During the Second World War, the British-American anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to propose replacing the word ‘race’ with the relatively unknown term ‘ethnic group’. For Montagu, the value of this new term stemmed precisely from the fact that it was new and unfamiliar. As he put it, ‘the concept of ethnic group implies a question mark, not a period’. This uncertainty over its meaning distinguished the concept of ethnic group from the established concept of race, which was often unthinkingly and problematically used precisely because everyone thought they knew what ‘race’ meant. Montagu believed that the strangeness of the new term ‘ethnic group’ would force people to stop and think whenever they encountered it, to reflect on its meaning, and thus guard it from ideological appropriation: ‘Each time it is used it is likely to elicit the question, “What do you mean by ethnic group?”’ The soundness of Montagu’s strategy for ‘re-education’ and ‘self-enlightenment’ is no doubt open to debate.Footnote ¹ What is not open to debate is the fact that the concept of ethnic group has long since lost its novel and unfamiliar quality. Much like the early twentieth-century concept of race that Montagu was criticising, the concept of ethnic group today is often unthinkingly and problematically used, triggering all kinds of emotionally conditioned responses. Today, the concept of ethnic group implies a period, not a question mark.

The overarching aim of this book has been to turn the concept of ethnicity into a question mark once more: to dismantle its transhistorical veneer, to wrest away its natural appearance, and to lay bare its ideological functions. The first section of this conclusion ties together the narratives presented in the book’s three substantive chapters to provide a panoramic overview of the conceptual history of ethnicity. It recounts how the concept of ethnicity transformed from a residual category inhabiting the margins of existing frameworks into one of the most widely used concepts in the English language. This universalisation of ethnicity entailed not only the problematisation of existing categories such as ‘race’ and ‘tribe’, but also the elevation of ethnicity itself into a seemingly ‘neutral’ descriptor of humanity’s cultural diversity. The second section begins to chip away at ethnicity’s non-ideological façade by examining the close relationship between ethnicity and culture, which has been a recurring theme throughout the book. Even as the twin concepts of ethnicity and culture contributed to the dismantling of European imperial ideology and the ‘flattening’ of the global sociopolitical imaginary, they also helped to reconfigure racial and civilisational hierarchies under a seemingly neutral form. It is precisely the neutral and timeless appearance of these concepts that lies behind their ideological power. Building on this argument, the third and final section of the conclusion draws inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth to bring forward a speculative notion of ‘ethnos’. If Schmitt’s ‘nomos’ describes a constitutive ordering of land, then ‘ethnos’ describes a constitutive ordering of beings. Seen in the light of this more originary ethnos, the transhistorical appearance of ethnicity is exposed as a sham. The concept of ethnicity is no true transcendental, but a contingent historical effect of the concrete appropriations, divisions, and productions that constitute the international order.

From Supplement to Ground: The Universalisation of Ethnicity

The concept of ethnicity is a symptom of the epochal transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states. When ethnos-based terms such as ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnie’ were first coined around the turn of the twentieth century, they served as extraneous additions to the established conceptual triad of nation, race, and tribe. Faced with scientific breakthroughs, socioeconomic dislocations, and political upheavals, scholars, lawyers, and policymakers turned to this new vocabulary in an effort to manage the shortcomings of existing categories. As the concepts of nation, race, and tribe began to creak and crack under the mounting weight of their contradictions, ethnos-based terms were plugged into the emerging gaps and fissures. The concept of ethnicity thus began its journey as a residual container of differences and discrepancies that could not be reconciled within existing classificatory schemas. Ethnicity, to borrow Judith Butler’s memorable phrase, was born as the ‘embarrassed “etc.” at the end of the list’.Footnote ²

