Diverging and Converging Policy Paths: Critical Infrastructure Protection in the United States and the European Union.

This paper examines critical infrastructure protection as a form of risk regulation in a comparative perspective. While faced with many of the same challenges, Europeans and Americans approach risk and risk management very differently in a number of policy areas. The differences in how Europeans and Americans perceive and manage various kinds of dangers have philosophical as well as socio-political roots. The development of risk regulation with regard to critical infrastructure is shaped by the institutional context and, in the case of the EU and the US, the dynamics of federalism and globalization. In the face of growing public expectations and a diminishing real capacity to foresee and counteract risks, European and American policy-makers try to meet the challenge of protecting critical infrastructures in our society. Taking a historical-institutional approach to risk regulation, the differing ways in which the US and EU view and have approached this challenge forms the core of this paper's discussion. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]