ABSTRACT
The end of the epoch of the nation state could be dated, so Carl Schmitt believed, to the year 1963, the year he wrote a new foreword to a text originally published in 1932 entitled Der Begriff des Politischen, the ‘Concept of the Political’. (Schmitt, 1963, p.10) His thesis goes back to ideas from the 1930s and 1940s on the imperialism and expansionism of ‘transnational powers’ (Schmitt, 1988, pp.255ff, 271ff, 295ff, 303ff). 1 At that time, political movements such as Fascism and Bolshevism, but also the American project of democracy, gave rise to a diagnosis of the times which – independently of Schmitt – was placed by Hannah Arendt at the very heart of her 1951 book on totalitarianism: the diagnosis of the ‘Entstaatlichung der Politik’, the de-statification of politics (Arendt, 1986).