The concept of ethnicity was born as a supplementary category designed to suture the contradictions of the Eurocentric imperial order. But as Jacques Derrida reminds us, supplements are dangerous things: precisely because a supplement is an extraneous addition to the system rather than a feature of the system proper, it does not merely complete the system, but also testifies to the system’s incompleteness. A supplement is needed only because the system is lacking in some way.Footnote ³ This simple yet profound insight also applies to the conceptual history of ethnicity: as the supplementary concept of ethnicity was grafted onto the fracturing imperial system, the new concept inevitably foregrounded the limits and contradictions of that system, thereby furthering its disintegration. Seen in this light, it is hardly surprising that the meteoric popularisation of ethnicity in the second half of the century went hand in hand with the discrediting of scientific racism and the dismantling of the European colonial empires. As the world of empires gave way to a world of nation-states, the formerly residual and marginal concept of ethnicity was raised to the status of an all-encompassing master key. In Hegelian terms, the universalisation of ethnicity during the 1960s and 1970s was the world-historical moment where contradiction ‘falls to the ground’ and establishes itself as the foundation of an entire conceptual order.Footnote ⁴

The universalisation of ethnicity entailed a dialectical reversal of the concept’s relationship to its neighbours. At first, as noted above, ethnicity was conceived as an extraneous addition to the series of existing terms, a supplementary category that could be slotted alongside the established trinity of nation, race, and tribe. The situation changed decisively in the second half of the twentieth century. With the ethnos-based vocabulary spreading across the conceptual landscape like wildfire, nations, races, and tribes were themselves reconceptualised as particular forms of ethnicity: nations were recast as ethnic groups that had been politicised by the rise of nationalism, races were recast as ethnic groups that had been reified and naturalised through racialising practices, and tribes were recast as ethnic groups that had been fixed in time and place through colonial governance. By positing nations, races, and tribes as particular forms of itself – by remaking them in its own image – the concept of ethnicity played a pivotal role in the denaturalisation and historicisation of these older categories. Through the lens of ethnicity, nations, races, and tribes were revealed as contingent historical constructs rather than natural or primordial entities. In the very same movement, however, the concept of ethnicity also elevated itself into a seemingly transhistorical category. Even as it contributed to the historicisation and denaturalisation of its neighbours, the concept of ethnicity also insidiously naturalised itself, positing itself as the transcendental ground of their historicisation.

The transhistorical pretences of ethnicity are manifest in the language used to describe it. Time and again, as we have seen, ethnicity is depicted as a ‘neutral’, ‘noncommittal’, ‘noncontaminating’, ‘apolitical’, or ‘natural’ category that lacks the ideological baggage of its neighbours and precursors. A closely related semantic feature is the lack of a corresponding ‘ism’ or ‘movement concept’ to designate an ideological project centred on ethnicity.Footnote ⁵ Nations have been unveiled as products of nationalism, races as products of racism, and tribes as products of colonialism – but what ideological project is the concept of ethnicity a product of? Although the word ‘ethnicism’ does exist, it is almost entirely absent from public discourse and is rarely used even in specialised academic texts. Instead, any ethnic ideologies that arise tend to be given another (pejorative) label such as ‘nationalism’, ‘racism’, or ‘tribalism’.Footnote ⁶ Sometimes a hybrid term such as ‘ethnonationalism’Footnote ⁷ or ‘ethnoracism’Footnote ⁸ might be used, but the implication is much the same: ethnicity itself is taken as a non-ideological phenomenon that is then mobilised by other (pathological) ideologies such as nationalism or racism. Whenever and wherever ethnicity acquires any political weight, it seems to metamorphose into something other than ethnicity.

There is, of course, the word ‘ethnocentrism’, coined by the American social scientist William Graham Sumner in 1906 to describe ‘this view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything’.Footnote ⁹ Although more widely used than ethnicism, ethnocentrism retains the transhistorical and non-ideological guise of ethnicity itself. Thus, ethnocentrism is typically understood as ‘an age-old phenomenon’ that is ‘probably nearly as old as the human species’.Footnote ¹⁰ In this vein, the famed American sociologist Robert Park – among the earliest scholars to employ the term – referred to the ‘incurable ethnocentrism of peoples’.Footnote ¹¹ In contrast to nationalism, racism, or tribalism, but very much like ethnicity itself, ethnocentrism tends to be posited as an innate and therefore inescapable feature of human existence. All told, the seemingly transhistorical quality of ethnicity lends to this concept a mysterious resistance to ideologisation and politicisation.

