In defense of liberty, all battles appear worthy. As the world reacts to last week’s mass murder in the office of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine based in Paris, questions of “what next?” abound. News today, reported in TIME, suggests the politics of security have transmuted France’s official narrative:

Yves Trotignon, a former top counter-terrorism official in DGSE, France’s equivalent to the CIA, told TIME on Monday, “There is a strong feeling that this is not over.” Trotignon, now a private terrorism consultant, says he was in close contact with French intelligence officials investigating last week’s attacks. He says most believe that although the instigators of last week’s attacks might all now be dead, “there is a strong feeling that maybe something more dangerous is ahead.”

A shift from grief to vigilance is only predictable. But as British authorities framed the Paris attacks against the background of expected terrorist operations, specifically “a group of core al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria … planning mass-casualty attacks against the West“, one gets the sense that “Je suis Charlie” might become the means instead of the end.

“Emergencies demand rapid action,” wrote Michael Ignatieff, in his book The Lesser Evil, which explores the challenges for democracies in responding to terrorism. “Presidents and prime ministers have to take action first and submit to questions later. But too much prerogative can be bad for democracy itself.”

In emergencies, we have no alternative but to trust our leaders to act quickly, when our lives may be in danger, but it would be wrong to trust them to decide the larger question of how to balance liberty and security over the long term. For these larger questions, we ought to trust to democratic deliberation through our institutions.

But in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, government actions often leave the citizen fearful of enemies unknown and unknowable, and unable to discern just what is being done in his or her name. At the very moment when a state should engage its demos directly, it appears least likely to do so. Sadly, that nagging sense of being ignored stirs the very marginalization that makes violence—as nihilistic and destructive as its expression can be— more likely. For France, Europe and the rest of the world, let’s hope our support for the liberties of speech and expression do not hasten actions that curtail those same liberties for others.