The European Union’s response to the novel coronavirus is a sight to behold. For decades, the EU has linked the promotion of its progressive ideology and the construction of its supranational institutions to a vibrant promise. The ideology and institutions were supposed to lead to a more open and unified Europe that looks after the welfare of its citizens at home and matches the international power of Russia, China, and the United States.
The coronavirus crisis has exposed this grand vision as a fairy tale. The fiasco began in February, when Italy appealed to the EU’s Emergency Response Coordination Centre, which coordinates disaster relief among member states, for help handling the coronavirus. None came. The EU’s apparatus could not cajole a single country into coming to Italy’s aid. In fact, beyond merely declining to help the Italians, Germany banned the export of masks and ventilators to Italy on March 4. The French government requisitioned essential medical supplies on March 3, and by March 6, was seizing major orders destined for other countries. This total betrayal of European solidarity shocked the Italians. When Spain became overwhelmed by the crisis, it was also snubbed by more powerful member states and was left to beg NATO for help. The president of Serbia, a country that has applied for EU membership, drew the somber conclusion: “European solidarity does not exist.”
In the face of the worsening health crisis, the EU revealed its impotence in coordinating the actions of member states. A reasonable preventive measure in response to the spread of COVID-19 in early March would have been for the European Commission to coordinate a multilateral effort across the Schengen zone to close borders between member states. But the European Commission failed to act and discouraged the closure of borders. Its fecklessness prompted President Trump to announce on March 11 that he would close off the U.S. to European travelers. In the ensuing days, without guidance from the European Commission, most European governments decided to take matters into their own hands. It was only on March 16 that the president of the European Commission backpedaled and called for the closure of travel to the EU. Moreover, the European institutions failed to direct a common scientific and research program in response to the crisis. This prompted Europe’s top scientist, professor Mauro Ferrari, the president of the European Research Council, to resign on April 7. “I arrived at the ERC a fervent supporter of the EU,” he said, but “the COVID-19 crisis completely changed my views.”
The EU’s failures were also exacerbated by an ideological obsession with keeping borders open. This open-border ideology is steadily becoming a substitute definition for the European project. Many European politicians and parties put it at the forefront of their agendas and couple it with an aggressive political progressivism that shows little regard for the welfare of Europeans.
The dangers of this ideology-first approach were made manifest in March. Austria and neighboring eastern states (which have become suspicious of open-border dogmatism in recent years) were the first European states to establish border controls and close their frontiers during the last week of February and the first two weeks of March. Even Germany followed their example and closed its borders on March 16. Because of these border precautions, these states can reopen.
By contrast, French President Emmanuel Macron persisted in his devotion to keeping the Schengen zone open throughout the early weeks of the crisis. Despite the fact that France shares a long land border with Italy and was one of the first European countries to report cases of the coronavirus, even after the countrywide lockdown in Italy on March 10, Macron kept on defending open borders, warning against virus nationalism. Macron closed French schools before closing France’s borders. France was one of the last European countries to do so. Macron may have been waiting for guidance from Brussels that never came. But his reluctance to deploy traditional tools of state sovereignty, such as border control in times of crisis, betrays a mind in thrall to obstinate Europhilia.
In Spain, one of the countries worst afflicted by COVID-19, the Socialist government’s sacrifice of public welfare for the sake of ideology was even more outrageous. By early March, the virus had killed several people in Spain, and the government was already aware that the virus was spreading exponentially in Madrid. On March 3, the Spanish government forbade spectators from attending sporting events. But it still encouraged the public to participate in feminist rallies around the country on March 8 for International Women’s Day, a signature annual event for Spain’s Socialists. The government’s medical spokesman, Fernando Simon, declared, “If my son asks me if he can go, I’ll tell him to do what he wants.” The government may have even suppressed reporting on new COVID-19 cases between March 6 and 9 in order to boost attendance at the rallies. The Madrid rally drew 120,000 people, infecting and turning many of the attendees into carriers of the virus. Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, Equality Minister Irene Montero, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, all attended, and all later tested positive.
It was the day after the rally that the government forbade further large gatherings; a few days later, the government declared a state of emergency, closed borders, and locked down the entire country. More than 5,000 plaintiffs have now filed a formal accusation against the government, charging that it knowingly jeopardized public safety for political reasons. These ideological distortions of European government priorities are not just misjudgments during a month of fast-moving events. They betray the extent to which the priorities of the last few years have skewered public welfare. Back in 2015, Belgium, now facing a high death toll and supply shortages, had a stockpile of 63 million protective masks, but it incinerated them to clear out space in warehouses to quarter migrants.
