Europe Fights Existential Dispute Against Coronavirus-fed Nationalism

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The coronavirus threatens to hasten the collapse of the international order that emerged in the 20th century and of which the European Union has become the last bastion.

Authorities from the continental bloc are attempting to strengthen multilateralism with initiatives such as those approved on Tuesday (the first humanitarian aid to Iran and the naval operation to halt the Libyan war), but the widespread closure of borders and the retrenchment of national governments within their borders, including within the EU, have reinforced the unilateral trends fed in the White House by Donald Trump and enthusiastically endorsed from London to Moscow for different reasons.

The EU has hitherto withstood with great difficulty the clashes sparked by the Trump Administration – which, since coming to power in 2017, has managed to cast doubt on NATO‘s future, condemned the World Trade Organization to stagnation, dissociated itself from the global fight against climate change and left the international agreement to prevent Iran’s nuclearization on the brink of collapse.

Brussels chose to avert the head-on clash with Trump and preserve what was left of the multilateral order waiting for better times or a new tenant in the White House. The plan was to reinforce the EU’s own structures, increase the global presence of the euro (stagnant since its birth 20 years ago) and provide the EU club with defensive powers that would reduce political, economic and military dependence on Washington.

But the shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic surprised the EU without having led, in return, to any significant advance in its path towards geostrategic independence.

The unprecedented health crisis and its feared economic impact also triggered a nationalist reaction in most member states, which raises doubts as to the community club’s ability to jointly and multilaterally address not only the human and social drama that surrounds the Old Continent but also the problems that the continental bloc was already facing.

“We are at a critical moment of European construction,” said French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire on Tuesday. “Either Europe finds its political direction again and is strengthened, or it forgets its purpose and disappears,” he added.

Shada Islam, director for Europe of the Friends of Europe study center, believes that the global reorganization triggered by the pandemic, in fact, presents an opportunity for the European Union. “Countries like China, Russia, and Turkey do not have the traction needed to lead a new order, and with the US in retreat a void opens up,” she notes.

The European Commission (EU executive) is convinced that this crisis, as previous ones, represents an opportunity to deepen continental integration and strengthen its weight in the world.

“We should not forget that none of the problems we had before the virus disappeared,” warned Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief. “Some of these problems are growing and getting worse, and we must continue paying attention to them”, added the Spaniard, announcing the adoption of the naval operation Irini, which aims to halt the interference of Russia and Turkey in the Libyan war.

As a sign of this desire to remain on the global stage, Europe also debuted the Instex system on Tuesday, which, for the first time, allows the US blockade to be evaded and to send humanitarian aid to Iran, a country badly hit by the epidemic.

The European Union has also resumed its territorial expansion plans by giving the go-ahead for the opening of negotiations on the accession of Albania and Northern Macedonia (a country that last week joined NATO).

But the apparently positive signs are overshadowed by the sense of paralysis and powerlessness that the Union offers in the face of an unprecedented health crisis. The frictions of the last European summit on the potential economic response to the crisis in the making are compounded by the sense of helplessness that the countries most affected by the epidemic, such as Italy or Spain, feel in the face of the apparent lack of solidarity of their community members.

The human drama strikes the EU, moreover, at a delicate moment, with the first break in the newly-reduced club (with the departure from the UK on January 31st) and current budgets (2014-2020) about to expire.

The February European summit, the last time European leaders could meet in person, ended with a resounding failure to decide on new accounts (2021-2027), leaving the club under threat to tackle the coronavirus crisis without a final budget or pressed by the need to approve emergency allocations at least for next year.

“The EU tends to focus on its own small issues every time a global challenge arises,” laments Islam. “At the moment, the EU’s response should be an inspiration to other places on the planet, but it is far from being one, because of its internal disputes,” adds the European director of Friends of Europe.

Propaganda war

Brussels believes that the bad image of the European reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic is partly the result of the propaganda war waged between different world powers. “There is a global battle for the report,” commented Josep Borrell, the EU’s top foreign policy representative a few days ago.

Borrell’s department, in its reviews of misinformation campaigns, has already detected some one hundred waves of messages that seek to discredit European administrations and encourage mistrust of continental public opinion. These campaigns seem to be linked to interests related to Moscow, but not exclusively.

China is also pushing its own report, according to an internal Commission document, citing “the admirable work [of Beijing] in containing the coronavirus” and “the gratitude that the West should have for China for its rapid reaction.”

This campaign’s underlying message, according to Brussels, is that the strength of a centralized state like the Chinese “can be an asset” in cases like the epidemic.

Source: El País