At the end of a frustrating six-hour teleconference with European Union leaders at the end of March, French president Emmanuel Macron warned that the Covid-19 pandemic was challenging “the survival of the European project.” These dramatic words, uttered to spur the European Union and its member states into action, revealed both the bloc’s fragility and its “pre-existing conditions,” which make it more susceptible to grave economic and political blowback from Covid-19. A project that was designed for peace has declared war on the novel coronavirus. The European Union that emerges from this war will not be the same as it is today.
European watchers have grown so accustomed to high-level European meetings producing little and to observing EU leaders quarreling among themselves that we may not fully appreciate the magnitude of the crisis facing Europe. It is true that Europe progresses through crises and has managed an extraordinary series of shocks over the past decade. But in all of these cases, European leaders exited the crisis through a fragile institutional stalemate rather than a full resolution. Each crisis gradually weakened the rationale behind Europe’s institutional complexity and its solidarity mechanisms.
The European Union’s pre-existing conditions were created by two external crises that aggravated its internal weaknesses: (1) the 2008 global recession and subsequent Eurozone crisis, which exposed the incompleteness of Europe’s monetary union, pitting northern creditor countries like Germany against mostly southern debtor countries; and (2) the 2015-2016 migration crisis driven by the Syrian and Libyan civil wars and ongoing instability in Afghanistan and parts of Africa. The political shockwaves from both crises hastened the decline of the post-World War II political party structures and re-enlivened Europe’s far-right, and in some cases far-left, political movements. With growing anti-globalization sentiment, xenophobia, nativism, and anti-Semitism, European governments found it difficult to form majority governments after inconclusive elections. Established political parties could no longer keep new and more extreme voices outside of governments as fragile, multiparty, or minority governments became common.
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See Also:
(1) Coronavirus: The Looming Collapse of Europe’s Single Currency
(2) Nicola Sturgeon told ‘time is up’ following Scotland’s ‘major fall’ on international stage
(3) Boris ‘in fantasy land’ over Brexit deal by December – EU crisis exposed in leaked letter
(4) Gordon Brown’s catastrophic gold deal exposed: Reserves worth £14BILLION more today
(5) Macron stuns Brussels with break-away plot as EU rows intensify under pandemic pressure
