The Not-Yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality

It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.

—D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

She invested a variety of significances in the word "there," a concatenation of linked associations with space, time, and place too.

—Nuruddin Farah, Secrets

The argument in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Carl Schmitt's work that was first translated into English in 2003, is founded upon the title's central term, nomos. It is salient that, for a concept that is so fundamental to the project, the German political philosopher struggles to define it, to hold it in theoretical place for very long; he is certainly, despite his best efforts, not able to make it mean only one thing. Nomos reveals itself to be a philosophically palimpsestic term, given to eluding the philosopher even as he seeks to pin it down. Deeply grounded in discourses about national sovereignty, about law—and especially international law insofar as it is European, profoundly concerned with colonial history and the "land appropriation" so endemic to that process, with the development of Britain as a naval power that made the sea a new legal realm—it may be appropriate that the nomos proves such a polyvalent concept. Schmitt's nomos is, in truth, less a fixed concept than a way to understand the transformation from one historical epoch to another.

In The Nomos of the Earth Schmitt seeks to map three nomoi, the first two of which are explicitly based on a Eurocentric order (and the last of which is nostalgic for that order): the transition from Respublica Christiana (the Rome Papacy; Jerusalem, politically a Muslim city; and Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, all serving as symbolic centers of Respublica Christiana—with the German emperor functioning as another symbolic center, one that was outside of Rome), to the formation of the European interstate system that the "Age of Discovery" begins and that lasts until 1917, to the post-1945 era—the bipolar Cold War moment that has become, for want of a better term, unipolar American hegemony. Schmitt's work is grounded in the asymmetrical Europe/non-Europe distinction, a concept that is first enunciated as Christian/non-Christian and then as civilized/un- or less-civilized dichotomy. During the nineteenth century the latter distinction was increasingly translated in terms of race, white/nonwhite (especially black or, occasionally, Jew). Instantiated in Africa, this distinction provided the legitimacy for nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism and, in South Africa, for the apartheid laws; these laws that, post-1945 (the age of decolonization, formally inaugurated by Indian independence in 1947), were no longer ethically—or politically—sustainable anywhere else in the postcolonial world.

Although the white/nonwhite Manicheanism persisted as a political force after 1945, it was no longer ideologically tenable and was replaced by a formal "democratic" ideology that guarantees formal freedom (independence for the anticolonial movement), regardless of race, gender, religion, class, and so on. The liquidation of this primary nomic distinction marks the "triumph" of a postcolonial discourse that girds the international critique of apartheid after the National Party (NP) came to power in 1948. The struggle against apartheid represents, in Schmitt's terms, the battle between an old (in truth, an only recently ideologically anachronistic) legitimacy and a new one; a campaign against apartheid laws based on race that were, in the second half of the twentieth century less "illegal" (since they had the force of apartheid law) than "illegitimate," but nevertheless—or, precisely for that reason—ideologically intolerable within the new nomos of the postcolonial earth.

The determination to explicate the new nomos, be it the post–World War II era, the post–Berlin Wall or post-apartheid era, girds Schmitt's book: "As long as world history remains open and fluid, as long as conditions are not fixed and ossified; in other words, as long as human beings and peoples have not only a past but also a future, a new nomos will...