Hans Wallmark and Gunvor Kronman / Apr 2024
Janez Lenarčič, European Commissioner for Crisis Management. Photo: European Union, 2024
The enhancing of crisis preparedness and resilience has become a key cross-sectoral priority for the EU in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
The main goal of the union should be to ensure that the EU and its Member States are better prepared for the simultaneous occurrence of increasingly complex, cross-border and multi-faceted crises. The union should bring all policy sectors together in order to define common policy objectives and recommendations to increasing cooperation, peer-learning, and coordination.
In 2021, Finland and Sweden established a ground-breaking crisis preparedness programme called the Hanaholmen-initiative. The program brings together leading Finnish and Swedish security experts from all sectors of society, including civil society and the business community. The initiative has been successful in increasing joint knowledge of the countries’ different crisis preparedness systems and procedures, helping to identify cross-border government counterparts of, and providing practical opportunities for strengthened cooperation and coordination in the face of future crises.
The EU can draw inspiration from the Finnish and Swedish concepts of bringing different sectors together horizontally. At the EU level, there are several structures and mechanisms for crisis management that can be activated quickly in response to a crisis. These include the Council of the European Union’s crisis coordination mechanism the Integrated Political Crisis Response (IPCR) and mechanisms under the EU Commission such as the Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) and its coordinating hub Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC), resource bank Civil Protection Pool, and stockpile arrangement rescEU.
However, the EU crisis management is still carried out in silos and focuses on specific sectors and areas, leading to an insufficient coordination and exchange of information between these instruments.
The EU also lacks a structure to involve the private sector and understand its needs. In Finland, and increasingly also in Sweden, the private sector plays a crucial part in the societal security strategy, which is built on close collaboration between the government, authorities, business operators, organizations, and citizens. According to Sweden´s minister for civil defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, there is no task within total defence that can be solved sustainably in the long term without the participation of industry and the business community.
The EU should also focus on strengthening its strategic cooperation on preparedness and resilience between the EU and NATO. There could be an EU host nation support arrangement, following a similar NATO mechanism. This could be used in a crisis, for example, to organize cross-national rescue transportations.
Now that Finland and Sweden have both become members of NATO the civil defense area also needs to be harmonized with the military strategy, improving societal security along with military defense. As Hasit Thankey, head of the enablement and resilience section in NATO: s defense policy and planning section pointed out during a seminar at Hanaholmen in August last year, it´s all about resilience, about recognizing the societal vulnerabilities and preparing better.
The focus on societal security will offer the EU countries tremendous opportunities but will also require adaptation and major financial investments. Crisis preparedness is dependent on fixed resources that are mainly created on a national basis, which means that various forms of bilateral and international cooperation require not only good planning, but a lot of extra time and money.
All of the above points require a carefully crafted EU-wide preparedness strategy as well as coordination of the crisis preparedness terminology, which is currently too fragmented.
