Integration through Institutional Entrepreneurship: How the European Commission Reframed Civil Protection towards Civil Defence

The paper examines how the European Commission’s 2025 proposal to revise the Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) exemplifies crisis-induced transformation of EU executive governance through supranational entrepreneurship. It bridges European integration theory with policy process approaches to conceptualise policy entrepreneurship as a micro-level mechanism producing incremental integration under institutional constraint. The accumulation of crises (the economic and financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, hybrid threats, and intensifying climate disasters) has fundamentally altered the EU’s crisis governance landscape. The UCPM is central in this context: in the proposed reform, the Commission frames citizen protection not merely as solidarity but as strategic resilience, explicitly linking civil protection to civil defence and advocating a whole-of-society approach. This represents a significant shift in executive governance, extending supranational competence into domains traditionally reserved for core state powers without treaty reform. Drawing on the Multiple Streams Framework and institutional layering theory, the paper traces how the Commission exploited a unique political window (geopolitical instability, transatlantic uncertainty under a second Trump administration, and the UCPM legislative review cycle) to engineer functional spillover into security and civil-military preparedness. Through discursive innovation and strategic coupling of problem, policy, and politics streams, the Commission redefines disasters as hybrid, systemic threats, introduces dual-use capacities and civil-military coordination arrangements, and proposes an EU Crisis Coordination Hub linked to NATO and a prospective Civil Defence Mechanism. The analysis employs qualitative process-tracing of official documents, including the 2013-2023 consolidated UCPM Decision, the Commission’s 2025 reform proposal, European Council Conclusions (2023–2024), and strategic communications. Four phases of the entrepreneurial mechanism are reconstructed: problem framing, policy design (dual-use instruments), political coupling, and institutional layering embedding civil-defence logics within civilian frameworks. The paper contributes theoretically by linking crisis-driven agency to incremental integration dynamics, showing how entrepreneurship provides the cognitive and discursive foundation of spillover. It argues that the Commission’s activism in crisis governance reflects a broader executive turn in EU policymaking. Supranational institutions, particularly the Commission, leverage crises to reinterpret mandates and expand competences through procedural and discursive means rather than formal authority, effectively creating new forms of authority. This process illustrates integration through entrepreneurship: incremental, directional, and achieved through strategic layering of new meanings onto existing competences. Empirically, the paper addresses key questions: How do crises trigger institutional change? How is the institutional balance reshaped? Who sets the agenda in EU crisis responses? Findings show that while the Commission acts within boundaries set by the European Council, it translates intergovernmental consensus into concrete reform agendas, shaping the direction of integration before formal decisions. This dynamic of delegated yet directional entrepreneurship helps explain how EU executive governance evolves under successive crises, balancing efficiency demands with sovereignty concerns while extending supranational coordination into sensitive domains.