The official response to the combined crises facing Europe has been a concerted insistence that existing national tools and the Community legal and institutional acquis are sufficient to deal with the challenges of migration, state debt, monetary union and rising insecurity in Europe’s ‘near abroad.’ But this façade of ‘business as usual’ increasingly clashes with the reality of European crisis management involving ever more unorthodox policy responses and a surprising disregard for existing legal proscriptions.

This presentation examines whether a more forthright reliance on emergency law could have limited the damage to the legitimacy of integration and the integrity of the Community legal order. Constitutional emergency provisions seek to provide the organs of the state with the requisite flexibility and competence to speedily and effectively deal with existential threats, while corralling the damage to the constitutional order through procedural and temporal limits. Applying the theory of emergency law to both national and European crisis management, this presentation seeks to investigate why existing national emergency provisions were rarely used, whether functionally equivalent mechanisms at the European level existed, and offers a legal assessment of the lasting damage inflicted by the rhetorical innuendo of exception without correspondingly sound legal instruments and safeguards.