Mediaboss Marketing

In September 2019, two months before officially taking office, the new European Commission president was already insisting that the European Union needed to change. On the one hand, Ursula von der Leyen promised a new geopolitical Commission, but on the other, she wanted the EU to be the guardian of multilateralism. The difficult question was left unstated: How exactly is the EU supposed to reconcile the great-power maneuvering of geopolitics with the more level playing field of multilateralism?

Geopolitics is the ruthless pursuit of self-interest by powerful states, no matter the cost to others. Multilateralism involves mutual agreements among states pursuing their collective welfare. At a minimum, the two sit awkwardly with each other; at the worst, they are radically incompatible. The latter is true of the current system of globalization, which has been supported by a complex system of multilateral rules and agreements among states.

Von der Leyenand the EUfaces a fundamental strategic dilemma. More than any ordinary nation-state, the EU is as pure a creature of multilateral globalization as exists in the world. It is most comfortable when the outside world mirrors its traditional internal principles of organization: free economic exchange and mutually beneficial cooperation.

Deglobalization has cut the EU adrift. In the new world order, geopoliticsin the form of newly assertive great powers like the United States and Chinais coming to trump old trade commitments and international cooperation. Europe, for its part, has been vacillating between defending the remnants of multilateralism and building up geopolitical muscle so it can pursue its own strategic self-interest.

The coronavirus crisisin which other member states have been willing to leave Italy high and dryshows how the EU may suffer if it does not figure out how to reconcile these clashing imperatives. Geopolitics abroad may come to roost at home, undermining the solidarity that the EU needs to exist.

Globalization remade Europe before it remade the world. The historian Quinn Slobodian has shown how the driving ideas of globalizationstrengthening cross-border exchange and restraining the nation-statewere the motivating force behind European integration.

The EU (then called the European Economic Community) was founded in a 1957 treaty that set out the new groups aims: eliminating restrictions on the import and export of goods between its member states and abolishing obstacles to freedom of movement for persons, services and capital. These four freedomsfor things, people, services, and moneyare still the cornerstone of the EU.

The four freedoms were supposed to not only power an economic dynamo but also build the foundations of a lasting peace. For most of modern history, Europe had been torn apart by wars between great powers such as Germany and France. The founders of the EU wanted to transform the politics of Europe, replacing geopolitical conflict with shared institutions and cooperation. Power had to be recognized: The size of the bigger member states meant that they got more votes on crucial EU decisions. However, their clout was balanced by institutions such as the European Commission and European Court of Justice (ECJ), which were supposed to deal evenhandedly with all members and protect the interests of the smaller states.

The result was a unique set of political arrangements. The EU has never looked much like a national state. It employs fewer people than a regional government, has no army, and has very limited spending power. Even today, its national security powers are negligible: The key decisions are taken by its member states.

What it has is the power of rules. The commissionproposes laws, drafts regulations, and makes antitrust decisions. The ECJ interprets EU law, as well as the basic treaty texts that the EU is founded on, when national courts ask it to.

Together, the court and commission drew on the four freedoms to build a European free market, enhancing their own authority in the process. ECJ decisions struck down national standards and rules that restricted imports from other member states. The commission issued common regulations to support a truly European marketplace. Its Directorate-General for Competition acted as an antitrust enforcer against potential monopolists. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the commission implemented a highly ambitious single market program aimed at eliminating existing barriers to trade and exchange. Even before the current wave of globalization began, the EU was building a globalization in miniature. Within EU borders, markets and free movement dominated while free trade rules constrained national governments from building favored firms into national champions.

When globalization really began to take off in the 1990s, the EU was thus ready to help shape it. It understood how to knock down barriers to market competition. The founding director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Peter Sutherland, had been Europes competition commissioner at the height of the single market program. In some ways, the EU was more comfortable with globalization than the United States was. After all, it had been founded on the belief that open commerce and shared institutions were a better guarantee of peace than great-power maneuverings.

