The European Union Integrated Political Crisis Response Arrangements: Improving the European Union's Major Crisis Response Coordination Capacities

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has progressively assumed more and more of a primary role in crisis response coordination. The EU Integrated Political Crisis Response arrangements (IPCR) were recently approved to facilitate this task. These new agreements, which substitute for the Crisis Coordination Agreements, will add more flexibility to crisis response mechanisms in the EU. They will also strengthen cooperation between the different relevant agents in a major crisis situation and create new useful tools, such as the Integrated Situational Awareness and Analysis. Their real performance still needs to be fully tested, but some weakness can already be foreseen. This article provides a deep analysis of this new legislation.