Susi Dennison* says the European Union’s reputation has suffered during the pandemic, and how it handles the recovery is now crucial to its future.
As the northern holiday season approaches and with European Union’s digital COVID-19 vaccination certificates are set to come into use on 1 July, it is a race against time.
European leaders must encourage enough of their citizens to sign up for available COVID-19 vaccines to ensure reopening travel across the EU doesn’t lead to a new surge in cases.
Over the past year, the easiest option to contain the disease has been to restrict travel across Europe, but that is no longer viable as the public grows increasingly restive.
A survey commissioned by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) shows a majority of Europeans either have no confidence in the EU or their confidence has decreased during the pandemic.
In Germany, the picture is stark. There has been a 10 per cent rise, the largest jump among all the countries surveyed, in the view that EU integration has gone too far.
Other surveys indicate the loss of confidence in EU institutions is largely a result of their perceived mishandling of the vaccine rollout.
That rollout only began in earnest in the second half of April, when it was already well under way in the United Kingdom and the United States.
As President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen (pictured) acknowledged: “We were late to authorise.
“We were too optimistic when it came to massive production, and perhaps we were too confident that what we ordered would actually be delivered on time.”
The pressure is thus on EU leaders to demonstrate the value of the union to voters.
Although the data suggests it is too late for EU leaders to demonstrate competence on handling the pandemic, they can and should show leadership in pandemic recovery.
When respondents were asked in the ECFR survey what they would consider the biggest potential Governmental failure in the coming years, the most common answer was the inability to tackle a major recession and rising unemployment.
Rebuilding the conditions to allow citizens to live, work, and travel normally within Europe is one way EU institutions and member States can reboot the European project.
It would allow citizens to benefit again from one of the project’s founding principles: Freedom of movement to facilitate social, cultural, and economic connections.
Building up the EU’s global role is another way to revive the project.
When respondents were asked what vision of the EU they most identified with, more than 50 per cent chose an EU with a strong global role.
This would be either as a beacon of democracy and human rights or as one of the world’s great powers, capable of defending itself from external threats.
Instinctive appeals to the Cold War-era Western alliance has been banished from European minds.
Although there has been some improvement in perceptions of the United States since President Joe Biden took office, the prevailing view across Europe is that the US political system is still broken from the tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump.
Only one in five people see the US as an “ally” that shares Europe’s “values and interests”.
The view most respondents (44 per cent) subscribed to is the US as a “necessary partner” with which they “must strategically cooperate”.
This complicates matters when it comes to building the EU’s global role and means a delicate balance will need to be struck between the EU and the US, for example, on how they shape the rules-based order beyond COVID-19.
However, the US does not stand out in the European imagination on this: Europeans now see a world of strategic partners, not one of automatic alliances.
This was the largest response when the survey asked how they would characterise other global actors, including the United Kingdom, Russia, and China, as strategic partners.
Turkey was the exception here, where the most commonly held view from respondents was that the country is now an adversary of Europe.
This data offers some insight as to why Europeans place importance on building up EU power; it is a necessity in a competitive, interest-driven world.
Yet citizens want the EU to stand for something more than just European interests.
A plurality of respondents subscribed to a vision of the EU as a beacon of democracy and human rights.
This should embolden EU leaders to take action on flagrant human rights violations, such as Belarus’s plane hijacking or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A majority of Europeans also agree the EU should scale up its vaccine-sharing commitments, either before or as soon as its own vulnerable population has been immunised.
Soft power is understood as an essential part of European power, but the time for talking about the nature and necessity of Europe’s sovereignty is over.
The EU’s existence is a fact, and the union has to kick into action as a global player before citizens lose faith.
Now, as parts of the world begin to glimpse the possibility of life beyond the pandemic, the EU is genuinely at a turning point.
Although its ability to act on threats affecting its citizens’ daily lives has been called into question by the vaccine rollout’s slow and chaotic start, there is a route out of the crisis — if leaders are willing to take it.
Despite voters’ frustrations with the EU, 59 per cent of those surveyed believe the COVID-19 crisis has shown the need for greater cooperation at the European level.
A majority of respondents in the countries surveyed indicated they saw their country’s membership of the EU as a “good” or a “very good” thing.
*Susi Dennison is a senior policy fellow and Director of the European Power Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
This article first appeared on the Foreign Policy Magazine website.
