State, Movement, People: Representation and Race in the Construction of Political Identity

Abstract

At the beginning of his Constitutional Theory, Carl Schmitt lays out an understanding of a constitution in which it does not consist of a set of laws that would form a unified system of norms that govern state procedures. Rather, he insists that a state does not simply have a constitution but is the constitution in the sense that the constitution consists not just of the laws but of “the concrete manner of existence that is a given with every political unity.”1 Since the existence of political unity is the major achievement, any situation of such unity implies a corresponding…