From European critical infrastructure protection to the resilience of European critical entities: what does it mean?

The article is a public policy analysis of the development of legislation on critical infrastructure in the European Union (EU), covering 27 developed countries. More precisely, it concerns the 2022 CER Directive “on the resilience of critical entities’. This directive replaced the 2008 ECI Directive ‘on the identification and designation of European critical infrastructure and the assessment of the need to improve their protection’. We ask what is at stake in this process of moving from one directive to another. Why has the concept of protection been replaced by the concept of resilience, and why has the concept of critical infrastructure been replaced by the newly invented euro-concept of ‘critical entity’? In the concluding section we discuss the European integration dimension of this new directive; what does this development in the CI domain tell us about the current dynamics of European integration, and how it could be explained?