Of course, as the vast literature on ethnic conflict testifies, it is widely recognised that ethnic identities can and do become politicised. But this kind of superficial politics is not what is at stake here. What is at stake is the persistent failure to theorise the concept of ethnicity itself as political. Even Rogers Brubaker’s radically constructivist understanding of ethnic identities as ‘perspectives on the world’ rather than ‘things in the world’ falls into this trap insofar as it stops short of questioning the historical conditions of possibility of ethnicity as a category.Footnote ¹² Contrary to appearances, what is actually being problematised in these kinds of constructivist approaches is not ethnicity as such, but associated concepts such as ‘group’ or ‘identity’.Footnote ¹³ ‘The problem’, as Steve Fenton puts it in a widely cited study, ‘is not the word “ethnic” but the word “group”.’Footnote ¹⁴ No matter how radical the constructivist approach might be, the concept of ethnicity stubbornly retains a depoliticised and non-ideological guise. And this, precisely, is the source of its political and ideological power.

Ethnicity, Culture, Ideology

Ethnicity was not the only concept that first crept into European vocabulary at the turn of the twentieth century. Developing in parallel, there was another newcomer that recurs in all three chapters of this book: the concept of culture. Thus, a central problematique in Chapter 1 was the tension between the political and cultural definitions of the nation; in Chapter 2, it was the splitting of the race concept between the biological and cultural spheres; and in Chapter 3, it was the relationship between tribal or social units on the one hand and culture areas or traits on the other. The form and function of the concept of ethnicity was thus structured around three key dichotomies, each involving the concept of culture: political/cultural (Chapter 1), biological/cultural (Chapter 2), and social/cultural (Chapter 3). As the imperial trinity of nation, race, and tribe split along these fault lines, the concept of ethnicity was adopted as a supplementary category to shore up the gaps. More specifically, this new concept was used to enclose each of its precursors within a distinct domain: the concept of nation was collapsed into the concept of the state and confined to the political domain; the concept of race was segregated from the concept of culture and limited to biological characteristics; and the concept of tribe was distinguished from modern urban patterns of culture difference and coupled to the notion of primitive social structure. This threefold conceptual restructuring, in turn, underwrote the emergence of ‘culture’ as a new domain of human activity distinct from the political, the biological, and the social. In short, the invention of ethnicity went hand in hand with the naturalisation of culture as ‘the universal ground and horizon of difference’.Footnote ¹⁵

Despite the conceptual linkages between ethnicity and culture, the former is not reducible to the latter – if it were, it would immediately render itself redundant. Rather than belonging purely or entirely to the sphere of culture, the concept of ethnicity belongs to those liminal border zones and marginal spaces that attach culture to the political, biological, and social domains. The concept of ethnicity marks a rupture, a fissure, a cut, in the totalising fabric of culture, a folding of culture along national, racial, and tribal lines. As the imperial trinity of nation, race, and tribe was negated by the work of sublation, the concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the empty spaces left behind. To quote Derrida, the concept of ethnicity is ‘a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it’.Footnote ¹⁶ Ethnicity is the scarring left upon culture’s supple surface by the violences of the imperial past.

Taken together, the twin concepts of ethnicity and culture have entailed a fundamental reconfiguration of the way in which the peoples of the world are ordered. In contrast to the vertical model of difference that prevailed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the postcolonial world order is defined by a lateral or horizontal model based on symmetrical and therefore reversible tropes. The civilisational metanarratives of the imperial era, which had arranged the peoples of the world along a gradated ladder from lowest to highest, have been displaced by a relativist-pluralist logic where a multiplicity of different cultures or ethnic groups can reside side by side ‘on a single horizontal plane’.Footnote ¹⁷ This ‘flattening’ of the global sociopolitical imaginary, as Bernard McGrane writes, ‘has rescued the non-European Other from the depths of the past and prehistory and reasserted him in the present; he is, once again, contemporary with us’.Footnote ¹⁸

