Europe and the transnational politics of emergency

ABSTRACT

This piece outlines the concept of emergency politics as it may be applied to EU politics, distinguishing it from more familiar terms such as crisis management. We define emergency politics as a mode of politics in which actions departing from convention are rationalised as necessary responses to exceptional and urgent threats. Arguably, the many crises affecting the EU in the recent past have made this mode increasingly salient. To capture its various expressions, the article presents a new typology of the forms that emergency politics can take in this setting, identifying four in particular: supranational, multilateral, unilateral and domestic. It connects these to the events of the last decade, spanning eurozone economics, migration, and Covid-19. We conclude by considering the variable consequences of these different types of emergency politics, in particular for the EU’s normative and sociological legitimacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergency politics
• European Union (EU)
• crisis
• legitimacy

Acknowledgments

This Debate Section emerges from a workshop on ‘The Transnational Politics of Emergency’ organised by the authors in June 2020. We thank the Hertie School (Berlin) and LSE European Institute for financial and administrative support, and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung for White’s fellowship at the Hertie School. We are especially grateful to all participants of the workshop, to the Journal’s editors and referees, and to Dominic Byatt at Oxford University Press.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 NB we use the terms emergency politics and exceptionalism interchangeably.

2 Note that we refer to institutions with supranational authority that is either delegated (e.g. the Commission, the ECB) or pooled (e.g. the Council of Ministers under ordinary legislative procedure). Council actions that remain intergovernmental (without pooling) as well as actions by the European Council are subsumed under multilateral emergency politics.

3 Art. 1, Conclusions of the Special meeting of the European Council, 17–21 July 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Kreuder-Sonnen

Christian Kreuder-Sonnen is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Organisations and Co-director of the MA International Organisations and Crisis Management (IOCM) at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He has held visiting positions at Oxford and Harvard University. His book Emergency Powers of International Organisations (Oxford University Press, 2019) was awarded the Chadwick Alger Prize by the International Studies Association.

Jonathan White

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics at the LSE. He has held visiting positions at the Berlin Institute of Advanced Studies, Harvard, Stanford, the Humboldt University, Hertie School, Sciences Po in Paris, and the Australian National University. Books include Politics of Last Resort (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Meaning of Partisanship (with Lea Ypi, Oxford University Press, 2016), and Political Allegiance after European Integration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He was awarded the 2017 British Academy Brian Barry Prize for Excellence in Political Science.