The Political Theology of Germany’s Staatsräson: Exception, Enmity, and the Exposure of the Liberal Order

Germany’s unconditional support of Israel is encapsulated in the dictum “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’état” (Staatsräson). Shaped after World War II and formally articulated by Angela Merkel in her speech at the Knesset in 2008, the confession to Staatsräson has been intensified amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, following the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023. This article conceptualizes the consolidation of this extra- and paralegal doctrine through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s political theology. A politico-theological approach lays bare how modern sovereignty rearticulates divine attributes like omnipotence, supremacy and the power of decision in a secularized form at the heart of liberal constitutional orders. First, the article argues that Staatsräson operates through the selective displacement of legal constraints by subordinating specific international and constitutional norms to a politico-theologically defined superior political commitment. Second, building on the Schmittian premise that the sovereignty of decision is inseparable from the sovereignty of distinction, the article examines how the German–Israeli bond of “friends” is constituted through the designation of enemies. Friend–enemy distinctions appear on the performative level in speeches of state representatives who ritually confess Staatsräson, independently from Israel’s atrocious actions. Moreover, they materialize in directive documents like resolutions or modifications of punitive or citizenship law. In the third step, the paper therefore foregrounds the distinctly racializing components of Staatsräson in its disproportionate target of minoritized populations—above all Palestinians, Arabs, and/or Muslims, as well as anti-Zionist Jews—as threats to the political community. Finally, the article suggests moving beyond conventional framings of Staatsräson solely as a response to the Holocaust by situating it within a longer European genealogy of political–theological friend–enemy distinctions.