The Rule of Law in Economic Emergency in the European Union

Abstract: Both decades of the 21st century have been categorized as testing the EU constitutional foundations in the course of different crises, that have been challenging the viability of the European integration and causing alterations to EU constitutional design. The rhetoric of crisis/emergency in the EU has been consistently deployed in the areas of public security, environmental protection, migration law, Union values, the Economic and Monetary Union, public health and EU external action and acted as a justification for the invocation of non-standard measures. In this respect economic emergency, exemplified by the Great Crisis of 2007–2008 and the Euro Area Crisis, turned out to be a real test for the Union actors in terms of preserving adherence to the EU value, the rule of law, under such extraordinary circumstances.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the rule of law, Union’s foundational principle, has been affected during economic emergency of the Great Crisis of 2007–2008 and the Euro Area Crisis and its aftermath in several policy areas; what implications it produced for the functioning of the EU constitutional edifice in general, as well as what impact it had on the EU’s response to a new economic emergency, triggered by the COVID-19 outbreak.