The International Spectator

Italian Journal of International Affairs

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rspe20

Navigating a Covid World: The European Union’s

Internal Rebirth and External Quest

Riccardo Alcaro & Nathalie Tocci

To cite this article: Riccardo Alcaro & Nathalie Tocci (2021) Navigating a Covid World: The
European Union’s Internal Rebirth and External Quest, The International Spectator, 56:2, 1-18,
DOI: 10.1080/03932729.2021.1911128

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03932729.2021.1911128

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group.

Published online: 30 Apr 2021.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1884

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rspe20
THE INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR
2021, VOL. 56, NO. 2, 1–18
https://doi.org/10.1080/03932729.2021.1911128

ESSAY

Navigating a Covid World: The European Union’s Internal

Rebirth and External Quest
Riccardo Alcaro and Nathalie Tocci
Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), Rome

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The world on which Covid-19 has unleashed its destructive force is Covid-19 and the EU; EU
one where the partly supranational and multilateral-minded EU is ill integration; EU foreign
at ease. The pandemic has devastated economies across the world policy; transatlantic relations
and exacerbated pre-existing dynamics of growing geopolitical
rivalry and the declining clout of multilateral regimes and practices.
The EU’s response to the Covid shock has been twofold: on the one
hand, it has embarked on a new integration effort, with the con-
tours of a ‘transfer union’ emerging for the first time in EU history;
on the other hand, it has failed to use the crisis to advance its
strategic autonomy agenda. The reason for this dichotomy is that,
while the severity of the Covid emergency has shifted public and
elite attitudes towards economic solidarity, the lingering commit-
ment to the US has worked as a brake on a similar trend in European
foreign policy preferences.

It has become conventional wisdom that the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has
worked as a great accelerator of history (Haass 2020a).1 The pandemic, so the argument
goes, catalysed major pre-existing trends, causing them to interweave faster. The result is
that the more power-based, competitive and eventually volatile international system that
(some) experts were expecting to emerge over the next decade is already here (Allen et al.
2020). A corollary of this argument is that, in a ‘Covid world’, those who benefit the most
from multilateral regimes and norms will find themselves among the losers. As a partly
supranational entity with an inbuilt bias towards multilateral cooperation, the European
Union (EU) tops the list.
That the EU is structurally weaker than it was before Covid-19 is not a straightforward
conclusion, however (Moravcsik 2020). EU institutions – the Commission, the Council and
the European Central Bank (ECB) – have all taken steps that go far beyond lowest-common
-denominator measures. Such measures are indeed premised on an unprecedented degree
of fiscal flexibility and solidarity. While they are contingent on the Covid emergency, they
contain the seeds of more permanent arrangements. Greater intra-EU cohesion should, in
theory, translate into greater international influence. Yet, foreign and security policy is the
one area in which Covid-19 has failed to trigger a thrust towards deeper cooperation.

CONTACT Riccardo Alcaro r.alcaro@iai.it @Ric_Alcaro

1
We have encountered the argument of Covid-19 as an ‘accelerator of history’ over and over again in numerous
exchanges with experts and policymakers in conferences, webinars and private conversations.
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med-
ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
2 R. ALCARO AND N. TOCCI

This article attempts to make sense of the EU’s response to the systemic shock of
Covid-19 by engaging with the question of why the EU has taken steps to strengthen its
internal cohesion but has not been as ambitious in its pursuit of greater international
autonomy. We argue that the impact of the pandemic has reshaped the preferences of
European publics and decision-makers along integrationist lines in fiscal terms, but has
not generated an equally shared perception of the need for the EU to sharpen its foreign
policy profile, mostly because of the lingering European commitment to the relationship
with the United States (US).
The article begins with a recollection of the systemic implications of the pandemic for
EU member states and institutions. It then moves to the empirical analysis of the
response that EU member states and institutions have put together to cope with the
economic effects of Covid-19 and to adjust to a more volatile international system.
The second section provides an overview of how EU member states have laid the
groundwork for an economic rebound through greater EU fiscal solidarity. The next
section compares unfavourably the steps towards greater internal cohesion with the lack
of progress in the EU’s strategic autonomy project. The fourth section delves into EU
decision-making to dissect the dynamics that have facilitated progress on the internal
front and those that have stalled it on the external front, drawing from recent EU
integration and foreign policy studies.

