Coronavirus exposes EU’s creeping irrelevance

Covid-19 was only just arriving from Asia when the European Commission, with the technocratic equivalent of fanfare, announced a “Conference on the Future of Europe,” to be kicked off in May. Now, of course, the various seminars, committees and working groups are in lockdown limbo. And the conference title suddenly seems exceptionally ill-chosen. For it raises the question: Does the EU, in the long term, even have a future?
Among dyed-in-the-wool europhiles, such big and fundamental thoughts are usually disallowed. “Europe” has always muddled through, from one crisis to the next, goes their refrain. It will weather this one as well.
And yet, many Europeans increasingly have their doubts. The Brits volunteered to leave the club even before the pandemic. As morgues fill with coffins in Bergamo, Madrid and elsewhere, others no longer find that choice so outlandish. A survey conducted in March by Tecnè found that 67% of Italians view their membership in the EU as a disadvantage. The prime minister of Spain isn’t alone in warning that, short of a political miracle, “we will fail as a union.”
That’s because one side effect of Covid-19 has been to blow away the pretense of solidarity among the 27 states. That solidarity has, since the founding treaties of the European project in the 1950s, been the implicit glue binding its members into an “ever closer union.”
It was eventually supposed to lead to a common identity in a United States of Europe.
But the coronavirus called Europe’s bluff. Instinctively, member states slammed down their national borders even before imposing (epidemiologically more sensible) domestic policies such as “social distancing.” And with short shrift, they suspended their much-touted “single market,” temporarily banning exports of life-saving gear such as face masks.
“We caught a glimpse of the abyss,” admitted Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, alluding to an unravelling of the union. So the EU’s members quickly lifted their export bans again. But only after China and Russia, of all places, scored propaganda coups by delivering masks and other gear to Italy before any European country did.
Since then, eurocrats have reverted to standard Brussels ways, promising vague and complicated but rhetorically impressive measures yet to come, from “coronabonds” to “a Marshall Plan for Europe.” This doubles down on a decades-old misunderstanding: that there’s some technical kludge that will fix all this, to be found in more rounds of late-night summitry.
The EU’s problem is at once bigger and simpler. It’s that its members never resolved their fundamental dilemma: Are they ready to pool (meaning cede) their sovereignty to join into one entity, strong enough to stare down the US, China, Russia and maybe a coronavirus? Or do they want to remain a club of independent nations, acting in unison only when it suits all of them?
As it happens, there is a surprisingly precise historical analogy for this dilemma. For centuries, a similar union sprawled across central Europe, called the Holy Roman Empire. As Voltaire famously observed, it wasn’t really an empire (or holy, or Roman), just as the EU isn’t really a union. Sovereignty was shared between the elected emperor (usually a Habsburg in Vienna) and several hundred independent princes, kings and bishops.
The empire, like today’s EU, gradually became an anachronism. In the 16th to 18th centuries, England, France and Spain centralised and became major powers, whereas the empire remained decentralised and weak. Today the US and China are heading towards a “G2” stand-off and other nationalist powers like Russia and Turkey are vying
for their spheres of influence, whereas the EU is trying desperately to stick to its post-national multilateralism.
The Holy Roman Empire also failed to resolve its internal rivalries, especially between Prussia and Austria. Similarly, the EU today is divided by bitter rifts between north and south, west and east. If anything, today’s divisions cut even deeper, because Europe also defines itself as a beacon of democracy, human rights and rule of law. If members become “illiberal,” the EU loses its raison d’etre.
That’s why a tin-pot dictator like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban undermines the whole edifice. He has already largely neutered Hungary’s opposition, courts and press, and last month he took the pandemic as his pretext to rule by decree. Poland, ruled by a nationalist and populist party, isn’t quite as bad, but has also been dismantling, piece by little piece, the rule of law.

—Bloomberg