The craft of governing a multinational union requires a judgment call between rash moves in the heat of crisis and sliding into the avoidance of responsibility. By emphasising certain procedural priorities, arrangements or regulations, attention can be shifted away from the substantive controversy at hand. Delays can be created through exercises in consensus building or legal requirements of unanimity. You should distinguish between a calculated postponement and a drift into avoidance by fear of taking responsibility for the whole.

The danger of entrapment at the top, rather than of splendid isolation, seems to characterise crisis decision making by European public leaders. You might find yourself highly vulnerable to the restrictions of the normative and regulatory frameworks and procedures that the professionals claim have bearings on the crisis at hand. Political leadership, however, requires sensitivity to the more ambiguous symbolic and politically charged elements of a crisis. These dimensions are rarely on the horizons of the sectoral specialists or operational professionals that might do much of the advice giving in an acute crisis. The presidency should therefore enforce a holistic view of the requirements for crisis leadership, in contrast with national concerns or sector-based perspectives grounded in distinct professions. It is best to build such a shared paradigm for trans-boundary coordination in advance of the next major crisis.

When matters go wrong, it is comforting to be able to point the finger at somebody or something else. It is tempting in the aftershock of a crisis to engage in blame shifting. One can claim that the media created a hostile event or inflamed a difficult situation in the union into a crisis. One might rationalise that with a more responsible media role, the crisis would not have erupted at all or our ability to manage the situation would have been much better. Crisis research shows time again, however, that it is counterproductive to blame the media for your possible shortcomings or for inflaming a situation or affecting the outcome of a crisis. You can meet the media only through a proactive posture. You cannot hope to silence journalists or crush the impact of the rapid flow of news images on the public.

If you cannot blame the media, why not point the finger inside the less than perfect construct that you have been obligated to lead? Finding scapegoats lower down the hierarchy or across the institutional or partisan divide would seem a prudent post-crisis strategy for a political leader. History is filled with examples of how mid-level officials face charges linked to crises, while the top leadership escapes from any public accountability claims. Not only is such a blame-management strategy normatively problematic, it will turn the bureaucracy against you, making it fearful of being frank when the next crisis comes along. Avoiding responsibility is short sighted. Leaders and their organisations alike thus forgo the opportunity for self-evaluation, learning and institutional reform that crises create. Teflon leadership comes at a price.