This grim conclusion links the work of the reactionary German jurist Carl Schmitt and the Irish-born scholar Gerard Toal.
Few thinkers have so dramatically reshaped our understanding of space and power. That their intellectual projects span ideologically and historically disparate worlds—Schmitt making his mark amid the death throes of the Weimar Republic and Toal mapping the post-Soviet terrain of imperial aftershocks—only makes their convergence on the subject of spatiality more curious.
The work of these men is particularly helpful for understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the murky geopolitics of Aleksandr Dugin, who is the state philosopher for Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Carl Schmitt was no ordinary lawyer. He redefined sovereignty in terms of the power to make exceptions, preferring Caesar to Cicero, decision to deliberation, and maps to laws.
Schmitt was the kind of legal theorist who could find a metaphysical justification for annexing a peninsula. His conception of spatiality permeates his Nomos of the Earth, a melancholic meditation on the decline of European order after the disintegration of the ius publicum Europaeum, the system of international law that governed relations among European states from the Peace of Westphalia until the early twentieth century.
Within Schmitt’s framework, spatial order is inseparable from political order. Every order emerges through a spatial “appropriation” (Landnahme), followed by distribution and production. In other words, land grabbing is not merely an economic or military matter but the sacred ur-act of sovereignty.
“The first land seizure,” he writes, “provides the basis for every further ordering of space”. No land, no law; no boundary, no being.
Schmitt’s spatial politics is dialectically bound to his famous friend/enemy distinction. Spatial distinctions—frontiers, walls, zones—are political distinctions. “Who is within” and “who is beyond” the line are not just geographic facts; they are existential ones.
For the Nazi jurist, sovereignty was cartographic: drawing the line, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, is the exemplary act of the sovereign.
Schmitt was also deeply attuned to the spatial metaphysics of sea power and land power. In Land and Sea, he contrasts the stability and hierarchical ordering of terrestrial empires—Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, the great powers of continental Europe during the nineteenth century—with the fluid, liberal, and commercial sea powers epitomised by the British Empire.
Land means order, whereas the sea represents chaos. Or even worse, liberalism. Faint echoes of this dichotomy persist today in the Russian portrayal of NATO as a floating force of moralising decadence, encroaching on the “sacred soil” of Orthodox civilisation.
Like Schmitt’s other contributions to political thought, his spatial theories have a habit of reappearing where you least desire. His concepts—especially the idea that law follows conquest—have been retrofitted into the vocabularies of neo-Eurasianists like Aleksandr Dugin, whose Fourth Political Theory offers a delirious remix of Schmittian geopolitics, Eurasian land mysticism, and Orthodox metaphysics.
That Schmitt was banned from postwar German academic life for his affiliation with the Third Reich but is now a darling of Russian fascists who view sovereignty as holy war is either a tragic irony or a case of the chickens coming home to roost.
In contrast, Gerard Toal is a mild-mannered cartographic deconstructionist with the postcolonial scepticism that befits an Irishman.
As a leading figure in the interdisciplinary study of critical geopolitics, Toal doesn’t see maps as expressions of God’s will or Caesar’s sword. Rather, he views them as the products of discourse, power, and what he calls “geopolitical cultures”. His work, particularly in Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus, offers a pointed critique of how spatial imaginaries—especially in the post-Soviet space—are constructed, contested, and weaponised.
Toal doesn’t deny the importance of space. But he insists that it matters as meaning, not merely as terrain.
Political actors, he argues, do not simply act on space but through spatial narratives. Ukraine is not just a place on the map—it is, variously, a “buffer zone,” a “bridge,” a “bulwark of democracy”, or, in Kremlin parlance, a “wayward brother”. These designations are not neutral. They are ideological performances with very real consequences.
Toal’s central theoretical move is to unmask the supposedly objective “geopolitical truths” espoused by realists and strategists as expressions of narrative power.
