The Constitutional Contours of EU Crisis Law

Abstract The aim of this article is threefold. First, it develops the premises on which the Special Issue “A Union of Crises: In Search of Constitutional Resilience” is based: that the omnipresence of diverse crises has become an inescapable reality for the EU, and that the low likelihood of Treaty change requires a reorientation in legal literature towards a more systematic exploration and conceptualisation of EU crisis law that transcends the hitherto focus on single-crisis measures. Second, the paper attempts to lay the groundwork for such a reorientation by offering a meta-view of what EU crisis law entails by outlining the constitutional contours of EU crisis law. It argues that the concept of EU crisis law is a combination of constitutional, international, hybrid, exceptional and legislative models of crisis accommodation, and demonstrates how these have interacted in the responses to past and present crises. Finally, the paper demonstrates how the remaining papers that form part of this Special Issue advance a meta-narrative of EU crisis and begin to provide answers to some of the most pressing issues that this nascent discipline is to address.