States of Emergency: A Favorite Autocratic Tool

Autocrats love states of emergency. Often declared in the wake of some real or invented crisis, states of emergency give illiberal leaders expanded powers, letting them do things they’ve wanted to do anyway — crack down on the opposition, purge their parties and parliaments, or attempt a coup to maintain themselves in power. This happened recently in South Korea, when President Yoon Suk Yeol, claiming an impending threat from Communist North Korea, declared martial law to avoid facing an influence-peddling scandal.

The second Donald Trump administration holds promise in this regard. On his first day in office, the president signed over twenty executive orders and declared two national emergencies in areas essential to our developing autocracy: persecution and policing of immigrants, and giving big corporations and the very rich more freedoms to plunder the earth with impunity.

One emergency concerns the “southern border.” The government needs the perception of a crisis there to justify repressive action on immigration and a new role for the military. Without the fiction of an emergency of non-White people coming over the border to take jobs, commit crimes, and poison the population with their inferior genes, what rationale would there be to direct the U.S. military to domestic activities in the interest of “the nation’s peace, harmony, and tranquility,” as a companion executive order reads?

Customs and Border Enforcement Agents arrive at the US-Mexico border on Jan. 20, 2025, following President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency. Reuters.

The other crisis is a so-called “National Energy Emergency,” which was part of a suite of actions decreed on “Day One” to “unleash” American energy production and mineral sourcing by freeing it from the strictures of state, federal, and international climate regulations. U.S. oil production reached a record high in 2023, during the Joe Biden administration, outpacing even Saudi Arabia and Russia. So, the only “emergency” in this area is likely fossil fuel industries put on the defensive by wind power (target of another Day One executive order) and other expanding clean energy sources.

Like the border “situation,” the declaration of a crisis in the U.S. energy sphere opens doors to outrageous proposals that would be vetoed during “normal” times. Trump’s demand that Ukraine give the United States half of its treasure trove of rare earth minerals (worth an estimated $11.5 trillion) as compensation for American military aid given to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s invasion can be seen in this light.

The idea was floated at a reprehensible planet plunderers’ summit: representatives of Russia’s kleptocracy, which is lubricated by dirty energy, and officials of America’s own aspiring MAGA-Mafia state met in Saudi Arabia (an autocracy that would be a backwater without its oil) to discuss the future of Ukraine –a meeting from which President Zelensky and other Ukrainians were excluded.

We should pay careful attention to the rhetoric around states of emergency right now, since such situations have always been prominent at critical junctures of strongman history.

Some states of emergency help authoritarians on the rise to consolidate their power. Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini started a custom that continues today when he declared a state of emergency in 1925 to escape political ruin from an investigation into his corruption. The measures imposed by the “Laws for the Defense of the State,” which created the world's first right-wing dictatorship (secret police, new courts for political crimes, prohibitions on strikes and unions, bans on opposition press and parties) made him untouchable.

Other states of emergency help autocrats stay in power. Augusto Pinochet used his to secure control for the Chilean junta after the 1973 military coup, which he justified as a healing act in a country sick with Socialism. “It’s like when you amputate the arm of a sick person, it’s hard to predict how long they will take to recover,” he said, telling journalists he could not be sure when the state of emergency would end.

While states of exception are meant to be temporary, in the hands of autocrats they can become normalized as a tool of governance, “no longer the exception but the rule,” as the anti-Nazi philosopher Walter Benjamin observed.

That was been the case in Turkey after the July 2016 coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As state reprisals spread from the military (where the coup had originated) to other categories of people Erdogan wanted to persecute (the Kurdish opposition, journalists, members of the judiciary) the state of emergency continued. By the time it ended after two years, the crackdown had become normalized.

Whatever the specific prompt or excuse for the state of emergency, one master narrative holds: the action is always taken in the name of “saving the nation” from whatever invented threat is most compelling at that place and time. Strongmen excel at creating crises and declaring emergencies and then stepping in to provide a “solution.” The “peace” of the autocrat in foreign and domestic affairs, like his plunder of the environment, has an exceedingly high cost.