THE AGE OF 'ADMINISTRATIVE' POWER.
Warwick Powell explains how the administrative state has taken over in Europe...
'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...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....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.....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.”.......So coercion is reframed as compliance. Decisions are recoded as procedures. Politics is displaced by management. Orwellian double-speak becomes the norm....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.'
