1. Spatiality and Großraum: Schmitt’s conceptual framework

Schmitt’s idea was both an inspiration and aspiration, a characterisation of past and a project for contemporary and future, macro-scale political order: his historical referent was the Monroe Doctrine and the US assertion of a hemispherically American zone; his contemporary (interwar) referent, a Teutonic-dominated Europe in line with National Socialist foreign policy; his future (postwar) referent, never fully articulated and only elaborated by successor theorists, interpreters and critics (who have invoked inter alia the non-hegemonic, ‘Reichlos’ EU). Großraum has been the subject of a major early twenty-first century IR (and international law [IL]) revival, as a number of thinkers have sought to test or contest its adaptability to global post-bipolarity (and post-abortive unipolarity). Some, including left Schmittians, find in it an eminently salvageable core idea of a counter-hegemonic, anti-US-universalist pluriverse of regional macro-spaces (Uwazuruike and Salter Reference Uwazuruike and Salter2016; Salter Reference Salter2012); others deem it irredeemable from its imperialist, Eurocentric, racist time-bound substance and methodology (Orsi Reference Orsi2021; Hooker Reference Hooker2009; Hohenwald Reference Hohenwald2018).

Großraum, as Schmitt formulated and elaborated it, is thus polysemic and problematic: descriptive and normative, essential and accidental or contingent. Its ultimate principle of coherence is not sharply delineated and bleeds across the political, the historical, the geographic and the cultural or civilisational. The geographic scale of political order appears now as a matter of fate (geographic or demographic), now as matter of contingency or luck, now as a matter of political vision and boldness – across a spectrum from determinism to decisionism. Its very malleability, however, renders it serviceable for recuperation, reappropriation and redeployment, shorn of its hierarchical and retrograde tenets. In working changes and riffing on the relationship between Großraum and continentality, this paper makes no pretence to fidelity to Schmitt’s conceptualisation and extends it well beyond his historical examples, as well as his contemporary applications and future predictions. It exploits the play in that conceptualisation to pose a series of questions about the global geopolitical imaginary in the twenty-first century and the residual constraints on the imaginable and practicable spatial scaling of order it imposes.

Although Schmitt dropped tell-tale hints of the preferential continental scale for Großraum, he wrote primarily with an international lawyer’s concern for the demarcation and regulation of space – with boundaries and rules – not the geographer’s or International Relations (IR) theorist’s concern for its contours and morphology. Schmitt invokes (in the mid-1940s) the USA and the USSR as the two ‘modern spatial [that is, continental] powers’ (Schmitt Reference Schmitt2006 p 145).Footnote ³ The relation in which continental states stand in relation to Großräume is not clarified: a Großraum, although anchored by a hegemonic power, would appear not to require that power itself be continental in scope, a ‘continental power’, extending sea to sea. A Großraum is larger than a single state by definition, insofar as it incorporates subordinate or satellite states, but amounts more to a political-geographic than a physical-geographic ‘great space’. Yet clearly, there remains some fundamental connection between the spatiality of a Großraum, the spatiality of a continent, and the spatiality of a continental power, even if those spaces or spatialities do not precisely overlap or dovetail. Continental powers are (arguably) the ideal anchoring hegemons or ‘realms’ (Reiche) of a Großraum, and continents are its ideal spatial extent or expanse.

If the USSR and the USA are, for Schmitt, supreme spatial or continental powers because of their continent-spanning national territories, then they are proto-Großräume by virtue of their continent-dominating ambitions, even before they establish a network of adjacent subordinate powers on which to impose an order or exert a sphere of influence. ‘Manifest destiny’ is not merely sea-to-shining-sea (whether Atlantic west to Pacific or Black Sea east to Pacific), or continental margin to continental margin, but whole-continental in scope: the construction and assertion of continental spatiality, of continentality. Albeit less extensive – national, not international, ordering – this mode of spatialisation entails a great deal beyond a ‘political idea’ and corresponding regime, since it accomplishes a far more intensive multidimensional (material, cultural, social, economic, psychological as well as political) ‘production of space’ in the sense of Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991).

