Does Europe Have a South? An Essay on Borders

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.