The COVID-19 crisis has additionally exposed the problems of production exacerbated by EU policies. European states have suffered enormously from shortages of essential medical supplies, tests, and protective equipment. The countries in which the virus has exploded have excellent healthcare systems but insufficient capacity to produce the supplies those systems need. EU regulations have made the production of medical supplies more difficult. One doctor pointed out how EU regulations require medical companies to staff four administrators for every engineer, placing time-consuming burdens on production lines and making them inflexible in emergencies. European states also lack the capacity to certify and distribute new medical products on their own, slowing down delivery. In mid-March, the French company bioMérieux developed a rapid test, “Biofire COVID-19,” which delivers results in 45 minutes. The test was quickly authorized for use and production — but in the United States, not in France, as Brussels had to approve first.
Inefficient production at home renders the strategic dependency of European countries more acute. Since the 1990s, the post-Maastricht EU has presided over an era that deepened strategic dependencies, with unhappy consequences for the present emergency. Italy and Spain depend on ostensible allies that refuse to help. The Netherlands receives defective masks and tests from China. Strategic dependency makes countries more vulnerable and puts their people in peril.
This conclusion is not new. In 2003, Bernard Carayon, a deputy in the French National Assembly, wrote a report warning about the dangerous strategic dependencies developing in Europe, hindering the capacity of states to handle emergencies. Carayon connected the growing problem of strategic dependencies to a debilitated French state. When essential supplies are not available, states lack the means to achieve their goals, and if they fail to coordinate resources effectively, they cannot achieve their goals even with outside help. As a result, institutional trust and civic order break down. In an emergency, this breakdown happens very quickly.
Carayon called for a national strategy to restore strategic independence, and a stronger state to coordinate activity in emergencies. His point parallels one that Alexander Hamilton made in Federalist 70, when he argued for “energy in the executive” and “adequate provision for its support.” Once we determine what the necessary ends of government are, say, resolving national emergencies and crises, we must ensure government can access the means. Otherwise, we get a feeble executive, and “a feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government … a bad government.”
Today, Carayon’s (and Hamilton’s) warnings have come true. In spite of all the rhetoric of European solidarity and strengthening the common market, European integration has worsened strategic dependencies. Whereas 30 years ago, only 20% of medical supplies came from outside of Europe, now it is 80%.
Moreover, the last decades of the European project have corroded the powers of national governments. Like any good fairy tale, the fairy tale of EU integration taught a moral lesson: nationalism and authoritarianism were bad, the source of all of Europe’s past wars, and so, it was imperative to take power away from potentially nationalist nation-states and potentially authoritarian executives. Europhiles wanted to weaken the nation-state, and they got what they wanted. But the effect is that EU member states cannot handle crises without seeing serious breakdowns in civic order.
In a national medical emergency, the supply shortages caused by strategic dependencies beleaguer first responders. French firefighters and paramedics are the first to make contact with COVID-19 patients, but throughout Ile-de-France, they report having to attend to patients without masks. First responders feel abandoned by their government and place their hopes in catching the virus early and recovering quickly. Strategic dependencies also burden law enforcement. The French state has for years demanded more and more from its military and police to respond to unrest in the banlieues (the poverty-stricken metropolitan suburbs), Islamic terrorism, and the gilets jaunes protests, while simultaneously cutting their budgets to comply with EU budgetary regulations. In the present crisis, police officers have been asked to enforce a national lockdown and inspect everyone out of doors in order to stop the spread of an epidemic. But because of supply shortages, the police lacked access to protective equipment for themselves throughout March, and what supplies they did have were taken away.
The police still have to handle France’s persistent problems. In early April, a Sudanese asylum-seeker killed two in southeastern France; and on April 27, a man professing allegiance to the Islamic State tried to kill two police officers. In the banlieues, efforts to enforce the lockdown have produced violent, recurring backlashes, injuring police. Overstretched, police have been ordered not to enforce the quarantine in some areas and not to confront vandals. As the strain on the French state became more apparent during the last week of March, confidence in France’s executive branch plummeted. It dropped 10 points over several days. Telling signs of mounting distrust are Macron’s public row with a nurse over supply shortages and the fact that over 100,000 legal complaints have been filed against the French government.
