Decolonial Shocking Surprises: (Walter Mignolo’s “appropriation” of Carl Schmitt).

In March 2026, Harald Kümmerle published an article on TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research titled “Carl Schmitt Afterlife in Decolonial Theory: Rereading Walter Mignolo”. The article is an outcome of a reading group organized by Kümmerle. His motivation for running a group that lasted from April 2024 to February 2025 was to examine the reach and impact of Carl Schmitt’s ideas—both within mainstream conservative circles (for example, those associated with JD Vance, the current U.S. vice president) and across leftist and decolonial academic communities.

Kümmerle reports that, during these sessions, some participants (mostly Germans, as he notes) were surprised—“if not shocked”—when he observed that Walter Mignolo, the decolonial thinker under discussion, had welcomed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. My concern is less with the charge itself than with what is assumed but left unsaid in its framing: that the invasion must be rejected, while NATO’s eastward expansion and the conditions that Russia presents as “root causes” are either ignored or treated as irrelevant. The devil is in what goes unspoken.

I. Context: What Kümmerle Says Happened

Before returning to my main discussion of Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth and how it relates to Kümmerle’s perspective, I want to take a detour—this entire newsletter—to revisit the paragraph in which he frames the episode:

“Seeking to understand Schmitt’s lasting and conflictual influence—including his appropriation by prominent critical area studies scholars such as Naoki Sakai—I organized a reading group at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) from April 2024 to February 2025. The thinkers whose reception of Schmitt we examined also included Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo, one of the most prominent figures of the Latin American decolonial school. As it became clear both from circulated manuscripts and from the discussion at the workshop De-centering Academia: InterAsian Perspectives at the DIJ (13 September 2024), Mignolo’s work has served as a reference point for several participants of Shaping Asia, an interdisciplinary research network exploring connectivity, comparisons, and collaborations across Asian societies. When I explained in my own presentation during the workshop that Mignolo had welcomed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as harbinger of a new multipolar world order, some German participants who had previously invoked Mignolo for their own arguments were surprised, if not shocked.”
(emphasis added).

Kümmerle is a German citizen based in Tokyo, and he emphasizes that German participants in the reading group were shocked. There is no mystery about how many Germans (and many Europeans) currently feel about Russia. I am Argentinian born (and an Argentinian citizen) and also a U.S. citizen; my perspective is not the same as that of someone formed within German or European political sensibilities. What I mean is simple: Kümmerle’s framing implicitly measures my position against expectations intelligible within a German/European horizon—as if that horizon were universal, unless one assumes that the rest of the planet “should” feel the same toward Russia as those participants in the reading group (and, most likely, Kümmerle himself).

Seen from a decolonial perspective, the surprise begins to look less like an intellectual discovery than a projection of Kümmerle’s own thoughts and sentiments (to paraphrase Quobna Ottobah Cugoano).

After Hegel, many Europeans held on to the belief that Europe is the center of the world and the “present” of time—and that idea still lingers. That may also be why it stings, for some Europeans, when a U.S. president (including Donald Trump) brushes them off. None of this makes me a Trump supporter, and it certainly does not oblige me to join Germany’s or the EU’s Russophobia.

The text of mine that Kümmerle cites is “The Explosion of Globalism and the Advent of the Third Nomos of the Earth,” in Globalization: Past, Present, Future, edited by Manfred B. Steger et al. (University of California Press, 2023).

Alternatively (or additionally), he may have had in mind my post “It Is a Change of Era, No Longer the Era of Changes” (January 29, 2023).

Both texts have attracted substantial critique—particularly, as far as I know, among German, Polish, and Ukrainian readers. When Kümmerle tells his readers that, in his presentation, he said that Mignolo had “welcomed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as harbinger of a new multipolar world order,” and that “some German participants … were surprised, if not shocked,” I paused and scratched my head.

Honestly, I was not aware that I was “welcoming” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I thought I was explaining (or at least sharing my understanding of) the reasons for the special operation—or invasion, in Western vocabulary. But even if, for the sake of argument, one insisted on that reading, why is that singled out as uniquely scandalous by those who condemn Russian barbarism while glossing over (or normalizing) centuries of Western brutality—colonial expansion, genocide, and the ongoing effort to preserve geopolitical and economic privilege?

The point is not to excuse violence; the point is to notice the asymmetry in moral outrage and the historical amnesia that often accompanies it.

I do know, however, that I have discussed what I understand as the “root causes” of Russia’s military action. I also know that “root causes” is a keyword in Russian narratives. But the mere presence of a term in Russian narratives does not, by itself, invalidate the claim that Russia demands those causes be addressed. In many Western accounts of the conflict, Russia’s stated demands are not engaged; they are dismissed. And I suspect that listening to Russian demands is enough, within the either/or logic of a zero-sum game, to brand someone “pro Russian.”

