Ragion di stato democratica e governance delle emergenze

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 associa-tion 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 line of study, the essay examines the relations between de-mocracy and reason of state in order to further an interpretation of contemporary democracies as “emergency democracies”. Demo-cratic reason of state will not be interpreted as the constitutional ex-ercise of exceptional powers in extreme necessity but as the re-course to emergency policies in recurrent and enduring crisis. The article also discusses the relations between reason of state, demo-cratic 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.