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Does Europe Have a South?: An Essay on Borders
- The Global South
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 2011
- pp. 37-50
- 10.2979/globalsouth.5.1.37
- Article
- Additional Information
The paper looks at the emergence of a new conception of “border” in the heyday of what Enrique Dussel has called “Eurocentric modernity.” Such new understanding of borders inaugurated not only a new ius publicum europaeum (Carl Schmitt) and a “modern” Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), but also a new epistemic category—the “south”—conceived (from the European north) as the necessary antithesis for that self-understanding of Europe and the West that we call “Eurocentrism.” In this sense—this paper proposes—the European south is intimately tied to a global south and inseparable from it: they are both the “state of exception” defining by antithesis the spirit and identity of Europe.