Abstract
It has become virtually impossible to discuss developments in European politics without referring constantly to the concept of ‘crisis’ (Rhinard, 2019). Crises are now a recurrent element in European politics, even though EU-specific crises, such as the Euro-crisis, economic stagnation, refugee crisis, terrorist crisis and Brexit, have been trumped by eminently global crises, starting from the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, they are now so numerous and overlapping that it has become impossible even to characterize a solar year by attaching it to a specific crisis. This is certainly the case with 2021, which began with a massive response to the enduring Covid-19 crisis and ended with the emergence of a dramatic energy and inflation crisis – not to mention rising tensions at the time between Ukraine and Russia at the eastern boarder of the EU, which turned into a fully-fledged war in 2022.