Individual citizens and businesses follow their lead and go on to use the crisis to their personal benefit, as Gerhard Schindler, former head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, complains. Once they overcome their initial paralysis, some government officials tend to present a crisis as a chance to take far-reaching action that might be difficult in normal times due to political circumstances. Instead, politicians and officials in Europe have too often tried to excuse their fly-by-night crisis response by adopting a “crisis-as-opportunity” narrative. But channeling the surge of goodwill and engagement from society is hard for states and, although many governments are indeed engaging more with civil society and the private sector, they have not done It helps people combat a feeling of hopelessness and works to counter any popular backlash against the state by damping social upheaval and economic stress. This popular involvement is often key to a country’s resilience in crisis. One obvious antidote to governments’ rush for “action for action’s sake” thus lies in the careful engagement of civil society and the private sector whether hosting refugees or finding useful supplies for basic needs. The state apparatus alone cannot handle crises of today’s depth and scale. Given that international crises now often affect all levels of government across all policy fields, the scope for parallelism is huge. But creating parallel structures in the middle of a crisis is often a sign of panic, and these have been a feature of most recent European crisis responses.
Functioning structures and entities are of course important, and where they are lacking, they must be created. Different bodies produce proposals for new measures, entities, and structures, but without examining the actual usefulness of the proposals. Instead of a cool, fact-based response, states try to create the impression they are taking charge of the situation. This initial inaction soon gives way to the reverse - panicked action just for the sake of doing something. Soldiers, paramedics and firefighters train so that when it comes down to it, they don’t have to think. That’s why it’s so important to rehearse these types of situations. Like a car accident, you don’t know exactly what’s happening to you. World Health Organisation Executive Director Michael Ryan says: Without readiness, the initial official response is almost always no response at all, but rather paralysis. But crisis readiness and management are nevertheless possible. Admittedly, experience shows that no planning survives the first phase of a crisis. But it need not be so if states were better at readiness. Indeed, for ordinary Europeans these days, a shared sense of stress is almost the definition of a crisis. In the public mind, crises are characterized by social upheaval, economic stress, and political ad hockery. Learning from Crises is Difficult but Essential The NSS could thus usefully overcome the false dichotomy between crisis response and strategy by refocusing its attention on anticipating domestic crises arising from geopolitical shifts. Both are increasingly about coping with the way international dependencies and geopolitical rivalries affect matters previously viewed as strictly domestic, local, and technical. There are other reasons to view strategy-making and crisis management as mutually reinforcing. They prove that crises need not be stressful, destructive or lead to action for the sake of taking action. These are a first step to helping a state steer a strategic course. A heavy focus on crisis management is taken as proof that strategy-making is futile, and the latter often happens only when states lose faith in their ability to respond to unexpected crises.Ĭrisis response can be improved and even made routine with some relatively straightforward reforms. Crisis response and strategy-making are often viewed as separate, even antithetical processes.
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