Emergency Europe and the Politics of Volition

Persistently engaged in the politics of emergency, the EU has come to rationalise some of its most important decisions as urgent measures to handle a crisis. With its suggestion of decisions born of necessity rather than choice, this governing mode consolidates an image of the EU as the negation of political agency. In this paper I examine how such actions invite their opposite: a politics defined by its rejection of necessity and the celebration of political volition. The mobilisations commonly studied under the heading of ‘populism’ gather much of their wider appeal from this promise to restore political agency – a promise independent of the other features typically ascribed to them, and which the term populism can serve to obscure. The paper goes on to examine how the spectre of such mobilisations may be invoked by established powers as reason for further measures grounded in necessity, thus raising the prospect of escalation.