The rules-based international order is not simply breaking down. Governments are increasingly governing through exceptions built into the rules themselves, argues Ilan Kapoor

The contemporary international order is often described as being under assault. Wars violate borders, tariffs disrupt free trade, and governments invoke national security to restrict technology, investment and migration.

The usual conclusion is that the 'rules-based international order' is weakening. There is considerable truth in this. But something more interesting is also happening: rules are not simply disappearing. Governments are increasingly creating exceptions that allow them to modify or selectively apply those rules while leaving the wider institutional architecture intact.

The exception is becoming part of the system.

Governing through exceptions

Political theorists have long been interested in emergency power. Carl Schmitt famously argued that sovereignty reveals itself in the capacity to decide on the exception: liberal political systems normally operate through laws and procedures, but emergencies expose the authority capable of suspending them.

Contemporary politics looks somewhat different. Increasingly, the exception does not stand outside the rules but is written into them.

Liberal political systems normally operate through procedures, with emergencies exposing the authority capable of suspending them. Increasingly, however, the exception is written into the rules

Consider European fiscal governance. EU member states normally operate within rules constraining deficits and public expenditure. Yet amid growing concern about European military capacity, the EU activated a ⁠national escape clause for defence expenditure. Participating governments can temporarily deviate from their normal expenditure paths to increase defence spending, subject to agreed limits.

In August 2026, the European Commission went further, issuing ⁠guidance allowing this exceptional fiscal flexibility to encompass certain energy-security measures. The fiscal rules have not disappeared. They now contain mechanisms for departing from themselves.

When temporary becomes normal

Migration politics reveals a similar pattern. When millions fled Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion, the EU activated its Temporary Protection Directive, giving displaced Ukrainians collective protection without requiring each person to pass through the normal asylum procedure.

This was an extraordinary response to extraordinary circumstances. Yet the EU has repeatedly extended the arrangement, most recently agreeing to ⁠continue temporary protection until March 2028.

The EU has repeatedly extended its Temporary Protection Directive for displaced Ukrainians, but the exceptional treatment has been legally codified and administratively managed

Again, law has not disappeared. Exceptional treatment has been legally codified, administratively managed and repeatedly renewed. This matters because we often imagine emergency politics as dramatic: constitutions suspended or parliaments bypassed. Contemporary exceptions can instead arrive as regulations, derogations, escape clauses and temporary frameworks.

Their bureaucratic appearance makes their politics easy to miss.

Free trade, except when necessary

Trade provides another example. The post-Cold War economic order was built around lowering barriers to international commerce. Yet governments increasingly restrict technologies, subsidise strategic industries and impose tariffs in the name of national or economic security.

The EU’s relationship with the United States illustrates the resulting tension. In July 2026, the European Commission ⁠continued the suspension of EU commercial rebalancing measures against the US, even while maintaining that the underlying American safeguard measures are incompatible with World Trade Organization rules.

The rules therefore remain important enough for the EU to preserve its legal objection. But geopolitical considerations influence how those rules are enforced.

Rules and power are not opposites. Increasingly, they operate together.

Selective legality

One reason exceptions are proliferating is that more areas of ordinary policy are being described through the language of security. Energy becomes energy security; semiconductors become technological security; supply chains become economic security; migration becomes border security.

Once an issue is securitised, ordinary constraints become easier to challenge. An expenditure normally limited by fiscal rules becomes necessary for defence. A trade restriction becomes a strategic instrument. An exceptional migration regime can persist because the geopolitical circumstances producing it continue.

This does not mean the underlying threats are invented. Governments clearly need flexibility when confronting wars and other major disruptions. But security changes the grammar of policymaking: constraints previously presented as binding become negotiable.

The result is not straightforward lawlessness. We can better understand it as selective legality.

Governments need not announce that rules no longer matter. They can invoke another rule permitting an exemption

Governments need not announce that rules no longer matter. They can invoke another rule permitting an exemption, activate an escape clause, introduce a temporary regime or suspend enforcement while formally preserving the underlying principle. Contemporary exceptionalism can therefore be intensely institutional.

Whose emergency counts?

This raises a crucial political question. If governments increasingly possess mechanisms for departing from ordinary constraints, who decides when circumstances are sufficiently exceptional?

Europe’s fiscal rules provide a revealing example. Military expenditure now receives exceptional flexibility, and certain energy-security investments may receive it too. Housing shortages, healthcare capacity or deteriorating public infrastructure may also be described as crises, but they do not automatically trigger comparable exemptions.

The same hierarchy appears elsewhere. Ukrainians fleeing war receive collective temporary protection, while people fleeing other conflicts generally navigate the ordinary asylum system. Some industries are designated strategic and protected from market competition; others are not.

The question is therefore not simply whether exceptions exist. It is: whose emergency counts?

Exceptions reveal political priorities: which threats are urgent, which populations deserve extraordinary protection, which industries are indispensable and which expenditures warrant relief from otherwise binding constraints.

The permanent emergency

Exceptional measures are not necessarily illegitimate. Political systems incapable of responding flexibly to wars, pandemics or other shocks would be dangerously brittle.

The difficulty is that many conditions now generating exceptions – geopolitical rivalry, migration pressures, energy insecurity and technological competition – are unlikely to disappear soon. If each produces exemptions and emergency mechanisms, the distinction between normal and exceptional politics begins to erode.

The defining question may therefore no longer be whether the rules-based international order survives. It may be what kind of rules-based order is emerging: one in which institutions remain powerful and rules proliferate, while those same rules contain an expanding repertoire of mechanisms determining when they need not fully apply.

The exception would no longer interrupt the system. It would become one of the ways the system works.

The rules have not disappeared. They have learned how to suspend themselves.