The European Commission and the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper examines how the Commission defined and acted in response to COVID-19 crisis as an issue with economic, public health, and cross-border mobility dimensions. Tracing Commission’s action from January 2020, the paper makes two arguments and contributes to two debates in the literatures. First, following Smeets and Beach 2020, and Kassim and Tholoniat 2021, it challenges the view that the European Council inevitably takes the lead in defining and managing the EU’s crisis response. Second, whereas much of the existing literature black boxes the European Council and the European Commission and construes their relationship as conflictual and zero-sum, this paper argues that the two institutions is not inevitably antagonistic but that the spirit of their interaction is contingent on issue and agency. Support is drawn from an empirical analysis of the EU’s crisis response, which takes into account the full range and phasing of EU action.