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

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
systems seem to be expanding.” One main reason for this, Egan argues, is that in
modern societies there exists set of systems “that are not part of the CI in their
current state but which may be in the years to come.”
In this section, we discuss some relevant official definitions of CI in the
comparative perspectives of the United States, NATO, the EU, and the BSR
countries. We may find that though these definitions and typologies overlap, they
are also in many ways different in their exact understandings of what are the
critical sectors and also in more fundamental perspective about what to focus on in
their strategies.
However, a general trend seems to be that while infrastructures or CI were
perhaps earlier understood as something very stable and concrete, either physical
or information and communication technology systems, there seems to be a trend
towards a broad, holistic understanding of CI, where it is understood as networks
or systems of vital functions of the society as a whole or the infrastructures
embedded in these functions.
United States’ definition of CI
The development of the definition of CI in the United States illustrates the
expansion of the concept. Moteff et al. (2003) have analysed the US debate and
official documents since 1980s to the current post-9/11 Homeland Security era.
While they notice that before CI became a term used in security debates, public
policymakers commonly used the seemingly similar term ‘infrastructure’ as an
object to be protected. However, in those early debates the concern often was the
issue of ‘natural’ long-term deterioration and erosion of the important
infrastructures and the need for more public funding to modernise them. When the
issue became more about the ‘vulnerability’ or ‘criticality’ of those infrastructures
in case of security-related rather sudden events, the criteria for an infrastructure to
be judged critical became that it must be vital to one or several broad national
functions.
The 1997 President’s Commission defined infrastructures as mostly the
privately-owned ‘basic foundations’ for society. The report stated that:
“By infrastructure we mean more than just a collection of individual
companies, engaged in related activities; we mean a networks of
independent, mostly privately owned, man-made systems and processes
that function collaboratively and synergistically to produce and
distribute a continuous flow of essential goods and services” (PCCIP
1997, p. 3).
Moteff et al. (2003) argue that the set and number of those sectors, infrastructures
or functions defined as critical or vital have been variables. Indeed, the President’s
Commission 1997 focused in its report on eight infrastructures “whose incapacity
or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our defence and economic
security”. These eight infrastructures were telecommunication, electric power
systems, natural gas and oil, banking and finance, transportation, water supply
systems, government services and emergency services. (PCCIP 1997, Appendix 1.)
A year later, the definition was broadened and infrastructure was defined as
the framework of interdependent networks and systems comprising identifiable
industries, institutions (including people and procedures), and distribution
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