EXPLAINING THE EU MEMBER STATES' VARIED POSITIONS ON EUROPEAN INTEGRATION OF CIVIL PROTECTION. A Longitudinal Comparative Analysis of Sweden and Finland

Sammanfattning: Protecting the citizens is a responsibility deeply embedded in the heart of the traditional Westphalian nation-state and far beyond the initial intentions of a European Community. Despite this, the EU has rapidly developed into a key actor in civil protection policies in later years, without explicit competence and with varied support from the member states. However, it is currently unclear in the literature why some member states are more willing than others to delegate power to the EU in this traditionally national matter. As such, this study aims to address this gap by investigating if the variation in member states' positions could be explained by their perceived domestic capacity in civil protection. More specifically, this paper will answer the question: How can perceived disaster management capacity explain member states' varied positions on the supranational integration of civil protection policies at the EU level? This paper uses a dimension analysis on a longitudinal qualitative text analysis of position papers on three Commission proposals and national capacity assessments from 2011 to 2020. The results show a parallelism between Sweden and Finland's perceived disaster management capacity and their varied positions on the supranational integration of civil protection, indicating a causal relationship between them. The result contributes to a further understanding of European integration by providing empirical support to the notion that member states use integration to compensate for domestic shortcomings also within EU civil protection policies. In addition, it also presents a rarely used method for comparing and ranking perceptions over time.