WEDNESDAy, MARCH 18 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST eZ re A21
The coronavirus outbreak
President Ursula von der Leyen
said Tuesday. “We have to keep
cross-border transport of supplies
going, in particular that of medi-
cal products.”
European leaders spent three
hours Tuesday talking about the
border issues and traffic pileups.
They agreed to create special
lanes for trucks to get waved
through or receive prioritized
screening.
But Europe’s collective-action
problem is not just a matter of
logistics. France and Germany
last week threw up political bor-
ders around crucial medical
equipment produced in their ter-
ritory, banning the export of pro-
tective gear, including masks, to
any other country, even Italy,
which is struggling with shortag-
es. After entreaties by E.U. l eaders,
the countries loosened their bans,
but not before the message was
sent to Italians and others: In a
crisis, don’t count on your neigh-
bors to help y ou out.
“For the E.U., this is really an
existential threat,” said Stefano
Stefanini, an Italian former diplo-
mat who now works as a security
consultant in Brussels. “If the E.U.
is seen as not having done enough
or not having c ared e nough or not
having been up to the challenge,
people will double down on the
question of what is the E.U. f or.”
Stefanini, 72, described an anx-
ious daily routine of calling
through a list of family membersand friends in Italy to check on
them. A brother is a doctor in his
native city of La Spezia, on the
Italian Riviera — outside the hard-
est-hit region of the c ountry b ut at a
hospital that is on the edge of its
capacity, he said. Even in his moth-
er’s m emories of wartime Italy, Ste-
fanini said, rare was the absolute
lockdown the c ountry was now fac-
ing, apart from moments when
fighting was at c lose h and.
“The sense of European soli-
darity is shaken when your neigh-
bor refuses to export medical
equipment,” h e said.
China has moved quickly to
step into the gaps in European
generosity, a irlifting masks, r espi-
rators and other critical supplies
to Rome’s Fiumicino Airport on
Thursday, a day when France and
Germany had yet to offer assis-
tance to Italy. Chinese media has
played up the international assis-
tance e fforts, even though the gov-
ernment’s halting response to the
initial viral outbreak was seen as
helping fuel the pandemic.
Just o utside E.U. b orders, Serbi-
an President Aleksandar Vucic re-
acted bitterly to news that the E.U.
this weekend imposed a bloc-wide
export ban on equipment to pro-
tect medical workers, such as
masks and gowns. The restriction
is intended to help jump-start
countries inside the E.U. to come
to one another’s assistance, but it
left n eighbors in the l urch.
“International solidarity doesnot exist. European solidarity does
not exist,” Vucic said. “The only
country that can help us is China.”
Some observers caution that
challenges in the heat of the crisis
may seem less important in
months or years a s the E.U. a djusts
— perhaps constructively — to a
new world in which pandemics
can challenge its basic operating
model. They point to the 2015
migration crisis — when borders
also sprouted up within Europe
only to fade away — a s an example
of a problem that did not ultimate-
ly lead to the collapse of the bloc.
Still, said Daniela Schwarzer,
the head of the German Council
on Foreign Relations, the initial
resistance by national govern-ments to cooperate with one an-
other “doesn’t l ook good.”
The E.U. i nstitutions “are trying
to push t he more cooperative h an-
dling of the crisis, but as long as
governments don’t really play
along, this is very difficult,”
Schwarzer said. “If not handled in
a very cooperative way, this will
increase the losses in terms of
people, in terms o f wealth.”
Further challenging Europe’s
fundamental, open-bordered
model, some policymakers warn,
internal borders may be difficult
to pull down again. Unlike the
2015 migration crisis, when there
was a clear influx of people that
eventually subsided, the virus w ill
probably offer no clear off-ramp.“When are we going to say that
we are ready to lift those restric-
tions and bans?” asked Rinkevics,
the Latvian foreign minister. “If
we, say, r eopen schools or all those
facilities that have just closed,
what if there is a new spike be-
cause we have not been able to
completely get rid of it? This is
something we are not yet discuss-
ing i n national governments.”
The border closures were serv-
ing “a legitimate goal” — to slow
the spread of the virus, he said.
“But how long can we do it?”
[email protected]Quentin Ariès in Brussels and loveday
morris in Berlin contributed to this
report.seAN gAllUP/AgeNce FrANce-Presse/geTTy ImAgesOdd ANderseN/AgeNce FrANce-Presse geTTy ImAges
TOP: A line of trucks trying to enter Poland from Briesen,
Germany, stretches 25 miles on Tuesday as Polish border guards
check drivers’ health. ABOVE: Poles returning home Monday from
Germany cross a bridge connecting Frankfurt and Slubice.Axel scHmIdT/reUTersA man in protective gear rests Tuesday in Frankfurt on the highway connecting Germany and Poland.
As of Tuesday, 19 countries in Europe’s previously border-free area had imposed new border controls.
BY MICHAEL BIRNBAUMbrussels — Modern Europe is
built on the idea of binding coun-
tries together by stripping away
borders. But in the space of just a
week, the coronavirus pandemic
has led countries to reimpose
hard frontiers across the conti-
nent, challenging the European
Union’s basic model in ways that
may reverberate for y ears.
Leaders of the 26 European
countries that are part of what is
normally a free-movement zone
also agreed Tuesday to shut their
external borders to most nonresi-
dents f or the first time.
“We are faced with a serious
crisis, an exceptional one i n terms
of magnitude and nature,” Euro-
pean Council President Charles
Michel said late Tuesday. “We
want to push back this threat. We
want to slow down the spread of
this virus.”
Other leaders phrased it in
martial terms: “We are at war,”
French President Emmanuel Ma-
cron said Monday.
Until last week, citizens of the
E.U. could move across the conti-
nent with ease, even as the virus
slowly spread across its popula-
tion. Just as a resident of Mary-
land can easily pack bags and
head to Virginia, so, too, could a
Pole cross into Germany.
As of Tuesday, 19 countries in
Europe’s previously border-free
area had imposed new border
controls.
The about-face in Europe is
proving as disruptive as it would
be if American states imposed
border controls on one another.
And since Europe’s countries are
no longer built for self-sufficiency
and no country manufactures or
grows everything it needs, the ef-
fect of the internal blockade could
quickly become catastrophic.
Trucks trying to enter Poland
from Germany were backed up 25
miles on Tuesday as Polish border
guards checked drivers’ tempera-
tures, overall health and docu-
ments before allowing them
through.
Meanwhile, Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania, whose only connection
to the rest of the E.U. is through
Poland, have had to mount a rescue
operation by air and sea to help
their citizens trying to get home.
The Baltic states have deployed the
Latvian national airline and even
chartered ferries so their nationals
can scramble to German ports and
sail a round Poland.
“Conditions have been very
miserable,” said Latvian Foreign
Minister Edgars Rinkevics.
“We need uninterrupted cargo
flow, because our economy is suf-
fering, like every country around
the world,” h e said.
Leaders of the E.U. institutions
in Brussels, watching national
leaders erect walls all around
them, have been desperately try-
ing to keep the internal borders
open, at least partially. One major
risk, they say, is that medical sup-
plies necessary to combat the cor-
onavirus will pile up in trucks that
have been stopped at national
frontiers, sapping Europe’s a bility
to fight the crisis.
E.U. citizens are stranded
“within Europe. And this needs to
stop,” European Commission
Countries
in E.U.
closing
borders
Major disruptions ensue
in a continent used tofree flow of people, goods
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