Like the United States, the EU resisted multilateralism in areas of trade that might undermine internal political bargains or sensitive external relationships. Europe was slow to abandon restrictions on textile imports. It was notoriously opposed to free trade in bananas, which might damage its ties to former European colonies. Nonetheless, it grudgingly opened up.

The EU gradually discovered that it could turn its embrace of globalization into a strategy of influence. It could use the internal markets rules and standards to shape the rules and standards of a globalized world. The EUs combination of a large market and a common standard setting system gave it unique leverage in many sectors. While the United States had a big market too, its internal regulations and standards were often weak or created by squabbling private organizations. The commission was a sophisticated and internationally oriented regulator, with decades of experience in making its regulations work across different countries. Often, it was able not only to impose its rules and standards on multinational firms that wanted to sell to Europe but to get them to apply these rules and standards outside Europe too. This subtle form of influence, which Columbia Universitys Anu Bradford has dubbed the Brussels effect, reshaped global markets.

In short, the EU seemed well adapted to a globalized world. The stronger the EU became, the easier it was to influence world markets in Europes direction. The relationship worked the other way too: The ideas of globalization helped EU officials push for further internal reforms. It was easier to push member states to accept more European integration in a world where everyone believed in open trade and free movement. Together, these created a feedback loop between European integration and global markets.

Now that feedback loop is breaking down. Just as the EU began to globalize before most other countries, it started encountering problems earlier too. International market integration necessarily limited national democracyand voters didnt always like it. When EU leaders tried to introduce a new constitution in 2005, French and Dutch voters rejected it. A somewhat less ambitious follow-up document, the Treaty of Lisbon, was rejected by Irish voters in 2008 (though it passed when they were asked to vote again in 2009). The 2008 global financial crisis demonstrated the problems of easy financial flows across borders. The EU was especially weak in financial regulation, meaning banks could relocate their most risky and speculative lending to lax jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom and Ireland without difficulty. And as the Greek debt crisis mounted, power politicsand the self-interest of Germanyreemerged within Europe. German taxpayers were unwilling to support further integration if it meant they had to pay the bill.

The Brussels effect turned out to have limitations as well. The EU was able to spread its privacy rules worldwide, but it was too late to help European firms. Europes information economy had already been eaten up by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other big technology firms. These are not just companies that can be tamed through ordinary antitrust regulation: They aspire to become economies in their own right. Amazon, for example, is already both a marketplace and a formidable market regulator, setting rules for the businesses that use its many different backend services. Even before 2016, it was clear that the EUs approach to globalization needed to be updated to deal with market actors that were themselves effectively evolving into markets.

Now Europe is facing the new challenges of a deglobalizing world. The Trump administration wants to tear apart the existing globalized economy and replace it with an America First approach to trade. It scorns multilateralism in favor of threats and one-sided bargains. It fears China as an adversary and is trying to cut it out of global technology supply chains. When the Trump administration decided to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, it threatened to punish allies that were impertinent enough to uphold a treaty that the United States itself negotiated. As the political scientist Abraham Newman and I have argued, the United States is weaponizing the trade and financial networks that wove globalization together and turning them into tools of coercion.

Unfortunately for Europe, the United States isnt the only problem. China is not as powerful as the United States but is just as ruthless in exploiting what economic leverage it has. For example, it has threatened to retaliate against German car manufacturers if Germany gives in to U.S. pressure to block the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei. When a Swedish writers organization gave a prize to a dissident Chinese publisher late last year, Chinas ambassador to Sweden said on Swedish public radio: We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we got shotguns, warning of trade restrictions.

Globalization is unraveling as the United States and China face off against each other. It will not unravel completely: The worlds economies are too entangled to be easily separated from each other. But the way that the global economy works is now at odds with the way that Europe itself does business. Deglobalization has especially imperiled the multilateral institutions governing trade. The WTO Appellate Body, which serves as a final court of appeal for trade decisions, cannot do its work because the United States is vetoing new appointments to it. The EU is trying to keep the appellate system on life support through independent arbitration.

