Europe ‘forged in crisis’? : problematising the North-South cleavage in Europe’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to focus on the cleavages between Europe’s southern countries and the so-called ‘frugal’ bloc (Austria, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and later Finland) as they played out during the pandemic crisis and to highlight the causes of the disagreements, the lines of convergence and the economic solutions proposed to face the consequences of this crisis. After tracing the origins of this intra-EU divide in both its cultural and its institutional dimensions, the article sets out to analyse how these divisions have played out since the corona crisis struck Europe in the spring of 2020. We do so in two stages; firstly we focus on public statements made by key figures of selected southern European countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) and of the ‘frugal’ coalition, and then we examine how the cleavages were overcome in the run-up to the European Council of July 2020.