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.
Conditional Rights: Inclusion by Permission
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.
Speech follows a similar pattern. Expression is rarely banned outright, though there is some inching in that direction. Instead, it is algorithmically suppressed, administratively flagged as “disinformation,” demonetised or rendered institutionally illegible. The right to speak survives in abstraction, but its reach and consequence are quietly neutralised.
Political participation, too, is increasingly conditional. Surveillance of parties, NGOs and movements proceeds not on the basis of illegality but potentiality - what they might do if empowered. The AfD debate exemplifies this logic. The party is not primarily contested as a political opponent, but framed as a latent systemic threat. Politics gives way to prophylaxis.
Inclusion in the legal order is on perennial probationary terms, where the incumbents decide if you’re allowed to play and on what terms.
Administrative Privilege as Political Weapon
A defining feature of Europe’s silent exception is the weaponisation of administrative discretion.
Regulatory authorities now determine which organisations qualify as legitimate civil society actors, which media outlets are “trusted,” which research bodies are acceptable partners and which narratives are “foreign-influenced.” These classifications carry decisive material consequences - access to funding, platforms and institutional recognition - yet are framed as neutral, technical assessments.
Migration and residency regimes operate similarly. Legal status is rarely revoked outright. Instead, renewals are delayed, evidentiary requirements tightened, procedural hurdles multiplied. Individuals exist in prolonged administrative uncertainty, formally lawful, practically insecure.
Power here is not spectacular. It is procedural. Rights are not denied per se; they are endlessly deferred.
Financial Coercion and Conditional Sovereignty
The EU’s most potent administrative instrument is financial conditionality.
Recovery funds, cohesion funding and development grants are now routinely tied to broad, elastic criteria such as “rule of law,” “values,” or “institutional integrity.” These terms lack precise legal definition, granting wide discretionary power to the European Commission and its allies.
Hungary and Slovakia are the most prominent cases, but the precedent is now general. Financial flows that once functioned as mechanisms of economic integration are repurposed as tools of political discipline. Sovereignty is not abolished but it is financially rationed.
This logic extends downward as well. Universities, municipalities, NGOs and media organisations find access to EU funding contingent on alignment with approved narratives and policy priorities. Dissent is not prohibited; it is simply priced out.
Exporting the Exception: Elections Beyond the EU
Perhaps the clearest demonstration of Europe’s administrative turn is found not within the EU itself, but in its treatment of neighbouring states.
In countries such as Georgia and Moldova, the EU has increasingly positioned itself not merely as an observer of democratic process, but as an active arbiter of acceptable political outcomes. Elections are framed in advance as “tests” of European alignment. Parties and candidates are classified as pro-European or anti-European, democratic or suspect, legitimate or dangerous, often irrespective of their domestic political platforms.
Financial assistance, accession pathways, visa regimes, and institutional support are explicitly tied to electoral results and post-election policy trajectories. When outcomes deviate from expectations, the response is not neutrality but pressure: threats of suspended funding, frozen negotiations or political isolation.
What is striking is that this intervention is justified in the name of democracy itself. Electoral sovereignty is subordinated to a higher-order normative project defined externally. Voters may choose freely, so long as they choose correctly.
Here again, Agamben’s logic applies. These states are not excluded from the European legal-political order. They are included conditionally, as probationary members whose democratic agency is recognised only insofar as it aligns with predefined outcomes. This isn’t classic imperialism. Rather, it is straight-down-the-line administrative tutelage.
Multiple Sovereignties, Permanent Friction
These techniques arise from Europe’s unresolved sovereignty structure, which define the vectors of tensions and contradictions acting as centrifugal forces tearing at the European Project.
First, within member states, governing elites face growing resistance from electorates challenging established policy paths on migration, energy, war and economic distribution. Rather than reopening these questions politically, elites increasingly seek to manage outcomes administratively.
Second, between states, sovereignty remains contested. Hungary’s resistance over Ukraine financing is emblematic. The EU lacks the authority of a federal state, yet increasingly behaves as though it must enforce uniform political alignment.
Third, the European Commission exercises quasi-sovereign power without democratic accountability commensurate with that power. It governs through expertise, procedure, and regulation, which are the ideal tools of quiet coercion. The EC thus butts against the sovereign authorities of its member states.
In such a system, a Schmittian emergency declaration would be impossible. There is no single authority capable of declaring the exception, and no unified political community willing to accept it. Administrative salami slicing is therefore not merely preferred, it is structurally necessary.
Why There Is No Reichstag Fire
The absence of a dramatic rupture is not evidence of restraint. It is evidence of adaptation.
A Reichstag fire moment presupposes a unified sovereign capable of suspending legality in one stroke. Europe has no such actor. Instead, power advances incrementally, embedding exceptional measures within ordinary governance.
Each step appears defensible. Sanctions are imposed to protect security. Funding is conditionalised to uphold values. Election “guidance” is mobilised in the name of safeguarding democracy. And the surveillance of political parties is undertaken so as to “prevent extremism.”
