TheEconomistMay 16th 2020 151I
n january brusselswas an optimistic
place. The European Union (eu) had sur-
vived a decade that included the near col-
lapse of the bloc’s currency, a refugee crisis
and its second-largest economy, Britain,
voting to leave. For the first time in years,
officials had time to think of the future
rather than clear up the messes of the past.
Then 120,000 people died.
Sweeping lockdowns confined citizens
to their homes, in Paris and Warsaw alike. A
bloc that prided itself on removing bor-
ders—“the scars of history” in the words of
Josep Borrell, the European Commission’sforeign-policy chief—reintroduced them
in chaos. Commuters were stranded at Po-
land’s borders with both Lithuania and
Germany, some of them for days.
The bloc’s gdpis expected to drop by
7.4% this year, compared with a 4.3% fall in
2009, the worst year of the financial crisis.
Investors betting on the collapse of the
euro have started to drive up Italy’s borrow-
ing costs. European politicians have at-
tacked each other with a ferocity not seen
since the euro crisis, when the bloc’s future
was last in doubt. After Wopke Hoekstra,
the Dutch finance minister, suggestedsome countries had themselves to blame
for their financial troubles, Antonio Costa,
the prime minister of Portugal, issued a
fierce response. “This speech is disgust-
ing,” he said. “Disgusting.”
The whole world is struggling with co-
vid-19. But in the eu, the pandemic has trig-
gered a concatenation of crises. What start-
ed as a health crisis became an economic
crisis, then a political crisis, then a finan-
cial crisis, says Pepijn Bergsen of Chatham
House, a think-tank. Now it risks becoming
a constitutional one, after Germany’s con-
stitutional court challenged the legal su-
premacy of the European Court of Justice
earlier this month.
In its current form, the euamplifies cri-
ses rather than solving them. Sticking with
the current system is untenable. Altering it
will be difficult. Fundamentally different
expectations of the eudivide Europeans. At
the heart of these disagreements is an in-
ability to find an answer to a decades-old
question: what is the euactually for?There’s something evolving
It began as a peace project. On May 9th 1950,
five years after the second world war ended
in Europe, Robert Schuman, then France’s
foreign minister, unveiled a scheme to
make war between his country and West
Germany “not merely unthinkable, but ma-
terially impossible”. His method? Combin-
ing the coal- and steel-production capabil-
ities of the two countries, along with any
other willing European nations, and put-
ting them under the control of an indepen-
dent authority. Two years later the Euro-
pean Coal and Steel Community, the
forebear of the eu, was born.
Prosperity soon followed, with Euro-
pean co-operation framed as a path to rich-
es thanks to free movement of goods,
workers, capital and services in the origi-
nal club of six countries (as well as France
and West Germany it included Italy, Bel-
gium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg).
The small club first expanded to its north,
with Ireland, Denmark and Britain joining.
Then in the 1980s the young democracies in
southern Europe, such as Spain, Portugal
and Greece were included. By the
mid-2000s, much of eastern Europe had
signed up, too.
Building up the bloc was a piecemeal
process, as Schuman had envisaged, argu-
ing that “Europe will not be made all at
once, or according to a single plan.” Slowly
and quietly, bureaucrats in Brussels and
judges in European courts disassembled
barriers to trade and harmonised regula-
tions. In 1992 the single market pro-
gramme, backed by Margaret Thatcher, the
generally Eurosceptic British prime minis-
ter, made trade even easier. It took two con-
stitutional earthquakes for European vot-
ers to notice that the foundations of theirSearching for meaning
The covid-19 pandemic has shown just how little European countries agree on the
purpose of the euBriefing Europe under strain