Of continents and Großräume: the production and persistence of continentality

Newton, Scott

Abstract

This paper renews the contemporary and enduring salience of archaic and discredited concepts of spatiality and physical geographic determinism, but historicises, repurposes and reworks them: it is an essay in critical and decolonial palaeo-territorialisation. Concreteness may well have been misplaced, but place – and space – might not have been altogether mis-concretised. Rethinking the global is an opportunity to step back and think about macro-scales and macro-scalarity more broadly. This paper exhumes and decolonially/critically reappropriates Carl Schmitt’s Großraum concept (re-examining, along the way, if not quite rehabilitating the Meer und Land thesis and Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ (Mackinder 1904)) as a heuristic device to explore the overlooked scales of continents and continentality in the genealogy of a global geographic imaginary that is as much geotectonic as geo-historical. ‘The Global’ would then come to signify pre-eminently – or perhaps has always signified – as the intercontinental rather than the international: a space or set of spaces in some ultimate sense conditioned by the configuration of the planetary crust yet nonetheless produced through historical processes. We may never have been global, but we have been (inter)continental for the last half-millennium. State sovereignty, (racial) capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, public international law, fascism, communism and neoliberal globalisation have all been projects or formations – directly or indirectly, by design or accident – producing, pursuing, exploiting, organising and ordering continental Großräume. Contemporary regional trade blocs, regional international governmental organisations, regional human rights systems, military alliances and even putative civilisational divides all reflect the perdurable continental horizons of our ostensibly global imaginary.

Citation

Newton, S. (2025). Of continents and Großräume: the production and persistence of continentality. International Journal of Law in Context: A global forum for interdisciplinary legal studies, 21(S2), 213-230. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1744552325100037

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 13, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Jul 23, 2025
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jul 26, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 26, 2025
• Print ISSN: 1744-5523
• Electronic ISSN: 1744-5531
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 21
• Issue: S2
• Pages: 213-230
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/s1744552325100037
• Keywords: globality, Grossraum, Continentality, Carl Schmitt
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-law-in-context/article/of-continents-and-grossraume-the-production-and-persistence-of-continentality/77EFCE14ED5138FBEBBFE21528BA095D