Der Nomos der westlichen Hemisphäre

In Carl Schmitt's account of jus publicum Europaeum, the colonization of the Americas marks the beginning, whereas the American 20th century has seen the decline of classic public international law. This article questions Schmitt's thinking on American international law from the perspective of property law. It argues that Schmitt's unsystematic remarks on the public order of property in early American colonialism are the key to his reading of the transformation of international law after the American Civil War. While the English origins of natural law emerge as a crucial basis of early American expansion, they are reversed as the 'nomos' of American land law is established by the landmark case of Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), the Prospective Preemption Law of 1841, and the proto-welfarist Homestead Law of 1862. As a result, the United States developed features of a modern bureaucratic state, whose international flipside is the American opposition against any colonialism in the Western hemisphere known as the Monroe Doctrine. With the closing of the frontier, isolationism fades. It was the Russian Revolution of 1917 that halted the American dialectic of property and sovereignty and replaced it with the global bipolar order of the Cold War.