The laws of war and the state of the American exception

This article examines the US response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks using CarlSchmitt’s concept of the exception. It argues that the Bush administration’s response isconsistent with Schmitt’s view, which argued that US policy continued the historical practiceof drawing lines that separated ‘civilisation’ from zones of exception where the normal lawsgoverning warfare did not apply. This suggests that the state of exception declared after 9/11is not contingent on the rise and fall of the terrorist threat, rather it is the latestmanifestation of ‘global linear thinking’ and therefore a permanent feature of Americanhegemony. However, the article does not accept this pessimistic conclusion. US policy since9/11 fits squarely with a Schmittian explanation only because conservative nationalists haveused the war on terror to help reconstruct a sense of American ‘exceptionalism’. Analternative reading of how American liberalism should respond to terrorism can be foundin the manner in which the Bush administration’s policy was rejected by the US SupremeCourt.