EU Policymaking in Times of Crisis – Analysing EUNAVFOR MED Operation Sophia under the Lens of Crisisification

Abstract

Against the backdrop of what former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker termed the EU’s “polycrisis”, an abundance of scholarly work has turned attention to EU crisis governance. This article centres the concept of crisisification introduced by Mark Rhinard (2019) in this debate. Combining insights from traditional literature on EU policymaking and Critical Security Studies, Rhinard argues that a crisis mode of governance today complements traditional modes of policymaking in the EU. This article seeks to buttress his conceptual elaborations by offering more in-depth empirical insights into crisisification in practice in the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy. Turning to the case of the European Union Naval Force - Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR MED) Operation Sophia, it suggests that the concept can provide an improved understanding of the policymaking process leading to the operation’s launch as part of the EU’s response to the so-called ‘migration crisis’ in 2015. Concretely, the analysis sheds light on how a logic of urgency informed the policymaking process, detecting three procedural shortcuts EU actors have taken to abbreviate policy formulation and decision-making. Importantly, these findings demonstrate that even policies inherently designed as crisis management tools have been impacted by crisisification.