Ragion di stato democratica e governance delle emergenze: un approccio multidisciplinare allo studio delle istituzioni

The expression “Reason of State” belongs to the language and the political culture of the late Renaissance period. Still today, this expression is commonly used to mean recourse to force or, at any rate, to exceptional instruments on the part of a subject of political power who acts out of the need to keep personal command and to guarantee law and order within society. Beginning from the early 1980s a wide number of studies questioned the conceptual association between Machiavelli and reason of state as well as Friedrich Meinecke’s interpretation of ratio status as machtpolitik. This new scholarship described reason of state as an art of government expressing a specific sensibility toward the state and aimed at defining the techniques for its management and preservation. By following this new tradition of study, I will discuss the relations between democracy and reason of state in order to further an interpretation of contemporary democracies as “emergency democracies”. Democratic reason of state will not be interpreted as the constitutional exercise of exceptional powers in extreme necessity but as the recourse to emergency policies in recurrent and enduring crisis. The article will thus discuss the relations between reason of state, democratic institutions and global governance in order to debate the role of democratic reason of state within the broader framework offered by security governance international programs