L’Unione europea e la gestione dei disastri: considerazioni di natura sistemica a partire dalla reazione sovranazionale alla pandemia di COVID-19

The purpose of this contribution is neither to provide a comprehensive analysis of all legal tools elaborated in Europe to face disaster scenarios nor to review their global effectiveness. Instead, it aims to carry out a legal assessment of the most relevant trends of EU disaster law in light of the EU reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only such a reaction has represented the most powerful illustration of the EU capacities to manage disaster scenarios, but it has given the opportunity to look at how the constitutional framework of the Union has been reshaped to face the pandemic. In particular, this contribution argues that a change in the EU approach towards disasters has been put in place in the context of the pandemic, leading to a more flexible reading of the principle of conferral.