Schmitt failed to consider how continental states, once confronting a world of ordinary or non-continental states – however capacious their territories – could become an object of envy or emulation. Continental-state envy is not simply a matter of territorial extent but of depth: resources and diversity, the availability to a coastal metropole of a vast hinterland or interior, serviceable for rapid industrialisation, resource extraction, energy generation and agricultural production. Post-bellum America supplied the extraordinary spectacle of the conversion of frontierlands into hinterlands with the aim of organising a national economy at unprecedented scale (Maier Reference Maier2016; Beckert Reference Beckert2017). It was the wonder of the industrialising world, and a goad: once the USA had territorialised and organised a continent-spanning space for purposes of production (most emblematically, perhaps, with the completion in 1867 of a transcontinental rail network), the unique advantages of continental scale for capitalist development were indisputable. The westward expansion of the USA as the manifestation of destiny thus took continentalisation as an intensive ordering project (technological, political and juridical) to a radically new level. It was epochal for the production of production space. At the same time, it was a gauntlet thrown down before European states by the formidable power and promise of European settler-colonial spatialisation on the American continent. A continental power emerged as an integral state-empire, overland not overseas, capable of colonising and capitalising its own internal contiguous (‘national-imperial’) space – a self-continentaliser.Footnote ⁴

Yet it is not American self-continentalisation over the course of the nineteenth century as a kind of national-imperial (integral-state) Großraum that fascinates Schmitt and gives rise to the concept, but rather the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which preceded it. Schmitt repeatedly invokes the Monroe Doctrine as the origin and type-case Großraum – ‘i.e., a spatial order determined by the global line of the Western Hemisphere’ – which forbade intercontinental interference by European powers in the formerly colonial and now independent states of the Americas. That initial Großraum was thus bi-continental or hemispheric: a hegemonic assertion, by an expansionist but still far-from-continental state, of the power to control and regulate the foreign affairs (partially but significantly) of a multitude of neighbouring states.

Much as Monroe foreclosed resurgent colonial European land-grabbing in the post-colonial Americas, and effectively made them off-limits, European continent-grabbing became a live ambition – or a driving fantasy – in Africa. A recent literature argues that European colonisation of the African interior was driven by ‘continental envy’ of the emerging US, and the realisation that Africa was available and exploitable for Europe as vast continental hinterland, for analogous purposes. Sub-Saharan Africa was Europe’s American Midwest, Prairie and Far West (Beckert Reference Beckert2017). The resultant patchwork of European African colonies disguises the continental ambitions of colonisation projects – Rhodes’s dream of a Cape-to-Cairo railway, the great contiguous expanses of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, the enormity of the Congo Basin, etc. The aim of the scramble for Africa was just that, a scramble for a continent, not pieces of one, at a point when the civilisational, technological and economic bases for continentality as a preferential ordering scale were well appreciated, thanks to the American example, but frustrated on ‘The Continent’ itself by the jurisdictional mosaic of a Westphalian dispensation and the jus publicum Europaeum which undergirded it.

Schmitt never seemed to have contemplated the spatial order implications of Eurafrica as a candidate Großraum project, and indeed viewed the incorporation of extra-territorial colonial space into national territorial space as a symptom of the loss of the spatial ordering premise of jus publicum Europaeum in the course of its evolution into international (interstate) law (Schmitt Reference Schmitt2006, pp. 233–34). His interwar attention was elsewhere – on the National Socialist project for a Germanic European continental Großraum, extending east to the Urals and west at least to France and the Low Countries. That such a Großraum could only be coercively secured after a military victory was no barrier to its cogency or coherence, but presented the unlikely (and, in the event, unrealisable) scenario of a middling, non-continental state bidding for pan-continental hegemony. Interwar Schmittian thought was premised on a decisionistic sovereign swiftly and arbitrarily imposing a Großraum (though one could frame an analogous argument for Monroe), not a secure continental power playing a long game by incrementally and organically developing and projecting one.Footnote ⁵

2. Continental geobiographies

But the story of continents and continentality precedes the advent of modern spatial powers and industrialisation by several centuries, and warrants exploring the early modern history of European overseas mercantile and colonial expansion as establishing or producing the spatial predicates for any and all future Großräume. To expand Großraum itself in this direction means unshackling it from Schmitt’s narrow concepts of international legal ordering and ‘the political’, and approaching it as a matter of scale for the production of (modern, capitalist, sovereign) space in the sense of Lefebvre – even at a proto-industrial moment.Footnote ⁶