The Trump administrations invocation of a national security exception to justify its tariffs on steel and aluminum may be an even greater threat to the multilateral trade regime that Europe favors. Global free trade will not survive if states can invoke national security more or less on a whim, but the current U.S. administration may provoke an even bigger crisis if the WTO rules against it.

Europe now finds itself caught between two unattractive alternatives. It can accept deglobalization and embrace geopolitics, pushing to protect its own businesses as the United States and China protects theirs. Already, there are moves within Europe in this direction: Politicians are talking about watering down antitrust regulations and building and promoting European businesses. However, this would mean giving up on the multilateral institutions that Europe has relied on and hoping that soft power can be transformed into hard bargaining strength. That may be possible, but it will require luck, time, and profound internal transformation.

For example, the EU is unhappy with how the United States has used the dominance of the dollar to bully European officials and firms. If it wants to build the euro as a credible alternative, it will have to create a real system of common banking regulation and shared fiscal capacities, as well as offer stability to non-European currencies in times of economic crisis, just as the United States has. Even this might be insufficient. Europe has just lost its greatest geopolitical asset: the city of London, which is one of the core nodes in the global financial network. Building up clout would require the EU to figure out practical ways to bring London back into its orbit.

Alternatively, Europe can double down on protecting the existing multilateral system, working with other states such as Japan and Canada to build an alliance for multilateralism. The problem is that the two other great economic powers are taking just the opposite course. Even if the Trump administration is replaced by a Democratic leadership, the days of easy multilateralism will never return. Democrats, too, are hawkish about China, and presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders are skeptical about the old free trade nostrums.

Europe needs more than knee-jerk multilateralism or geopolitical cunning if it is to prosper. Naive multilateralism would lead to the EU getting squashed. Geopolitical cunning on its own would suggest that the EU should adopt Trumpism (or Xi Jinping-ism) with European characteristics, championing national firms at home while aggressively pressing its interests abroad. This is a recipe for failure. Europes external influence is based on patience and persuasion rather than brute force; it would wither if it became a crude proxy for self-interest. Without a shared commitment to problem-solving, Europes internal market would degenerate into a sordid squabble among member states, each favoring its own politically connected firms. Even worse, the political union might disintegrate, as member states absorbed the lesson that national interest trumps all. The EU can manage some temporary national ruthlessness, of the kind exhibited in the Greek debt crisis, or the decision of some member states to close their borders to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But even this is damaging, and it would undermine the EU if it continued indefinitely.

What Europe needs is a new understanding of its place in the world to connect its internal and external environments. EU experts used to describe the bicycle theory of European integration, claiming that, like a bicycle, European integration must keep on moving or it will fall over. In its golden age, globalization acted as Europes bicycle chain connecting the gear of its inner order and the gear of its outside environment, propelling the whole system forward. Now it needs a new strategy and a new bike chain.

It is a mistake to think of deglobalization as a universal withdrawal of nation-states from the world economy. It is altogether more complex. The push toward economic decoupling goes together with new needs for global engagement. The challenge of climate change will require extensive global cooperation. Under the digital platform economy, algorithms designed by market actors inevitably allow global information flows to impinge on national-level democracy. (New forms of machine learning, for example, can lump users of digital services into self-perpetuating disadvantaged categories such that a persons online habits might make it nearly impossible for them to find a job or to get a loan on reasonable terms.)

Both of these challenges provide new ways to connect Europes inside and outside. If Europe is to tackle them, it will need to move to an unparalleled level of internal integration, where it thinks about internal market rulesright from the beginningas external means of projecting European interests and values. Responding to climate change will require large-scale regulation and coordinated investment. Properly regulating information platforms will mean a fundamental shift in how the EU thinks about market power so that it incorporates an understanding of how the accumulation of data creates its own forms of influence.

Yet integration on its own will be insufficient: Both are global problems. Europes challenge, then, is to figure out how climate globalization and information globalization can become a new bicycle chain, using the smaller gear of European integration to propel change in the globaleconomy and the larger gear of the global economy to power change within Europe.

