Another European rescue of the nation-state? : COVID-19 and European integration

Abstract

The European Union is one of the few political systems to be unequivocally changed by the COVID-19 crisis. By the end of 2020, member states had taken adopted key policies to strengthen its role in health care and public health, reinforced its role in controlling trade between member states, and in fact expanded its supportive and redistributive role in the overall fiscal policy of its member states. This article analyzes the EU's pandemic response from the perspective of comparative federalism. We argue that the EU in COVID-19 faced the same pressures as other federations in history, and responded in the same way as the successful federations: with greater assumption of collective risk. Before the pandemic, the risk to the EU was that its liberal political and economic framework would become brittle in the face of economic divergence and democratic backsliding. A brief period of disintegrative behavior in spring 2020, however, showed member state governments the impossibility of going it alone in emergency response. Workforces, populations, supply chains and member state budgets were too closely bound together, and so member states opted for joint action. It was the only way they saw to rescue the nation-state.