States of Emergency - Centre for Policy Alternatives

as respect for human dignity regardless of socially constructed
identities.
In this context, to argue that crisis government is not ‘normal’ and
that we should be thinking about (a) how we can return to
‘normality’, and (b), from that perspective, to rethink how we are
going to rationalise the powers of the executive in the future in a
more satisfactory way, runs the risk of falling from the grace of
public opinion. Ultimately it becomes a contest of values and of
authenticity, in which liberal democratic options would be
portrayed as hopelessly foreign ideas which have no traction in
the politics of real people. That is to frame the debate in its
sharpest permutation: a debate between liberals and ethnonationalists.
To the latter, the agenda dictated by group political
interest trumps all others. On either side of the ethnic divide, we
Lind that the protagonists are more at home with Schmitt’s
concept of the political than with the liberal language of liberty
and freedom from fear, and where the binary dynamic of ‘us v.
them’ dominates political calculations.
For the vast majority of ordinary people, however, the experience
of three decades of protracted conLlict has meant that both conLlict
as well as the assumption of extraordinary powers and measures
by the State have become normalised as a part of everyday life.
Thus we seem to have become complacent in the belief that
nothing can be done to ameliorate the many mundane miseries of
crisis, because that just seems to be the way life is. This is what we
discussed as the ‘normalisation of the exception’ and which has
become invisible as the weathercock on a steeple.
The objective of this book has been to challenge these notions.
Peace, order and good government is both desirable and
achievable, but these public goods can only Llow from making
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