Europe and the transnational politics of emergency

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.