EIR, Xmas Eve 2025
The “protection” of free speech has become its subversion: authorities intervene to safeguard the principle by employing the very discretionary powers that hollow out speech in practice. Liberalism survives as ritual and language, but not as lived political reality. The result is a hollowed, brittle political order – procedurally dense, epistemically constrained and globally entangled – where the exception is no longer a moment of crisis, but the durable architecture of governance itself.
Warwick Powell, below
What, you didn’t hear of the EU move against Colonel Jacques Baud, for airing The Wrong Views On Ukraine (as discussed in the opening minutes of John Mearsheimer’s Xmas Eve appraisal of US foreign policy 1 ) – in Guardian, Telegraph, Independent or BBC? Only kidding. I know for a fact you didn’t. I just did searches – Baud sanctioned by EU […] – on all four, plus Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, only to draw null returns on each. 2
Apropos of plenty, let me introduce the late Carl Schmitt, a German jurist and political theorist who, rather like Machiavelli, wrote extensively on the effective exercising of political power. An authoritarian, he opposed parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism, and is best known for his dictum that when sovereignty is confronted by contradictions in its claims to legitimacy, it reserves the right to declare the exception.
Two things, however, constrain the EU in this regard. One is its structure – not least because it fails Max Weber’s test of having a monopoly on violence 3 – and the other its liberal ideology, loudly declared. Both, say Warwick Powell in this short but insightful analysis, 4 throw light on, inter alia, the persecution of Colonel Baud. 5 They can’t jail him, or have him committed to an asylum, for Voicing Incorrect Views so they do the next best thing …
Liberalism’s Denouement in Europe’s Permanent State of Exception
From Schmitt to Agamben in an Age of Administrative Power
Preface: the completion of this essay was spurred on by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent sanctioning of EU officials in the name of punishing European curtailment of ‘free speech’, which comes hot on the heels of the EU’s own sanctioning of Swiss citizens for their speech-acts concerning the war in Ukraine. The core ideas articulated here, that the political west has now moved into what Agamben called a permanent state of exception, is rammed home by these recent events.
This presages a series of essays, which hopefully will be completed during the first couple of months of 2026, which reflect on the situation in the U.S. and Europe – the transatlantic political west – as a way of thinking about the political situation we face globally. Some cross-civilisational philosophical reflection is entertained as I explore some dimensions of a post-liberal or non-liberal frame. Meanwhile, let’s see where Schmitt and Agamben takes us as we close out 2025.
Europe today is not sliding into authoritarianism in the dramatic fashion familiar from twentieth-century history. There is no Reichstag fire, no formal declaration of emergency, no suspension of constitutions accompanied by martial rhetoric. Instead, power advances obliquely, through regulations, sanctions lists, funding conditionality, judicial reinterpretations, and “technical” compliance mechanisms. What we are witnessing is not the return of Carl Schmitt’s sovereign decision in its classical form, but something more elusive, and in many ways more corrosive: a permanent, unacknowledged state of exception assembled through administrative salami slicing.
The European Union’s recent sanctions on non-EU citizens, including Swiss nationals such as Jacques Baud; the escalating debate over banning Germany’s AfD; the routine withholding of funds from non-compliant member states; and the EU’s increasingly overt involvement in elections and political outcomes in neighbouring states such as Georgia and Moldova all point in the same direction. The question is no longer simply what Europe is doing, but how power is exercised; and why it now takes this administrative, indirect form.
To understand this moment, Carl Schmitt remains indispensable. But Schmitt alone is insufficient. Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the permanent state of exception more precisely captures the mechanics of power at work today, especially in a Europe characterised by fragmented sovereignty, institutional multiplicity and unresolved political contradictions.
Decisionism Without Declaration
Schmitt famously defined sovereignty as the power to decide on the exception. In his account, politics reveals its true nature when legality is suspended in the name of necessity. The sovereign steps outside the law in order to save it. This decision is visible, dramatic and unmistakably political. The exception marks a rupture between normality and emergency. It is when the friend / enemy distinction is brought into sharp relief, and given tangible effect.
Yet contemporary Europe presents a paradox. Exceptional measures proliferate, but no one explicitly admits that an exception exists. Sanctions regimes extend beyond wartime logic and beyond territorial jurisdiction; political parties are discussed not in terms of program or policy but existential risk; speech is regulated through security doctrines rather than any sense of public contestation. Still, everything proceeds under the banner of legality, norms and values.
The decisive moment has not vanished, but it has been decomposed. Decision is no longer concentrated in a single sovereign act, but dispersed across committees, agencies, courts, banks, regulators and funding mechanisms. Power is exercised continuously rather than episodically, preemptively rather than reactively. Each step appears minor, reversible and technical. Just bureaucracy in action; nothing to see here. Taken together, however, they amount to a standing exception.
Schmitt anticipated that liberalism would eventually be forced to decide. What he did not anticipate was liberalism’s capacity to decide without acknowledging that it has done so.
