This article analyses the emergency governance of international organizations by combining securitization theory with legal theory on the state of exception. Our main argument is that where issues are securitized as global threats, exceptionalism can emerge at the level of supranational bodies, endowing them with the decisionist authority to define emergencies and guide political responses. We theorize the 'emergency trap', which is triggered when the emergency powers of international organizations reduce the obstacles to, and increase the incentives for, the securitization of further issues. Based on the idea that the emergency trap functions as an institutional driver of securitization, we also highlight the importance of the constitutional containment of emergency competencies as an alternative to discursive desecuritization strategies. We illustrate this security-emergency dynamic in a case study of the recent empowerment of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the governance of global health emergencies. The article shows how WHO's exceptional response to the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis paved the way for an institutionalization of emergency powers within the organization and contributed to securitizing the 2009 swine influenza outbreak as a global pandemic. However, WHO's crisis governance has also triggered internal and external processes of constitutional contention.
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This piece outlines the concept of emergency politics as it may be applied to EU politics, distinguishing it from more familiar terms such as crisis management. We define emergency politics as a mode of politics in which actions departing from convention are rationalised as necessary responses to exceptional and urgent threats. Arguably, the many crises affecting the EU in the recent past have made this mode increasingly salient. To capture its various expressions, the paper presents a new typology of the forms that emergency politics can take in this setting, identifying four in particular: supranational, multilateral, unilateral and domestic. It connects these to the events of the last decade, spanning eurozone economics, migration, and Covid-19. We conclude by considering the variable consequences of these different types of emergency politics, in particular for the EU's normative and sociological legitimacy.
Political science analyses of the governance of the euro crisis largely build on conventional theories of European integration to account for the extent to which institutional developments either reflect supranationalism, inter‐governmentalism or historical path‐dependencies. This analytical focus captures the usual integration dynamics and institutional design outcomes, but overlooks the constitutional dimension of how the crisis affects the EU's legal order. In this agenda‐setting article, I draw attention to legal scholarship that highlights important deviations from the EU's ‘legal normalcy’. Legal studies find that a number of emergency measures were taken on an extra‐legal basis and through quasi‐autocratic procedures. Normative reconstructions interpret this practice as a form of transnational state of exception which transitions into permanent traits of authoritarianism in the EU's legal order. I argue that their findings offer a new terrain for political science research which transcends the explanatory categories of integration theory.
This book explores emergency politics of international organizations (IOs). It studies cases in which, based on justifications of exceptional necessity, IOs expand their authority, increase executive discretion, and interfere with the rights of their rule-addressees. This “IO exceptionalism” is observable in the crisis responses of a diverse set of institutions including the United Nations Security Council, the European Union, and the World Health Organization. Through six in-depth case studies, the book analyzes the institutional dynamics unfolding in the wake of the assumption of emergency powers by IOs. Sometimes, the exceptional competencies become normalized in the IOs’ authority structures (the “ratchet effect”). In other cases, IO emergency powers provoke a backlash that eventually reverses or contains the expansions of authority (the “rollback effect”). To explain these variable outcomes, the book draws on sociological institutionalism to develop a proportionality theory of IO emergency powers. It contends that ratchets and rollbacks are a function of actors’ ability to justify or contest emergency powers as (dis)proportionate. The claim that the distribution of rhetorical power is decisive for the institutional outcome is tested against alternative rational institutionalist explanations that focus on institutional design and the distribution of institutional power among states. The proportionality theory holds across the cases studied in this book and clearly outcompetes the alternative accounts. Against the background of the empirical analysis, the book moreover provides a critical normative reflection on the (anti) constitutional effects of IO exceptionalism and highlights a potential connection between authoritarian traits in global governance and the system’s current legitimacy crisis.
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