Towards a Baltic Sea Region Strategy in Critical ... - Helsinki.fi

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
1 CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION
IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION 1
1.1 THE EUROPEAN PROGRAMME FOR CRITICAL
INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION
The concept of critical infrastructures (CI) 2 is relatively new. Its wider use as an
authorised policy concept upon which programmes, action plans, legislation and so
forth are built can be traced back to the United States in the mid-1990s. The
related concept of critical infrastructure protection (CIP) reflects the more
purposeful concern of the vulnerability of CI. After some delay, these concepts
became popularised in Europe too. Within the European Union (EU), CIP became
a more widely discussed theme in connection with the development of the
European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP).
Naturally vulnerable infrastructures have existed for a long time, and they
have had a central role in the public sector, not least in the military and economic
sectors. In that sense CI and CIP are not new phenomena. 3 Yet, the current debate
on CI has raised many of the previously underdeveloped dimensions of
infrastructures for more careful scrutiny. The increasing interest in CI also reflects
the changing conditions of modern or post-modern societies in terms of
technological development and related threat perceptions, such as cyber terrorism.
There tends to be a correlation between the developmental level of society, the
number and complexity of critical infrastructures and the severity of the society’s
vulnerability to a loss of supply (IRGC 2005; Gheorghe et al. 2006, p. 6).
The rise of the CIP in the United States
The United States’ interest in CIP is usually traced to the Oklahoma City bombing
in 1995, which revealed several previously unrecognised interdependencies, as the
society and economy was affected far beyond the city itself. This led to the socalled
Clinton initiative (Executive Order 1996) and the establishment of the
Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP) in 1996. Its
tasks were to report to the President the scope and nature of the vulnerabilities and
1 In writing this Introduction, the author has greatly benefited from the background papers and
literature reviews provided by Riikka Ikonen and Piia Nikula in particular. Also Viktoria
Barthofer, Per Francke and Timo Hellenberg have contributed with information and material
gathering. The sections 1.5 and 1.6 are largely based on Jyrki Landstedt’s and Petter Holmstöm’s
shorter analyses written originally for their case study presented in Chapter II of this volume, and
published in its original form as a working paper Landstedt and Holmström (2007).
2 The acronym CI is in this study used interchangeably to refer either to ‘critical infrastructure’ or
‘critical infrastructures’. They are treated as synonyms but the choice of the singular or plural
form depends on the syntactic context.
3 For the historical long-term origins of CI, see the de Bruijne and van Eeven (2007, p. 26), its
lengthy footnote 5, with reference to a body of relevant literature.
NORDREGIO REPORT 2007:5 3