In my arguments, I have said that Russia’s military action in Ukraine is a signpost—not a harbinger—of an emerging multipolar world order, whether we like it or not, as a response to Western unipolar global designs. This is an issue I will return to in the next newsletter. What I can say with certainty is that Kümmerle reports that I welcomed the invasion as a harbinger of a new multipolar order. The fact that he said what I said does not mean that I said what he says I said.

I cannot verify what the German participants in the reading group actually felt at that moment, but it is plausible that they reacted with surprise or shock. More broadly, anti Russian sentiment has become normalized in much European public discourse since 2022. I also wonder whether there were non Japanese Asian participants in the group and, if so, how they received Kümmerle’s claim; his post mentions only the reaction of German participants.

I am neither trying to be clever or to play with words when I say that I can confirm only what Kümmerle wrote—not necessarily what he attributes to me as belief or intent. Here I am indirectly invoking Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s well known TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”.Her key point is simple: everything depends on where you begin. If you begin with the assumption that Africans were incapable of self governance, your story moves in one direction. If you begin by recognizing that imperial and colonial rule displaced, devalued, or dismantled indigenous systems of governance, your story shifts entirely.

In the same way, perspectives diverge depending on whether one begins from the premise that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked” or from the premise that it was preceded by a long chain of geopolitical pressures and escalations involving the United States, NATO, and the EU. Each starting point produces a different line of reasoning, and there is no shortage of arguments built on either premise.

At minimum, we should be able to consider more than one starting point; otherwise, we fall back into the familiar “either you’re with me or against me.” Decolonial thinking does not accept that frame. I am not “on your side,” and I am not “on theirs” either; that is your binary, not mine.
Critics of decolonial perspectives emerging from the South Ibero American decolonial school—whether from the left, the right, or the center—often return to Western style binaries and a zero sum mentality. Decolonial thought does not fit neatly into those boxes and does not play by those rules. Much of the misunderstanding (and perhaps the frustration) begins there.

This helps explain why some German participants, for example, might be unsettled when a discussion of Ukraine does not automatically become a one sided allocation of blame—at which point disagreement is read as “pro Russian.” Something similar happens in discussions of Israel/Palestine: if you criticize Israeli state policies toward Palestinians, some will rush to label the critique antisemitic; conversely, others collapse any attention to Hamas’s violence into an accusation of being “pro Israel.”

In polarized debates, anti Zionism and antisemitism are also too often conflated, even though they are not the same thing. In binary argumentation, each side tends to hide its own baggage; it almost has to, especially when the goal is persuasion rather than understanding. Decolonially this dynamic is embebed in the “rhetoric of modernity.” The difference now is that more people are refusing to play by those rules—and the old game is no longer the only one in town.

This is where dewesternization becomes central—both in Russia’s so called “special operation” and in what I see as U.S. and Israeli attempts to restore Western dominance—as 500 years of Westernization (what Schmitt called the second nomos of the Earth) draw to a close. Schmitt thought that era ended after World War I.

For Quijano and those influenced by his framework (including myself), the second *nomos (*which is not Quijano´s word) closed with the fall of the Soviet Union—and with it, the West’s mistaken belief that Westernization would continue indefinitely. Once dewesternization began to generate its own narratives and rules of the game, it triggered a Western countermove: efforts to re Westernize and to preserve long standing privileges.

II. A U.S. and European Commissioned Example: “Decolonizing Russia” as Policy Discourse

One more point before I circle back to Kümmerle’s claims about Mignolo’s “appropriation” of Schmitt. Consider the Commission on Security & Cooperation in Europe—better known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission. On June 23, 2022, it held a briefing titled “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative.” The transcript is available here. https://www.csce.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/0623-Decolonizing-Russia-A-Moral-and-Strategic-Imperative.pdf. Two dparagraphs worth quoting from the transcript:

“Today’s discussion … [is] to look at the foundational reasons for Russia’s aggressive and brutal foreign policy that [has] leaving innocent people dead, displaced, and hurt in ways difficult to imagine. Investigating those reasons will help us craft policies and come up with ideas that will contain Russia and make a long term peace on the Eurasian continent and beyond be possible. … Without addressing the core of this, we’ll only be applying a Band Aid to [a] wound that will inevitably start gushing blood—in this case, literally.”

The rhetoric is unmistakable; there is no need to labor the point. A familiar tactic is to paint the enemy as monstrous, thereby securing one’s own moral standing behind an unquestioned truth. Acolytes celebrate the condemnation; others, seeing the move, respond with distrust. Such an approach also dismisses the necessity of listening: what would be the point of listening to a “monster”? If the other is a monster, the only “solution” becomes elimination.

