruptive style, at times even its aesthetics of the political, reveal a moment that goes beyond a neo-imperialist international law of the strongest. The state’s claim to be at the forefront of the movement—and to speak authoritatively for it—finds a transnational continuation. Where the movement is transnational, and this is no doubt the case with regard to the networks of the New Right, the movement state puts itself at the head of a transnational movement and, thus, tends to become a transnational state. The principle of territoriality gets disqualified. Any complaints against the “external” interference in the “internal” or domestic sphere of the state become meaningless. International restraint is necessarily alien to a movement state, which is committed to a transnational project.

Philip Liste (Dr. phil., Goethe University Frankfurt; Habilitation, University of Hamburg) is Professor of Political Science and Politics of Human Rights at the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany.

[1] Carl Schmitt, Völkerrechtliche Formen des modernen Imperialismus. In Frieden oder Pazifismus? Arbeiten zum Völkerrecht und zur internationalen Politik, 1924-1978. Edited by Günther Maschke. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005, pp. 349-366.

[2] Ibid., p. 365 (translation PL).

[3] Carl Schmitt, Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2022.

[4] Schmitt, Völkerrechtliche Formen, p. 365.