| dc.description.abstract | There is a widespread view in the European studies literature that the European Union has faced a series of important crises in recent years; one even finds the view that the Union is facing one overall multidimensional crisis. Crises have frequently happened in the course of the earlier history of European integration as well, and one could almost retrace the entire history of the integration process based on the occurrence of crises. The canonical listing of those remote and recent crises contains a mixture of endogenous institutional crises (such as the famous “empty chair” crisis of the 1960s3 or the various failures of Member States to ratify an EU Treaty revision) and exogenous developments (such as the banking crisis of 2008, the migration crisis of 2015, the current pandemic crisis, or the climate change crisis). The examples cited above show that there is no neat distinction between the two categories as, arguably, the institutional features (and decision-making failures) of the European Union can contribute to exacerbate a crisis that is of external origin, as the development of the banking crisis into a euro crisis may illustrate. What the examples have in common, though, is that they refer to “events or developments widely perceived by members of relevant communities to constitute urgent threats to core community values and structures.” That definition emphasizes the importance of perceptions and of framing: in politics generally and in European politics specifically, theexistence of an urgent threat to core values or structures of the community is itself contested; what may seem like a crisis to some actors may appear like normal events or developments to others. A further complication is that some crises are fast-burning whereas others are slow-burning: the urgency of the threat may appear suddenly and abruptly (as with a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, or the spread of a pandemic) or it may appear more gradually, step-by-step (as is the case, arguably, with the EU’s rule of law crisis emerging from Hungary and Poland). Again, this is not a neat distinction, since a slow-burning crisis can have fast-burning phases, as was aptly illustrated by the euro crisis which lasted for several years but required some very rapid emergency measures at some key moments in time. | en |
