To understand the subsequent redirection of political energies, we must trace the narrative back to the year 1492, and the moment in which ‘Spain bumps into, finds without looking, Amerindia’ (link).
In an attempt to exert control over the implications of this paradigm-shattering event with the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), religious authorities divided the rights to the newly discovered lands between the Spanish and the Portuguese, inadvertently initiating that which Dussell has described as ‘the first world hegemony … the modern system, European in its center [and] capitalist in it economy.’ (link)
Here, Tordesillas signified the demarcation of ‘a “civilized” area in which treaties and legal truces are respected by European powers, from a no-man’s land in which every kind of predation is permitted’ (link, p. 201). In a Schmittian sense, this new ‘geography of limit’ – the jus publicum Europaeum - resonates with Dussell’s notion of the ‘modern system’. While still based on the raw might of European state sovereignty, the jus publicum Europaeum was ‘the first global order’ (ibid, p. 25).
This was a nomos in which the states of Europe were the core, rather than the totality, as had been the case in the moral universe of the res publica Christiana. With Europe emerging from crisis, the bracketing of a previously unlimited warfare was guaranteed by an outward refocusing of political conflict and competition. In this new spatial nomos, the European powers’ focused their energies of colonial appropriation, competing with each other through the medium of Empire-building, rather than outright conflict. As these burgeoning colonial powers flexed their global muscles, ‘[o]ver, under, and beside the state-political borders … spread a free, i.e., non-state sphere of economy permeating everything: a global economy’ (ibid, p. 235) built on the productive capacity of the colonial body.
