The Late Liberal State

“The Late Liberal State”

Introduction:

In this third decade of the 21st century, we can subscribe to a regime of historicity (Hartog, 2007) that allows us to speak interchangeably of a late liberal state or a post-democratic liberal state, since several of the defining features of what were both proto-democratic liberal states and so-called "mature liberal democracies" have become blurred to the point of being unrecognizable.

The process of blurring began at the very moment when they seemed to shine most brightly, just after the Second World War, coinciding with the expansion of the Atlantic empire, and continues to this day. The “symptoms” are numerous and have accumulated over time, leading to the current tripartite state: beneath the shell of the constitutional state, a second security state and a third “deep” state have grown (Good, 2022).

While the relationship between democracy and liberalism has always been problematic (Ketcham, 2023), in this third decade of the 21st century we might conclude that we have gotten rid of both, while “formally” remaining entrenched in them.

The “easy” drift from the liberal state to a dual state was already analyzed in the context of Nazism (Fraenkel, 2016). But in this third decade of the 21st century, we have settled into a regime in which nothing we were told about political lies (Arendt, 2022) or about the crisis of the republic (Arendt, 2015) appears as an exception. Precisely in Western republics (and monarchies), the opinions and interests of ordinary people have ceased to be relevant (Gilens, 2012) (Gilens & Page, 2014) (Page M., 2017) (Page & Seawright, 2019). And the ordinary people is aware of it.

The symptoms and manifestations of such a drift are multiple and operate at many seemingly disconnected levels, which greatly hinders their analysis, and are practically ungraspable, despite their relevance, with the conventional research methods derived from the popperian ideology of the so-called social sciences in Western universities.

Thematic Axes:

By way of example, we can point to:

 

• The systemic corruption of the constitutional state (Nuñez, 2022).
• The proliferation of NGOs, many of which respond to “obscure mandates,” even when their funding is seemingly transparent (Fazi, 2022). Among these mandates, the recruitment and training of elite-satraps occupy a significant place, a process that is barely addressed in studies on elites (Saunders E. N., 2022).

But even when they do appear, they are limited to fractions (Saunders E. N., 2024), without being possible to trace the lines connecting them to economic interests, far removed from the path initiated by (Mills, 1956) and from Smith's reflection in The Wealth of Nations on the permanent conspiracy of capitalists (Sagar, 2018).

• The penetration, by the security and/or deep, of representative organizations—i.e. Parties, unions, associations, …- (Wilford, 2010) (Wilford, 2024).
• Justitocracy (Lambert, 1921), (Hirschl, 2004) (Hirschl, 2010), (Pokol & Téglási, 2019), (Loughlin, 2022), (Schoettl, 2022) is called upon to suppress dissent and replace the political imagination of ordinary people with the political imagination and unconfessed interests (articulated through different forms of corruption) of an unbridled judicial bureaucracy. Justitocracy is not exhausted by “lawfare” (Tirado, 2021), although the latter occupies an important place within it. The question Brecht posed is more relevant than ever: «Die Staatsgewalt geht vom Volke aus. — Aber wo geht sie hin? Ja, wo geht sie wohl hin? Irgendwo geht sie doch hin!» (Brecht, 1961, p. 179).
• The political theory of the economists who created the intellectual foundations of the “autonomy” of the economic sphere (Waligorski, 1990) and, with it, the depoliticization that explains the demonization of decisions relevant to the realization of the economic rights of ordinary people.
• The proliferation of “independent” institutions (Nuñez, 2025), independent of any democratic control.
• The penetration and replacement of discourses analyzing and changing the functioning of the economic and political system (Saunders F. S., 2000), (Losurdo, 2024), (Rockhill, 2025).
• The systematic creation of groups and violent false-flag operations, almost always at the service of neocolonial operations, and classified as terrorists—a classification that ends up being applied to any opposition movement within the Atlantic empire itself, even with subtle perversions such as equating anti-Semitism (Mazower, 2025) and anti-Zionism (Holden, 2025), (Pogrund & Maguire, 2020).
• Transnational financialization (Nuñez, 2023) with the consequent expansion of rentier oligarchies, beyond any democratic control, asset inflation, and the growth of inequality.
• The expansion of two- and three-dimensional digitalization on a planetary scale with the consequent erosion of sovereignty, the blurring of the distinction between inside and outside (i.e., applying sanctions intended for third parties—states and citizens—to EU citizens, as in the case of Hüseyin Doğru).
• The use against citizens within the Atlantic empire of technologies and techniques honed in counterinsurgency warfare or genocide —i.e., mobile phone tracking systems— that violate the right to privacy of communications and are used as weapons to coerce wills and/or fuel supposedly intelligent applications for capturing “military targets” that “whitewash” indiscriminate killing.
• The concentration of media ownership and the systematic manipulation of information displayed on the internet, which has reached a new level with the emergence of manipulable algorithms of “natural language processing artificial intelligence,” which makes it possible to create discourses that alter the perception of the world in terms consistent with imperial interests (Parenti, 1986), (Boyd-Barrett, 2015), (Boyd-Barrett & Mirrlees, 2020), facilitate the systematic use of suppression or manipulation of information to produce imaginary threats and enemies (Boyd-Barrett & Marmura, 2023) or those created “accidentally” by the deep state itself (from “rebel” states to drug cartels or “terrorist” groups), with which to justify both the expansion of the security state—to the detriment, for example, of the educational, welfare, or industrial sectors—and to promote the systematic appropriation of resources through militarization. The target population of this disinformation—far removed from the supposed initial (colonial) objectives of these techniques—are the citizens of the countries of the Atlantic empire, who are periodically urged to vote “correctly.” Otherwise, the elections are annulled.

