24 Time March 30, 2020
EUROPE
IN CRISIS
As the coronavirus spreads,
E.U. solidarity evaporates
BY CHARLOTTE MCDONALD-
GIBSON/THE HAGUE
When The clapping sTarTed, iT Was impossi-
ble not to feel moved. At 8 p.m. on March 17, peo-
ple across the Netherlands leaned out of windows
and congregated on doorstops to make a show of
support for medical workers battling the coronavi-
rus. First it was just a few claps, before the sound
spread down my street in the Hague, working up
to a crescendo of whistles and whoops. Fireworks
sounded in the distance. A neighbor I had never spo-
ken to waved from across the street. The warmth
and goodwill was the epitome of what it means to
be part of a community—a scene also playing out in
Italy, Spain and France as stricken neighborhoods
come together.
But these spontaneous acts of solidarity stand
in stark contrast to what is happening among E.U.
nations. The epicenter of the corona virus moved
from China to Europe in the first half of March,
and governments turned on one another. The pil-
lars that were meant to hold up the E.U.—the free
movement of goods and people— crumpled, as bor-
ders went back up and panicked governments stock-
piled medical supplies with little regard for their
neighbors. When European Commission chief Ur-
sula von der Leyen announced on March 17 that the
bloc would shut its external borders for 30 days, it
felt as if the E.U. was playing catch-up with the many
unilateral closures that governments had already en-
forced. It didn’t seem to be a coming together of like
minds.
When the E.U. is not in crisis mode, its leaders like
to talk up its grand ideas, preaching to their 446 mil-
lion citizens the narrative of diverse nations bound
by a common set of values in a unique project bring-
ing peace and prosperity to all. What is remarkable
is how quickly those ideas can unravel.
“The basic threshold of what it means to live in
a community is that you have some collective re-
sponsibility to each other that goes beyond your
self- interest—and there I have found it pretty shock-
ing,” says Chris Bickerton, an academic at Cambridge
University and the author of The European Union: A
Citizen’s Guide. “It reveals that the political obliga-
tions of governments and leaders are really still na-
tional, [and] it seems very difficult to think of a com-
mon European identity under those circumstances.”
The coronavirus outbreak is the latest in a long line
of crises that have thrust the E.U. into existential de-
spair. The euro-zone crisis of 2008 first gave the lie to
the dream of a pan-European solidarity, with wealth-
ier nations loath to take any economic hit to come
to the aid of struggling ones. The refugee crisis of
2015 exacerbated this. As 1 million people arrived at
E.U. borders seeking sanctuary, governments turned
against each other; there was little support for nations
like Italy and Greece on the front line of the crisis.
The coronavirus has arrived at a time when the ef-
fects of those emergencies still linger and threatens
to be the final blow for the grand idea of a politically
unified E.U. taking a leading role on the world stage.
“This very much fits together with all of the issues
around the other crises,” says Susi Dennison, a senior
policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign
Relations. “Do we want to be a Europe that is glob-
ally engaged and gets things done through coopera-
tion, or is the nationalist rhetoric more powerful?”
The warning signs came early. As Italy became
the first E.U. nation to suffer huge increases in cases
and deaths, Rome appealed to fellow member states
for medical equipment. Not one country volunteered
this assistance, each government keen to hoard its
supplies for when the virus came for its own citizens.
Some countries, including Germany, banned the ex-
port of crucial medical supplies, flouting E.U. norms
on the free flow of goods.
Then came a series of unilateral decisions on shut-
ting E.U. borders, apparently with no coordination.
CORONAVIRUS
^
A temporary
emergency room is
set up in Brescia to
alleviate strain on
Italy’s health care
system, on March 13
FRANCESCA VOLPI—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
