Carl Schmitt's postcolonial imagination

In 1941 Carl Schmitt asserted that, “The colony is the basic spatial fact of hitherto existing European international law,” its “foundation” and “basis.” I would like to make two claims in relation to this remarkable but largely overlooked statement. First, Schmitt’s unconventional theory of international public law, with The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum as its most emblematic expression, can be systematically reconstructed from the centrality that the concept of the colony enjoys in his ambitious historical narrative of the rise and fall of the first global nomos. Second, such a reading exposes the colonial underpinnings of the modern international system. Also, themes and arguments associated with anticolonial discourses acquire a central significance and a general geopolitical framework is recommended for a critical understanding of political modernity and its postcolonial alternatives.