European emergency politics and the question of legitimacy

ABSTRACT

Emergency politics raises theoretical questions about the legitimacy of executive authorities’ governing activities in times of crisis, and in particular whether ensuring effective outcomes (output) can make up for the temporary suspension of political responsiveness (input) and accountable procedures (throughput). Answers depend not only on the specifics of the emergency actions but also on executives’ rhetorical power to legitimize such actions via ideational/discursive coercion, structuring, or persuasion. After outlining the theoretical issues involved, this contribution considers the legitimacy and rhetorical power of political executives in multilateral emergency politics and technical executives in supranational emergency politics. It uses the cases of the Council and the ECB in the Eurozone and Covid-19 crises in illustration, considering their legitimacy over time, between a crisis’ fast-burning phase of emergency politics and its slow-burning phase of legitimizing normalization or delegitimation.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergency politics
• legitimacy
• rhetorical power
• council
• ECB
• Eurozone crisis
• covid-19 crisis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the co-editors of the debate section, Christian Kreuder-Sonnen and Jonathan White, as well as the three anonymous referees for their invaluable advice, which has improved the piece immeasurably.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vivien A. Schmidt

Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Professor of International Relations and Political Science in the Pardee School at Boston University, where she also served as Founding Director of its Center for the Study of Europe. Her work focuses on European political economy, institutions, and democracy as well as political theory (with a special focus on the role of ideas and discourse in political analysis– ‘discursive institutionalism’). In addition to her latest book Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone (Oxford 2020), recent publications include Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy (co-edited, Cambridge 2013), and Democracy in Europe (Oxford 2006; La Découverte 2010 Fr. trans.) – named in 2015 by the European Parliament as one of the ‘100 Books on Europe to Remember’. Recent honours and awards include decoration as Chevalier in the French Legion of Honour, the European Union Studies Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for her project on the ‘rhetoric of discontent’, a transatlantic investigation of the populist revolt.