Agamben and the Administrative State of Exception
Agamben’s contribution is to show how modern power no longer suspends law openly, but incorporates emergency into normal governance. The exception becomes permanent, while remaining formally invisible. Law persists, but as a flexible instrument rather than a binding limit.
Rights, under this regime, are not abolished. They are conditionalised. They remain valid in principle, but their practical exercise is contingent on administrative approval, behavioural compliance and political alignment.
Europe today offers a textbook example of this dynamic.
Across the EU, rights increasingly function as privileges contingent on conduct.
Financial exclusion through sanctions regimes illustrates this vividly. Individuals and organisations placed on sanctions lists – often without judicial process – are effectively expelled from economic life. Bank accounts are frozen, payment systems denied and employment foreclosed. This is not punishment following conviction; it is preventive incapacitation. One remains legally free, yet materially excluded …
You’ve read 700m words of a 2500 worder. Read the rest, and take in some startling graphics, on Dr Powell’s substack …
* * *
- Though I’m with Mearsheimer and the Colonel on causes of the Ukraine war, the former rightly argues that whether or not the latter is correct is beside the point.
- As regards the EU, here’s what I wrote on June 24, 2016:
Yesterday I gave my pencilled cross to a corrupt institution that only last year condemned millions of Greeks to a poverty they’d done nothing to deserve, and has plotted and connived behind our backs to subvert popular will in the name of TTIP. I voted Remain despite the self serving case made for it by the bulk of the British and international ruling class, and despite finding the arguments of most on the centre left lacking depth and factual knowledge, and frequently illogical with it.
I found the principled case against the EU made by Lexit (socialists for exit) more closely argued and knowledgeable than Remain arguments. What Lexit did not persuade me of, however, was how at this juncture leaving the EU will better the conditions of working people. The situation we awoke to this morning was arrived at by a debate whose terms have been framed entirely by atavistic elements and instincts that have nothing to do with workers’ rights or protection of living standards.
There is a case for leaving the EU but we’ve barely heard it. We’ve left in the worst possible circumstances …
- It might be argued however that insofar as the EU becomes increasingly the political wing of NATO, Weber’s test of state power will grow less crisply applicable.
- I’m yet again indebted to reader Dave Hansell, this time for alerting me to Warwick Powell’s Boxing Day essay.
- Today Jan Oberg at Transnational Foundation for Peace introduces a post with the kicker – If Baud, then we are all potential targets now! – and this opener:
Jacques Baud’s case is mind-boggling. A Swiss citizen, a former NATO, OSCE and UN-related author who relies mainly on Western sources, has been sanctioned by the European Union. There is no evidence that he worked with or for Russia. His “crime” is interpretation: offering analyses that diverge from the official NATO/EU narrative. There is also no legal process.
This is not an anomaly—it is a window into how censorship now operates in Europe. Baud’s exclusion reveals a hidden architecture of narrative discipline, one that citizens must urgently understand if democracy is to survive.
For an explanation of the everyday practical impact of these sanctions – as well as the Kafkaesque nature of the process – this 51:57 interview of EU sanctioned German journalist and EU/German citizen Huseyin Dogru by Pascal Lottaz provides a gripping insight into the increasing Malice in Blunderland world of Liberal Postmodernism applied on the Home Front:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LeNcOJz6J4
“You have to understand that sanctions are an extra judicial mechanism.
– There is no court.
– There is no hearing.
– There is no right to defence.
– There is no right for a lawyer, nothing.”
– Huseyin Dogru interviewed by Pascal Lottaz
Not unlike the Labour Party Discipline and Grievance procedures and processes, which themselves appear to be well on the way to being grafted wholesale onto the UK judicial system.
Moving on, apart from the very obvious parallels with identity politics classifications (with it’s manufactured hierarchies of oppression) and the ‘salami slicing’ techniques Warwick Powell identifies, what stands out from this piece is that both the EU and US bureaucracies are in the early rounds of using what Powell describes against each other.
In effect, Liberal Popstmodernism is going head to head with itself. It might be a good idea to get the popcorn in while any of us still have a bank account.
Bugger! That should read “Postmodernism”.
Is it possible to add an edit facility?
I would have fixed this were ‘popsmodernism’ not too good to alter. But I’ll look into plug-ins that allow readers to edit comments after posting.
I liked it too – it added the necessary bit of irreverence the the irrelevance of the whole idiotic concept and its promoters.
Well that’s two of us who enjoyed a chuckle, Dave. All the same, postmodernism at its best – a Michel Foucault, say, in works like Discipline and Punish – casts useful light, when abstracted from EU specificity, on the creeping reality Dr Powell describes:
That ‘salami slicing’ has been a key defining feature of organisational structure across the Western ‘public’ (sic), Corporate and third/voluntary/NGO sectors these past forty years or so – as the oft linked Yorkshire Ranter article/series on “Coasian Hell” details.
Ditto in terms of identity politics – captured in both the cartoon you occasionally feature and Jonathan Pie’s “Woke Utopia” polemic.
That it should also be the key defining feature of administrative decision-making and classification to maintain Official Narrative and other Control mechanisms is no surprise.
There’s a PhD thesis in there somewhere for someone in all this.