Europe is taking initial steps in this direction. The new proposals to price carbon emissions into border taxes provide one example of how this can be done, creating a virtuous cycle between Europes own efforts to reduce carbon emissions and those of other world producers, which will either have to match these efforts or pay a surtax when selling to the European market. In contrast to traditional tariffs, the ideal outcome of this border tax is that no one will have to pay it because the hope is that everyone will move to more carbon-efficient forms of production. Even better would be if Europes competitors introduced carbon taxes and carbon regulation too, making it easier to eventually build a global institutional infrastructure.

Antitrust regulation, too, is changing. Sutherlands distant successor as EU competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, is pioneering a new approach to global enforcement. Privacy regulation, citizen protection, and traditional antitrust regulation are no longer seen as separate priorities but as different aspects of a single problem: reducing inequities of power within the market to prevent abuses. Again, this promises to help create a mutually reinforcing relationship between European and global rulesalthough here the challenge is far greater, since what European and other democracies value may be seen by countries such as China as undermining their domestic system of rule. The EU will have a hard time figuring out creative rules to tame big tech companies, but if it succeeds, it can use the Brussels effect to spread these values to other jurisdictions.

None of this will be easy in a world where the United States and China weaponize their economic clout. Yet it is necessary. Europes apparent dilemma between geopolitics and multilateralism reflects a much deeper problem. Deglobalization has broken the relationship between Europes way of organizing itself and Europes way of acting in the world. Rebuilding that relationship will require Europe to discover new ways to couple the engine of integration to the engine of globalization so that strategy and multilateralism point again in the same direction.

This article appears in the Spring 2020 print issue.

Excerpt from:
Can the European Union Survive in a Deglobalized World? - Foreign Policy

BRUSSELS As a poorer, battered south asks a richer, frugal north for solidarity, youd be forgiven for thinking the coronavirus is throwing Europe back into last decades economic catastrophe. Youd be wrong. This time is set to be far worse.

The pandemic and the havoc the coronavirus is wreaking on European economies has echoes of the eurozone debt crisis, but this calamity is hitting everyone, not just smaller wayward nations, and it goes well beyond the economy. It presents a watershed moment for the future shape of the European project.

A growing number of officials and analysts believe the European Union needs an enormous financial response on a scale commensurate with the calamity. Short of that, they warn, the bloc risks inviting an even larger disaster, as well as losing legitimacy.

There are obvious links to the lack of solidarity with the eurozone crisis era of austerity and the handling of the migration crisis, said Janis Emmanouilidis, a senior analyst at the Brussels-based think tank European Policy Center. People now are also asking, What do we have the European Union for?

The very scale of the looming depression is focusing the minds of European leaders, and the fact that this crisis, unlike last time, does not come from some perceived profligacy may ultimately knock down the reluctance to putting up aid. The question is what shape that solidarity will take.

European finance ministers failed to reach an agreement over a list of measures in a marathon meeting that started on Tuesday and broke up Wednesday morning. They will reconvene on Thursday to try to hammer out a consensus on how to stave off the worst of the looming economic maelstrom.

European officials said that there was broad agreement on some measures, for example a loan program valued at 100 billion euros, or $109 billion, that will help member states fund temporary unemployment benefits.

But despite debating for 16 hours, the ministers were unable to reach a consensus on how to use the euro area bailout fund, created to tackle last decades crisis, to distribute loans without the brutal austerity restrictions Greece had to face. The European Investment Bank, it seems likely, will provide billions in support of small businesses.

Once the finance ministers reach an agreement, their bosses, the leaders of the European Union countries, will meet via teleconference to finalize the measures, which in total could amount to hundreds of billions of euros.

But as sweeping as those measures may be, they will disappoint some members.

At least nine of the 19 leaders of the countries in the common-currency bloc, and some leading policymakers in Brussels, believe the euro area needs to issue joint bonds, commonly referred to as Eurobonds or in the context of the current crisis, corona-bonds.

In the acrimonious overnight meeting, finance ministers from those countries demanded at the very least a reference to this approach in any final report, but it proved impossible to get an agreement.

