Crisis Communication by the European Union: Avoiding Siege Mentality?

The European Union has faced a range of crises in the past decade, including the Euro crisis, the refugee crisis and the corona crisis. Pressures from the public to quickly and decisively solve problems, albeit with widely differing preferred solutions, collide with institutional logics of decision-making, formal mandates and technocratic culture within EU institutions. Located at the intersection between the outcries in the public sphere and the internal logics within EU institutions, public relations officials working at EU institutions are ideally placed to interpret how the EU deals with crises in terms of communication and to what extent crises are internalized by key decision-makers within the EU. This paper presents a pilot study into the extent to which a siege mentality develops among EU staff as a result of crises and how that might translate into external communication. It does so through a series of in-depth interviews with EU communication staff. It concludes with reflecting on the implications of these findings.