To the extent that the concept of ethnicity has contributed to the dismantling of racist doctrines and colonial ideologies, its popularisation can be seen as a benign – even positive – development. At the same time, however, the culturalisation and ethnicisation of the world also performs an important ideological function of its own. As David Scott notes, ‘part of the appeal of the new culture-as-constructed-meaning concept is that it comports well with the new end-of-ideology conditions of liberal democratic discourse and practice’.Footnote ¹⁹ Framed through the depoliticising lens of culture, ‘the otherness of the Other can be edifying without being threatening to the order of things’.Footnote ²⁰ Whereas the imperial age was defined by the temporalisation and ideologisation of concepts in line with a Eurocentric metanarrative of historical progress, the postimperial age has witnessed the triumph of a ‘monstrous’ present that colonises both the past and the future.Footnote ²¹ By subordinating the peoples of the world to this detemporalised and deideologised imaginary, the twin concepts of ethnicity and culture help to freeze the present political map.

The erasure of colonial hierarchies and the naturalisation of a spatialised imaginary of formally equal and sovereign nation-states constitute two sides of the same movement of negation that dismantled the imperial order of the nineteenth century. However, the process of sublation also entails a simultaneous movement of preservation that eludes or exceeds this movement of negation. The contradictory doubleness of the dialectical process is reflected in the ideological functions of ethnicity: rather than merely confining nationalism, racism, and colonialism to a bygone era, the ethnic supplement also functions as the conceptual wedge that keeps the door to the imperial past ajar. Even as it appears to bring to an end the age of nationalism, racism, and colonialism, the concept of ethnicity also inaugurates the age of neo-nationalism, neoracism, and neocolonialism. In line with the inside/outside ontology of the international order, this reconfiguration and perpetuation of imperial hierarchies can be observed on three interrelated levels: inside nations, outside nations, and along the boundary lines between nations.Footnote ²²

Within the nation-state, the emergence of ethnicity has gone hand in hand with the institutionalisation of a domestic hierarchy between the hegemonic national culture, on the one hand, and national minorities and indigenous peoples, on the other. This is evident in the widely used ‘minus one’ model of ethnicity, according to which every state contains one group – the majority nation – that does not have an ethnic identity.Footnote ²³ In many ways, this domestic hierarchy between nations and ethnic groups is a continuation of nineteenth-century distinctions between historical and non-historical peoples, or between civilised nations and primitive tribes. But whereas the old paradigm was premised on the eventual disappearance of these marginal groups, the advent of ethnicity entails a recognition that ethnic groups are here to stay and that their co-presence needs to be institutionally managed. Insofar as the new conceptual framework downplays the requirement of assimilation and drops the explicit reference to the standard of civilisation, it is no doubt an improvement on its nineteenth-century predecessors. Nevertheless, it continues to perpetuate an asymmetrical distinction between the majority nation and its various ethnic ‘others’.

A similar shift has taken place on the international plane, with long-standing civilisational and racial hierarchies recoded through ostensibly culture-neutral concepts such as ‘capabilities’, ‘hegemony’, and ‘development’. Although the trend is, at least formally, toward greater inclusivity and pluralism, distinctions such as developed/underdeveloped still perpetuate an international hierarchy between the ‘established’ states of the West and the ‘outsider’ states of the non-West.Footnote ²⁴ The emergence of ethnicity as a supplementary category was central to the recalibration of these long-standing hierarchies in more abstract and universalistic terms: by absorbing the residual cultural content of the nation-state and confining this to the domestic space, the concept of ethnicity allows states from all over the world to appear as interchangeable ‘like units’. International hierarchies thus cease to be grounded on civilisational or racial differences and are instead expressed in more rational and merit-based terms. What is lost in this ostensibly benign reframing, however, is the long history of colonial extraction and expropriation through which these international differences were constituted in the first place. In facilitating a more culture-neutral understanding of international hierarchies, the concept of ethnicity also sweeps the legacies of imperialism under the carpet.

