EU Crises and Emergencies: What’s in a Name? - EmergEU Working Paper Series 1/2025
The EmergEU Working Paper Series serves as a platform for disseminating research conducted under the auspices of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Crises and Emergencies in EU Integration (EmergEU). Its objective is to facilitate broad access to high-quality scholarly analysis on the dynamics of crisis and emergency governance in the European Union.
On 16-17 June 2025, EmergEU organized an interdisciplinary workshop, held at Maastrict University’s Faculty of Law, on the conceptualization of crises and emergencies in the EU. The workshop explored the evolving notions of ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency,’ highlighting potential disciplinary differences in terminology, interpretation, and practice. Contributions from political science and legal scholars sought to examine what we can learn from these variegated approaches to jointly critically assess the EU’s capacity to respond to, and learn from, crises. The event’s full agenda can be found here.
There four panels during the workshop:
Panel 1 - How many shades of crisis and emergency? Towards a European definitional framework
Panel 2 - Crises and emergencies uniquely shaping the EU’s internal and external structures
Panel 3 - Multilevel crisis governance in the EU: emergency powers with(out) a sovereign?
Panel 4 - (Un)known unknowns: crises and emergencies from an epistemic perspective
The working paper that resulted was entitled “EU Crises and Emergencies: What’s in a Name?”
Authors: Guido Bellenghi, Giselle Bosse, Andrea Ott, Esther Versluis
Summary of the working paper findings: The workshop brought together scholars of law, political science, and related disciplines to interrogate how the European Union (EU) defines, governs, and is transformed by crises and emergencies. Against the backdrop of the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s war in Ukraine, the EU has increasingly been confronted with extraordinary events that test its constitutional foundations, governance mechanisms, and legitimacy. Yet despite the relevance of these events in the institutional and academic discourse, there remains no settled understanding of what qualifies as a ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’, nor of how such labels shape institutional responses and longer-term integration trajectories.
The workshop opened with a keynote lecture by Professor Bruno de Witte (Maastricht University), who situated the debate in the broader legal context of EU emergency law. He underlined that, unlike many national systems, the EU Treaties provide no general emergency clause. Instead, the Union has relied on a scattered set of emergency competences and flexible interpretations of ordinary Treaty bases. In his view, emergency responses have demonstrated the EU’s capacity to adapt within the constraints of its legal order. This framing provided a point of reference for the four panels that followed, which explored how crises and emergencies are conceptualised, how they reshape governance structures, and how they are navigated in conditions of uncertainty.
The first explored the definitional boundaries of ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’, revealing both disciplinary divergences and shared efforts to construct conceptual frameworks. The second examined how crises have reshaped the EU’s internal structures and external orientation, highlighting tensions between security, autonomy, and democratic legitimacy. The third turned to multilevel governance and emergency powers, tracing how regulation, financial autonomy, procurement mechanisms, and tacit states of exception transform the EU’s constitutional order. Finally, the fourth panel brought an epistemic perspective, foregrounding the role of institutions, individuals, and knowledge in navigating uncertainty.
The full working paper can be found in PDF format here.
