Damn reason of state. It hasn’t disappeared; it’s back at work

In politics, force has returned with a vengeance to centre stage, yet almost no one dares to admit it openly. This resurgence is still obscured by the language of ‘processes’, ‘law’ and ‘governance’. More recently, euphemisms such as ‘protectionism’, ‘deglobalisation’, ‘weaponisation’ and ‘special operation’ have been used to describe conflict, as if the power at play were an embarrassing remnant of the ancien régime, destined to fade away in an era of technocratic neutralisation and economism. Yet, as soon as one looks at the actual functioning of power – at the management of emergencies, at foreign policy, at the cyclical construction and breakdown of the international order through wars – force re-emerges as a decisive criterion: the capacity to set a direction, to force alternatives, to impose hierarchies. For decades, liberal democracy was conceived as a means of overcoming the original conflict, as the taming of violence through law, procedures and representation; yet the present shows that force is not a relic of the past but a constitutive element that has simply shifted location, changing its actors and forms of expression.

Legal and political thought has always linked force to sovereignty, that is, to the power to decide on the state of exception. Under ordinary conditions, force is channelled through rules; in the state of exception, it is the rule itself that is suspended in order to safeguard the overall form of order. It is in times of crisis that it becomes clear who is truly capable of deciding, that is, of taking upon themselves the responsibility for an act of force. This power of exception does not coincide with visible violence: it is the faculty to select political possibilities, to close off certain avenues and open up others, to determine what is still feasible and what has become impossible. Force is not measured solely by the power of the means employed, but by the capacity to define the very realm of the possible. Constitutional democracy has sought to distribute this power, to disperse it amongst a set of bodies, procedures and checks and balances; and yet the figure of the one who ‘truly decides’ in an emergency continues to loom large, inevitable and elusive, because every political order experiences, sooner or later, the moment when the exception demands a figure – or a handful of figures – to take it upon themselves.

If one looks at the history of democracies from the perspective of power, a long process of containment emerges. However, containment does not mean annulment: every political decision retains an irreducible core of power. Closing a budget, imposing a tax sacrifice, redefining the hierarchy of collective priorities is always an act that favours certain interests and penalises others. The myth of politics reduced to mere technical management or the distribution of rights obscures this fundamental fact: behind every ‘optimal solution’ lies a choice involving the exercise of power, an asymmetry that determines who commands, who obeys, and who is sacrificed. In the art of governance, positive-sum games remain a utopia.

Parliamentary democracy has sought to transform force into a majority: as long as a decision is taken by a representative majority, force may appear to be a legitimate expression of the will of the people. But the translation is never complete. The relationship between force and law remains conflictual: the law seeks to rein in force, yet depends on force to be effective. A law without enforcement mechanisms, a judgement that is not enforced, a constraint that is formally accepted but effectively ignored – all reveal just how little the law can achieve without force to underpin it. Political power exists within this permanent paradox: on the one hand, it promises to limit force through the law; on the other, it knows that without force, the law is a harmless text. It is within this ambiguous space that the raison d’état is situated – a concept now condemned and forgotten – as a body of knowledge that takes seriously the continuity of the body politic even when the ordinary forms of legitimation falter.

The raison d’état is the noble doctrine that explicitly posits force as the very heart of political decision-making. It is not a theory of violence, but a theory of order. The question it poses is brutal and clear: what must be done to ensure that the state survives, sustains itself and prevails over the internal and external threats that besiege it? The answer is not measured by the purity of principles, but by the ability to hold the body politic together when every other form of legitimacy crumbles. Reason of State is the knowledge that enables those in power to choose between norms and necessity, between rights and security, between ideal consistency and the preservation of order. It is the grammar of force when force can no longer be concealed behind formalities. It is the language that those in power speak when they cease to delude themselves that they can govern history solely through the categories of law.

Over the last thirty years, ‘humanitarian’ wars and international police interventions have revealed the paradoxical nature of the use of force that purported to be free from the dictates of state policy. Afghanistan, Iraq and the Arab Spring have shown that military superiority does not guarantee political control. ‘Light’ warfare, conceived as surgical and limited, has produced heavy consequences, often contrary to those declared: failed states, ungovernable areas, widespread radicalisation. Force, deployed in the name of universalist values, has at times ended up eroding the very democratic and liberal legitimacy that it sought to export, blurring the distinction between intervention based on principle and the naked projection of power. Meanwhile, war has returned to the heart of Europe with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, dispelling in a matter of months the remaining optimism of those who believed the continent to be safe from high-intensity conflicts. Recent history has thus disproved the notion that force could be confined to the margins of the international system, as a residual tool in a context dominated by rules and interdependencies.

Vladimir Putin’s role in this process is emblematic. The Russian president has built his domestic legitimacy not only on the promise of stability and a return to greatness, but also on his willingness to use force in a visible, theatrical and demonstrative manner: from Chechnya to Georgia, from Crimea to the Donbas, right up to the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Force becomes a language of identity, a tool for reconstructing an imperial myth, the hallmark of a policy that presents itself as disenchanted, immune to the ‘weaknesses’ of liberalism. From this perspective, the raison d’état takes the form of a will to power that does not hesitate to sacrifice lives, wealth and international standing in order to maintain the continuity of domestic power and the narrative of a historic mission. The use of external violence reinforces, at least for a certain period, the internal contract between the state and society: force beyond the borders becomes a guarantee of force within them.

