At the level of general principle, ideas of representative democracy are appealed to by the EU institutions and member-states alike. Yet the events of recent months, particularly moves to impose austerity measures where they lack a democratic mandate, suggest these ideas are respected in practice quite weakly: partly for good reasons – they are deeply challenging to institutionalise – but partly for bad – they can block the implementation of policy programmes deemed necessary irrespective of public opinion. This paper argues representative democracy in Europe risks being marginalised amidst the actions and rhetoric of emergency. In member states such as Greece and Italy, as well as at the EU level, it is de facto cast as anachronistic under conditions of crisis – a norm to be waived in a state of exception. Carl Schmitt famously defined as sovereign the one who has the power to declare the state of exception, and linked this power closely to suspensions of the law. The European setting invites a different understanding of emergency: one that is collectively produced by multiple actors in a ‘post-sovereign’ order, and which is manifest in the suspension of norms which may or may not be legally codified. While representative democracy may be its victim, practices of representation are its condition: the state of emergency is constructed and shaped through the representative claims of social and political actors in institutional and extra-institutional settings. The paper goes on to examine how exceptional this state of exception is. Is the European emergency a recent phenomenon, or has it been one of the currents of European integration from the beginning? If it is long-standing, what are the prospects for the political ‘normalisation’ of Europe’s national and transnational settings?
