Temporal justifications in crisis decision-making

Crises – such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the current war in Ukraine – profoundly challenge the usual temporal orientations of political decision-making. Coping with crises requires immediate, forceful action and thus usually undermines any (pre-existing) long-term considerations of, say, sustainability, intergenerational justice or simply decent life in the foreseeable future. At the same time, however, notions such as “return to normality” or “post-crisis re-construction” enter the vocabulary of the public sphere, notions with a strong inbuilt element of future-orientedness. Much has been written about crises as the hour of the executive, but much less about the fact that this also involves a temporal dimension. Emergency situations hardly prioritise legislative work based on systematic considerations of the temporally varying consequences of the planned legislation; and there is hardly any time for citizen/ public deliberation that generally tends to strengthen the knowledge basis of decisions-making and alleviate its inherent uncertainty. Yet executive decisions under crisis conditions often contain elements that are explicitly meant to make positive post-crisis long-term development possible; crises are articulated to be opportunities for creating a better future – at least for some groups of people. By way of comparisons between a number of crisis-related case studies, primarily derived from the Nordic context (e.g., the decisions to employ emergency legislation during the first corona waves and Finnish and Swedish decisions to join NATO), this paper seeks to make sense of the justificatory strategies informing these types of decisions in terms of time and future orientation.