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In the 70s todayth anniversary of the beginning of the European Union with the Schuman Declaration, the project launched to end centuries of war is in an existential struggle with a pathogen that knows no borders.
COVID-19 has won the opening rounds, challenging economic solidarity, the common political cause and the public confidence on which the future of the EU is based. Some consider this week’s landmark decision by the German Constitutional Court, which casts doubt on the authority of the European Central Bank to buy public sector bonds, as another nail in that supranational coffin after the UK’s departure.
As always in EU affairs, however, the truth is more complicated. The European Union remains a heavyweight economic force with 22% of world GDP in 2018, dropping to approximately 18.5% after Brexit. It maintains its undisputed role as the world’s regulatory superpower. Beyond that, EU countries through a series of government-backed schemes have kept their unemployment in the pandemic era at a much lower rate of 6.6% in March than in the United States, where it is 14.7% and is increasing. Covid-19’s real threat to the European Union is not one of its impending collapse, but one of its perceived irrelevance as a public defender and global actor. The danger is that the coronavirus period could affect public confidence in the value of the EU and harm its international ability to act consistently, that its relevance to its own citizens and the world could suffer an impressive blow.
What Europeans don’t understand enough, let alone Americans, are the global dangers in a weaker and more vulnerable European Union. With great power competition heating up between the United States and China, coupled with a systemic struggle between authoritarian and democratic forms of government, how the European Union emerges from its Covid-19 challenges could be of decisive importance to world democracies.
Although the scope of the coronavirus is global, it is nowhere a more crucial common cause than among European countries. Their union after World War II ended the conflict, expanded democracy, and contributed to the collapse of Soviet communism. The enlargement of the EU after the Cold War sealed its position as one of the great democratizing forces in history, and as one of the greatest achievements of the foreign policy of the United States.
The timing of this historic test could not be more auspicious.
Today is 70th anniversary of the Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950, when the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed placing the coal and steel production of France and West Germany under a common High Authority, open to the participation of other countries from Western Europe.
“Europe will not be done at once, or according to a single plan,” the statement said with its modest language and extraordinary ambition to pacify a continent that had produced two world wars. “It will be built through concrete achievements that first create de facto solidarity. The union of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the old opposition of France and Germany.”
It was a cruel irony that in this anniversary week the German Constitutional Court evoked a new fundamental challenge for the European Union. The judges notified the European Central Bank, claiming that the ECB had not carried out a “proportionality assessment” of the bond purchase to ensure that the “economic and fiscal effects” did not exceed the bank’s mandate and exceed other policy objectives.
The time bomb is that the court told the Bundesbank, by far the most important central bank for eurozone monetary operations, to stop buying more bonds within three months if the ECB failed to comply.
ECB President Christine Lagarde, a lawyer herself, was unfazed by the challenge. “We are an independent institution, accountable to the European Parliament and driven by our mandate,” he told Bloomberg at a webinar. “We will continue to do whatever it takes, whatever it takes, to fulfill that mandate. Unfazed.”
However, the details of the German court ruling are not as significant as the signal they send to other European countries seeking to challenge the authority of the EU institutions. The decision comes against current European background music, heard particularly in Italy and Spain, where European solidarity has been lacking in the fight against the virus.
Economic numbers do not help.
The European Commission said this week in its spring forecast that the economic crisis caused by the pandemic “could ultimately threaten the stability of the economic and monetary union.”
He noted “severe distortions within the single market and entrenched economic, financial and social divergences among euro area member states” as major risks.
Those, in terms, could fuel growth gaps between European states that could exacerbate tensions. A decline of more than 9% of GDP is forecast in 2020 for Greece, Italy and Spain. Germany would suffer less, with growth falling by 6.5%.
Although the European Union has moved slowly, this week brought encouraging news of new momentum, including what The Economist called the welcome appearance of a “genuinely European debate.”
The EU confirmed a $ 3.3 billion commitment to help Western Balkan countries combat the pandemic, as concerns grew, several countries aligned more closely with Russia and an increasingly assertive and generous China. .
The move came after a virtual summit between the EU and the Western Balkans, where the 27 leaders of the EU member states said “this support and cooperation goes far beyond what any other partner has provided to the region and deserves public recognition. “
What China cannot offer to the Western Balkan states is the possibility of being a member of the EU, and that was what Brussels did in March for Albania and North Macedonia. Accession talks could start within a year. But the road ahead will be a long one for them and four other aspiring countries in the Western Balkans, all of which “belong to the European Union,” said the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
Last Monday, the EU-led fundraising campaign for Covid-19 vaccines, treatments and diagnostics reached about $ 7.5 billion euros, including 1.4 billion from the EU. French President Emmanuel Macron, who warned that the EU faces “a moment of truth” for his political project, contributed 500 million euros.
It is not too late for the EU to demonstrate its resistance and relevance at this time of crisis. In this 70th anniversary, it is also worth remembering the global and transatlantic common interest in European stability and success.
Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, award-winning journalist, and president and CEO of the Atlantic Council, one of the United States’ most influential think tanks on world affairs. He worked at The Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years as a foreign correspondent, assistant managing editor, and as the oldest editor of the European edition of the newspaper. His latest book, “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” was a New York Times best-seller and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe y slocate yourself here to Inflection Points, your look every Saturday at the main stories and trends of the past week.
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