Reason of state: a latent force between the realm of rules and that of necessity

For the noble-minded, this is a dramatic awakening; yet, as the contemporary geopolitical landscape unequivocally demonstrates, power, danger, the ‘actual truth of the matter’ and the grey area that has always shrouded politics have once again burst onto the scene – and with them a concept as controversial as one might wish, yet one that is inseparable from the very heart of politics: raison d’état. In a book recently published by Liberilibri, Riserva di carica. La ragion di stato e il fondamento del potere, Lorenzo Castellani imagines the state as an automatic watch that possesses, precisely, a ‘power reserve’ enabling it to function even when we remove it from our wrist. Leaving the metaphor aside, raison d’état would be this ‘latent energy that dwells at the heart of the political machine, invisible as long as the pulse of normality keeps the cogs turning, sovereign when the motion seizes up’. The exception is not a marginal incident, but the moment when the reserve is activated and power ceases to flow silently behind the face of legality, revealing its fundamental task: to decide how the state must survive and at what cost’.

After the Second World War, the liberal-democratic West experienced a long period during which it seemed that every conflict could be resolved through discourse, by applying established procedures; some even took seriously the Habermasian utopia of ‘Herrschaftsfreiheit’ – freedom from power, precisely, the idea that power is legitimate only to the extent that it renders the exercise of force superfluous, which is tantamount to negating itself as power. Yet this is no longer the case today. Both domestically and in international relations, states once again find themselves having to contend with ‘necessity’: terrorism, the erosion of social bonds, socio-cultural fragmentation, hybrid wars and full-scale wars. In short, everything suggests that the political order is once again in peril and that the political dimension – let us even say ‘the political’ as such, with its autonomy from morality and law – is returning to centre stage. Machiavelli, Botero and Hobbes, to name but a few, certainly belong to bygone eras. The primacy they attributed, in various ways, to necessity over the rule of law has gradually been undermined by constitutionalism – that is, by the desire to confine all power within a binding legal framework. This is undoubtedly a huge step forward in terms of civilisation, but it must not blind us to the dangers that are once again threatening the political community. As the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran demonstrate, international law counts for little when there is no ‘force’ capable of enforcing it; the new technologies at our disposal make hybrid wars possible, capable of inflicting incalculable damage on the ‘enemy’ without any need for bombs or tanks; which means that we are once again grappling with the state of necessity, that the arcana imperii are still at work, and that even in free societies it is unthinkable that everything should take place in the open. This raises a question: in this new political landscape – and I am thinking above all of us in the West – will we still be able to uphold the principle of raison d’état without completely undermining the constitutional principles we have established for ourselves?

Many signs coming out of Trump’s America suggest that a brutal logic of force is gaining the upper hand. Democracy and technology are no longer compatible, some say (Peter Thiel). In Europe, by contrast, as if intoxicated by high-sounding words such as peace, diplomacy or international law, we are burying our heads in the sand, incapable not only of grasping the ‘necessity’ that looms over us all, but even of distinguishing between the victims and the aggressors.

By revisiting the theme of raison d’état, Castellani strives in every way to convey to us something structural about modern politics. As stated in a very fine passage, ‘there is the time of the rule: slow, repetitive, regulated, marked by procedures and competences. And there is the time of necessity: sudden, harsh, discontinuous, in which the order is called upon not only to function, but to save itself. Reason of state lies precisely on the ridge between these two times. It does not coincide with the normal life of institutions, yet it is not alien to them. It is not the opposite of legality, but its permanent shadow. It is not an accidental pathology of the political sphere, but rather the extreme possibility that the political sphere carries within it from the very moment it establishes itself as a separate order, endowed with its own ends and its own instinct for self-preservation’. If this raison d’état is once again becoming visible today, it is because it has never ceased to operate, not even when, in some respects commendably, we sought to subject it to the power of the law.