Spanish Civil Protection System as a Part of European Union Emergency Response

Abstract

European Union is a union of sovereign democratic countries which commonly agreed to integrate and, depending on the area, cooperate towards achieving better quality of life of European citizens. In the case of safety and security, since it is still national domain mainly, rather cooperation than integration aspect is prevailing. Since threats do not respect administrative borders it is the most important to do as much as possible for the cooperation improvement which, in fundamentals, could be done by knowing and understanding each other’s national civil protection and emergency response systems. Things are getting even more complicated if the object of scientific inquires in this respect is a country which is actually a federation of autonomous states as in the case of Spain or Germany. Then the national system as a matter of fact is being composed of a few or even several autonomous regional systems which are constituted and regulated on the regional level of the federation. This type of situation results from the historical, political, geographical backgrounds and due to many more reasons, however, it is always good to put a question how such systems operate in case of emergency? In order to present a synthetic description of the Spanish civil protection and emergency response system scientific methods of cognition such as the critical analysis of legal acts and normative documents as well as synthesis were used in the research. The study concluded with the future challenges for the system which should be undertaken to improve its efficiency.