Working paper produced within the TOLERACE project 1 Portuguese (post-)colonial situations, national identity and the

The colonial is thus the blind spot upon which the modern conceptions of knowledge and law are built. The theories of the social contract of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are as important for what they say as for what they silence. What they say is that modern individuals, that is, metropolitan men, enter the civil society. What they do not say is that a massive world region of the state of nature is thereby being created, a state of nature to which millions of human beings are condemned and left without any possibility of escaping via de creation of a civil society (Santos, 2007: 50). Within the twentieth-century colonial horizon of international relations, Nazism was a profound disruption of the global order; it brought the conventions of European imperialism and European racism into a colonial configuration that undermined the liberal template. Nazism conflated the distinction between European Nation and European Empire, confusing the so-called realm of order and civility and the so-called realm of chaos and savagery. […] In particular, the persecution and extermination of the Jews erased the global colour line, distorting the extant colonial and racial distinction between European and „non-European‟, white and „non-white‟. Within and against that context, a Eurocentric concept of racism emerged, concerned with confronting these excesses of „race ‟ –thinking‟, not thei