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Drawing on multi-disciplinary approaches to crisis management, crises are generally considered to be normal events in the development of organisations. Irrespective of their size or age, organisations regularly have to adapt to a changing environment. Moreover, they have to correct internal anomalies. Both are challenges to the status quo, which can manifest themselves in either abrupt or cumulative crises (Hwang and Lichtenthal 2000; Roux-Dufort 2009). An organisational crisis is conceived here as ‘a low-probability, high-impact event that threatens the viability of the organization [which] is characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution, as well as by a belief that decisions must be made swiftly’ (Pearson and Clair 1998: 60). Consequently, crises should not be interpreted as purely negative incidents because ‘these events can also be an opportunity to redesign and restructure a faulty system and turn it into a better one’ (Carmeli and Schaubroeck 2008: 192).

Over the EU’s sixty years of development, the recent crises have not been the first occurrences to challenge its institutional system. One major example was the ‘empty chair crisis’ in the mid-1960s, when France, due to its opposition against the planned introduction of majority decisions in the Common Agricultural Policy, stayed away from negotiations in the then European Economic Community’s Council of Ministers, thus bringing the whole organisation to a standstill and exposing shortcomings in how the Council was working. The crisis was solved by the ‘Luxembourg compromise’ in 1966, which reformed decision-making in the Council and allowed for vetoes against resolutions if a member state believed such a resolution to be against its national interest (Palayret, Wallace and Winand 2006). Another crisis occurred when in 2005 the majority of French and Dutch citizens taking part in referenda rejected the ratification of the European Constitutional Treaty, eventually resolved by a compromise leading to the Treaty of Lisbon (2009).

Even though both predicaments have been conceived as major blows against European integration, the most recent difficulties are of a much greater magnitude that puts the whole European project potentially at risk. They feature many attributes of a transboundary crisis: ‘These crises have no clear beginning, escalate suddenly, and, in unforeseen directions, exploit linkages between functional and geographical domains’ (Boin 2009: 368). In the context of the EU, these kinds of transboundary crises impact all levels of the European multi-layered system of governance, spilling over from one policy sector to another, for instance, from the financial to the fiscal and monetary to the asylum and the border regime. The ‘refugee crisis’, for example, has divided the EU (Culik 2015), and moreover has put those euro area states hardest hit by [12] the sovereign debt crisis under additional pressure. Consider Italy and Greece, member states already under strain due to the debt crisis, where the largest number of refugees first arrived from Turkey and North Africa. Under the prevailing EU common asylum system, these states were responsible for processing asylum applications and for taking care of the asylum seekers within their territory. Given both countries’ scarcity of resources and weak administrative capacity vis-à-vis the scope of the challenge, after unsuccessfully demanding solidarity from European governments, they started to directly forward refugees to other member states (see Zaun’s and Wallascheck’s chapters in this volume). This practice quickly fuelled dissatisfaction with the Schengen regime and its main pillar: the free movement of people among European member states, creating momentum for populists to fuel a full-blown crisis of legitimacy of the EU.

According to Jürgen Habermas (1973), a legitimacy crisis results from a loss of confidence in the ability of administrative institutions to effectively govern. In fact, trust in European institutions has dramatically decreased since the beginning of the debt crisis, with a further dip occurring during the ‘refugee crisis’ and slowly recovering since then (Eurobarometer 2018). In the current situation, the EU is at a critical turning point. The crisis, like any other legitimation crisis, ‘can be resolved only through recalibration, which necessarily involves the communicative reconciliation of the actor’s or institution’s social identity, interests, or practices with the normative expectations of other actors within its realm of political action’ (Reus-Smit 2007: 172; see also Liebert, ch. 20). As Mlada Bukovansky (2002: 233) already observed more than ten years ago, ‘the Concert of Europe shows that legitimacy contests may in the end be managed by political leaders, if those leaders are able to learn the relevant lessons of the day and cobble together an order that takes into account both traditional claims and those of newly empowered (and/or newly dissatisfied) sociopolitical actors.’ Learning from crises, however, is a difficult task, particularly if there are no authoritative and widely accepted explanations of why and how the crisis happened and if the proposed solutions are contested (Boin 2009: 374). This is true regarding the crises that have afflicted the EU since 2010, all of which are at the centre of contention between opposed views. Many of these conflicting views are characterised by the dichotomy of ‘Europeanism vs. neonationalism’. Though certainly not new, this dichotomy now shapes the EU’s politics of crises more strongly than ever before. Highlighting this aspect enables us to capture the major conflict line at the heart of the current political crises. A closer look into the contentions between nationalist and pro-European responses to the crises serves to illustrate the point about this reinforced division.