ABSTRACT
Nomos indicates a fundamental unity of space and law, order and orientation. It is a concept that points to 'the spatial context of all law' or to the fact that 'all law is law only in a particular location'. Carl Schmitt presents nomos, as an act of ordering and an institutional order. At the centre of the Nomos lies an account of the historic rise and fall of the global spatial order produced by the jus publicum Europaeum. Spatial order is defined by three primal processes of human history: appropriation, distribution and production. Land-appropriation is the fundamental process in establishing law: the 'primeval act in founding law', the 'archetype of a constitutive legal process'. Schmitt claims that the discriminatory war turns to the criminalization of aggressive war that dominates international legal thinking. The Nomos in fact offers a critical analysis of the factors contributing to the collapse of the jus publicum Europaeum at the start of the twentieth century.
