International and European Emergency Assistance to EU Member States in the COVID-19 Crisis: Why European Solidarity Is Not Dead and What We Need to Make It both Happen and Last

Abstract

It is of course too early to draw conclusions about the European Union’s response to the COVID-19 crisis in its Member States while we are still in the midst of the health crisis. On the other hand, it is already possible to correct the widely shared first impression that European solidarity had been shattered. The available public data systematized in Section II and the analyses in Section III show that European solidarity has been expressed in two ways: First, bilaterally between EU Member States; second, collectively under the recent impetus of the European Commission. To help explain this impression of the absence of a Union, Section IV proposes three paths that should be the subject of further research: public information and the policy of transparency of European public action, the Union’s emergency-reaction autonomy in the face of third countries’ Realpolitik strategies, and the gap between the expectations of the Union’s citizens and its actual competences.