Last but not least, the universalisation of ethnicity has opened the door to new modes of discrimination between national groups, even as the formal equality of these groups is acknowledged. Two salient examples of this are the ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse and the new differentialist racism, both of which are grounded on notions of culture or ethnicity rather than race. These new discourses are often cloaked in superficially antiracist premises – such as protecting the cultural diversity of the world – yet they also feed into essentialist understandings of culture difference that legitimate discriminatory practices. Such post-racial and postcolonial patterns of prejudice are no doubt less objectionable than their imperial precursors, yet their ostensibly antiracist guise also renders them more resistant to critique.

The Ethnos of the Earth

Ethnicity, then, is far from the neutral or apolitical concept that it is typically presumed to be. In fact, it is precisely the non-ideological guise of this concept that is the source of its ideological power: it is the ability of ethnicity to present itself as a seemingly transhistorical and value-free category that underlies both its rapid dissemination in the twentieth century and its ability to gloss over the contradictions of the international order. Yet this argument, in turn, throws up a new set of thorny theoretical questions: If ethnicity is not the transhistorical category it purports to be, then what are the conditions of possibility of demonstrating this? If the historicisation of nations, races, and tribes is predicated upon the naturalisation of ethnicity as the transhistorical ground for their historicisation, then what is the ground for historicising ethnicity itself?

To try and address these questions, this final section draws inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth to conduct a speculative etymological analysis of the term from which ethnicity derives: the ancient Greek ‘ethnos’. To be clear, the goal of this etymological exercise is neither to discover the ‘original’ meaning of ethnicity nor to juxtapose an ideological concept of ethnicity to a supposedly non-ideological concept of ethnos. Such efforts would merely repeat the ideological move exercised by the concept of ethnicity itself, that is, of positing a new concept as the transcendental ground for the historicisation of an existing concept, and ultimately pave the way for an endless regression of historicisations. Instead, the purpose of the etymological procedure is to unsettle the taken-for-grantedness of ethnicity by opening this concept to a broader range of historical and potential meanings. Hence, even as the notion of ethnos facilitates the denaturalisation and historicisation of the concept of ethnicity, it is not posited as the transcendental ground of this operation. Instead, the notion of ethnos is developed as an ‘aconceptual concept’Footnote ²⁵ that marks both the possibility and limit of the concept of ethnicity. This aconceptual concept functions as a pragmatic ‘lever of intervention’ that enables a ‘regulated extension’ of the meaning of ethnicity while keeping in touch with the existing system.Footnote ²⁶ Through this strategic operation, the meaning of ethnicity is stretched to the point where its conceptual boundaries begin to break down, exposing the metaphysical presuppositions and sociohistorical processes that have gone into their formation.

Let us begin our etymological excursion with the uses of ‘ethnos’ in ancient Greece. Surveying the varied applications of this term, it quickly becomes clear that ‘ethnos’ had a diverse range of referents and served as a rather nebulous collective noun. In the works of Herodotus, for example, the word ‘ethnos’ could refer to almost any culturally, politically, or geographically defined grouping of people.Footnote ²⁷ Although ‘ethnos’ always referred to ‘a people, not a state’,Footnote ²⁸ it was also used by ancient Greeks to designate the population of a polis; the term ‘ethnos’ was thus deployed not only in a sociological or ethnographical sense, but also in a roughly legal or political sense to indicate citizenship of sorts (not unlike the words ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ today). In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, written several centuries earlier, the meanings of ‘ethnos’ are broader still, also including the ranks of the dead, groups of warriors, flocks of birds, herds of animals, and swarms of bees or flies – in short, any class of beings sharing a common identification.Footnote ²⁹

The etymological roots of the Greek ‘ethnos’ or ‘ἒθνος’ are shrouded in the mists of time. One hypothesis assumes that ‑νος is a suffix, which allows ἒθνος to be compared to ἒθος (signifying ‘custom’ or ‘usage’). This parallel suggests that ἒθνος, like ἒθος, derives from the proto-Indo-European root *suedʰ to which the suffix -νος (instead of -ος) has been added. At the core of *suedʰ is the third person reflective anaphoric pronoun *s(u)e which is roughly equivalent to the English ‘himself/herself/itself’ but which was also used to designate the speaker’s own social identity as in ‘oneself’ or ‘ourselves’. The expansion *d^h may derive from *d^heh₁-, meaning ‘to put’ or ‘to situate’. Based on this speculative reconstruction, ἒθνος might have originally meant something like the placement of beings on the basis of their similarity to one another, the grouping of things with their own kind. This meaning certainly resonates with the wide-ranging use of the term by Homer.Footnote ³⁰

