The European Union on Thursday agreed a $546 billion coronavirus bailout. But rather than consolidate the political union amid the global pandemic, the bailout simply lays bare the EU’s great divisions.
For one, the bailout isn’t sufficient. The European Central Bank had advised a package three times the agreed-upon size. Something in the vein, that is, of the massive multitrillion-dollar bailouts authorized by the U.S. Congress. This represents the deep division that that defines the EU’s 27 different member states.
And the division here is very understandable.
After all, just as high-debt nations such as France, Italy, and Spain sought a larger bailout with “coronabonds” spreading the borrowing cost across the EU, other more fiscally stable nations such as Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands wanted the opposite. Those governments do not want a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis in which their balance sheets and taxpayers were burdened by the fiscal irresponsibility of other nations. And they don’t want that for a simple reason: they know that their national voters won’t like it, and the last thing they want is to stoke anti-EU sentiment at home.
This cuts to the core of the EU’s great challenge — namely, the limits to which a political union of 27 nations can find commonality when it comes to matters of great but disparate national cost and consequence. In the U.S. Congress, agreement has been possible because Democrats and Republicans and delegations from 50 different states ultimately have a shared interest — the nation. But in the EU, politicians are split between their own national interests and the EU ideal of a super-state.
There’s a familiar and increasingly problematic trend here for the EU. Just as Hungary pushes the limits of EU rules on immigration, autocracy, and individual freedom, some of the most powerful EU member states are undermining a common European mission even as they say it is a top priority. The coronavirus might not discriminate in terms of nationality, but nations are certainly discriminating in terms of their willingness to bear a burden for those they otherwise claim to be their political brothers and sisters.
The simple lesson: the nation-state continues to matter, a lot.
