Crisis management is an integral part of the exercise of power. However, one is not the other, and the consideration of elected officials towards these major current challenges is sometimes radically different. Philosopher, doctor of legal sciences and researcher at Crisp, Vincent Lefebve examines the management of these crises by the political world.
They are health, (geo)political, environmental or migratory. They are sudden, long and systemic, too. Crises appear a little more in the news every year, so much so that some people wonder if a major systemic, polymorphous and constant crisis is not taking hold. To face it, is the current Belgian political system well equipped? Everything depends on the crisis and its history, as well as the unanimous desire of the political world to respond to it, poses Vincent Lefebve, philosopher and jurist at the Socio-Political Research and Information Center (Crisp), in a Weekly mail which he puts into perspective for Le Vif.
There is, in summary, two kinds of crises. Those that unite and those that divide. In his study, Vincent Lefebve demonstrates this by means of four challenges which have marked (or will still mark) Belgian history: the health crisis, the refugee reception crisis, the climate crisis and the Ukrainian crisis. “While the management of health and geopolitical challenges has been or is still marked by a dynamic of (relative) unity at the Belgian level, the same is not true regarding the two other issues, climate and migration, which have given rise and continue to give rise to different approaches within political parties,” notes the researcher.
The urgency to comply
Why, when faced with a crisis, do we unite or tear ourselves apart? There comparison between the health crisis and the reception crisis (which some call the migration crisis) allows us to highlight the reasons for this differentiated approach. When Covid occurs, the country is going through another crisis, this time political, and has no full government. In an emergency, a minority executive (MR/CD&V/Open-VLD), confined to managing the crisis, is given the confidence of the other parties. At that time, the Wilmès II government governed via the mechanism of special powers allowing “set aside a parliamentary assemblywith his agreement a priori and its control in retrospectin order to speed up the decision-making process. But another technique is also used, called “administrative policing”: health decisions are then taken by simple ministerial decreeseven if it means putting certain fundamental freedoms on hold. However, the ministerial decrees are intended to respond to an emergency situation, not a prolonged crisis. “A whole series of jurists and courts therefore agree that the Belgian government is acting illegally. This is what forces him to develop the pandemic law, governing the measures that the executive can take in the event of a crisis in the future.
Measures as coercive as the travel ban are undoubtedly necessary, but so are the imperatives of the rule of law. It is with this in mind that this law was created. Yet, this desire to comply with the law is not always present. In the context of the reception crisis, the federal executive seems to consider that the principle of legality is variable, notes Vincent Lefebve. Even if it means ignoring the thousands of court convictions and allowing several (at least three) million euros to be seized from Fedasil's accounts.
Far right versus experts
“The reception crisis is a laboratory: we observe a distanced relationship to human rights,” observes Vincent Lefebve, adding that these human rights ended up, a contrario, being put at the center of debates during the pandemic. However, the reception crisis and the health crisis have one thing in common: they have tested the solidarity of Belgians“but there was no clear political divide on the health issue before the crisis, whereas it already existed before for the migration issue.”
The far right has nothing to do with it. Vincent Lefebve notes that his elements of language are diffused in the political sphere. If the right was first contagious (the philosopher notes for example the concept of “call for air” introduced by Belang which found itself in the vocabulary of the president of the CD&V and, in other forms, among certain members of the MR), he also notes that the left did not offer uncompromising resistance. Indeed, the last “pressure strike” from the left on the migration issue dates back to the summer of 2021 and the hunger strike of undocumented immigrants. At the time, the PS and Ecolo had threatened to leave the government if a striker died. Since then, the issue has remained rather absent from the electoral campaign or federal negotiations.
Two reasons (among others) explain why governments allow themselves to deviate from legality regarding migration, but not health management. First, because the context of March 2020 plunged the country in shockwhere every citizen was concerned. There was urgency. But the most convincing element lies in what Vincent Lefebve calls “consociational democracy”, i.e. the importance given to experts in their field before politics looks into it. “For the health crisis, we have moved away from politics. There was a scientific response, politically adaptable. But the migration issue cannot be resolved by science.”
The fact remains that crises will follow one another, and Belgium (and even its federated entities) are struggling to form functional governments quickly. It is not impossible that in the future, when new crises arise, the pandemic law adopted in 2021 will be obsolete. Of course, it will be possible to create a new version of it. “But for long-term issues, such as the climate crisis, new institutions will have to be called upon. Should we create a parliament of nature, for example? We are facing an unprecedented situation in human history which puts the survival of future generations at stake. For the moment, we are not yet ready politically or intellectually to confront such an omnipresence of the theme of crisis in our collective life. It’s a bit dizzying”
