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Short abstract

I extend crisis to its organisational corollary: the project. I then argue that governance through serial exceptionalisation renders politics unstable and makes invisible structural transformations to economic intervention. Returning to normal is not enough—we need a new normal.

Long abstract

Crisis has long been part of European economic governance. Under the Hayekian conceptualization of EU law, markets are ‘encased’ in legal protections shielding them from public reproach. Until they are not. Crisis-infused special state subsidy guidelines operate as recurring suspensions of normal rules, enabling market incursions and governance rearrangements otherwise legally precluded. They are palatable because they are ultimately temporary. They promise a return to ‘normal’. Borrowing from Esposito, I argue that accepting crisis as ‘crisis’ entrenches the blindness she speaks of, reinforcing encasement and foreclosing inquiry into alternative forms of intervention.

I extend this critique to the organizational corollary of the crisis—the project. Like crises, projects denote a temporal boundedness, a promise that things will return to normal. Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEIs) exemplify this logic. They perforate the European governance architecture not despite but because of their exceptionality, centralizing actors around a central node buoyed by the promise of an end. Rather than treating them as correctable governance failures by extending project horizons or reforming investment instruments, I ask what the project form renders systematically invisible: non-exceptional, routinized, and democratically accountable public investment.

I propose reading the crisis-project dyad not as a mechanism to manage emergencies, but as a ritual of recurring affirmation of a Hayekian fiction which precludes its structural transformation. The promise of redemption—of a return to normal—is not a solution to the EU’s problems. It is the problem.