From 72-Hours Emergency Kits to Strategic Crisis Navigation: What the Eu Really Needs
- Patrick Trancu
- Mar 31
- 3 min read
The European Commission recently launched its Preparedness Union Strategy, encouraging citizens to assemble 72-hours emergency kits amid mounting geopolitical instability, climate disasters, cyberattacks, and other escalating threats. The initiative has sparked significant public reaction—particularly due to a promotional video by EU Commissioner for Crisis Management, Hadja Lahbib, which many felt trivialized the seriousness of the message.
Although individual preparedness is necessary (the 72-hour kit is a solid starting point as climate mega-shocks and hybrid attacks become increasingly common), deep security requires more than citizen involvement. Personal preparedness—currently largely insufficient—must not obscure a far more pressing and urgent need: a bold new approach to European crisis governance in a world constantly exposed to mega-shocks and major turbulence.
Beyond emergency kits lies a sobering truth: the European Union still lacks a comprehensive, integrated, and forward-looking crisis management architecture. In an era of polycrises—overlapping and interconnected economic, environmental, technological, and geopolitical disruptions—traditional, reactive crisis response models have become woefully inadequate.
We are no longer exclusively dealing with isolated emergencies requiring coordinated European responses. Today's challenges—climate shocks, wars, cyberattacks, energy disruptions, geopolitical upheavals, and disinformation campaigns—create cascading impacts that threaten both citizens and nations. These crises aren't merely concurrent; they create non-linear, unpredictable feedback loops that stretch institutions to their breaking points.
This demands more than public information campaigns or symbolic gestures. It calls for a radical transformation in how the EU approaches crisis governance in our turbulent global landscape.
What Europe Truly Needs
While anticipation, response, and recovery remain essential, a world marked by high-intensity turbulence demands more than management and coordination procedures. We need a dedicated European body—permanent, strategic, and operational—to support top-level decision-makers in navigating a world where wild shocks and the unknown have become the new everyday normal.
Traditional crisis management was designed for isolated, well-defined events. But today, we face a world shaped by rapid change, systemic fragility, and multidimensional cascading threats. What we lack is the capacity to comprehend and act within this volatile landscape—the collective ability to navigate uncertainty. To meet the demands of modern crises, we need a new institutional architecture and a mindset attuned to complexity.
We certainly don't need another layer of burocracy to Brussels' already complex structure. Instead, we need agile organizations genuinely prepared to anticipate and grasp rapidly developing situations, and—most critically—address them creatively. "Invention" must become our guiding principle.
A New Architecture for Crisis Navigation
This requires a fundamentally different approach:
Designing innovative organizational architectures at both EU and Member State levels
Integrating strategic foresight as a core capability
Creating interdisciplinary teams that prioritize both competence and creative potential
Developing cognitive frameworks and tools (including AI) that leaders need for decision-making under extreme uncertainty and instability
Designing exercises and simulations that reflect the chaotic, interdependent nature of today's crises
Training senior EU and national officials to adapt rapidly, think systemically, and respond coherently across borders
Train senior EU and national civil servants to adapt quickly, think systemically and respond judiciously and inventively outside the box.
Europe has shown moments of unity during past crises—from COVID-19 to the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis. But these responses were largely reactive, often characterized by hesitation and a "wait-and-see" approach—more catch-up than strategy.
We cannot remain unprepared for the next unknown. We need permanent capabilities, institutional memory, strategic foresight, structured anticipation systems, and structured tools to assist the decision-making process.
It's time to move:
from crisis management to navigation of chaotic universes;
from symbolic preparedness to institutional resilience;
from fragmented responses to an integrated architecture built on trust, agility, speed, and clarity.
Citizens are rightly being asked to do their part. It is now time for the EU to do its own—by building and equipping the necessary structures not only to survive turbulence but to chart directions through it and open up fertile new paths.
This article was originally co-written in English by Patrick Trancu, CBCI and Patrick Lagadec , edited for style using ChatGPT and Claude, and translated and adapted by the authors in French and Italian.