Understanding the Crisis Management System of the European Union

Abstract

In less than a decade, Europe has witnessed a series of large-scale natural disasters and two large terrorist attacks. Traditionally, incidents of this kind have been the sole responsibility of the individual Member States. However, a growing concern among the members of the European Union about the trans-national effects of these incidents has caused them to ask for more cooperative arrangements within the field of disaster and crisis management.

As a result, during the last years, the European Union has gradually developed a system of common arrangements for handling large-scale emergencies or disasters. It is a system still under construction. Some parts are in place and operative on a daily basis, some parts are ready to be used but have never been tested and some parts are still being developed. These common arrangements are new and original insofar as they not only tie the national crisis management systems of the Member States together, but also crisis management arrangements within different policy sectors of the Union, and with an all-hazard approach. European cooperative arrangements for managing emergencies within specific sectors have been present for many years. What is new is the ambition to tie them altogether into a coherent crisis management system of the European Union.

This development towards a common system for crisis management has come about rather quickly and very much in an ad hoc manner. The result of this irregular growth of new common arrangements has been the creation of a system that seems disorganised. Different types of cooperative initiatives exist almost everywhere, they overlap, they are founded on different legal documents or different treaties, and they play different roles in different stages of a crisis, some are operative on a daily basis while some are sleeping until activated. It is an unfortunate trait of the system that it appears impenetrable for most people.

For newcomers to the field of crisis management within the EU it is very easy to get lost. The system itself, as it is today, is confusing, but things are not made easier by the fact that it is hard to find comprehensible information on how everything works. As yet, the European Union as an organisation has not developed a self-image of its own system of crisis management. There are no brochures, no website and no guidebook that can give an accurate and complete description. Anyone who enters the field is left on his own. One can hear even experienced researchers complain loudly about how hard it is to get basic information about the design of the system.