The term ‘continent’ is ventured with some trepidation. The original term as applied to the three continents of antiquity – Europa, Asia and Africa – signified geoculturally rather than geophysically, and then only as Mediterranean littoral landmasses of unknown extent, with North and Southeast Asian and especially sub-Saharan African space barely guessed by classical (Mediterranean) geographers. Only the voyages of Columbus, Cão, Cabral, da Gama, Magellan, Drake, Hudson and their compeers enabled anyone to conceive or construct the idea of ‘continents’ in their proper planetary crustal contours and configuration – as members of a set of inhabited terrestrial mega-islands – completed with the addition of the twin Americas, and eventually augmented by Australia (and later, uninhabitable Antarctica), much as the complement of solar system planets was incrementally filled out with Uranus and Neptune, and then finally Pluto. Antique and medieval ‘continents’ were not the continents of a developed cartographic consciousness, nor the expansionist drive and organisational capacities/technics it reflected of the advent of Capital; they greatly preceded – although they conditioned and helped shape – the European spatialising concepts and projects of early modernity.

Certainly, the geophysical and geoimaginary contours of the ‘Four Continents’ (excluding Australia and Antarctica – the Uranus and Neptune of the system) had been stabilised by the seventeenth century, as evident in the continental personifications of Bernini’s Fontana del Quattro Fiumi of 1651 in Rome’s Piazza Navona and Tiepolo’s great Allegory of the Continents and the Planets frescoed on the Würzburg Residenz ceiling a century later. The figures of the continents (or continental rivers) reflect an already settled iconography of differential continental-cum-civilisational attributes/functions and a corresponding scala culturae (wisdom, bounty, indolence, martial/navigational prowess, etc.). The terraqueous globe only becomes imaginable and representable on the basis of the configuration of continents in twin hemispheres, Old and New – a world paradoxically now whole but ‘divided [by ocean] in continents’. The (ideologically freighted, orientalised, racialised and normativised) concept of globality itself (Ferreira da Silva Reference Ferriera da Silva2007; Sylvia Wynter Reference Wynter2003; Quijano Reference Quijano2007) is thus premised on continentality: no continents, no globe. Moreover, the system of planetary landmasses is aligned with (and fractally replicates) the system of planets as Whole-of-Parts.Footnote ⁷ This integrated, hierarchical and teleological continentality is rapturously celebrated by Whitman in ‘A Passage to India’ after the interval of a further century – now with Hegelian overtones:

Those spatial ordering processes noted above were composite and piecemeal, mediated by sundry discrete colonial/commercial projects and enterprises, including the political actions and juridical acts of actors at all scales and with diverse capacities and roles. However local and place-specific, the effects and consequences of these ongoing poly-scalar processes could be regarded as cumulatively continentalising. Schmitt’s Großraumordnung, by contrast, appears as a more limited and less nuanced, traditional concept of top-down juridical spatial ordering, whereas those processes emphatically entailed piecemeal, bottom-up juridical spatial ordering.

The continentalisation story is as a result composite, contingent and complex. ‘The whole world is … divided in continents’ – and potential Großräume (using the term grossly) – but they are manifestly unequal, geophysically and geopolitically. Each continent has a distinct geobiography, a history of production as potential or imaginable macro-space, Großraum sensu latu – a differentially penetrable and occupiable, or assemblable and governable, territorial expanse – thus confounding the inherited view of a set or system (Lewis and Wigen Reference Lewis and Wigen1997). All continental landmasses are contingent accidents of plate tectonic, climatic, volcanic, erosive and biotic dynamics over aeons, but they acquired (or didn’t) geopolitical continental status (‘continentality’) as contingent accidents of spatial production – through processes like ‘discovery’, conquest, settlement, commodity frontier advancement and resource extraction, colonialism, war, state formation and interstate relations/regulation – and concomitant spatial imagination, over centuries. Those material and symbolic contingencies produced distinct and hierarchical ‘continentalities’ – heterogeneous continental identities and corresponding orders. The ‘continental physiognomies’ of Latin America, Anglo-America, Africa, Europe and Asia (West, South, North, East, South East) are as far from uniform as their respective macro-territorial geographies.

