The EU civil protection mechanism and Serbia: Perspectives of cooperation

Abstract

The EU Civil Protection Mechanism was established in 2001 to bring together Member States' capacities for a joint response to natural and technical and technological disasters, which go beyond national response capacities. In addition, an increasing number of security challenges, risks and threats that come from nature or as a consequence of technical and technological processes, directly affect several EU member states and neighboring countries, which makes mutual cooperation and coordination on prevention and elimination of consequences necessary. The Republic of Serbia became a member of the Mechanism in 2015. Besides Serbia, which is not a member of the EU, five other non-EU countries are part of the Mechanism, which shows that the activities of the Mechanism are not limited to the EU and that Serbia has all the Mechanism capacities available even before EU membership. The aim of this paper is to analyze all the capacities of the Mechanism that Serbia can use to develop its own resilience to disasters, as well as procedures for joint action in case of major natural and technical disasters. In addition, the goal is to explore the indirect benefits that Serbia may have on its path to joining the EU from cooperation with the Mechanism.