Emergency Politics in the Euro Crisis

Chapter 5 starts with an analysis of the establishment and normalization of the European “bailout regime” in the Euro crisis. In 2010, member states of the Eurogroup and EU institutions devised exceptional emergency credit facilities and created the so-called troika to devise and implement harsh austerity measures in recipient states. A combination of rhetorical and institutional power advantages for the authority-holders explains why the regime was ratcheted up despite the widespread resistance of societal actors. Second, the chapter analyzes the European Central Bank’s (ECB) adoption of the role of a lender of last resort to sovereigns of the Eurozone. With the Securities Markets Programme in 2010, the ECB circumvented the monetary financing prohibition and began to intervene in the fiscal and economic policymaking of recipient states. While the Bank’s emergency measures were highly contentious, it successfully deployed arguments of necessity and functionality to stabilize and even ramp up its powers.

A Proportionality Theory of IO Emergency Powers

Chapter 3 develops a proportionality theory of IO emergency powers to account for the variable outcomes of normalization (ratchets) and containment (rollbacks). It posits that IO exceptionalism creates distributional consequences at the level of political autonomy that are positive for the governors and negative for the governed. Since IO authority is dependent on its general recognition by the rule-addressees, the states and supranational actors in authority need to be able to justify their measures as proportionate, or else the delegitimation attempts by their opponents threaten to undermine the authority. Ratchets and rollbacks are thus conceived as the product of rhetorical legitimation struggles among the holders and the addressees of IO emergency powers that revolve around the normative standard of proportionality. The chapter derives a set of testable hypotheses from the proportionality model and provides alternative explanations based on variations of rational institutionalism that focus on state power and institutional design.

Conceptualizing IO Emergency Powers

This chapter introduces a constitutional perspective on international organizations (IOs) that foregrounds the legally constituted relationship between authority-holders and authority-addressees. Distinct from the common principal–agent perspective, it paves the way for understanding IOs’ crisis-induced authority-leaps as an assumption of emergency powers—an act defined as the constitutionally deviant widening of executive discretion at the expense of the political autonomy of the rule-addressees that is justified by exceptional necessity. The chapter taxonomizes the possible institutional embodiments of IO exceptionalism according to its constitution, reach, and intrusiveness and highlights its phenomenological differences with respect to domestic exceptionalism. Given the structural conditions of the international spheres of authority in which IO exceptionalism operates, it is expected to rely on the acquiescence of the most powerful member states, to be stratified in scope and application according to states’ power differentials, and to instrumentalize rather than openly suspend norms of international law.

Introduction

The first chapter introduces the emergency problematique for the context of international organizations (IOs). While long tied to the nation-state, the internationalization of political authority in the last decades has now also rendered IOs potential and actual holders of emergency powers. In conversation with the relevant strands of research in international relations, international law, and (international) political theory, the chapter lays out the book’s main conceptual contribution, which consists in an operational definition of IO exceptionalism that is amenable to comparative analysis. Furthermore, it presents the contours of the theoretical framework to analyze the institutional consequences of IO exceptionalism and foreshadows the argument of the analytical model. The chapter concludes with a reflection on research design and methods.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter revisits the proportionality theory and assesses its explanatory power relative to the theoretical competitors by way of an aggregated cross-case comparison. It finds that the theory fares exceptionally well in both explaining single case outcomes and accounting for variance across cases. The model holds across a variety of institutional designs, levels of authority, issue areas, and crisis types. Second, this chapter turns to the question of how to normatively evaluate IO exceptionalism. It proposes to distinguish three different questions about the normative legitimacy of (a) the adoption and exercise of emergency powers by IOs, (b) the process of constitutional change after IO exceptionalism, and (c) the post-exceptionalist political order of IOs. While the preliminary assessments of the cases on these dimensions are not uniform, overall they warrant skepticism regarding the normative legitimacy of mostly unregulated emergency politics at the global level.

WHO Emergency Powers for Global Health Security

Chapter 6 analyzes two consecutive cases of exceptionalism in the World Health Organization (WHO). In the first case study, it explains how the WHO’s assumption of emergency powers in the 2003 SARS crisis led to their legal normalization. To confront the SARS outbreak, the WHO resorted to unprecedented emergency measures infringing on states’ sovereignty. Building on arguments of functionality, the WHO managed to create a broad consensus on the general appropriateness of such measures. They were thus enshrined in the new International Health Regulations in 2005 and came to their first reuse in the second case: the adoption of emergency powers during the H1N1 influenza “pandemic” in 2009. Due to a very mild course of the outbreak, however, this time it incited a societal backlash against the WHO. The emergency measures were delegitimized as excessive and futile, forcing the WHO to accept a procedural containment of its emergency powers.

Emergency Powers of the UN Security Council

Chapter 4 applies the proportionality model to two cases of IO exceptionalism at the United Nations (UN) Security Council. First, it explains the normalization of the Council’s self-asserted emergency power to act as a global legislator. After 9/11, the Council, for the first time, decreed abstract, general, and indefinite rules to the entire international community. Despite opposition in the aftermath, it was capable to arrogate a permanent de facto legislative competence by credibly justifying the measures as necessary. Second, the chapter accounts for the constitutional containment of the Council’s regime of targeted sanctions against terror suspects. Through Resolution 1390 (2002), the UN Security Council implemented the so-called “terror lists” financially sanctioning all listed individuals without providing for a legal remedy. Against the preferences of the most powerful states, a coalition of societal actors and courts successfully induced procedural improvements by delegitimizing the measures as excessive.