The sections below take up and outline divergent geobiographies of continentality, in three broad families or genealogies. Eurasia – a singular and improbable continental amalgam in the first place – is treated first, Eurocentrically but unavoidably, since the ‘pivotal’ (to play on Mackinder) concept of continent/continentality as a scale for ordering space is European to begin with, and Europeans ‘continentalised’ the world. The European World System could just as readily be called the European (Six) Continents System. Next are the transformatively Europeanised (European-settler-colonised) continents – the Americas and Australia – which were the sites of unprecedented projects of spatial macro-scaling (Großräume plotting) from the moment Europeans were made aware of them. Their continentality (and indeed the concept of continentality as ordering space) was produced through the efforts to seize, control and exploit their territories, and to subjugate, reduce and marginalise their inhabitants. Finally, Africa exhibits perhaps the most fraught and charged theatre of European continentalisation, since that process was inextricably bound up with the slave trade in the first three centuries, followed by precipitous colonial land-grabbing and marked throughout by race. The contemporary ‘continental physiognomy’ of Africa thus reveals as a result a signature dehegemonic, decolonial Großraum logic – almost a Großraumselbstordnung (self-order) or Großraumgegenordnung (counter-order).

3. The World Island and Island-Hopping

3.1. Mackinder’s Geographic Pivot, with the World Island at its centre

Eurasian continental space is singular in its sheer geographic enormity, heterogeneity, and complexities of scaleFootnote ⁹: not for nothing does Mackinder aggrandise it as the ‘World Island’ (Mackinder Reference Mackinder1904). Geophysically, the Eurasian Landmass – thirty-six per cent of the terrestrial crust – is the consequence of the tectonic aggregation of the Eurasian (itself an aggregate), Arabian, and Indian plates, and dwarfs the other continents. At the moment of the end of the fifteenth-century Erdapfel, the World Island floated in splendid isolation (much as in traditional ‘island’ cosmogonies, see the reference to Turtle Island below), save only for the vast and newly navigated African coastline (not yet continent) below it. But the integrity and salience of its continentality appear dubious in light of its component peninsular subcontinentalities – Europe, Arabia and India – as well as its vast archipelagic southeastern fringe – notwithstanding that, as noted just above, its westernmost subcontinental peninsula contingently became the organising pole of global continentality itself: the geometropole.

The Orientalising geography of distinct European and Asia continents – anomalously among the other great landmasses made divisible at a set of entirely arbitrary or conventional lines (Urals, Caucasus and Bosporus) – is a classical contrivance that has been improbably maintained (as witness ‘transcontinental’ states like Russia, Turkey and Kazakhstan – pure artefacts of convention). In any case, the 54.76 million square kilometres of Eurasian space are inhospitable and inapposite either to Schmitt’s Großraumordnung or to the broader concept of continentalisation developed here. Although Eurasia might be a geophysical landmass, it is not a geopolitical space for continental ordering: the World Island is not a potential Übergroßraum. Expansionist, Großraum-making, continentalising projects have certainly been essayed across northeastern Eurasian space (Chinggisid and Romanov, to name twoFootnote ¹⁰), and expansive macro-scale projects of rule over lesser or subcontinental spaces (Roman, Iranian, Indian, Near Eastern/Islamic, Anatolian, Central Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Khmer, etc.) – just not over its entirety.Footnote ¹¹

Mackinder’s designation of a ‘World Island‘ and then ‘Periphery Islands’ (‘the outer or insular crescent’) is particularly suggestive for a consideration of continentality. Mackinder’s ‘Periphery Islands’ were rendered both ‘peripheral’ and ‘islands’ by the expansion of commodity frontiers, which proceeded by ‘island-hopping’, first across the Atlantic and Caribbean islands (Moore Reference Moore2015) – themselves produced as plantation space, and plantations are islands on islands, micro-archipelagos: demarcated, surveyed, regimented, ‘abstract’ spaces for commodity production located on islands – and then on to the mega-islands of the American continents. The sixteenth-century ‘Spanish Main’, the mainland space for colonial commodity production in Mesoamerica and Northern South America, was the beachhead for continentalisation – for the organisation of a Chinese-box continental macro-space that was continentalised to the same extent it was ‘islanded’: demarcated as a space to be developed or produced for purposes of commodity production, itself eventually organised into a mini-archipelago of colonies – viceroyalties – each containing micro-archipelagos of plantations.