The wide range of referents enjoyed by the term ‘ethnos’ in ancient Greece has uncanny parallels in the present. Although the concept of ethnicity today is primarily used with reference to national, racial, and tribal communities, it has also been applied to a variety of other human groupings. Some of its more unconventional referents include social elites such as London bankers,Footnote ³¹ military organisations,Footnote ³² the community of deaf people,Footnote ³³ the gay community,Footnote ³⁴ and people who are HIV/AIDS positive.Footnote ³⁵ The concept of ethnicity, as Carola Lentz notes, ‘functions like the joker in a card-game: it can be introduced into various play sequences, taking on the characteristics […] of the card it replaces’.Footnote ³⁶ In structural terms, the apparent contentlessness of ethnicity recalls what the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously described as a ‘floating’ signifier: a sign of ‘zero symbolic value’ and ‘therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever’.Footnote ³⁷ The concept of ethnicity would thus be a signifier without a signified, hovering over an empty space in the signifying structure.

And yet, the concept of ethnicity is not entirely devoid of content. This can be seen in the tendency to qualify certain referents – such as the military or the gay community – as ‘quasi-ethnicities’ or ‘quasi-ethnic communities’ rather than treat them as ethnic groups proper.Footnote ³⁸ Clearly, there are some uses of the concept that seem more natural or more appropriate, while others seem strange or unconventional. Despite its malleability, ethnicity still feels the gravitational pull of the concepts in relation to which it was articulated at the turn of the twentieth century – above all, the imperial triad of nation, race, and tribe. The empty space or structural void that the concept of ethnicity occupies is not a pure, abstract nothing, but the sublated product of the negation of certain concrete determinations: something was erased to create the structural void that ethnicity occupies, and the ghost of this something still haunts ethnicity from within. To make ethnicity ‘float’ away from these concrete historical moorings requires deliberate effort and belaboured justification. If ethnicity today seeks to constitute itself into the universal form of culture difference, there are nevertheless some differences that are different from this kind of difference. These deviant differences, which the concept of ethnicity struggles to hold within its grasp, are gathered up by the more expansive notion of ethnos. What the speculative notion of ethnos gestures at is a non-totalisable field of different kinds of differences that are structurally barred from entering the domain of ethnicity, yet which continually threaten to breach its ramparts all the same.

In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt conducts a similar etymological exercise for the term ‘nomos’. Tracing the uses of ‘nomos’ in ancient Greek sources, he identifies three primary meanings of this term: to take or appropriate, to divide or distribute, and to pasture or produce.Footnote ³⁹ These three meanings of nomos are not equal, but follow from one another in a determinate sequence where appropriation precedes distribution and distribution precedes production: ‘No man can give, divide, and distribute without taking.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Schmitt thus identifies land-appropriation as the primeval sovereign act which ‘constitutes the original spatial order, the source of all further concrete order and all further law’.Footnote ⁴¹ The act of land-appropriation orients the land-appropriating group both inward, toward the concrete sociopolitical order that it creates, and outward, toward other land-appropriating and land-owning groups.Footnote ⁴² It is worth quoting Schmitt’s discussion at length:

