ABSTRACT
In The Nomos of the Earth Carl Schmitt gives a striking account of the significance of the discovery of the Americas. It is an account of the simul - taneous appropriation of a new world and a division of the world on a global scale. In part it is an account of the justification of this appropriation of an entire continent: a process that aroused controversy at the time and still continues to elicit new interpretations (see, for example, Vitoria 1991; Tuck 1999; MacMillan 2006). It is, even more so, an account of the legal signifi - cance of these appropriations: in the language of Schmitt’s subheading, of ‘Land-Appropriation as a Constitutive Process of International Law’ (Schmitt 2003 [1950]: 80). According to Schmitt this appropriation inaugurated a new epoch of international law that had come to an end only during Schmitt’s own lifetime.1 Immediately after announcing the epochal significance of these events Schmitt turned to what he called ‘global linear thinking’:
No sooner had the contours of the earth emerged as a real globe – not just sensed as myth but apprehensible as fact and measurable as space – than there arose a wholly new and hitherto unimaginable problem: the spatial ordering of the earth in terms of international law.