Continentality itself was produced only in and over the course of European colonisation and appropriation: ‘continents’ became the largest ‘explorable’, appropriable and colonisable contiguous terrestrial spaces – mega-islands. Continentality then becomes a concept and product for non-European spaces of an expansionist Age of Capital, Commodities and Production and was only subsequently back-applied to European/Eurasian space. Although the westernmost Eurasian peninsula might have colonised and continentalised the world, it only continentalised itself as a spatial order candidate belatedly and haltingly. Ironically, ‘The Continent’ had never been continental: European continentality, in the sense of political and material ordering-space, congealed only after the continentality of the Americas had been produced – conceived and imagined, explored and exploited, conquered and colonised.Footnote ¹²

Schmitt’s idea of Großraum, it might be ventured, was offered to Europeans as a correction to, modification in, and self-application of, continentalising theory and practice in other (properly continental) spaces. Public international law, the jus publicum Europaeum developed on, by, and for ‘The Continent’ was a juridical compensation for a spatial deficiency: Europe was undercontinentalised, and a new political project of ‘Großraumierung’ was formulated as a belated but now necessary ‘spatial self-fix’, once the old juridical project based on customs, usages and norms, and buttressed by treaty, had (for Schmitt) begun to come apart under the pressures of formalism, positivism and unilateral universalism.

Of course, from the eastern pole of the mega-continent, Eurasia is a less compelling continentalised conceit or case, since the historical, cultural and political significance of Europe was remote and secondary or tertiary – a far barbaric periphery. However expansionist Asian powers have historically imagined or acted (Chingissid, Mughal, Han, Timurid, Khmer, etc.) they do not appear to have embraced any concept of Asian continentalityFootnote ¹³ – which arguably only arises in contemporary discourse off the back of the construction of ‘The Continent’ and remains equally dubious and as culturally and historically fraught or over-determined. Portuguese, Dutch, British Euroforming of Asian territories bounding the Indian Ocean and South China Sea was spatially distinct and disjunct – a function of largely archipelagic and non-contiguous geographies – and never offered vast, contiguous and ‘virgin’ American spatial expanses nor solicited large-scale settler colonialism (save in the overland rather than overseas Russian expansion to Siberia and beyond). Ironically, of course, the originary American continentalisation was accidental and incidental to an Asian trade project: a western sea route to the Indies.

4. Stolen continents: settler colonialism and dispossession in the Americas and Australia

4.1. The Americas

The New World was just that, never imagined by its European discoverer-marauders, and of planetary scope, integrity and remoteness – an extra-terrestrial terrestrial space, the surface of a transoceanic planet. It furnished the first example of functionally empty, ‘virgin’ continental space: resource-abundant, undeveloped, unclaimed, its population unpropertied. ‘In the beginning all the World was America’ (Locke Reference Locke and McPherson1980, chap. V, sec. 49). Never before or since have such vast territorial expanses been vulnerable to wholesale, macro-scale dispossession and depopulation – accidental and intentional, microbial and biopolitical, by decimation and by extermination, concentration, or displacement (Galeano Reference Galeano1997; Wright Reference Wright2005; Quijano and Wallerstein Reference Quijano and Wallerstein1992). The Columbian Exchange was a demographic and spatial catastrophe of unprecedented and continental (or hemispheric, bi-continental) magnitude. It overcame the ice-age sundering of the biogeography of H. sapiens, and profoundly restructured the fundamental ‘divid[ing] in continents’ of a cosmopolitan, African-derived hominin species: the displacement-cum-replacement of an indigenous (bi-)continental array of peoples and cultural/political orders by those of another and remote continent.Footnote ¹⁴ The European-mediated ‘peopling’ of the American continents (Bailyn Reference Bailyn1988) over the period was a cataclysmic depeopling, repeopling and transpeopling.

