The EU’s constitutional resources for dealing with emergencies: From the Covid crisis to the energy crisis.

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any states in the world have “emergency constitutional law”, whereby the normal constitutional rules are put aside for the time of the emergency and then come back into operation once the emergency has ended. The constitutional law of the European Union does not make available such a general emergency regime. Instead, the EU Treaty rules must be used in good and bad times, in normal times and in crisis times. However, we do find, dispersed in different corners of the European Treaties, a number of legal competences allowing the EU to take action to address emergencies or, more generally, unforeseen situations. The Union did show its capacity to act in dealing with the pandemic crisis; not so much with the health crisis itself (which was largely left in the hands of its single member states), but much more with the economic consequences of that crisis. The economic response to the pandemic crisis represented a true shift in the EU’s economic policy which was possible thanks to some creative legal engineering from the side of the EU’s institutions and their legal services. In 2022, the war in Ukraine and, later on this year, the energy crisis, required again the creative use of the EU’s constitutional resources.