In his lecture on The Repressed State of Emergency, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde argues for the constitutional possibility of a partial superimposition of certain laws in times of emergency. Repressing the state of emergency would ultimately lead to greater and more permanent damage to the rule of law and liberal rights. This warning bears some similarities to Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the emergence of a permanent state of emergency, which loses the feature of exceptionality by becoming “the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.” Agamben thus proposes a shift from structure to practice, which focuses on the features of emergency politics instead of states of exceptions. The European Union's recent financial crisis is a promising object of research in this regard. After a brief discussion of Böckenförde's illuminating lecture on the repressed state of emergency, this Article will analyze a comment written by Böckenförde at the beginning of the Euro crisis. While this comment has sometimes been interpreted as an unconditional defense of unlawful emergency measures, a closer look at this statement reveals a much more nuanced argumentation. Böckenförde concurs with other legal scholars—such as Paul Kirchhof—in emphasizing the danger of an erosion of the rule of law through illegal measures. Böckenförde's intervention, however, leaves room for interpretation that this emergency action could—in principle and under specific circumstances—nevertheless be legitimate, although he was critical towards the handling of the crisis. On a more general level, this Article will discuss if the suspension of law can ever save the legal order it disregards. Next, the legality of EU crisis management—which has not been judged unanimously—will be scrutinized. At least, the circumvention and adaptation of EU primary law involved in this management has crucially changed the law of “normal affairs.” Finally, this Article will argue that the managerial style of emergency politics challenges the EU's project of “integration through law,” hollows out democratic procedures, and enforces, with its one-sided austerity policy, a form of economic integration that bears strong traces of an “authoritarian constitutionalism.”