The impetus was nascent capitalist commerce: large-scale transatlantic population flows enabled by novel nautical technology. No previous human migrations approached these appropriately continental scales. The Americas furnish the type-instance and originary continental arena for settler colonisation (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006) and its multidimensional transformation, or production, of large-scale space. This took the form of the elective or induced transoceanic transfer of successive waves of European settlers and dependents, concurrently with the forced transoceanic deportation of successive waves of enslaved Africans, and their permanent, adverse occupation and exploitation of American territories already comprehensively and autochthonously inhabited and culturally, politically, juridically and economically organised at a multitude of scales. These waves occurred under diversely framed legal schemes and ventures, along a spectrum of election/coercion, all imagined, organised, chartered, sponsored, financed, executed, regulated and administered by an array of European private and public authorities and actors – schemes and ventures from encomiendas in New Spain for conquistadores to Royal Charters in New England for non-conformists. The social, communal and national origins, as well as the contours of the colonising imagination and desire of the settlers, were commensurately various. So too was the course of the characteristically but differentially violent dispossession, displacement, subjugation, marginalisation, incorporation and/or elimination of the vast heterogeneity of native peoples, from Arctic Inuit to Fuegan Yaghan.

The Iberian Conquista of South America and Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century and the incremental British/French/Spanish settler-colonisation of North (eventually Anglo) America from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were events that thus cumulatively produced continentality itself – events that forced the concept of continental space on the European imagination and respatialised the global surface.Footnote ¹⁵ Although the era is conventionally defined by maritime navigation, exploration and commerce, when the seas became a universal road from any coastal port on the globe to any other coastal port, its macro-terrestrial spatialisation was concomitantly revolutionary. A new type and scale of spatialityFootnote ¹⁶ was thus encountered, imagined, charted, penetrated and occupied in virtual simultaneity – indeed, the temporal condensation is paradoxically matched by the spatial scope, and environmental, cultural, epidemiologic and demographic consequences. Moreover, as American continentality cohered, so did global intercontinentality (or intercontinental globality) across, for the first time, circumglobal trade flows: transpacific Spanish gold and silver from Acapulco to Manila from the mid-sixteenth century and the transatlantic triangle of African enslaved, European manufactures and American raw commodities from the early seventeenth century. West and East, it was emergent American continentality that effectively summoned or provoked Old World continentality into modern conceptualisation and operationalisation, serving as the (bi)continental node connecting Atlantic with Indo-Pacific spaces: Whitman’s geographic Hymen (‘Europe to Asia, Africa join’d, and they to the New World’), the real World Island, the Inter-Continent(s).

The concomitant European-on-non-European cataclysms – the forced importation and enslavement of fifteen million Africans and the dispossession/displacement/destruction of sixty million indigenous Americans – created continentality-defining, complementary and interdynamic histories of macro-scale (spatial and temporal) victimisation and subordination, which have played out over the ensuing centuries of plantation slavery, other forms of coercive labour, deprivation, exploitation and genocide for their survivors and descendants: the parallel and interrelated Red–Black racialisation (natives and slaves) in the construction of unmarked European Whiteness. The multiply scaled ‘geo-chromatics’ of the Americas is thus also a singular aspect of its continentality, emblazoned across its many divergent but replicative histories of Black, Red and mixed struggle against domination and destruction, and for rights and recognition – from sixteenth-century Peru (Túpac Amaru) to late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue to the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (The Landless Workers’ Movement) and Black Lives Matter movements of the moment in Brazil and the USA. That geo-chromatics has accorded the Americas a global discursive and political centrality in formulating, understanding and redressing the critique and claims of/from Indigeneity and Blackness particularly, and people of colour more generally. Blackness (along with other diasporic forms of continental identificationFootnote ¹⁷) and Indigeneity, born with American continentality, both buttress and complicate the coherence of that continentality, and have propagated globally and informed extra-American continentality, reflecting globally comparable and convergent experiences of displacement, marginalisation and racialisation (Gilroy Reference Gilroy2022; Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014; King et al. Reference King, Navarro and Smith2002; Hokowhitu et al. Reference Hokowhitu, Moreton-Robinson, Tuhiwai-Smith, Andersen and Larkin2021).

