My faith in the cohesion of the EU is very weak right now. I mean, come on?
One fifth of all surgical procedures in the EU use personal protective equipment imported from Asia by the Swedish company Mölnlycke. The company’s main distribution warehouse for southern Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands is in Lyon.
Mölnlycke’s entire stock of an estimated six million masks was seized by the French. All had been contracted for, including a million masks each for France, Italy and Spain. The rest were destined for Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland, which has special trading status with the EU.
Some friends we have in this union. All the questions this will raise will take years to sort out, and I’m not so sure we will come back from it. If this is how France acts in a pandemic, how would it act in a war? A friend of mine from North Africa was almost filled with schadenfreude seeing how the nations of the EU turned their backs to each other, closed borders and started a game of “none for all, all for none”. And in a global pandemic, the weakness of having your production outsourced to your old colonies suddenly becomes painfully evident. As we have connected the world, we are suddenly in a situation where we see that the entire world can urgently need more of the same thing, at the same time.
if this pandemic is the dressed rehearsal…
I’d just reserve judgement till we see in hindsight what happened. This is all incredibly bizarre. And hopefully a big wakeup calll to have production capacity for the essentials where you have some measure of control.
European states were always bloodthirsty and fratricidal. This is why we needed a union in the first place, after 700 years of almost continuous wars on the continent.
The European institutions have done a lot against the state of affairs that you described. For example Germany (a bloodthirsty and fratricidal European state) tried to ban the export of surgical masks (many would have gone to Italy). Commissioner Breton threatened Germany with an infringement procedure, and the German govt stood down.
My problem, rather, is with the stiffness and aridity of the European institutions. China, for example, is love bombing Italy:
Compare that with the EU’s institutional communication:
Indeed. But perhaps we need to go back to the drawing board and return to the original message. We need a union because we don’t have the strong cohesion on the continent that we need to survive. Indeed, the French government backed down after two weeks of pressure. That might not have happened without supporting institutions. There has been too much of a fake it until you make it approach to fraternity and European identity. UvdL’s cringeworthy “standing tall together” tweet a case in point. Better to just admit that it’s not there but that we must take this opportunity to build that unity.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what ramifications all of this will have for the EU in the coming few years.
Nicely put. I do feel plenty of European fraternity and identity, but that’s just me.
You know, it might be that the top people in the institutions (the appointees: commissioners, EU Commission DGs, top people in EU Council and ECB) are the least fraternal of Europeans. It’s a matter of selection: they are appointed by member states exactly to represent the interest of the states that appointed them, and not those of all Europeans. Same happens with MEPs, because MEPs are elected in their home countries, and that includes plenty of folks from parties with “Italy first”, “Malta first”, “Denmark first” etc. on their platform. The Nigel Farages and Marine Le Pens and Matteo Salvinis, who literally go to the party in order to spoil it.
