Geneva School neoliberals reconciled the tension between the world economy and the world of nations through their own distinct geography. Their global imaginary was sketched by the erstwhile Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in 1950. Schmitt proposed that ­there was not one world but two. One was the world partitioned into bounded, territorial states where governments ruled over ­human beings. This he called the world of imperium, using the Roman ­legal term. The other was the world of property, where ­people owned ­things, money, and land scattered across the earth. This was the world of dominium. The doubled world of modern capitalism coalesced in the nineteenth ­century. The ubiquity of foreign investment had made it routine for ­people to own all or part of enterprises in countries where they ­were not citizens and had never even set foot. Money worked almost anywhere and could be exchanged into and out of major currencies at the fixed rates of the gold standard. Contracts ­were enforced universally by written and unwritten codes of business conduct. Even military occupation did not affect private property. Unlike earlier eras of plunder, the land or business was still yours ­after the ­enemy army had swept through. To Schmitt, the division between dominium and imperium was more fundamental than the purely po­ liti­cal distinction of foreign and domestic.

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, loc. 50