American continentality is geographically, geoculturally and geopolitically twinned or doubled in a unique sense, setting it apart from all other continents. One continent or two, or a continental set or pair? The Americas or America? The differential elaboration and evolution of distinct Northern (Anglo) and Southern (Latin) senses of continentality (complicated by the linking arc of the Antillean archipelago) transpose and scale up the European North–South cultural, linguistic and historical axis of the colonising powers. These twin Americas have evolved into a gross albeit complex political, cultural and economic intercontinental inequality.Footnote ¹⁸ The exercise by the first independent American republicFootnote ¹⁹ of hegemonic cultural, political and economic force over all succeeding American and Caribbean states for the last two centuries, prompting the promulgation of Schmitt’s favourite Großraum manifesto, the Monroe Doctrine, has left hemispheric American space and continentality (‘the global line of the Western Hemisphere’), standing in tension with national American (US) space and continentality. No other continental space is geopolitically dominated in the same manner by a single continental hegemon – concentrating Schmitt’s attention to the same degree as nineteenth-century European would-be continentalisers who coveted an analogous hinterland in Africa. That hegemony has reinforced the geocultural continental bisection, misaligned with the strict geographic, and with it starkly divergent geochromatic patterns of racialisation and racial dynamics, yielding over the long durée significant mestizaje, hybridity and cultural/racial mixing in Latin America, and commensurately prominent bounding and policing of racial/cultural identities in Anglo-America.Footnote ²⁰

5. The counter-continent: Africa as decolonial Großraum

If the Americas furnished the originary spatial models of ordering at continental scale because they were perceived as ‘empty’ and ‘penetrable’, Africa provides a counter-case of continentality, for centuries unsuitable because ‘impenetrable’ (overpopulous and overgrown, uniquely hostile and forbidding in the European imaginary thanks to the savagery of its people, density of its vegetation and virulence of its diseases). The long history of a thin European coastal presence only, for purposes of the trade in enslaved persons and ancillary commodities (albeit accompanied by a complex insertion of affected African authorities and polities into the nascent global economy [Greene Reference Greene2019]), deferred proper continental spatialisation until the nineteenth-century moment of the European ‘effective occupation’ of the interior. It was moreover the only example of a blanket, juridically mediated continentalisation, a bespoke international legal order for its seizure and control (Craven Reference Craven2015).

Africa, for Europeans before the nineteenth century was a coast, not a continent: its singular geographic obscurity (physical and human to the same degree) and cartographic blankness made for a kind of spatial negation or absence: a continent-sized hole or vacuum that provisionally forestalled the processes of European-directed spatial production that stretched from the Arctic to Australasia. Indeed, this inverse spatiality at scale (negative or silhouette continentality) was necessarily co-produced with the positive spatiality at scale of the other continents (Australia, from the time of its charting as ‘New Holland’, might be a second and roughly contemporaneous example, but it never attained the deep psycho-geographic status of ‘Dark Continent’).

Africa is the supremely essentialised continent in European discourse, most emblematically fixed by Hegel (Gathii Reference Gathii2000), imbued with a character coterminously racial, cultural and continental (Mudimbe Reference Mudimbe2004). Over the four centuries of the violent transatlantic deportation of as many as fifteen million Africans and their sentencing to a trans-generational carceral labour regime, their continent of origin was comprehensively and uniquely racialised. If for the European continentalisers, ‘in the beginning the whole world was America’, for the extra-European continentalised, at the end, ‘the whole world is Africa’, both in the sense that the African condition of subordinate (extra-European) continentality has become generalised (Africans, along with other peoples of colour, are conscripts of continentality insofar as it constitutes a necessary dimension of the globalised condition of modernity [Scott Reference Scott2004]), and in the special sense that slave-descended and colonial African diasporas represent a significant demographic and cultural-political factor and force spread across the other continents (in particular, the rise of the Black Atlantic).

