Suspending vetoes for the pandemic response. The Covid-19 Outbreak, Next Generation EU and the Limits of Intergovernmentalism

Suspending vetoes for the pandemic response. The Covid-19 Outbreak, Next Generation EU and the Limits of Intergovernmentalism The scholarly debate in 2020 has given much space to the pandemic crisis-management and decision making at EU level and especially surrounding the European Council negotiations.Frugal countries (the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Denmark), Poland and Hungary for rule of law related issues, tried to block a wide recovery plan launched by Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The Pandemic put under stress the very core of European Union: solidarity not just as moral value but as foedus. Vetoes have been suspended by the willingness of Germany, France, Italy and Spain to ground the compromise on political rather than solely economic priorities to display solidarity towards all Europeans who are fighting against health and economical consequences of Covid-19.Nevertheless, as all diplomatic confrontations, as all European Council negotiations demonstrated (even during Sovereign Debt Crisis) although vetoes may have been suspended, ideas, culture, bias and beliefs remain there ready to be reactivated in future dialogues. The paper investigates the nature of the negotiations, the key role played by the German Presidency in the agenda-setting process and the role played by most affected countries (such as Italy and Spain), the diplomatic framework, keeping in mind the juridical limits of current EU institutions and similar negotiations mainly on Greek Crisis and, more in general, on Sovereign debt crisis.While NGEU clearly emerges as a major step ahead, it is still not enough on political and juridical terms to determine a breaking point in European integration and effective common response in all similar future shocks. Moreover, the progress towards implementation is far from free of procedural and political challenges which may reveal the full scale of diverging priorities across the Member States as the proposed National Recovery and Resilience plans are negotiated with the EU institutions. Considering the draft Commission proposal for NGEU, all European Council conclusions related to the progress of the negotiations and positions of the European Parliament (and political-national heterogeneities within its debates), the analysis pinpoints how the negotiation evolution led to a watering down of the common response by way of compensation, elimination and compromise following Tsebelis and Hahm (2014) classification. Results allow to draw some preliminary assessment of how the intergovernmental decision-making process within EUCO - against more advanced integration propositions from the Commission and the Parliament - hindered a more effective and timely joint pandemic response and transnational solidarity. In doing so it evaluates as well the crisis-readiness and performance of EU economic governance in the face of arguably the biggest challenge ever faced by the Union, building on and contributing to the vast literature on literature of EU decision-making, the rise of intergovernmentalism, the EMU and its shortcomings of key interest in the context of the current reform debate and Conference on the Future of Europe.