Coronavirus: The Covid-19 crisis has sidelined the European Union

As the pandemic worsens across the continent, nations are looking to their own government – and leaving Brussels out of the loop, writes Sean O'Grady

The Schengen passport-free system has been suspended in part. Free movement of goods and people is but a memory (AFP)

It is probably not the European Union’s fault, to be fair, that the coronavirus has left the institution somewhat sidelined. Whether that near-irrelevance in recent days leads to a longer-term weakening is an increasingly open question.

It is natural at a moment of crisis that a nation’s citizens look to their own governments. Public health, the armed forces and fiscal policy, the three areas the crisis has most affected politically, are still, to a very large extent, matters for the member states alone. Each country has had to face its own challenges. None has done so entirely alone – there has always been an international dimension to the crisis – but critical decisions have been made in national capitals.

Thus, to take an as-ever extreme example, the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, has arrogated emergency powers to himself, establishing a virtual dictatorship. With little reference to Europe, Emmanuel Macron declared France to be at war, and his aides compare him to the victor of the Great War, Georges Clemenceau. Less dramatically, Austria, the Czech Republic and some others insist on citizens wearing masks when shopping, while other countries are relaxed. On the whole, the countries with the highest mortality rates so far, Italy and Spain have had to fend for themselves.

EU procurement programmes for ventilators (such as the one the British were invited to join) and for personal protection equipment have not proved transformative. Each country is also pursuing its own options to equip its hospitals. Indeed, some states – Germany, France, Romania and the Czech Republic – imposed export bans on key items. The Germans were ahead of most others in any case. Lockdown regimes vary from state to state, province to province – Sweden and the Netherlands being more relaxed and keener on herd immunity than some. Borders, between and within member states, have been closed. The Schengen passport-free system has been suspended in part. Free movement of goods and people is but a memory.

The president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has publicly despaired of the situation: “When Europe really needed to be there for each other, too many initially looked out for themselves. When Europe really needed an ‘all for one’ spirit, too many initially gave an ‘only for me’ response’ ... A successful European response can only be coordinated if our internal market and our Schengen area work the way they should.”

Yet the EU has also failed to financially support member states. Ms von der Leyen herself enraged those nations asking for the EU to issue “corona bonds” by dismissing the idea as “just a slogan”. Italy’s prime minister Giuseppe Conte, supported by Spain, has wanted the EU to share the burden by “mutualising the debt”, and making more fiscally secure taxpayers in Germany and the Netherlands, say, jointly liable for the debt. The Dutch finance minister asks why some countries were not better prepared; the Portuguese took that as an insult. Although the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank has been bold and decisive, its lead has not been followed in Brussels.

It has not been a collegiate atmosphere, and adds to existing EU tensions from the migration crisis, enlargement, the EU budget and Brexit. Much the same sort of wrangling about money and the merits of an EU “fiscal union” were heard during the various eurozone crises a decade ago, and with a similar lack of conclusion. Now Mr Conte asks: “Europe needs to show whether it can live up to this call of history.”

Once again, Europe faces challenges unimaginable to its founding fathers in the small customs union club of the 1950s, or even to the architects of economic union, Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, in the 1990s. In the past it has usually found some way of muddling through its crises, and survived. Will this time be different? Will European unity become a casualty of coronavirus?

The last word on that may as well go to Ms von der Leyen: “We are at a turning point,” she says, and what the EU does now will determine “if we simply let this virus divide us between wealthy and poor, or we are going to end up with a stronger continent, an important global player, perhaps we will become closer as communities, and people will respect democracy even more”.