This essay considers a brief moment in the H1N1 flu controversy - the attack on the World Health Organisation by the Council of Europe - as exemplar of a type of struggle for sovereignty "post-empire". It extends Giorgio Agamben's formulation of the "permanent state of exception" to examine how member states of supranational organisations partially delegate their own capacity to declare health emergencies of varying scale and scope. It goes on to ask whether the structures of consciousness about the dangers of global disease and utility of promised disease control that was embedded in the will to expansion of classic empires have now been transformed into a new mechanism of control on behalf of a different type of translocal force.
