EU Leadership in the Internal and External Covid-19 Response: Does It Matter at All?

Besides being a health crisis causing more than 200 000 deaths in Europe and one million worldwide so far, the Covid-19 pandemic triggered a deep economic and social crisis, the worst recession since the Second World War. Crises call for leadership. Under conditions of urgency and uncertainty, measures must be adopted and decisions must be coordinated swiftly and resolutely without sacrificing their effectiveness and legitimacy. In parallel with abounding calls for a coordinated EU action and solidarity, old and new conflicts have (re-) emerged, and national solo efforts have threatened to undermine coherent crisis management. And yet, the EU managed to overcome its initially sluggish response, and launched a number of significant initiatives to deal with the pandemic and its repercussions. Key examples include the EU’s historic debut on the bond markets through the SURE social bonds and the coordinated effort at the global level to grant access to Covid-19 vaccination, testing and treatment. Given the EU’s lack of a strong center and hierarchy, and given the diversity among its many veto players, the determination of the first response (e.g., compared to the Eurozone crisis) is puzzling. How did the EU manage to turn from a spectator to the key decision-making site of multifaceted joint crisis action within a few months? Did the European response emerge from mostly decentral coordination among national capitals, or did the EU’s institutional actors shape the decisions and measures that were adopted? The paper explores these questions by applying leadership theory to explain and assess the initial reaction of the EU to the Covid-19 crisis. We adopt a behavioral and mechanistic approach to leadership, whereby the latter is defined by the observable actions of potential leaders, and submit it to a plausibility probe by comparatively studying key examples of the internal and external responses of EU institutions to the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper examines to what extent the Commission (with the HR/VP) the European Council (with its President and its staff) and the rotating Council Presidencies provided leadership to overcome the typical collective action problems that pose obstacles for an effective crisis response. Empirically, these actors are in a good a priori position to step up as leaders. This focus allows us to distinguish between supranational and intergovernmental leadership, informing the debate about a “new intergovernmentalism” in European integration. Capturing the pandemic’s global nature, the analysis engages with both the internal and the external dimension of leadership. Indeed, the response to Covid-19 has become a new frontier of geopolitical competition, and the EU needs to reposition itself among global actors like China, the US, and the WHO. By looking at the establishment of EU social bonds and on the global vaccination strategy, the paper therefore bridges the gap between internal and external leadership research and points to neglected empirical linkages and potentials for synthesis.