A new approach for a new era? The European Union's responses to crises and polycrises and how these have evolved in recent times.

The European Union has over time been the location of a great number of events understood, narrated to and responded to as crises. Over time, both the scale and number of such crises has increased. This paper thus seeks to consider some of the implications of such events for the EU’s legal order, and to consider the evolution of the European Union's responses to such events. While the traditional concept of a state of emergency has no application to the European Union, there are a number of provisions in the Treaties of potential significance in crisis or emergency situations - both the (somewhat sporadic) provisions directed specifically at some such situations and more general legal bases. These Treaty provisions are looked at in this paper, as is the wide variety of responses of all kinds, and not merely legislative, that have characterised the EU’s responses to crisis situations. Trends of particular interest have included action in areas normally linked to national policies, changes in political paradigms associated with the EU, institutional developments of various kinds and latterly, a shift to a sub-Treaty approach and, in particular, the advent of a more organised and comprehensive ‘resilience’ approach to dealing with crises, with a significant recent example of the legislative aspect of this approach having been the adoption of the Internal Market and Resilience Act (IMERA).