Democratic respect in times of crisis : the case of the Next Generation EU fund

Abstract

Crisis may generate policies that open new political vistas, pushing back the limits of the possible, or on the contrary policies that constrain our collective agency, giving defenders of the existing order a pretext on which to seek to consolidate it (White, 2022). To ask under what conditions are crises horizon-expanding instead of horizon-shrinking is not to ask whether politicians and policy makers manage to “solve” a given crisis, or in the period examined in this book, a series of crises, but rather whether the manner in which it is solved opens up new transformative possibilities that had not been imagined before (Nicolaïdis, 2022).