All this occurs while attempts are made to suppress “conspiracy theories” (Byford, 2011) and persecute “fake news,” which, with varying degrees of accuracy, account for all these phenomena. However, both are produced, according to the imperial academy, by “crazed” citizens and foreign agents, not by the deep state, which, more often than not, generates the phenomenon through its own structural dynamics and produces plausible deniability (DeHaven-Smith, 2021). As Popper stated, contrary to what Mills suggested and subsequent events confirmed, conspiracies either do not exist or, if they do, are ineffective (in an open society, only contracts guaranteed by the state following Pareto optimum exist). In any case, as Strauss would say, their denial is a “white lie” necessary to maintain world order, the management of which can only be entrusted to the epistemically superior elite(s), capable of seeing the invisible.

The rampant secrecy (Schwarz, 2015), disguised under recurring rhetorical figures (Lefebvre, 2021) and justified by various euphemisms, i.e., national security (Beard, 1934), a concept that is easy to manage, is the essential “arcana imperii” for the deep state to direct the constitutional state through the security state. While it is not possible to clearly distinguish the “arcana imperii” from the “arcana dominationis” and the “arcana inania or simulacra” (Clapmarius, 2014), the dominant narrative remains that the constitutional state controls all others (Quill, 2014). Secrecy, Sub Rosa, endemic in bureaucracies, as Weber already pointed out, and endowed with an irresistible allure, and key to social regulation, as Simmel noted, is paradoxical: nothing is more opposed to democracy than state secrecy. And nothing is more contrary to democracy than the violation of the secrecy of ordinary people's communications, preventing them from organizing and opposing policies that are not only unjust but also indecent (Margalit, 2016). The liberal state, which originally restricted the first type of secrecy and protected the second, has moved in the late liberal state in precisely the opposite direction, generating along the way a vast amount of disinformation (Rid, 2020), a process that, by all indications, is accelerating.

All of these phenomena are by no means disconnected, and they have contributed and continue to contribute extraordinarily to the “neutralization” of the political, while simultaneously placing us in a permanent state of exception (Schmitt, 1998), where “sovereignty” resides precisely in the deep state. And this deep state acts to empty the constitutional state of its content, sometimes operating in broad daylight and, much more frequently, in the shadows, through voracious institutions, and systematically producing what we can call SCADs—state crimes against democracy— (deHaven-Smith & Witt, 2009), (Kouzmin, Witt, & Kakabadse, 2013).

 

Invitation:

We invite to submit articles, written in Spanish or English, on any of the listed topics and any other related topic at the authors' discretion, provided they can be linked to the conceptualization of the late liberal state as a three-dimensional state. It will be especially interesting to delve into the relationship between the three states, particularly how the bureaucracies of the deep state shape the policies of the security state and construct security narratives that undermine the constitutional state.

The aim is to depict this late liberal state as precisely as possible and define its possible evolution(s), including the resistance that may arise.

Author Guidelines (Key Abstract):

Manuscripts must strictly adhere to the guidelines of the Journal of Global Studies, available at:

https://revistas.um.es/reg/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Submission Process:

Full manuscripts must be submitted through the journal's website: https://revistas.um.es/reg (Registration and login are required).

Submissions must not have been previously published or be under consideration by another journal.

Format and Structure:

File format: Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.

Maximum length: 9,000 words, including footnotes and references. Pages must be numbered.

The manuscript must include:

• Title, abstract, and five keywords in both Spanish and English.
• Contact information (ORCID, email address, and institutional affiliation).
• Citation style: APA (7th edition). Example: (Author, 2020, p. 15) or Author (2020). The reference list should be in alphabetical order at the end of the document.

Figures and tables: These should be inserted into the text and also submitted as separate, numbered, and descriptive original files.

 

Editorial Process:

All articles will undergo double-blind peer review.

The journal is open access, with no article processing charges (APCs) for authors or readers.

 

Special Issue Timeline:

Deadline for submission of full manuscripts: January 30, 2027.

Peer review period: February–March 2027.

Notification of decisions to authors (after the first round of review): end of March 2027.

Deadline for submission of final revised versions: April 2027.

Publication of the special issue: June–July 2027.

For any questions related to this special issue, please contact the guest editor, Manuel Núñez García, at mn_niche@proton.me

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