What I am saying is not original. It has been noted repeatedly by U.S. scholars and public intellectuals such as John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs, who often try to explain the conflict in terms of strategic interests and escalation dynamics rather than moral denunciation, yet are frequently labeled “pro Russian” or accused of echoing President Vladimir Putin’s narrative. Recall Adichie’s point about binary opposition and zero sum thinking: these habits are deeply embedded in much of the discourse.

I recognize the Helsinki Commission’s objectives just as I recognize Russia’s stated claim to safeguard its national security in response to NATO’s eastward expansion. My question is straightforward: why is the Commission so concerned with “European security” while denying Russia the legitimacy of having comparable security concerns? Does Russia not have the right to feel threatened by Western policies, or is national security treated as an exclusive right of Western states?

Since the late twentieth century, Western strategy has repeatedly assumed that post Soviet Russia could be sidelined. With Vladimir Putin’s project of rebuilding the Russian Federation after 2000, the imperative shifted, in many policy circles, toward “containing Russia.” The trajectory toward the 2014 conflict in Ukraine—after earlier confrontations in Georgia—was, in that sense, a foretold confrontation.

Now, the second (and more explicit) paragraph:

“And that brings us to the subject of today’s discussion, the issue of decolonizing Russia. Russia’s barbaric war in Ukraine has exposed the Russian Federation’s viciously imperial character … Let me make it clear: Ukraine is not the first. And, if left unchecked, it won’t be the last instance of this. The Russians for decades now have waged wars on people [in] Chechnya, Syria, [and] Georgia. This aggression also is catalyzing a long overdue conversation about Russia’s interior empire, giving Moscow dominion over many indigenous non Russian nations, and the extent to which the Kremlin has taken to suppress their national self expression and self determination.”

When I first saw that title and then read the paragraph above, I was unsure whether it was meant seriously or tongue in cheek. How could the U.S. Helsinki Commission—a body focused on security and cooperation in Europe—take on “decolonizing Russia” as a moral and strategic mission? And how does this square with criticisms of decoloniality that accuse it of “similarities” with the far right, or with the “appropriation” of a thinker associated with Nazism, as Schmitt was?

The language of “moral imperative,” coming from institutions that have benefited from centuries of Westernization, reads to me less like ethical clarity than an attempt to preserve the perks of the second nomos of the Earth (Schmitt’s framing of the post 1500 order). Beyond Adichie’s point, it is also instructive to revisit the neoliberal geopolitical strategies outlined in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Strategic Imperatives (1997), where Georgia and Ukraine are identified as pivotal points in an anticipated Western push eastward toward Central Asia.

By the 1970s, Carl Schmitt was already sensing that the post 1500 order was winding down and speculating—mid–Cold War—about what might follow as a “third nomos.” He sketched (at least) three scenarios: (1) a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower (either the United States or the USSR/Russia); (2) a multipolar order in which several powerful states or blocs compete for influence, often framed through his concept of Großraum (great space); and (3) a fragmented world marked by weak centralized authority and intensified regionalization.

I think we are living amid a mixture of the second and third scenarios. Two elements, however, are missing from Schmitt’s account—largely because he could not have witnessed them: the rise of dewesternization as a force remapping the global order, and the rise of decoloniality as a force remapping the public sphere.

On the emergence and rise of dewesternization, consider this passage from Thomas S. Wilkins’s review of Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (2008):
“In Chapter 4, ‘De Westernization and the return of history,’ the author buttresses his case for the relinquishment of the instruments of world order by the West. In some respects, this is an elaboration of the philosophical stance he propounded in Can Asians Think: Understanding the Divide between East and West (2008).

Once, Asians may have believed in the innate superiority of Western civilization. Now ‘the rest of the world has moved on … The mindsets of the largest populations within Asia—the Chinese, the Muslims, and the Indians—have been changed irrevocably.’”

It is unclear whether this reading was included in Kümmerle’s group in Japan; his post does not indicate it. Wilkins’s observation is broadly applicable to Russia as well, even though Mahbubani’s book does not focus extensively on the country. By 2008, Russia was already signaling a “return of history.” Vladimir Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference is often read in that register, signaling a shift toward Eurasianist framings and away from Eurocentrism.

III. Toward Kümmerle’s Charge: Schmitt, Mignolo, and “Appropriation”

I am now ready to address Kümmerle’s arguments about Schmitt and Mignolo more directly. But this newsletter has already grown longer than I intended. I will stop here and take up Kümmerle’s interpretation—and the broader question of “appropriation”—in the next newsletter.