African singular continentality endures. In European policy, academic and popular discourse, ‘Africa’ long remained a kind of (racialised) continental shorthand for developmental failure, political pathology and dysfunctionality (‘bad governance’), social disorder and endemic conflict, systemic human rights crises, and poverty, disease and malnutrition (Thomas Reference Thomas2000; Gathii Reference Gathii2000) – as well as a preferred site for emergency extra-continental, bilateral or multilateral, strategic and/or humanitarian intervention, from peacekeeping deployments to international criminal investigations and prosecutions to counter-terrorism operations (du Plessis Reference du Plessis2012; Williams Reference Williams, McNamee and Muyangwa2021; Gathii Reference Gathii2000). But African continentality also signifies in other, positive registers – material, discursive, symbolic and institutional – such as the increasing sophistication of the African Union as an interstate organ of governance, security and development, to the globally unmatched proliferation of infracontinental or subregional trade and governance organisations or economic integration projects (effectively, Mittelräume, like ECOWAS, ECCAS, SADC, EAC, G-5 Sahel, etc.) (Bashi Reference Bashi2018). Tellingly, Africa and Europe are the two contemporary instances where ‘The Continent’ has become a standard geographic term and trope in academic and policy discourse as well as in popular culture and journalism. Finally, the ‘continental iconography’ of Africa is as unique as the continental cultural identity (manifest in the global brand-recognisability of African literature, music, sports and arts). No other continental contour is as ubiquitous: the shape of Africa can be found in jewelry, on jumpers, in hair designs, in the pan-African trademark colours of the Ethiopian flag, etc. This symbolic, insistently decolonial continentality reverses the subaltern valence of its received continental status and constitutes a vital dimension of the contemporary geopolitical imaginary.

6. Continentality and Globality in the moment

Continentality, continental order and continental identity not only persist amid, but define, globality in the twenty-first century. The map of regional human rights organisations and the map of trade areas both strikingly (though not precisely) reflect the geophysical configuration of continents – as does the map of Huntington’s clashing civilisational blocs (Huntington, Reference Huntington2011), a baffling but revealing fin-de-siècle throwback to early twentieth-century essentialist geographic and historical thought in the mould of Mackinder and Spengler – and Schmitt. Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin American remain primary identity markers for individuals and core categories for census data.

The ‘Periphery Islands’ were continentalised (and islanded) through histories of enslavement and then racialised over the course of colonial subjugation, followed by post-colonial admission to the world economy and the international political order on grossly unequal terms (Africa); through dispossession, settler colonialism and – in one case – imported enslaved labour and a post-slavery racial order (Australia and North America); and through conquest, settlement and cultural hybridisation in the context of enslavement (Latin America) These processes produced Großräume and corresponding continental identities or political macro-spatial self-conceptions, and gave rise to both Blackness and Indigeneity, as argued above. The experience of violent continentalisation gave rise, for its myriad numbers and categories of victims, to intercontinental political communities, movements predicated on an intercontinental solidarity and collective mutual recognition, and a distinctive posture with regard to continental as well as national modes of ordering: Native Americans, First Nations, Indigenous Australians, African Americans, Afro-Brazilians, inter alia, are, in diverse but provocatively complementary ways, extra-territorial to Großräume, residual micro-islands on the continental macro-island. Analogous processes of duress shaped infracontinental and extra-territorial identities and Großräume in West, South, Southeast and East Asia.

Whether Left Schmittians or IR enthusiasts looking for a pluralistic alternative to the never-really-and-now-no-longer New World Order are plausible in their strategic redeployment of Großraum theory or not is not really the point. Großräume might matter less as macro-political projects or as pluralistic forms of transnational order preferable to the current positivist, state-centric, monistic international legal standard on offer. They might matter more as continental communities of fate, history and experience in the wake of colonialism and conscription into modernity, capital and sovereignty – a system that produced continents and established continental horizons of repression and resistance both, of power and counter-power.

Continentality is our condition; it is one among many ‘imperial durabilities’, phenomena reflecting the sustained shaping pressure or ‘duress’ (Stoler Reference Stoler2016) of centuries of European formation, deformation and transformation of space, lifeworlds and lives, of macro-scale biopolitical, ‘chromopolitical’ and geopolitical engineering. That duress is also evident in the historical constraints on our geopolitical imaginary, operative at the level of effective macro-identities and the abiding preference for macro-scale over global ordering beyond the state, the comfort zone of the continental Großraum. We have never been (fully) global – that is, post-continental: our transnational horizons remain continental or intercontinental, and our political imaginary remains commensurately segmented.Footnote ²²