This originary meaning of nomos as a concrete spatial order was, however, ‘destroyed by a series of distinctions and antitheses. Most important among them was the opposing of nomos and physis, whereby nomos became an imposed ought dissociated from and opposed to is’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Through the elaboration of a conceptual opposition between nomos and physis, Schmitt argues, the meaning of nomos was transformed from a concrete spatial order into an abstract norm. A central aim of Schmitt’s work was ‘to restore to the word nomos its energy and majesty’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Schmitt’s speculative genealogy of nomos is not without problems. As critics have pointed out, Schmitt’s world view was deeply influenced by German conservative nationalist thought, and at times his theorisation of a primeval nomos strays close to a ‘blut und boden’ mentality that mythologises the earth as the privileged source of law and order.Footnote ⁴⁶ Despite his mystification of the relationship between the law and the land, however, Schmitt’s conception of nomos is by no means an essentialising or totalising one. For Schmitt, the sovereign act of appropriation is not only the constitutive force that founds the concrete order, but also, at the same time, the element of pure contingency that fractures that order from within and prevents it from ever constituting a self-enclosed totality. The act of appropriation is ‘a founding rupture’ that marks ‘a void in the closure of order immanent to itself’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The parallel between Schmitt’s concrete order thinking and Derrida’s insistence on the incompleteness of any conceptual system is evident here: every concrete order contains an immanent void, an outside on the inside, that opens the possibility of different appropriations and divisions of the earth.

‘Prior to every legal, economic and social order, prior to every legal, economic or social theory,’ Schmitt writes, ‘there is this simple question: Where and how was it appropriated? Where and how was it divided? Where and how was it produced?’Footnote ⁴⁸ It is in this spirit of concrete-order thinking that I wish to complement Schmitt’s speculative notion of nomos with a speculative notion of ethnos. If Schmitt’s nomos signifies a constitutive ordering of space, then ethnos signifies a constitutive ordering of beings. I refer deliberately to ‘beings’ rather than ‘people’ because the notion of ethnos should not be unthinkingly restricted to the sphere of living humans. The separation of the human from the animal, for instance, is an incredibly fraught distinction that in the modern era has been intertwined with discourses of racial hierarchy. A broader understanding of ethnos as the ordering of beings in general is also more in line with the flexible use of the term by Homer and the speculative proto-Indo-European etymology sketched out above.

This primeval meaning of ethnos, much like the primeval meaning of nomos, has been lost (or, perhaps, has never been found) due to the elaboration of a series of metaphysical antitheses stretching back to Aristotle’s opposition between ‘ethnos’ and ‘polis’. The meaning of ‘ethnos’ thus became associated with barbarian societies that lacked the political and legal institutions of the Greeks, while the polis came to be seen as a quintessentially Greek idea.Footnote ⁴⁹ From this point on, the term ‘ethnos’ and its derivatives have been repeatedly (though not exclusively) associated with an ‘other’ separated and dissociated from the ‘self’, whether this be heathens and pagans in the medieval period or national minorities and non-Western peoples today.Footnote ⁵⁰ To paraphrase Schmitt, it is time to restore to the word ‘ethnos’ its energy and majesty.

Seen in the light of a re-energised notion of ethnos, the transhistorical pretensions of ethnicity are exposed as a sham. Behind ethnicity’s apolitical and non-ideological veneer lies an unacknowledged configuration of appropriations, divisions, and productions – an ethnos of the earth – that is the condition of possibility of ethnicity as such. The concept of ethnicity is no true transcendental, but a contingent symptom of those concrete historical processes that have produced the present global order of nation-states. Even as ethnicity’s range of referents has expanded to embrace the darker side of the colour line and the lower rungs of the ladder of civilisation, it has also participated in the construction of new divisions and hierarchies. Above all, the concept of ethnicity has helped to erect a temporal boundary, a historical watershed, that segregates the states-system from its imperial past. It is this boundary work performed by the concept of ethnicity that allows the international order to take on a universalistic guise and to engulf the earth as a whole.

No ethnos is eternal. Like the imperial order that preceded it, the international order, too, must come to an end. On some level, it already has. In a Derridean twist, the emergence of ethnicity signals as much the end as the beginning of the international order: the concept of ethnicity is not only a ‘filler’ category that imbues the states-system with an aura of coherence and totality, but also, at the same time, a symptom of an inassimilable heterogeneity that discloses this system’s contingency and incompleteness. As a phenomenon that resists absorption and assimilation, ethnicity signals the impossibility of the congruent nation-state, shattering the national space into a multiplicity of ethnic groups and exposing the limits of the international order. Over time, these indigestible differences will coalesce into oppositions, before maturing into contradictions that will impel the eventual breakdown of this order. The work of deconstruction has always-already begun.