Collective debt would be a first for the bloc, and has been fiercely opposed by wealthier states like Germany and the Netherlands. They argue that, by treaty, every member nation of the European Union is responsible for its own finances. Floating these bonds would also be legally difficult and time-consuming, opponents say.

Each member state has launched its own interventions, and if we aggregate those, were talking about rather big figures, said Paolo Gentiloni, the European commissioner for the economy and a former Italian prime minister, who supports the idea of joint bonds. But we are a union, 19 member states who have a common currency.

It is crucial to have a common fund to face the crisis, and help the recovery, he added. How can you have a common fund? Only by issuing bonds, obviously.

Key to this is a question that has been nagging for nearly two decades: How can 19 of the now 27 European Union countries share a currency, the euro, and not use some, even limited, common debt to weather crises?

And the coronavirus counts as a crisis by any measure. The currency unions third- and fourth-largest economies, Italy and Spain, seem set to shrink by more than 10 percent, while the largest, Germany, could also shrink by 10 percent, unleashing a domino effect. By comparison, the euro area shrank by 4.5 percent in the post-financial crisis recession in 2009.

The stimulus that will be needed because of the damage caused by the epidemic is being estimated at more than 2 trillion, or $2.18 trillion. At stake wont be just the survival and recovery of each individual economy, but potentially the survival of the euro.

Eurobonds are the solution, a serious and efficient response, adapted to the emergency we are living, said Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy in an impassioned address to the nation on Monday.

Prime Minister Pedro Snchez of Spain, where the death toll has approached 14,000, has called for a new Marshall Aid plan for the reconstruction of Europe.

Without solidarity there can be no cohesion, without cohesion there will be disaffection and the credibility of the European project will be severely damaged, he warned.

Europes de facto top leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, this week called the coronavirus outbreak and its aftermath the greatest test for the European Union since its inception.

Germany will only do well in the long run if Europe is doing well, Ms. Merkel told reporters at a news conference. The answer to current events, she said, was more Europe, a stronger Europe and a well-functioning Europe in all its parts, meaning in all its member states.

But Ms. Merkel stopped short of backing joint debt.

For Ms. Merkel, loans with few strings attached and German subsidies for unemployment benefits elsewhere in Europe were already quite brave measures, and as far as she was prepared to go.

She and other northern European leaders have signed off on waiving rules that normally punish European countries for running high deficits.

They have also implicitly backed a decision by the European Central Bank to launch a new bond-buying program that will see it swoop up the debt of eurozone countries, buying time for leaders to work out their next moves.

Joint debt has been a foundational step in the creation of federal states, most notably of the United States in the late 18th century,

In Europe in the age of coronavirus, it has been elevated to an existential question for the future of the bloc.

Why? Because these bonds imply a clear and explicit sharing of the cost incurred to fight the Covid-19 crisis, as a symbol of European solidarity, says Silvia Merler, head of research at the Algebris Policy Forum, the research branch of an investment fund based in Milan.

But they are by no means the only tools on the table, she added.

One key obstacle to joint debt is the scar tissue from the eurozone debt crisis of last decade, in which the bloc paid hundreds of billion of euros to Greece and another four countries, demanding in exchange some of the harshest austerity measures in modern history, to ensure no nation sought such bailouts opportunistically in future.

The wounds of that crisis are still deep, as is the feeling in Italy and Greece that the European Union was also not there to help much with the migration crisis that peaked in 2015-2016.

Mr. Gentiloni and others are keen to stress that, despite a fleeting resemblance, this time is different.

I think it is a completely different crisis, Mr. Gentiloni said. In itself this crisis is an equalizer, it is affecting at different speed and intensity more or less all of Europe, all countries, it is not concentrated like the financial and migration crises were.

And the debate over how to respond is more mature too, experts noted, pointing to the fact that even conservative German economists were no longer talking about solidarity as if it meant charity, as they had in the past.

When the Greek crisis started back at the end of 2009, the question of European solidarity was much more controversial, Ms. Merler said. Back then, policymakers could not even agree among themselves on whether it was legal for euro area countries to help financially a member in distress.

