Page:ELO 1(1), 6–25. European public law after empires.pdf/9

14   Signe Rehling Larsen appropriation of the New World that ‘made possible a new European international law among states: an interstate structure’. The Eurocentric spatial order of Jus Publicum Europaeum, in Schmitt’s view, started to decline towards the end of the nineteenth century when the fundamental distinction between European and non-European soil was abandoned. Empire, therefore, is not incidental to ‘European’ international law; the law between European sovereign states. It is a constitutive feature.

4. The collapse of Droit Public de l’Europe [sic]

During the interwar period, European colonial rule was starting to fray at the edges with growing demands for self-determination and constitutional reform in places as different as Ireland, India and across the African colonies. The French and the British had relied heavily on their empires for the war effort, and as the colonial troops returned to the colonies from the battle for the empires’ mother countries, they could not understand why they should be denied the freedoms they had fought to secure for people in Europe. Yet while World War One and the interwar period exposed the weakness and instability of the old world of European empires, they did not lead to the creation of a new stable legal, political and economic order that could replace it. On the contrary, the interwar period saw a new level of chaos in a world where empires and proper nation-states existed alongside one another for the first time on a grand scale.

The age of extremes spelled the economic, political and constitutional collapse of the European states, which left them incapable of securing their most basic aims of territorial defence, repression of civil war and the aversion of hunger. The most prominent example is the Weimar Republic, which never managed to realise a stable form of government. This resulted in the widespread use of emergency decrees that ultimately brought the Nazis to power with the project of turning Eastern Europe into the colonial territory of the Third Reich. Without overseas colonies to sustain the state, Nazi Germany brought the practice of colonial exploitation home to ‘Europe’ in the quest for raw materials, slave labour and Lebensraum. The racial violence of colonialism, including slavery and genocide, that previously had taken place territorially outside the ‘civilised’ world in the colonies was thus for the first time in history forced upon Europeans by Europeans on European soil. In this way, the foundational distinction of ‘European’ international law between what passed as legitimate action in the ‘civilised world’ and what were legitimate acts in the ‘uncivilised world’ outside Europe was eradicated.

With the conclusion of World War II and in the following decades, it became increasingly clear that ‘Europe’ was no longer the centre of gravity for the world order; nor was it likely to become so again. Not only had the imperial control of the colonies been lost or weakened, but the