What do globalization and the war on terror share? The connection between these two frames for the present moment is easily obscured by the seemingly different levels of social reality they address: globalization names a broad and impersonal macroeconomic process, while war on terror evokes the military campaigns that the Bush regime has pursued in the name of responding to the September 11 attacks. This apparent difference echoes the one that Wendy Brown has observed between “neoconservatism,” the hawkish ideology of the Bush administration as it seeks to “intensify U.S. military capacity and increase U.S. global hegemony,” and “neo-liberalism,” which she understands as a “political rationality” of market intensification that began to build momentum as far back as the Reagan/Thatcher years.1 In contemporary usage, the war on terror fits neatly with the neoconservative political agenda, while globalization represents, in large measure, the process celebrated and promoted by neoliberalism. In this essay I will bring these two formations together through a specification of their common genealogy and their shared biopolitical aims. Together, as I will show, they have precipitated the telling collapse of liberal society’s traditional distinction between the internal and external enemy, as well as between the practices by which each is targeted: regulation and warfare, respectively. This collapse of internal and external threat is itself a consequence of precisely what globalization and the war on terror share: the unbounded surface of the earth as their territorial frame of reference.