As the debate over assuming joint debt goes on, the European approach in the meantime to fighting the coronavirus will look similar to how Europe tends to respond to crises: a patchwork of imperfect measures.

Theyll build substandard instruments that are not good enough, but do the job at first, and they will keep kicking the can down the road, said Shahin Valle, a French economist who is a senior fellow at the German Council of Foreign Relations, and previously served as a senior adviser to the European Council during the eurozone crisis.

It wont be a make-or-break moment like some predict, Mr. Valle said. Instead well just continue to hobble along on our crutches.

Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting from Berlin, Emma Bubola from Rome and Raphael Minder from Madrid.

Go here to see the original:
As Europe Confronts the Coronavirus, What Shape Will Solidarity Take? - The New York Times

ONEmeasure of the stability of the capitalist system is the profitability of its banks. This is so important a priority for our ruling class that it rescued themwith unimaginable mountains of cash our cash in the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis.

Even so banks remains a weak link. For banks across the Eurozone, according to figures from the European Central Bank, the average return on equity fell over the past year from 6.2 per cent to 5.2 per cent.

In the dominant EU economic power German banks had a return of 0.08 per cent.

Banks are so central to the maintenance of economic stability that the case for firm supervision is barely contested in places where the public might notice. In fact inmore select gatherings of the rich and entitled such circumspection is missing, while among the public as a whole the case for public ownership and control of the banks finds a ready audience.

The divisions between the stricken southern members of the EU and the main beneficiaries of the way the eurozone is structured those northern states grouped around Germany have widened as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Premier MarkRutte stalled on an EU-wide programme to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

And this after the European Parliament's President the Italian David Sassoli was excluded by the select pair from talks on the EU response to the coronavirus crisis.

In a statement the European Council said: The Covid-19 pandemic constitutes an unprecedented challenge for Europe and the whole world.

It requires urgent, decisive, and comprehensive action at the EU, national, regional and local levels. We will do everything that is necessary to protect our citizens and overcome the crisis, while preserving our European values and way of life.

They then kicked the whole issue into the long grass.

One barely suppressed undercurrent has it that the change in the leadership of the Labour Party offers a new opportunity to reverse the Brexit mandate or at least place Britains separation from the EU into cold storage.

A good part of the support for Britain remaining in the EU came from still comes from well-intentioned people who project their own hopes and dreams for a continent of co-operation,with nations united in scientific endeavour,onto the less seductive reality that is the neoliberal alliance.

The news that the EUs top scientist, the president of the European Research Council, has chucked in his job right at the start of his four-year term of office should give those starry-eyed at the sight of the starry blue flag second thoughts.

Professor Mauro Ferrari resigned after the EU turned down his proposal to establish a large-scale scientific programme to fight Covid-19.

I have been extremely disappointed by the European response to Covid-19, he said. I arrived at the ERC a fervent supporter of the EU [but] the Covid-19 crisis completely changed my views, though the ideals of international collaboration I continue to support with enthusiasm.

In a telling phrase Professor Ferrari said: The proposal was passed on to different layers of the European Commission administration, where I believe it disintegrated upon impact.

It is clear that the coronavirus emergency is best tackled by international co-operation and solidarity. While President Trump now threatens to withdraw funding from the World Health Organisation, accusing it of a China bias.

The WHO set the pace with firm advice and in popularising best practice from countries that have made significant progress in tackling the crisis. China and Cuba have set the pace in rendering real aid to stricken nations while the EU has failed the test.

Excerpt from:
The European Union still refuses to confront the coronavirus crisis - Morning Star Online

Shortly after World War II, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman came up with a plan: In order to prevent further wars on the European continent and achieve peaceful coexistence of the European nation states, he recommended to build a European community based on mutual solidarity. Fully aware of this being a long-term task, he proclaimed in 1951: Europe will not be made all at once. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.

One might assume that 70 years and eight treaties later including the Treaty of Rome establishing a European Economic Community and the Treaty of Maastricht founding a common European parliament Schumans dream would be fulfilled.

Europe presents itself as a strong, social community. But how much is this sense of community worth when it regresses into a collection of egoists as soon as it is challenged by global problems, like an economic recession or migrants asking for asylum in this community.

