The European Union Response to Emergencies: A Sociological Neo-Institutionalist Approach

Abstract

Disasters can strike at any time and can be of various types: natural like the Tsunami of 2004 that left over 300,000 people dead or man-made like the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah fighters. In face of the recurrence of major emergencies both inside and outside the EU borders, EU governments agreed in 2001 to set up a system which would allow them to pool their resources. The Council Decision of 2001 created the Community Civil Protection Mechanism (CCPM) relying on the so-called Monitoring and Information Centre (MIC), as the crisis centre for civil protection located in Brussels at the European Commission. In 2005, another major step was made regarding EU emergency management, with the creation of the Emergency and Crisis Coordination Arrangements (CCA). These arrangements, which are legally dealt with by the Council, were developed to share information, ensure coordination and collective decision-making at EU level in an emergency. It is dealt with by the Joint Situation Centre (SitCen). These two new organizational structures of EU emergency management, the MIC and the SitCen, and the two new organizational architectures of EU emergency management (commission- and council- based) are the object of my research. I address the question of their creation, adoption and implementation, developing a sociological neo-institutionalist approach based on the concept of divergent isomorphism. Incorporating an agency aspect, I demonstrate thanks to the use of the process-tracing method that new EU organizational structures emerged in an institutional context of fight for legitimacy: On the one hand, EU officials relying on input-legitimacy based on the isomorphically copied model; On the other hand, national officials relying on output-legitimacy drawn from their actions during crises. Thus, I contribute to the development of both EU integration theory in the field of security and organizational theory in the field of emergency management.