Evaluating security performances of EU countries in the context of sustainable development using fuzzy SMART and ARAS approaches

The European Union’s (EU) efforts toward reaching sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the regulatory decisions serve as a model for other nations. Despite the successful progress of the EU in the field of development, it is seen that crime and security problems continue. Security is one of the essential factors for the welfare of the people in a country. Evaluating the security performances of the EU countries in the context of sustainable development is significant for monitoring their development on Europeanization. In terms of the methodology, dataset, and comparative analyses performed, this study fills a gap in the literature while evaluating the sustainable security performances of EU countries. Besides, this study is the first to obtain the importance weight of sustainable security evaluation criteria. In this study, a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach is used to evaluate the security performances of EU member countries. The importance weights of evaluation criteria are determined using the fuzzy Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique (SMART) approach. The EU member countries are ranked according to their sustainable security performances with the Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS) method. As a result of the evaluation, the top five performing countries are Croatia, Czechia, Slovenia, Poland, and Hungary. The ensuring security practices in the countries differ from each other. However, with this study, the security performances of the countries can be observed on a single scale. The study’s findings can help researchers and policymakers better understand countries’ security performance in the sustainable development context.