Abstract
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has placed severe pressure on the EU’s capacity to provide a timely and coordinated response capable of curbing the pandemic’s disastrous economic and social effects on EU member states. In this situation, the supranational institutions and their models of action are evidently under pressure, seeming incapable of leading the EU out of the stormy waters of the present crisis. The article frames the first months of management of the COVID-19 crisis at EU level as characterised by the limited increase in the level of steering capacity by supranational institutions, due to the reaffirmed centrality of the intergovernmental option. To explain this situation, the article considers the absence of the institutional capacity/legitimacy to extract resources from society(ies), and the subsequent impossibility of guaranteeing an effective and autonomous process of political (re)distribution, the key factors accounting for the weakness of vertical political integration in the response to the COVID-19 challenge. This explains why during the COVID-19 crisis as well, the pattern followed by the EU is rather similar to past patterns, thus confirming that this has fed retrenchment aimed at the enforcement of the intergovernmental model and the defence of the most sensitive core state powers against inference from supranational EU institutions.
Highlights
In the last 10 years, the European Union (EU) has been through several crises which have led to the questioning of the trajectory of the EU’s integration process
The article argues that despite the Commission’s considerable activism, the response coming from the EU can be seen as confirmation of the difficulty experienced in further raising the level of integration by enforcing the role of supranational institutions during a crisis
The incapacity of EU supranational institutions to exercise the function of resource extraction is key to accounting for the impossibility of any autonomous, genuinely supranational response in the case of the COVID crisis
Summary
In the last 10 years, the European Union (EU) has been through several crises which have led to the questioning of the trajectory of the EU’s integration process. The article argues that despite the Commission’s considerable activism, the response coming from the EU can be seen as confirmation of the difficulty experienced in further raising the level of integration (vertical political integration) by enforcing the role of supranational institutions during a crisis This outcome can be accounted for by the EU’s inability to forge its own autonomous capacity to extract resources from European society(ies), and to enforce a coordinated, supranational response. This limit unavoidably produces a process of crisis management, which comes close to vertical political disintegration as a result of the enforcement of the intergovernmental decision-making model
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call