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There are two things a quarantined European will reliably find when he goes online for news in this age of the coronavirus: first, the clucking of local pundits at how the Trump administration has managed the epidemic in the United States; second, unmistakable evidence that every one of the major countries of Western Europe, with the exception of Angela Merkels Germany, is doing worse.

The coronavirus epidemic has turned Europeans against one another. In early March, Germany, one of the few countries with the manufacturing capacity to equip its citizens with medical masks, canceled plans to export protective gear. This infuriated Italy, which was then at the most desperate stage of its own epidemic. Italy in turn became the scapegoat in a wave of Spanish newspaper storiesabout various Iberian fashionistas who had brought Covid-19 back from Milans Fashion Week (also canceled, but too tardily); about Venices Carnival (halted, but only once it was underway); and about the Valencia fans who fell sick after traveling to Milan for a Champions League soccer match against Atalanta, the team of the heavily infected Italian city of Bergamo.

In Barcelona, Quim Torra, president of the autonomous (and nationalist) government of Catalonia, sought to close off the border between his region and the rest of Spain. He failed. Spains politically vulnerable Socialist prime minister, Pedro Snchez, sniffing a stratagem for Catalan independence, soughtand gota centralization of emergency authority in Madrid. The Catalans were left to grumble that they were heading into a plague yoked to Europes least competent government. That, alas, was an accurate assessment of Spain for much of the spring. By the end of April, its death rate had reached 510 per million. But then the virus took off in divided, decadent Belgium, paralyzed by its own subnational power structures. As April turned to May, deaths there reached a world-beating 633 per million, more than three times the American rate. Meanwhile, almost-forgotten border checkpoints had been reestablishedbetween France and Germany, Austria and Italy.

Facing their largest challenge since World War II, Europes countries are performing poorly. The Brussels-based European Union, the one institution with a track record of coordinating emergency responses continentwide, has been casting about aimlessly for a strategy. Right now, Europe needs regulatory harmonizationwhich is just what Brussels is good at providing. But Europe also needs leaders who can boost morale and stir up sentiments of shared sacrificeand these are the specialty of nationalist democracies. Europes nations were built on family ties, regional languages, and horrific wars in which everyone shed blood together. The sense of belonging is emotional, intense. Since its consolidation as a political unit after 1992, the EU has sought to transcend and abolish that kind of emotional kinship in favor of a politics of global capitalism and expert planning. Democratically inclined citizens often find this kind of politics frustrating even when global capitalism and expert planning are working splendidly. Right now, they are not.

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Can the European Union Survive a Pandemic? - The New Republic