The idea that NATO “provoked” Russia, for instance, is not just an empirical claim. Rather, it is a geopolitical script that recasts Russia as a reactive victim rather than an imperial actor. Similarly, Putin’s invocation of “historical Russia” as justification for the annexation of Crimea is less a policy proposal than a mythic cartographic performance, bidding to restage the land grab with a touch of the ressentiment articulated by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Whereas Schmitt considers the friend/enemy distinction ontological, Toal regards it as constructed, rehearsed, and internalised through media, discourse, and policy. He is not interested in the “truth” of geopolitics but in the cultural practices that make some geopolitical visions feel inevitable. Toal is like Michel Foucault with a Rand McNally atlas, tracing the epistemes of geopolitical reasoning.
Nowhere are the divergent philosophies of Schmitt and Toal easier to discern than in nationalist analyses of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
From the standpoint of Schmit’s conception of geopolitics, the Russian invasion is an act of spatial reordering, a reclamation of order from chaos, territory from liberal encroachment. It is justified not by international law but by history, blood, and identity. As Putin put it in his 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Ukraine is not a real country; it is an aberration, a spatial mistake in need of correction. The correction, of course, comes by tank tread.
Toal, by contrast, sees this not as the resumption of history but the performance of a deeply constructed geopolitical myth.
The Russian state’s narrative of NATO encirclement, Ukrainian Nazism, and Eurasian destiny is not reacting to an objective threat. Rather, it constitutes a deliberate scripting of space. Toal’s work underscores that such narratives are embedded in what he calls “geopolitical cultures”, the historically sedimented ways in which states imagine space, threat, and identity.
While Schmitt might admire the decisiveness of Putin’s “exception”, Toal wants to remind us that such exceptions are rarely made in a vacuum. Instead, they are cultivated through decades of ideological fertilisation. And while Schmitt might insist that “order is the realisation of spatial structure”, Toal would ask: whose order, for whom, and told through what story?
Any discussion of spatial politics and Russia would be remiss without consideration of Aleksandr Dugin, the Rasputin of post-Soviet geopolitics and the world’s most theatrical disciple of Carl Schmitt. His Eurasianism combines Schmittian geopolitics with Orthodox aesthetics and an unhealthy dose of Heideggerian fog. His calls for a “sacred geography” of civilisation-states battling liberal Atlanticism take Schmitt’s land/sea binary and inflate it into an eschatological cartoon.
For Dugin, space isn’t just territory but destiny. From his perspective, as the heartland of Eurasia, Russia is spiritually compelled to resist the fluid, individualist, degenerate West. That he borrows from Schmitt’s Grossraum concept—large spatial orders governed by culturally dominant powers—is not subtle. Indeed, Dugin calls for the establishment of a Russian-led Grossraum that absorbs Ukraine, defies NATO, and restores cosmic order.
This is Schmittian thinking at its most baroque: not simply the friend/enemy distinction, but a mythopoetic reenactment of spatial domination. Toal’s response would likely be a wry smile and a reminder that such geopolitical melodramas are not natural outgrowths of national character but carefully constructed discourses tailored for strategic effect. Dugin, in other words, is less a prophet of the land than a performance artist of geopolitics.
In the final accounting, Schmitt and Toal represent opposing poles of spatial theory. Schmitt is the existential cartographer, tracing borders in blood and soil, insisting that space is the condition of the political. He is the quintessential far-right nationalist. Toal, on the other hand, is the critical diagnostician, revealing how those same borders are narrated, contested, and reproduced in the geopolitical imagination.
One way of comparing them is to say that Schmitt gives us the “why” of spatial power—its metaphysical and juridical roots—while Toal demystifies its cultural, discursive, and performative mechanisms.
Schmitt sees order in the map itself; Toal perceives it in the stories we tell about the map.
Nevertheless, these two thinkers are united by their insistence that politics is always a matter of space. The liberal delusion that politics can be abstracted from geography, that democracy can float free of place, is precisely the illusion that Schmitt and Toal, in their contrasting idioms, seek to dispel.
As the old saying goes, location, location, location. So the next time someone draws a border on a napkin, builds a wall, or declares that a region “naturally belongs” to some nation-state, remember: you’re either living in the world of Carl Schmitt or the world of Gerard Toal.
The difference is who gets to decide. And who gets written off the map.
Photograph courtesy of UNDP. Published under a Creative Commons license.
