The European Commission’s Responses to Slow-Burning Crises – Identifying Different Types of Action in the Climate and the Rule of Law Crises

Over the past decade, the EU and its member states have faced several crises. In all of these, the European Commission has played a pivotal role in managing crisis responses. Existing research offers a range of analytical approaches and empirical insights into the Commission’s leadership, its role in crisis-induced policymaking, increasing political activity and its success in securing new competences (e.g. Peterson 2017; Müller 2018; Vaagland 2021; Brandsma and Blom-Hansen 2025). However, comparative insights into the Commission’s actions remain scarce. More importantly, there is a lack of systematization. We seek to contribute to research on the European Commission and its crisis responses by developing a typology of policy activity. To that end, we focus on two crises that can be defined as slow-burning: the climate and the rule of law crises. While quite different in nature, both are characterized by a certain degree of permanence on policy agendas and sustained attention. At the same time, they differ from fast-burning crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as they do not trigger ad hoc responses but rather incremental policy activity of varying intensity. By investigating the Commission’s handling of both crises, we develop a typology of activity and identify two modes of policy responses: a more technical response in the rule of law crisis and an ideological response in the context of the climate crisis. In addition, we show that these types can vary over time. To develop this typology, we draw on the policy dynamics perspective (Thomann et al. 2025), which highlights the facilitating and constraining factors shaping different types of policy activity. Empirically, we provide a qualitative analysis of the Commission’s activity in the two crises, offering comparative insights that allow us to propose a typology of responses to slow-burning crises.