From Pandemic to War: Examining the European Commission’s Approach to Successive Crises

Over the past decade the European Union has confronted a “permanent crisis” environment—spanning the euro and migration crises, Brexit, rule-of-law disputes, COVID-19, and Russia’s war against Ukraine—compounded by geopolitical uncertainty including shifts in US policy under Donald Trump. Against this backdrop, this study examines how policy lessons drawn by the European Commission’s COVID-19 response informed its subsequent proposals during the Ukraine crisis, which was brought on by Russia's conflict with Ukraine and strengthened by shifting US foreign policy under Donald Trump. It does so by examining how reflections and cognitive shifts were translated into concrete, congruent policy changes indicative of inter-crisis learning. The analysis applies a tripartite macro-level framework—active reflection, cognitive change, and behavioral congruency—across three core domains: the joint procurement of critical public goods, emergency financial assistance and legal engineering, and fiscal flexibility via the National Escape Clause. Empirically, it uses a qualitative research design combining desk research on official documents and reports with six semi-structured elite interviews conducted in early 2026 with Commission officials (purposive sampling; anonymized coding), and a structured, focused comparison of the COVID-19 and Ukraine crises, conceptualized as a long-shadow and a fast-burning crisis, respectively, in an era of polycrisis. The findings show that pandemic-era failures of non-exclusive joint procurement under the JPA and fragmented national “vaccine alliances” prompted a cognitive shift toward “integration through funding,” emphasizing industrial de-risking and solidarity enforced through conditionality. These beliefs manifested during the Ukraine crisis in EDIRPA/EDIP/SEAP requirements for multi-state consortia, ASAP’s €500 million to expand ammunition production, and “buy European” rules (≥65% EU/associated content). In crisis financing and governance, the Commission replicated SURE through the proposed €150 billion SAFE “defence-SURE” loan instrument, justified and expedited via an expanded interpretation of Article 122 TFEU as autonomous EU emergency law. Finally, learning from broad pandemic fiscal waivers yielded a paradigm of “constrained flexibility,” operationalized in 2025 through guardrails on the National Escape Clause (defense-only, +1.5% of GDP annually, four years, relative to a 2021 baseline). Overall, successive crises accelerated the Commission’s learning and reinforced integration dynamics, while highlighting the need for further research on the institutionalization and durability of these adaptations amid political and methodological constraints.