Urgency Meets Inertia: European Emergency Governance in the Sovereign Debt Crisis

Political science analyses of the governance of the sovereign debt crisis largely focus on the question of the extent to which institutional developments either reflect supranationalism, intergovernmentalism, or historical path-dependencies – sometimes claiming that the crisis produced nothing new from an integration theory perspective. Legal and normative analyses, by contrast, strongly question this normalcy by focusing on the specific emergency mode in which institutional change has taken place during the crisis. They claim that the exercise of authority in certain cases took place on an extra-legal basis and through quasi-autocratic procedures. This paper asks how such ‘exceptionalist’ practices at the European level have become possible. It argues that the conjunction of joint decision trap effects on the one hand and a securitized crisis perception throughout the EU on the other induced a problem-solving strategy that consisted in keeping the formal legal/institutional structures in place while undermining them in practice. Conflicting interests within an institutional context replete with veto points prevented constitutional overhaul during the crisis. At the same time, the systemic scope of the risk of default made the costs of inaction appear prohibitively high. This collision of push and pull factors maneuvered the community into repeated deadlock situations where ‘exceptionalism’ seemed the least costly escape from collapse. I illustrate this process in two case studies of European exceptionalism, namely the Greek bailout in spring 2010 as well as the adoption of the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program by the ECB.