The last hundred years have been punctuated by economic crises. The banking crisis of 2008 and the sovereign debts crisis of 2011, both of which are very recent, are still headline news. The various reactions of public authorities or the economic sector have been hasty and improvised but they have been accompanied by new values and norms which merit further study.
In 2012, a symposium on this notion of crisis was organized to mark the thirty years of the International Association of Economic Law (AIDE). The thinking behind this was to adopt a broad interdisciplinary approach with a view to looking at the issue with both detachment and discernment. Various contributions have been transcribed in a collective work under the scientific coordination of Nicolas Thirion, Professor of Economic Law at the University of Liege. Both sceptical and hopeful at the same time, this work(1), soberly entitled “Crisis and Economic Law”, has just been published by Larcier.

Before delving into the content of the work, it is worth taking a look at the context in which it was framed. Nicolas Thirion is critical of the present-day utilitarian tendency in Legal science. “Conferences on Law are more and more geared towards describing the legal rules that exist and towards transferring information without questioning this information and without making any attempt to detect the underlying values that influence ways of applying law and its content”.
    
Indeed the aim of the researcher and AIDE is to understand how the law both influences arguments and is itself influenced by arguments that are external to it, how the rules, norms and values that drive the law result from this influence. This is an avowedly broader academic analysis that could inspire politicians if the channels of communication between the academic and political spheres were not so poor. “The politicians of today are evidently not going to attend a legal conference in its entirety. In my opinion, it is not up to the academic sector to approach politicians. Academics reflect, distance themselves and provide tools. Where necessary, they offer ways of thinking that could be useful for experts who belong to the political sphere. Yet an immediate bridge between the two cannot be envisaged today, it seems to me. This is very much the case because in politics, what is urgent takes precedence over what is important. What should be dealt with in the long-term and carefully thought out is abandoned in the interest of short-term gain”.  

And this is perhaps one of the symptoms of the crisis. Politicians are overwhelmed by the need for urgency and they adopt hasty measures. The public sector continued to grow with the emergence of capitalism in order to promote it but also to contain it. Towns grew with the merchants of the Middle Ages, nation-states grew with the discovery of new worlds and regional unions, the best example of which is probably the European Union, and international relations developed during the second half of the 20th century… “And then suddenly it all stopped. While economic liberalization has continued to grow and accelerate, unions between states have not succeeded in bringing about a sufficiently strong international framework”. According to Nicolas Thirion, this is because these inter-governmental organizations result from alliances between nation states which do not want to relinquish their sovereignty even if this sovereignty is becoming more and more limited. In this context, the law is finding it difficult to find its place. “The law is nothing other than a political decision enshrined in a text that is supposed to last. For the law to exist there needs to be political will. Unfortunately this will does not exist.  The law does not have an autonomous role to play. It is merely an instrument. Without someone to play this instrument, it is useless. For this reason, there is an intellectual requirement to look beyond the law, to delve below the surface of texts, to understand where they come from and what they were intended to communicate. Legal texts have no power in their own right”.

(1) Crise et droit économique (Crisis and economic law), sous la coordination scientifique de Nicolas Thirion, Ed. Larcier, Bruxelles, 2014.