EU’s pandemic failure isn’t just about money

A “great day for European solidarity” is how Germany’s finance minister described last week’s $590 billion euro-area virus rescue package, clinched even as Europe’s North and South haggle over the cost of cleaning up the economic wreckage left by Covid-19. The package would allow countries to borrow from the euro region’s rescue fund, the European Stability Mechanism, for health-care spending without policy constraints, up to a certain amount.
The focus on money is understandable, given the looming recession that’s expected to be deeper than the crisis of 2008. But it obscures a glaring failure of the European Union that may have made both the human and financial cost of the pandemic worse: A lack of coordination and collaboration in healthcare policy.
Despite a common market, a (mostly) common external border, and a common health-care challenge in the shape of an aging population, the EU’s 27 member states have scattered like mice when fighting the coronavirus. At the beginning of the crisis, Italy, the first and worst hit in Europe, begged its partners for masks and equipment — not money. The response was a string of border closures and the hoarding of medical supplies for domestic consumption. By the time France, Spain and Germany instituted their own lockdowns, it was clear there would be 27 different responses to the coronavirus, not one “European” one.
Normally, it’s the lecturing tone of the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, that would set the line for countries to follow. But health-care policy is jealously guarded by national governments, which have never given Brussels technocrats full powers to dictate how hospitals or drug supplies are managed. The lesson of Covid-19, supposedly, is that Leviathan’s nation-state knows best.
Yet the uneven death toll as it now stands suggests Leviathan isn’t always well-equipped against epidemics. Countries that reacted early relative to their Covid-19 outbreaks — Austria, Denmark, Greece — appear to be doing better than those that reacted relatively late, such as Italy or Spain. A thrifty yet decentralised country like Germany, combining high intensive-care capacity with specialist industrial health-care firms, seems to be coping better than France’s well-funded but centralised system that’s ferrying patients by high-speed train to less-hit regions in order to ease the burden. Some countries have better access to masks and tests than others.
There are complex factors that seem to make one country more Covid-resistant than another. They go beyond a North-South divide, or healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP. Some factors, like population density, can’t be helped. But the EU should have been ideally equipped to fight a lot of these disparities. Properly-funded information-sharing and coordinated disease surveillance between countries would have made swift responses possible.
—Bloomberg

Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Brussels. He previously worked at Reuters and Forbes.