Together, however, they transform the political order without ever naming the transformation. The exception is not declared. Instead it is administered. It simply emerges, piece by piece, one slice at a time.
Liberalism Consuming Itself
The deepest irony is that this transformation is not imposed from outside liberalism. It is liberalism’s own solution to its internal contradictions.
Liberalism promises neutrality and pluralism, yet depends on substantive commitments it cannot openly defend as political choices. When those commitments are challenged, or are demonstrated to be ‘not up to the task’, liberalism lacks a legitimate language of power. It cannot say, “We choose this order and will enforce it,” without betraying its self-image.
So coercion is reframed as compliance. Decisions are recoded as procedures. Politics is displaced by management. Orwellian double-speak becomes the norm.
As such, Agamben’s warning is sharper than Schmitt’s. When power no longer recognises itself as power, resistance becomes unintelligible. Opposition is not debated; it is classified. And classification, once normalised, knows no natural limit. Those who wield the classification pen can marginalise, contain and curtail.
The Judicial–Epistemic Dimension
This institutional and administrative reading of Europe buttresses our previous observations about the decay of the social and epistemic conditions of political dialogue. Speech is not merely regulated; it is filtered, pre-classified and rendered conditionally intelligible. Debates about free speech feel hollow because the very conditions under which speech is legible - audience, recognition, and institutional mediation - have been eroded. Habermas’ dream of dialogue has evaporated.
Courts, regulators, platforms and funding agencies now act as gatekeepers of intelligibility, determining which statements can register politically and which are administratively illegible. This produces a system in which formal rights persist, but capacity to exercise rights meaningfully collapses. Speech exists, but the audience, institutional support, and epistemic infrastructure necessary for dialogue no longer do.
Transnationalising the Administrative Exception
These dynamics are no longer confined to Europe. The news that US legislators, led by Senator Marco Rubio, have formally barred entry to EU and UK officials allegedly complicit in suppressing free speech illustrates a striking development: the administrative exception has now gone global. The silencers themselves are now to be silenced, in the name of protecting speech.
This is a reflexive and paradoxical logic. Officials who allegedly interfered with the epistemic conditions of debate - through regulatory interventions, funding restrictions or party surveillance - are themselves made subject to discretionary restriction. Rights are formal but conditional: entry into the US is now contingent on alignment with US-defined free speech norms. Power is exercised administratively, pre-emptively, and extra-judicially.
The Rubio move reveals a reflexive dynamic:
EU and UK officials condition rights and manipulate epistemic space to “protect democracy;”
The US imposes entry bans to sanction the misuse of authority;
Europe interprets this as external interference, justifying further internal administrative tightening; and
Reciprocal measures continue to proliferate, making the exception permanent, global, and mutually legitimised through procedure.
Conditional rights - whether to speech, mobility or political participation - are now transnationally contingent, dependent on recognition by multiple authorities. Political and epistemic agency is measured not only by domestic law but by compliance with extraterritorial standards.
Free Speech as a Tool of Administrative Governance
Ironically, the rhetoric surrounding these measures, both in Europe and the U.S., is about protecting free speech. Yet the method mirrors the mechanisms that suppress it: discretionary exclusion, pre-emptive sanction and administrative classification. Rights are maintained formally but hollowed out functionally; speech exists, but only insofar as it is intelligible, sanctioned and compliant with layered authorities.
This is meta-decisionism: discretionary power that was once used to condition speech is now itself subject to discretionary restriction. Administrative authority becomes both instrument and object of control, creating a system in which political agency is conditional, rights are provisional, and dialogue is structurally constrained.
The Globalisation of Epistemic Exceptionality
The Rubio sanctions reveal that the collapse of social and epistemic conditions for political dialogue is no longer confined to Europe. Administrative exception, conditionalised rights and managed intelligibility are now transnational phenomena. Political dialogue is increasingly structured by procedures, classifications and conditional permissions rather than open contestation or persuasion, if indeed these conditions were ever genuinely real.
The risk is increasingly systemic, in the political west at least. When the social conditions of intelligibility collapse, debate degenerates into procedural manoeuvres, sanctions and counter-sanctions. Rights discourse persists, but the capacity to exercise rights meaningfully diminishes. As Europe and the US intertwine their administrative mechanisms, even as they superficially ‘clash’, the exception becomes both permanent and portable, reshaping the political west’s global architecture of political speech, agency and governance.
Liberalism’s denouement
Europe’s tragedy, and now that of the wider liberal world, is that in seeking to avoid Schmitt’s decisive moment, it has institutionalised Agamben’s permanent exception. Rights persist formally, but intelligibility, agency and meaningful debate are conditional and precarious. Arguably they always were, but now their precarity - and perhaps even hypocrisy - is exposed for all to see. Administrative salami slicing governs not only bodies and institutions, but knowledge, legitimacy and even the social conditions of political dialogue.
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.
Liberalism’s unravelling is getting messy.