In a different context, Benjamin Netanyahu embodies another manifestation of the return of force. Israeli politics in recent years has been operating within a state that could be described as a permanent emergency, in which national security is not merely one issue amongst others, but the axis around which the entire institutional framework revolves. Military force is presented as a safeguard for survival, and war as a recurring and structural event, rather than a traumatic exception. This results both in a progressive distortion of the democratic system – the urgency of security drives a redefinition of rights, the balance of powers and spaces for dissent – and in an unscrupulous use of force and a willingness to disregard the provisions of international law. In this context, the raison d’état is not merely a cynical calculation within the corridors of power, but the mindset of a society that perceives itself as constantly exposed to an existential threat. Once again, force is not merely an action on the ground, but a criterion that reshapes the very forms of political coexistence and the hierarchy of lives deemed worthy of protection.

On the Western front, the story of Donald Trump signals a shift that is less military and more symbolic, but no less significant. The American leader has not only launched new wars, in the name of reasons of state and national security, after promising peace during his election campaign. He has also brought the language of force back to the centre of domestic political discourse. The language of confrontation, the simplification into terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, and the systematic delegitimisation of judicial and technocratic institutions are ways of reintroducing force into the domestic sphere – not as the direct use of coercion, but as the dissolution of that formal respect which previously kept the resort to exceptional measures in check. The threat not to recognise election results, the pressure on the administrative and judicial systems, and the reduction of the opponent to an internal enemy are already forms of potential violence: they define the limits of what is deemed acceptable in order to retain power. Here, the raison d’état takes on a domestic dimension: the state is identified with a leader and his political bloc, and force becomes the means of defending that identity against institutions and procedures perceived as obstacles to the achievement of political objectives. But when force is imposed domestically without pacifying society, it soon becomes a tool to be exported abroad. And the Trump case is proof of this.

These three cases cannot be equated in terms of context, background or institutional structure. Yet they are converging symptoms of a prevailing climate. In a world rife with open warfare, geopolitical crises, and economic and identity-related insecurities, force is once again emerging as a plausible – and at times inevitable – solution in the eyes of growing segments of public opinion. The idea that history is moving towards the gradual marginalisation of violence seems less convincing than it did thirty years ago. The rationale of state has not disappeared; it has simply set to work again: it governs energy choices, migration policies, military alignments, and definitions of security and the enemy. The promise of a politics free from the harshness of conflict is giving way to a politics that is once again thinking in terms of survival and power relations.

From the perspective of raison d’état, force is therefore not a moral issue but a structural element. It is what enables the state to defend itself not only against external enemies, but also against its own self-destructive tendencies: internal fragmentation, paralysis in decision-making, and the erosion of its capacity for leadership. Institutional politics may long harbour the illusion that it can postpone the use of force indefinitely, but there always comes a point where inaction itself becomes a decision to use force, because it surrenders the community to the forces that erode it. A power that does not know how to use force when necessary is a power that condemns itself to being overwhelmed by the forces of others, who are less hesitant and less scrupulous. Reason of state thus poses a question that the democratic conscience prefers to postpone: to what extent is it permissible to sacrifice principles, norms and customs in the name of the state’s continuity? What threshold cannot be crossed, even in the name of necessity? The critical point is the moment when force is laid bare, and the politician is forced to choose.

This choice is not made in the realm of abstract ideas, but within the concrete fabric of power relations. Power can take the form of military, police, fiscal or regulatory force; it can manifest itself as the power to strike or as the capacity to take away: freedom, wealth, rights, positions. It may be concentrated at the very top or dispersed across a constellation of institutions. It may be exercised openly or almost invisibly, through the manipulation of timing, constraints and opportunities. The raison d’état is the compass that indicates which means are considered viable, which limits may be crossed, and which sacrifices may be imposed. When a power faces a conflict, a terrorist threat or a systemic crisis, it is confronted with a range of possibilities that is not dictated by legal textbooks, but by the combination of available force and force deemed legitimate. At that point, politics ceases to be administration and returns to being decision-making, in the strongest sense of the term: to cut, to separate, to choose.

A political culture that refuses to consider the use of force and the reasons of state surrenders itself to the rhetoric of innocence and, consequently, to passivity. It imagines that history might be a realm of cost-free policies, of decisions with no losers, of balances without sacrifice. But when reality disproves this image, disappointment paves the way for two opposing and symmetrical paths: pure cynicism, which celebrates force as brutal domination, and impotent moralism, which condemns force in the name of principles it is unable to defend. The only alternative is a form of politics that recognises the necessity of force without turning it into an idol, and which regards the raison d’état as the point at which decision-making is measured against its limits.

Power in politics, then, is neither a mere accident nor a taboo, but the raw material from which institutions, orders and balances are built. The raison d’état is the knowledge that governs its use when all else fails, when the language of rights and procedures is no longer sufficient to conceal the harshness of the conflict. To think about politics is to reflect on this core issue: who holds power, under what conditions they exercise it, and what conception of the state they seek to preserve when they decide to assert it. Everything else, in the final analysis, is secondary. It is by the way in which a power addresses its relationship with force, and by the way in which it justifies its raison d’état, that the truth of a political civilisation is measured: whether it is capable of reconciling necessity and limitation, continuity and justice, survival and meaning. Whether it recognises that force is inevitable, but that precisely for this reason it cannot be left to its own devices.