What role does the European Union (EU) play in crisis management? What organisational capacity does the EU have to service the demands of crisis management? This report from the Forum for Security Studies (EUROSEC) at the Swedish National Defence College (SNDC) and Leiden University Crisis Research Center (CRC) examines EU crisis management capacity. It shows that the EU plays a role in European crisis management and has at least a minimum of organisational capacity to deal with crises. However, many issues must be resolved before the EU takes on larger crisis management responsibilities.
The EU has the organisational capacity for crisis management and the ability to learn from experience. However, crisis management preparation in the EU has a narrow orientation which impedes learning across sectors, hindering understanding of existing crisis management capacities. The convoluted relationship between the EU and member states is also a major impediment to crisis management at the EU level. Finally, post-crisis accountability structures in the EU are complex and unclear at best.
There are four dimensions to crisis management: crisis prevention, crisis preparation, crisis coping and crisis aftermath. The EU has considerable crisis prevention capacity and varying levels of crisis preparation, coping and aftermath capacity. Empirical research further reveals that:
- The EU has a well-developed capacity for mapping and monitoring trends. This capacity is geared towards known risks rather than unknown threats and is organised independently of member states.
- Crisis plans only seem to exist in sectors where member states have explicitly authorised the European Commission to formulate them. Crisis planning in the Commission is primarily concerned with the supranational level.
- Crisis awareness within Directorates-General (DGs) correlates with crisis experience. Commission DGs have accumulated considerable crisis management experience, even if the formal definition of crisis suggests otherwise.
- The Commission undertakes crisis management in an ad hoc fashion. The Commission can make rapid decisions during crises, but relies on member states to provide critical information, and implementation of decisions is problematic.
- The Commission appears ready to evaluate crisis management performance, but the functional nature of its evaluations undermines their potential symbolic value. The creation of agencies following crises reflects EU ability to learn from crises.
- The EU has several instruments that might engage available capacity to manage crises.
There are a number of issues which the EU must resolve before it takes on greater crisis management responsibilities. The EU risks creating a gap between expectations and capability unless it considers a number of descriptive, normative and prescriptive questions with regard to:
- the crisis management capacity of the EU – we need more qualitative and quantitative evidence on EU crisis management capacity, as well as a normative framework for assessing EU involvement in crisis management;
- the EU-member state interface – we need greater knowledge of how the complex relationship between the EU and member states shapes EU crisis responses; and
- the ‘functional’ security identity of the EU – the revealed crisis management capacity of the EU indicates a new type of regional security identity. We need to consider the effect of the EU’s role in crisis management on its security identity.
