Towards Emergency Europe

Developments in recent decades have pushed the EU from a structural vulnerability to emergency rule towards increasing reliance on it. Executive agents today are surrounded by powerful non-state agents of the market sphere who carry the authority to interpret socio-economic conditions, to make sense of moments of uncertainty, and to specify the responses they demand and when. Changes within the field of executive power itself mean their voices carry ever further into decision-making circles, as a governing ethos of problem-solving displaces ideologies of principle and responsiveness to public opinion. Emergency politics is a way of coping with weakening public authority in the age of governance. The chapter goes on to examine how these dynamics extend beyond the domain of economics to include policy-making in the field of migration.

Introduction

These pages lay out the central argument of the book: that to grasp the workings of the present-day EU, one must examine a mode of rule centred on the logic of emergency. The idea of extreme circumstances that need to be overcome, and that give licence for unconventional governing measures, shapes both contemporary decision-making and the public responses that emerge in parallel. The Introduction outlines the book’s structure, which starts with an exposition of transnational emergency rule as a practice, moves to consider its historical emergence in the EU, goes on to consider its implications for governing authority, and then looks at the critical responses it generates and the normative questions they raise.

Beyond a Politics of Singularities

The concluding chapter offers a restatement of why the transnational politics of emergency, rather than a benign process of functional adaptation, is something one should wish to see restrained. It explains how emergency rule reinforces an enduring problem of EU political culture: the tendency to cast events as sui generis episodes, each detached from a larger historical and normative frame. With their emphasis on exceptional measures of last resort, the agents of emergency rule assert the extraordinary nature of the situation they face, and govern it in ways that reinforce its uniqueness. Theirs is a politics grounded in the particularity of the moment—a politics of the avowedly singular. By contrast, the critical scrutiny of power and the identification with its demands depend on the recognition of what is not particular to the moment—on moving beyond the politics of singularities.

Principled Disobedience

One legacy of yesterday’s politics of emergency is that the contestation of policy in today’s EU may depend on a willingness to break rules. The concept of disobedience provides both an interpretative frame for analysing such actions and the basis for their evaluation. As a contribution to theories of civil disobedience, the chapter reflects on the kinds of political agent that can lead such actions, showing how one of the distinctive features of the transnational realm is to make possible a form of disobedience waged through institutions by collectives such as parties. The chapter goes on to develop criteria by which to distinguish principled disobedience from illegitimate forms of extra-legality, connecting them to developments on the ground. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the normativity of exceptionalism more generally.

Populism as the Promise of Agency

Persistently engaged in the politics of emergency, the EU has come to rationalize some of its most important decisions as urgent measures to handle a crisis. With its suggestion of decisions born of necessity rather than choice, this governing mode consolidates an image of the EU as the negation of political agency. This chapter examines how such actions invite their opposite: a politics defined by its rejection of necessity and the celebration of political volition. The mobilizations commonly studied under the heading of ‘populism’ gather much of their wider appeal from this promise to restore political agency—a promise independent of the other features typically ascribed to them, and which the term populism can serve to obscure. The chapter goes on to examine how the spectre of such mobilizations may be invoked by established powers as reason for further constraining measures, thus raising the prospect of escalation.

Iterations of Technocracy

What do the practices of emergency rule imply for technocracy, traditionally the cornerstone of EU legitimacy? On one view, emergency rule spells problems for technocracy, as non-scientific criteria intrude on decision-making. Yet exceptional situations are also when the claim to expertise-based governing carries furthest. Knowing how to act in such situations, and when to circumvent existing politico-legal norms, is in some ways the very measure of expertise. This chapter evaluates these two contending theses against recent EU experience, and argues they can be reconciled once we see how claims to expertise may span theoretical and practical knowledge. Emergency rule disrupts claims to scientific ‘know-that’, and encourages would-be technocrats to rely on a form of crisis expertise centred on practical know-how. This recalibration of technocracy carries significant implications, not least in detaching institutions further from public scrutiny and demanding ever more trust from citizens.

Structural Vulnerabilities of the Transnational Sphere

Since its origins in the 1950s, European integration has entailed the creation of institutions whose rationale is to advance and maintain certain policy ends, notably the ‘four freedoms’ of the common market. As this chapter argues, the effect is that policy commitments have tended to be privileged over procedural arrangements. Rather than self-standing entities that can be put to different ends, broadly on the model of the modern state, one sees institutions evolving with the policies, and liable to be side-stepped should they fail to serve those ends. A non-hierarchical constitutional structure does little to inhibit these restructurings, indeed arguably gives further encouragement. The ideas and practices of emergency become ways to galvanize action, coordination, and innovation across a diverse and potentially recalcitrant institutional field.

Structuring Partisan Power

Controls on emergency rule are often sought in legal constraints upheld by courts, or strategies of institutional design that make exceptionalism less appealing. As this chapter argues, what tends to be missing is an account of the political will that could support such initiatives. Challenging the transnational politics of emergency depends, it argues, on strengthened ties of partisanship, both as these may constrain directly the discretion of representatives holding executive authority, and especially as they may influence it indirectly from a position of opposition. The chapter draws and develops on debates concerning the possibility of transnational partisanship, and connects them to a discussion of the structural preconditions of political opposition, examining in particular its temporal aspects.

Beyond a Sovereign State of Exception

Central to the imagery of European crisis politics in the 2010s was the figure of the Troika. Though on one level just a term of public condemnation, on another it encapsulated some deeper truths about the politics of the time. Specifically, the concept of the Troika expressed a politics based on ostensibly impermanent, unconventional arrangements for defined purposes, governed by an agenda of speed and urgency, and propelled by trans-institutional executive power. Taken together, these features amount to a specific mode of governing, one usefully grasped with the concept of emergency rule. The chapter outlines its core features and dynamics. Such a perspective is intended to offer an original contribution to EU scholarship and a starting-point for thinking about the specificities of transnational emergency rule.

Prospects of a New Normal

Following a period of emergency rule, decision-makers face the challenge of drawing a line under their actions so that their unconventional measures do not compromise the polity in lasting fashion. This chapter analyses the preconditions for providing constitutional reassurance through an act of separation between the period of emergency and its aftermath. The suggestion is that the principal resources for doing so in the contemporary EU are missing. The prospect of exceptionalism will tend to endure, with important implications for the kind of authority that the political order can accommodate. The chapter addresses, through the prism of the constitutional particularities of the EU, an under-examined aspect of exceptionalism more generally—the constitutional challenges arising from the difficulty of localizing it in time.