As events in Ukraine spiraled out of control earlier in 2014, regional observers frequently raised the question of how the European Union could respond. This is the kind of question addressed directly by the authors of The European Union as Crisis Manager, a helpful volume especially well suited for students of international public administration. A separate question, however, is how the European Union should respond, one that is not addressed directly by this timely book, other than to say that the EU can and should do more.

This is both explicable and justifiable. Any work tackling “crisis management” writ large is immediately confronted with the challenge of scope and scale. Certainly a massive flood is a “crisis,” but so is an earthquake, a terrorist campaign, a lethal epidemic, a radioactive discharge, or even a civil war. In this book, the scope is inclusive to all manner of crises, but in regard to scale, Arjen Boin, Magnus Ekengren, and Mark Rhinard are careful to parse what is meant by the term. They identify three domains—national, external and transboundary—that are dealt with in dedicated chapters.

A “national” crisis addresses a scenario whereby one or more EU member states are overwhelmed by a catastrophic event, including but not limited to natural disasters and terrorism. The key institutional organ for handling such crises is the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism. Founded in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Mechanism was inspired by the need for a “clear, coordinated disaster response strategy, which would ensure mutual assistance in times of disaster” (p. 25). Examples provided include the 2002 floods in Central Europe, the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige off the coast of Spain, the Portuguese forest fires of 2003, and the Asian tsunami of 2004. (The justification for the latter was due to the large numbers of European citizens affected by the disaster: Nearly two thousand either went missing or were confirmed dead.)

An “external” crisis, on the other hand, is essentially a crisis management mission executed outside EU boundaries, including but not limited to sending “civil-military missions to worldwide hotspots” (p. 100). Examples include peacekeeping missions in Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as personnel deployed to Congo, Lebanon, and elsewhere. A principal mechanism for coordinating such missions is the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP), which enables the EU to participate not only in peacekeeping missions but also in conflict prevention and international security generally. The CSDP is considered here in detail as an organ that coordinates with other intergovernmental organizations, including NATO, the African Union (AU), the United Nations, and (to a lesser extent) the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Of the three domains, the third and most interesting—transboundary—is defined as “one that affects multiple member states and, when left unaddressed, can threaten the political fabric of the EU” (p. 100). The need for transboundary crisis management capacity was highlighted in 1986 by a man-made disaster, that is, the massive radioactive cloud released by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, but also by a natural disaster, namely, the massive ash cloud released by an Icelandic volcano in 2010. More pointedly politically, the global financial crisis triggered by the collapse of the U.S. housing market in 2007 continues to stretch the “spirit of solidarity” that nominally undergirds the EU ethos of member states supporting other member states in times of crisis. The EU’s capacity to manage transboundary crises is in many ways dysfunctional as “capacities are scattered across the EUs civil service and there is no observable logic tying them together” (p. 130). Nonetheless, the authors contend, “the EU policy process inexorably muddles on and continues to produce new transboundary crisis management capacities” (p. 133). How should this be the case?

The answer to this question is framed by the authors’ theoretical model, which builds on the idea of institutionalization as an evolutionary process, a concept addressed earlier by Boin and Tom Christensen (see “The Development of Public Institutions: Reconsidering the Role of Leadership,” Administration & Society 40 [May 2008]: 271–97). The model also depends on the European policy development approaches found in such works as John Peterson and Elizabeth Bomberg’s (1999) Decision-Making in the European Union and Jonathan Zeitlin’s (2011) Transnational Transformations of Governance: The European Union and Beyond.

In the book under review, the process of institutionalization “starts with vaguely articulated political ambitions to solve a problem,” (p. 13) in which case member states expect action by the EU to help respond to a crisis or disaster. As may be expected, the EU may respond with “a little funding and a dedicated bureaucratic unit” that begins to experiment with new ideas and new networks of stakeholders. Such an experimental effort, however, may in turn be confronted by emerging problems that “produce lessons, both positive and negative.” As a result, the bureaucratic unit must respond with “adaptive capacity,” which can become routinized. Finally, “institutionalization crucially depends on efforts to generate legitimacy for the capacity under construction” (p. 14).

It is fair to say that this process appears not only complex but also rather “ad hoc” (p. 82), which it is, a point with which the authors agree. This is a challenge addressed by the book, that is, to show “why certain crisis management capacities have become institutionalized at the EU level,” despite a range of impediments both national and supranational, particularly the fact that there is very little agreement among member states and as to how the EU should respond to crises (p. 3). Importantly, however, the authors acknowledge that their goal is to determine the “availability of crisis management capacities,” rather than to determine their effectiveness (p. 15). This appears rather counterintuitive—why not study the effectiveness of the EU as a crisis manager?—but that is a separate question than how the EU develops the ability to respond to crises. (In a perfect world, this book would be followed by a second volume that addresses this question directly.)

While the authors’ clear focus is the EU, this model of institutionalization could be tested elsewhere in the wide world of international public administration, including but not limited to such bodies as the UN or the AU. However, this model is less amenable to the world of politics. Indeed, the book argues that the process of institutionalizing crisis management capacities is often “depoliticized” and “not the result of a far-sighted design or visionary leadership of large member states” (p. 87). The authors frankly do not “explicitly train” their “attention on leaders or leadership” (p. 152). This not to say, however, that the book in any way falls short of its stated goal, that is, to demonstrate that the “EU’s crisis management capacities have progressively accumulated to a substantial and perhaps impressive degree” in spite of the fact that crisis management “remains a core competency” of member states. (p. 17). This point is well taken, and their model of institutionalization is both original and useful.

Nonetheless, the authors also acknowledge that their book “has very limited predictive value” because “future crises will test just how deeply the EU’s crisis domains have been institutionalized” (p. 17). All the same, they argue, “capacity building rolls inexorably forward” (p. 145). Therefore, if we consider Ukraine as a case of regional crisis, this book would not anticipate how Brussels should deal with Kiev (or Moscow), or even whether any given action is effective, but it would be useful in the aftermath to show how the EU evolves institutional crisis management capacity going forward. Thus, the book is of less general interest to students of specific European states, even if it is of great value to students of the EU as an institution, and should serve as a theoretical lens through which a number of crisis case studies could yield fruitful research.