Co-operative Management of Transboundary Crises: Evidence from EU Efforts on Cyberterrorism and other Threats

From the human health threat posed by the Ebola outbreak and the lingering effects of the financial crisis to the often shocking imagery of the ongoing refugee crisis, the EU has recently experienced a spate of major, multi-country crises. These events can be categorized and analyzed as transboundary crises. Notably, cyber terrorism is one such threat – it has clear transboundary crisis potential. These transboundary crises are characterized by their capacity to affect or threaten multiple countries and policy sectors; plus, their complexity and duration are often an order of magnitude above that of their local and national-level counterparts. Even more problematically, their incidence and impact appear to be increasing, largely due to globalization and a host of associated integration processes. These crises are now revealing the true extent of economic, ecological and infrastructural interdependence produced by those integrative process and, thereby, the limits of nation-states’ individual crisis management strategies and capacities. As the examples above suggest, nowhere are these developments being felt more strongly than in the highly interconnected and geographically proximate member states of the EU. The need for cooperative inter-state management of these crises is clear and the EU has actually developed substantial transnational crisis management capacity in some policy sectors. But efforts to research how additional and more effective EU crisis management capacity could be developed have hit a stumbling block, a puzzle: Why do the member states readily deepen their cooperation in response to some transboundary threats but not others? Indeed, in some cases – think of the refugee crisis – we may even be witnessing an unravelling of transnational cooperation. The importance of this research question is evident not only in the recent emergence of so many large-scale crises, but by the realization that their management, depending on how it is carried out, can have a legitimizing or delegitimizing effect on the EU itself. Despite the question’s importance and obvious timeliness, no single strand of the academic literature offers the promise of a clear, comprehensive answer. That said, the international relations, EU integration, and collective-action-theory-based literatures on global commons and global public goods do offer a range of relevant insights. These insights, together with others from the multi-disciplinary field of crisis management, will be employed in this paper to distill a preliminary analytical framework for the prospect of cooperative responses to a range of transboundary crises. The plausibility of that framework will then be checked against evidence gathered from the handling of contemporary transboundary threats in the EU, including that of cyber terrorism. This work is highly applicable to the imperative research goal of better understanding responses to transboundary crises in the EU, but may also yield findings relevant to crisis management in other regions or globally.