Pandemic Polity-Building

Abstract This book tells the unlikely story of how the European Union survived COVID-19, which came on the heels of a difficult decade during which the EU wrestled with repeated crises, from the Euro area, to refugees, populism, and geopolitics. Against all odds, a divided polity with a weak center and low competences in crucial policy domains, managed to overcome powerful disincentives to coordinate its way out of the pandemic and built central capacity. We argue that this puzzling outcome stems from COVID-19’s crisis characteristics and the EU’s polity features. The relative symmetric nature of the pandemic and the deeply disruptive economic shocks revealed the potential long-term externalities of a lack of joint action at the European level. The EU suspended the fiscal and state aid rules, coordinated a common vaccine procurement scheme, and pooled its fiscal firepower. Our polity perspective shows how the EU overcame conflicts and managed to coordinate and create new capacity in its center while relying on a new geography of solidarity within the EU. The polity approach allows us to show how the EU did not take a federal path to polity formation. Instead, it moved toward a polity that serves as an imperfect but solidaristic safety net for its member states. Our polity approach offers a more fine-grained argument than “more or less integration” through a triptych of concepts (bonding, i.e., solidarity, binding, i.e., capacity building and bounding, i.e., bordering) that capture both the supply and demand side of politics.