The same distrust in the executive branch is evident in Spain. The Spanish cannot produce adequate medical equipment, so medical caregivers do not have access to protective gear. As the situation worsened in March, ambulance teams refused to come to senior homes to respond to emergency calls, for fear of contracting the virus. Caregivers within senior homes stopped showing up for work. Family members reported that their elderly relatives were left to die, and the army found residents left dead in their beds. These are the breakdowns that result when, during an emergency, the state lacks the means to achieve its ends.
Because of Spain’s strategic dependencies, those on the front lines have to wait until June for essential equipment. Opposition parties have attacked Prime Minister Sánchez for these failings. But the crisis facing European states goes deeper than which political party or leader is in charge. It is a structural crisis, brought about by years of policies that worsened the strategic dependence of nation-states and weakened their means to achieve necessary ends.
In return for heeding the moral of the European fairy tale and weakening nation-states, Europeans were supposed to get strong supranational institutions. If European states wanted to handle modern challenges and crises, the tale went, then they needed to abandon archaic views of national independence and build supranational institutions. The EU, the European Commission, and their myriad of administrative agencies provided the best format and scale to handle a regional or global crisis. The European public has endured three rounds of integration: Maastricht, Lisbon, and the deliberate decisions to violate Lisbon’s rules and deepen integration after the 2008 financial crisis. It did so because that was allegedly the way to make the EU capable of coordinating responses to global and continental crises. Yet it is on those terms that the EU’s institutions miscarried in March. Despite decades of integration to prepare and handle crises such as the present one, the EU’s institutions have failed to achieve the ends Europhiles boasted they would achieve. Rather than project the imagined post-Lisbon geopolitical strength of a united continental bloc, the EU demonstrates its inefficacy and inherent feebleness, ready to be exploited by the Chinese and Russians. It shows itself to be, as Hamilton would say, a bad government.
Decades of “ever-closer union” have built institutions that fail to deliver what they promise. They have deprived nation-states of the energy and means to resolve crises. They have made Europeans more vulnerable, not less. And as the present quarrels over “coronabonds” show, the EU makes Europe more divided, not less.
Unabashed, the EU’s institutions try to carry on with their old agenda. In late March, the Commission opened negotiations to bring Albania and Macedonia into the EU. But neither geographic expansion nor the European Commission’s recent apology to Italy will hide the disaster. Brussels must reckon with a massive breach of trust. Italians, for example, have tended to favor the EU. But recent polls show that 88% of Italians do not think the EU is helping their country deal with the coronavirus outbreak, and two-thirds now think that being part of the EU is a disadvantage for Italy, up from 47% in November 2018. The consequences of this massive attitudinal shift will reverberate throughout Europe. It will force the reconsideration of what the ultimate objectives of the European Union and the European project should be.
To counter strategic dependency on foreign markets, some reformers will be satisfied with dependence on the European common market. But they should heed Carayon’s advice. He cautioned France against too much reliance on European states and the EU; they are often France’s competitors, have their own political interests, and cannot enact a common political program. The coronavirus has made this obvious. Europe contains not one united people or nation, but a variety of distinct peoples or nations that prioritize their own welfare. Even for the Germans, the maxim has not been “Europe first,” but “Germany first.” Whether it is China or Germany requisitioning essential supplies intended for Italy, the result is the same: Italians do not get what they need. The problem facing the European project is still the same one Gen. Charles de Gaulle identified in 1962. Without a common European people, there cannot be a common political program. Without a common political program, there cannot be a common government. And without a common government, there cannot be effective power.
The basis for reforming the European project is straightforward. While formal European cooperation should exist, it should strengthen national independence and state self-reliance. That is the only reliable form of solidarity.
Reformers can take their cue from the Europhile politicians themselves. They grasp they cannot carry on as before. In an emergency address on March 18, Angela Merkel called for national solidarity. She did not mention the EU. In France, the customary nod to the cosmopolitanism of the European project usually happens by invoking republican values. But Macron’s emergency address on March 12 only used the word “republic” once, in the standard presidential conclusion: Vive la République, Vive la France. By contrast, Macron’s address mentioned the word “nation” eight times. Macron even borrowed Brexit slogans: Faced with food, security, and sanitary dependency, he said, “We need to take back control.” Macron is still Macron, but he knows what the people now expect.
Nathan Pinkoski is a postdoctoral research fellow at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.