The last month taught us that COVID-19 is a global problem a crisis seeking global, post-national solutions. The European Union (EU), a community of 27 states, built on solidarity, is (supposed to be) the flagship of the post-national era. It seems to be predestined to cope well with major and global crises. After being challenged in 2010 by the economic breakdown of Greece and in 2014 by the high influx of refugees mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, one might think that the EU would be well-equipped for another global crisis; that it would have a blueprint ready containing a common strategy for how to fight a world-wide pandemic, together and in solidarity.

But the opposite seems to be true. The German chancellor Angela Merkel is preparing her people for an infection rate of 60 to 80 percent. She emphasized the situation is serious and asked her people to stay calm and remain in their homes. Her French counterpart Emmanuel MacronEmmanuel Jean-Michel MacronCOVID-19 a make-it or break-it moment for the European Union US inaction is hurting the chance for peace in Libya Officials say Paris hospitals will be hit hard following coronavirus spike MORE employed all his pathos in a speech about our new heroes, the doctors and nurses fighting for French lives. He declared, We are at war. Victor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, flexed his populist, right-wing muscles, firmly trained during the refugee crisis. He closed his borders and is using the spread of the coronavirus to win the vote to rule by decree, muting critical journalists who dare challenge his health care system.

Missing in the cacophony of parental admonitions, pompous speeches and populist deemphasizing is a clear and loud pan-European voice asserting solidarity within the community a voice like that of Robert Schuman. His Schuman Declaration is the foundation of the European Union, proclaiming the rule of three principles in Europe: reconciliation, peace and solidarity. These are the three pillars on which the EU is supposed to be built on; this is what it is supposed to stand for. It is also what the EU will be tested on especially in days of crisis such as these.

In 2020, this would mean offering 26 helping hands to Italy, to send doctors and to receive patients, to exchange research results and to deliver protective gear. It would mean to create and operate a common European health care system, together and without borders. It should mean to bundle all knowledge, to stand and fight together in solidarity beyond national borders.

Instead, we are experiencing a comeback of the nation state. Borders are closing. Not only Europeans, but European member states are quarantining themselves. Europeans are becoming foreigners in Europe. Suddenly China feels closer than Germany or France. Serbia and Italy both already reached out for Chinese help as their European neighbors left their plea for help unanswered.

At the end of the day we have to realize: COVID-19 is a product of its time, globalized, leaping between species and societies. The virus does not stop at borders, it needs neither passports or visas in order to travel. We are truly entering uncharted territory.

The COVID-19 pandemic can indeed be compared to World War II not in terms of destruction but in terms of social and economic consequences. For Europe, this is the chance to rise and be the union it was meant to be. Europe needs to show real solidarity and to prove that the Union is a sustainable and necessary concept for the future. It needs brave and compassionate visionaries. It needs a Europe of the people and for the people. If the EU fails this stress test, it will make itself very dispensable indeed.

Katharina Konarek is a political scientist working on European and German foreign policy, currently teaching and researching at the Haifa Center for German and European Studies (HCGES) at the University of Haifa.

Continue reading here:
COVID-19 a make-it or break-it moment for the European Union | TheHill - The Hill

On 17 February 2020, the Council adopted Decision (CFSP) 2020/212[1] implementing Council Decision 2013/255/CFSP.

The Council Decision adds eight natural persons and two entities to the list of natural and legal persons, entities or bodies subject to restrictive measures in Annex I to Decision 2013/255/CFSP.

The Candidate Countries Republic of North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Albania[2], the EFTA countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, members of the European Economic Area, as well as Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and Georgia align themselves with this decision.

They will ensure that their national policies conform to this Council Decision.

The European Union takes note of this commitment and welcomes it.

[1] Published on 17.02.2020 in the Official Journal of the European Union no L 43 I, p.6.

[2] Republic of North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Albania continue to be part of the Stabilisation and Association Process.

Excerpt from:
Declaration by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union on the alignment of certain third countries concerning restrictive measures...