The Paradoxical Strength of a Weak Centre: Crisis Politics in the United States and the European Union

Despite early missteps in its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Union has had a relatively good crisis, and certainly a better one than its very weak competences in the field of public health policy might have predicted. This presents a puzzle to students of federalism: how did a relatively young compound polity, with all its weaknesses, achieve functional and political stability even through this moment of acute policy crisis? We propose a challenge to the conventional wisdom on the effects of Europe’s 'incomplete' federalism, based on the logical corollary of Hamilton’s Paradox (Rodden 2006): if a strong centre cannot resist exploitation by states because it has the means to rescue them, a weak centre might possess certain advantages, not in spite of, but directly related to, its lack of exploitable capacity. The Covid-19 pandemic, in providing a stress-test of historic proportions, has served to expose both the pathologies of strong-centered federations and the surprising advantages of weak ones. In particular, the differences between the EU and US federations along three dimensions - polity integrity, powers and decision-making modes - are shown to have contributed to Europe's relative success in managing the political consequences of the pandemic.