Introduction: European Civil Security Governance — Towards a New Comprehensive Policy Space?

Abstract

The post-Cold War period has witnessed a transformation from military-focused civil defence towards broader concepts of ‘all-hazards’ crisis and disaster management.1 Civilian crises and disasters, it seems, are ubiquitous and ‘normal’ (Perrow, 1984, 2007), while the threat of major interstate war has receded from the top of the agenda of security planners and crisis managers — at least in Western Europe and before the recent confrontations in Ukraine. Thus, security challenges like large-scale industrial accidents, infrastructure failures, major terrorist attacks or global pandemics have risen to prominence in the work of security policymakers and practitioners and become merged with longstanding concerns about ‘natural’ disasters such as floods and storms. The paradigmatic shorthand for these developments is the emergence of the ‘(world) risk society’ (Beck, 1992, 1999), whereby advanced societies are confronted with a multitude of increasingly complex, transnational and incalculable risks resulting from the unintended side-effects of globalization and high-tech capitalism. There is no shortage of recent examples supporting this thesis, ranging from the terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid or London and the Fukushima nuclear disaster to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or the Ebola virus pandemic in Western Africa.