The emergency lane: How the EU can speed up its crisis responses

Time matters in an emergency. Fire engines, police cars, and ambulances need sirens to reach incidents quickly to put out fires, apprehend criminals, or care for the injured as fast as possible when every moment counts.

The same goes for emergencies on a national or even a European scale. Not only must the right resources be marshalled, but they must be able to move fast through the proverbial traffic of standard governmental, legal, financial, and other institutional procedures. When pandemic strikes, war convulses the neighbourhood, external disinformation and sabotage threaten citizens, and climate disasters wreak devastation: it all calls for quick action. Money must flow fast to where it is needed, domestically or among partner states. Factories must prioritise production of the relevant materials; be they face masks or ammunition, sandbags or electricity pylons. Transport and digital networks must be reinforced to allow goods and information to travel fast and securely to the site of the crisis.

Yet in today’s European Union, too often they get stuck in the traffic. During the covid-19 pandemic, cooperation between its member states initially broke down in several areas (with border closures and medical export bans) and although the bloc ended up improvising its way to a more unified response, the speed left something to be desired. As of mid-2024, some 50 months after the onset of the first lockdowns, under a quarter of the loans and under half of the grants under its ground-breaking Next Generation EU recovery fund had been dispersed.

The EU’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has at points evinced the same gridlock (or at least tailbacks). Where Russian arms factories have switched to three-shift, 24/7 production, European manufacturers have not been able to meet ammunition production targets. Repurposing funds for supporting Ukraine has often been a slow and bureaucratic process. In some cases, the traffic has quite literally been jammed-up: with roads and railways across central Europe, as well as border crossing facilities and energy inter-connectors, struggling to cope with the volumes of arms, civilian goods, electricity, and people moving between the EU and Ukraine.

This is not to say that the union, or its leading member states, has not adapted — in many cases, in impressive ways — to the new circumstances. The European Commission has developed a much sharper geopolitical edge. Governments have taken measures to improve the resilience of strategically essential supply chains and reinforce their protective infrastructure against hybrid attacks. A ‘flow’ mentality focused on efficient just-in-time processes has in many areas (from medical supplies to ammunition) given way to a ‘stock’ mentality focused on storing up supplies in the event of future shocks.

This progress is, however, a mixed picture. The commission has shown laudable adaptive leadership under Ursula von der Leyen — with both Kaja Kallas, the incoming high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, and Andrius Kubilius, the incoming and inaugural defence commissioner, well-suited to extending that progress over the next five years. But member states have often pursued their resilience-building initiatives in a patchwork fashion rather than at a coordinated European level.

The cost of letting the EU’s proverbial fire engines, police cars, and ambulances creep forward in the slow traffic of everyday processes will only grow

That has to change. Europe’s “ring of fire” neighbourhood looks increasingly flammable, from Ukraine in the east, via the worsening conflagration in the Levant, to violence and disorder in the Sahel to the south. Hybrid threats from Russia, China, and others are mounting. The next pandemic is a matter of when, not if. The climate crisis is intensifying and with it the likelihood of related economic, migratory, energy, and public-health shocks. The cost of letting the EU’s proverbial fire engines, police cars, and ambulances creep forward in the slow traffic of everyday processes will only grow.

Procedurally, dictators can mandate production, redirect resources, and generally bulldoze roadblocks more easily than democratic leaders. So, democrats must also smash this illusion of autocratic effectiveness in moments of urgency. They must show that their system is not only more participatory, but also better at delivering the crisis-response resilience and security that people need, all without abandoning the pluralism and checks and balances that provide its greatest long-term strength.

For this, the EU needs an emergency siren, a package of measures that can part the proverbial traffic when crises make that necessary and allow the materials and services needed to travel fast and in the volumes needed to the site of the incident — whatever and wherever it may be. The core of this package should be a European equivalent of the US Defence Production Act (DPA). That legislation, adopted in 1950, has repeatedly enabled American federal governments to secure their population in ways that would not be possible under conventional processes. From funding early research into Liquid Natural Gas to supporting urgent lithium and cobalt extraction for green energy today, from speeding up ventilator and firehose production to expanding the industrial base for hypersonic technologies, the act has, within the framework of a democratic system, enabled ordinary American administrations to meet extraordinary demands.

A European Defence Production Act (EDPA) would of course need to reflect the EU’s distinct institutional and political structure. Primarily it would enable the bloc’s institutions and its member-state governments to coordinate their emergency efforts on everything from ammunition production to cyber-security improvements. It would enable the selective relaxation of conventional procedural constraints in moments of intense time pressure. And it could be reinforced by other complementary measures such as: a new legal mechanism enabling EU states to prioritise the production of certain critical goods; revised rules making it easier to repurpose funds for urgent necessities when time is short; and a deeper pot of flexible emergency-response funding.

This new, distinct, European version of the DPA, and its wider logic, would give the bloc and its governments a much better chance of moving resources to where they are needed at the speed required. It would be that siren parting the traffic. And it should be high on the new commission’s agenda.