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A Spanish police officer stops a car at the La Jonquera crossing between France and Spain
‘By mid-March, as the EU closed its collective external border to the outside world, the union’s common travel area collapsed, as a cascade of member states closed their national borders within Europe.’ Photograph: Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty Images
‘By mid-March, as the EU closed its collective external border to the outside world, the union’s common travel area collapsed, as a cascade of member states closed their national borders within Europe.’ Photograph: Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty Images

The Guardian view on the EU: our nations are self-isolating too

This article is more than 3 years old

The global pandemic has pushed the countries of Europe further apart. They must rediscover the habit of working together

Europe is in the eye of the global storm over Covid-19. Four of the six countries with the most confirmed cases are in our continent. The three with the most reported deaths are all in Europe too. Yet the European Union has often felt like a second-rank player, and some of its most important common principles are being scattered to the winds. When the pandemic struck, it was nation states that stepped up, not the EU. Faced with a foe that ignores boundaries, the states of Europe closed their borders. All focused on their own citizens. Citizens have reciprocated, looking overwhelmingly towards their own governments. Most have followed their governments’ advice, not that of the EU. National leaders’ public ratings have risen in many countries. In Europe’s shared adversity, Europeans have become nation-statists once more.

To a degree, this picture is misleading. It was the nation states themselves that told the EU they had enough resources to combat the virus when it hit Europe. But the nation states were badly wrong; Britain has proved to be just the same. In January, the EU asked member states for details of the masks, tests and other supplies they might need, so that a common procurement plan could be initiated. Only four countries said they might have problems. Britain stood aside for ideological reasons too. The EU’s subsequent “things under control” assessment was therefore wrong, because the states were wrong too. It is also true that several EU states have been cooperating vigorously. Germany, Austria and Luxembourg have opened their hospitals to Covid-19 victims from France, Spain and elsewhere. France and Germany have now donated more masks to Italy than were provided in the more widely publicised aid from Russia and China, but without the latter’s political dividend.

Nevertheless, by mid-March, as the EU closed its collective external border to the outside world, the union’s common travel area collapsed, as a cascade of member states closed their national borders within Europe. Solidarity was again in short supply when the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, fed the nation state mentality further by saying it was not the ECB’s job to be each EU member state’s borrower of last resort (she later retracted the comment). When France and eight other EU members demanded the setting up of a Europe-wide “corona bond” debt instrument to help the worst-hit nations, a north-south divide deepened. Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Finland said no. Relations between Portugal and the Netherlands were stormy. Solidarity, in the eyes of Europe’s “frugal four”, now equates with moral hazard.

When France and Germany, so often the driving force of an effective EU, pull in opposing directions, a faltering EU follows close behind. It feels significant that, when Italians go on their balconies to support their health workers, they sing Italy’s national anthem, not the EU’s Ode to Joy. Nor should it be any surprise that Europe’s most celebrated integrationist, Jacques Delors, emerged from retirement in March to warn that the retreat from solidarity posed “a mortal danger to the European Union”. Mr Delors is right about that. Europe’s centrifugal forces are becoming more powerful in the pandemic – and, for once, Brexit is not chiefly to blame. Hungary’s latest authoritarian shift is an act of contempt towards the EU’s core principle that it is a union of democracies. Italy’s terrible Covid-19 experience will, in due course, feed into the nation’s already mounting EU scepticism. Just as individuals across Europe are isolating themselves from others, the same thing seems to be happening among Europe’s nation states. Togetherness seems a long way off.

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