No facet of our personal and social lives is free from the impact of COVID-19. At the moment, the battle is to stop its spread, reduce the mortality rate and resume some level of normality before lockdowns irreparably devastate our economies, affect our mental health, and compromise the next generation’s education. For years to come, this excruciating experience will force us to revaluate our priorities on all levels of human existence, including the adequacy of the political arrangements that govern our societies. In this context, the manner in which the EU is handling the crisis deserves close scrutiny, if only because this union of some of the wealthiest economies is also one of the worst hit by the coronavirus.
The EU was facing severe challenges long before it was hit by this invisible enemy. It was struggling in its efforts to create a unity of values and generate universal support for a constitution, while having to deal for the first time with a member state leaving., Given the unconvincing fashion in which the remaining 27 members have responded to the pandemic, it is difficult to see how this unique project — which has enjoyed astounding success in improving the human condition by maintaining the longest period of peace and prosperity in the history of the continent — can avoid questions about its viability.
As early as the 19th century, influenced by events on the other side of the Atlantic, intellectuals pondered a united Europe in which local squabbling, discord and wars would make way for cooperation and coexistence. Victor Hugo the great French poet, novelist, and playwright, prophesied in 1849 that in a future Europe “the only fields of battle will be markets opening up to trade and minds opening up to ideas. A day will come when bullets and bombs will be replaced by votes, by universal suffrage of the peoples, by the venerable arbitration of a great sovereign senate.” It was a vision, in other words, of a United States of Europe.
The extent to which that dream has floundered can be partly attributed to the rapid enlargement of the EU at the expense of ensuring that all countries internalise the same principles. Now, the pandemic has exposed the flaws and weaknesses of the EU as a governing body rather than its prowess, competence, creativity and courage in the face of an existential crisis.
For years to come, this excruciating experience will force us to revaluate our priorities on all levels of human existence, including the adequacy of the political arrangements that govern our societies.
One of several grim verdicts on the EU’s response to the pandemic was supplied by the resignation last month of Mauro Ferrari, president of the European Research Council, who said he was quitting at a time when sound scientific advice was literally a matter of life and death because he had lost faith in the EU institutions that failed to support him in setting up a special program to defeat the virus. This stinging attack by the bloc’s chief scientist is an obvious cause for concern for all EU citizens, especially those most vulnerable to the virus. It is bound to play into the hands of euroskeptics who have long accused the Brussels bureaucracy of being an unelected self-serving junta detached from the needs of those they are employed to serve.
The rates of infection and mortality have been slowing down in hard-hit countries such as Italy, Spain and France, which may offer some hope of flattening the coronavirus curve and with it a gradual easing of the lockdowns, a process that has already begun in a number of countries. Then will come the next big challenge that is dividing the EU leadership: An economic package capable of rebooting the European free trade zone, or a new economic operating system capable of dealing with the global economic fallout from the past few months.
What is emerging from high-level meetings last week is that when member states face an existential threat, they return to their bad old habits of protecting their own nation, and enter a state of collective amnesia, forgetting that the essence of the European project is that all member states are better off — not always visibly and not always in the short term — when they work together.
In last week’s videoconference, the division between the northern European countries and the southern ones on how to finance 1 trillion euros on top of the 500 billion euro emergency fund already agreed, was only too clear. Although participants competed to describe how dire are the economic consequences of the pandemic, to such an extent that European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans predicted that “the EU as we know it will not survive this,” they could still not agree on whether the extra funding should be supplied as loans, as the northern countries of the eurozone wish, or grants, as the southern countries of the zone are understandably desperate to receive. It was a show of deep distrust between different camps in the EU, a distrust that puts the union in serious jeopardy.
The approach that the EU takes in combating and subsequently recovering from this catastrophic act of nature will be the litmus test of its very survival. If in the moment of reckoning it cannot act as one unit, its relevance will diminish. On the other hand, if it becomes the instrument of a successful recovery for all its members, as it has been since the end of the Second World War, then it will survive — and may even come closer to Victor Hugo’s dream of a United State of Europe.
