O mundo-fronteira

Abstract

Paulo Arantes explores the original image of frontier that was born with modernity and reflects on its consequences in geopolitics today. The starting point is Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's thesis that the attacks of September 11 marked the symbolic end of the "age of the space" and inaugurated an age of permanent vulnerability that he calls "global frontierland”. Arantes recovers the Schmittian theory of the "nomos of the Earth" to explain the ongoing transformation. He is mainly interested in the power of demystification of modern liberal thought that the frankness of that German reactionary jurist offers. After all, his theory of the intrinsic link between legal order and spatial roots allows us to recognize in the discovery of the New World and in the colonial experience the precondition for the establishment of jus publicum europaeum, of the mutual recognition of European sovereign states and of the consequent rationalization and decriminalization of war proper to the constitution of capitalism. Against the backdrop of the globalizing euphoria of contemporary ideology, Schmitt's theory reveals how the organic core of capitalism and its colonial periphery arise together and must end up apart, for the gap between the two would be constitutive. The second consequence drawn is that if the foundation of the rule of law in Europe is its reverse overseas, this process is also coetaneous with a thinking along global lines. It is in this context that Arantes seeks to reflect on the novelty identified by Bauman and already sensed by Schmitt in the post-war period with the emergence of a national power outside Europe that starts to claim authority over a space that is no longer national. Demarcating a new global line called "Western Hemisphere", the US would also inaugurate a new concept of sovereignty that disregards the old notion of territorial annexation and dismantles the intrinsic relationship between law, state, and territoriality - a process that goes back to both the exhaustion of the bloody expansion on the US frontier and the overwhelming war victory of the young American nation at the conclusion of the World Wars at the gates of the Atomic Age. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Bush administration's foreign policy abuses appear to be only the most recent and striking manifestations of this new historical paradigm in which everything has become a frontier and whose hallmark is the generalization of the state of siege. (Abstract by Artur Renzo).