Before a political leader can engage in exploitation strategies to build public credibility, one must engage in individual and shared sense making. Uncertainty and complexity are key early parameters of a rapidly evolving trans-boundary challenge (and the chapters in this volume clearly illustrate how leaders around the world have grappled with these parameters in making sense of the escalating financial crisis). Crises are characterised by communications overload and by information shortage. In spite of vast investments in information-gathering agencies, intelligence analysts and a close reading of the daily news, public leaders appear genuinely taken by surprise over and over again.
As the leader of the union, you should be aware of how information is filtered and summarised before it reaches your desk. You should probe behind the seductive phrases in texts and the compelling charts in briefings. Examine how the information given to you is being framed. Time spent on a critical dialogue over how to diagnose the rapidly evolving situation is an investment in your remaining years as a leader in good public standing.
The institutional features around you matter for how you can deal with crises. As EU President, you are clearly not a free agent but an institutionally embedded policy shaper. Your leadership must be connected not only with proactive crisis responses, but with strategic questions of institutional design. The implementation of your national decisions is in the hands of the professionals. Coordination in crises across professional boundaries has proven to be at least as difficult as cooperation across geographical borders. The mandarins of the union’s sprawling bureaucracies can hold the presidency hostage to their preferred line of action or inaction.
Crises can drive you out of control and literally out of office. Beware not to lose control of your own team. Stay proactive with your organisation and with the media. This is not the time to hide; rather, you must remain visibly on top of the dramatic situation. Do not allow yourself to be driven by events. Seize the formative moment to shape the course of events. Relate the crisis to the fundamentals of your public mission, to the storyline of your presidency.
Crises cast long shadows. Prepare yourself and your staff for dealing with cascading effects over the long haul. Monitor from the beginning the second-order consequences, which will come back to haunt you if you remain unprepared. Check how the crisis, and your handling of it, is reflected through the media. The press mirrors your actions and the appearances of action or inaction. Fluid images of success or fiasco are framed through media reports of what you seemingly did and did not do in the crisis. Is your preferred narrative the dominant one for the public meaning-making process?
Public officials often regard the media as an adversary in crises. Much of the attention of your staff is devoted to how to meet the demands of journalists. You get instant reports from your associates about how the coping effort plays out in the media. Bad reviews invite commentary within your inner circle about unfair treatment and poor journalistic styles. The crisis scenario can turn into a script of them against us. A comforting myth is created that ‘we are the victims of circumstances, who are trying our best to handle a grave situation’.
Crises are not only threatening challenges to be coped with. Exploitation processes can be identified and explored, as covered in this book. Crises and their aftermaths also offer space for changes of policy, procedures and institutional designs. A period of serious inquiry, evaluation and recommendations that are based on this analysis is needed between crisis and public reform. Leadership in crisis should include a personal and organisational capacity for engaging in meaningful accountability proceedings and evaluation processes.
Leadership in crises will sometimes invite the taking of draconian measures. Forging effective and visible action might take precedence over other equally vital considerations. Quick, forceful and possibly effective intervention in a crisis, however, might come at the price of eroding the legitimacy of democratic governance and the rule of law. At what cost to democracy, civil liberties, freedom of the press and public stature at home and abroad will your strong crisis leadership image be earned? What kind of value base do you want to embody as president, and—when push comes to shove in a crisis—do you propose the union makes trade-offs between effective and appropriate governance?
In the heat of the dramatic moments of urgency and immediacy, strategic considerations must be part of decision making. When the ordinary grind of political life again takes hold after the urgent phase has passed, draconian crisis measures will, however, appear in another light. How then to account for the choices made in the heat of the moment?