The Global War on Terror and liberal universalism: reflections through Carl Schmitt

Abstract

Fundamentally based on Carl Schmitt´s Nomos of the Earth in the international law of the ‘ius publicum Europaeum’, the article points to reflect on the Global War on Terror spatiality and the universalist discourse that accompanied it. Through its reading, contemporary scholars have asserted that Global War on Terror is the liberal war par excellence. Effectively, the liberal discourse that was established with the US world hegemony imposed a universalism that erased the possibility of wars with political objectives and transformed them in police actions carried on in the name of humanity. In the case of Global War on Terror, this moral and abstract universalism entailed also a spatial one which demolished the existent borders and put the global space available for preventive American interventions. This way, an order sustained on the vocation of global homogenization by the establishment of a unique particular socio-political model (liberal democracy), which does not recognize its political nature and hide itself behind ambiguous normative abstractions, was put on the spot light.