Covid-19 as a systemic shock

The economic and geopolitical implications of the Covid-19 pandemic make it a systemic
shock of global scale. The prolonged and extensive restrictions to travel, movement and
economic activities adopted by most countries in the world in an attempt to slow down
infection rates have dampened demand and disrupted global supply chains.
Unemployment has increased – at times considerably – and whole sectors of the
economy (tourism, catering, entertainment, non-food retailing, just to mention a few)
have suffered immensely, with innumerable small and medium-sized enterprises at risk
of bankruptcy. In spite of considerable regional differences – East Asia has performed
significantly better than anyone else – the effects of the pandemic have been felt globally
(Chudik et al. 2020). For the first time since the 1930s Great Depression, in 2020 both
advanced and developing economies contracted – on average by 4.4 per cent.2
While the distribution of vaccines will mitigate and eventually remove the rationale
for lockdowns and other forms of restrictions to economic activity, a full return to the
status quo ante is unlikely. Governments will not only keep dealing with the conse-
quences of the crisis (especially massive public debts) for years to come. They will also
want to improve their preparedness for the next crisis, even if that involves
a paradigmatic change from ‘just-in-time’ supply models to shorter and safer, if costlier,
value chains. While globalisation has sunk too deep in national economies to be
uprooted, political considerations now have greater leeway to slow it down than at any
time in the last decades (Antràs 2020). This process is likely to play out against
a backdrop of increased international tensions, as the economic disruption brought
2
Real GDP growth rates can be monitored on the International Monetary Fund’s website: https://www.imf.org/external/
datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVEC/WEOWORLD.
 THE INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR 3

about by the pandemic has exacerbated a number of pre-existing dynamics of

disaggregation.
Arguably, the most consequential geopolitical trend amplified by Covid-19 is the
rivalry between the US and China. Especially in the early stages of the pandemic,
China sought to gain international goodwill through much-publicised transfers of med-
ical equipment and offers of health management expertise (all spiced with a good dose of
disinformation), causing alarm in Washington (Rapp-Hooper 2020). American pre-
existing concerns about trade deficits, unfair economic practices and the political use
of foreign investment and technology transfers consolidated even further into a more
fundamental political-ideological contest. Such issues as China’s systematic repression of
the Uighur minority in Xinjiang and crackdown on Hong Kong protesters, its uncom-
promising (and menacing) approach to Taiwan and relentless military projection into the
South China Sea are now being constructed as manifestations of a structurally conflictual
relationship between democratic America and autocratic China (Pompeo 2020).
The Covid outbreak also jolted further a transatlantic relationship already troubled
by years of increasing estrangement. When the coronavirus broke out, Europeans had
been watching with dismay the transatlantic order fray for some time already.
Persuaded that the US was being “taken advantage of” (Galindo 2018), former
President Donald Trump presided over a downgrading of the US commitment to
Europe in economic, security and strategic terms (Alcaro 2019; Gordon and Shapiro
2020). The Trump administration hit at EU member states with tariffs (Financial Times
2020a) and extraterritorial sanctions (Geranmayeh and Lafont Rapnouil 2019), while
regularly lambasting them for spending too little in defence and eventually scaling
down the US military presence in Germany (Alcaro 2020). Unsurprisingly, the trans-
atlantic relationship failed to produce any cooperation initiative aimed at mitigating
the public health emergency (Brattberg 2020).
Another trend that the pandemic exacerbated was the weakening of multilateral
institutions (Mason 2020), which was also a by-product of increased US-China competi-
tion (Wright 2020a). The US record in multilateral endeavours under Trump was one of
disengagement and contestation (Haass 2020b), with the US withdrawing from the Paris
Accords on climate change, leaving arms control agreements (including the Iran nuclear
deal) and stalling the dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
(Schmucker 2020). This trend only hardened after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pan-
demic. Not only was the US utterly uninterested in global health and economic govern-
ance, but it doubled down on the delegitimisation of multilateral institutions, recast as
part of its broader contest with China. The main victim was the multilateral body to
which most countries in the world looked for guidance during a pandemic, the World
Health Organisation (WHO), from which the Trump administration declared with-
drawal on the ground that it failed to call out China for initially downgrading the severity
of the Covid-19 infection (Financial Times 2020c). For its part, China took advantage of
US disengagement, bidding for leading positions in multilateral bodies. Beijing especially
targeted such agencies as the International Standards Organisation and the International
Telecommunication Union – both headed by Chinese officials now – to make sure that
global technology standards reflect China’s interests (Financial Times 2020b).
As multilateral institutions have been weakened, power politics has increasingly
become the main game in town in a number of regional theatres, several of which have
4 R. ALCARO AND N. TOCCI

experienced a rise in interstate tensions after the outbreak of the pandemic. The Nagorno
Karabakh conflict in the Caucasus, Turkey’s attempt to forcefully insert itself into the
Eastern Mediterranean energy complex and the lingering confrontation over Iran’s
nuclear programme are just a few cases in point.
This brief review of the effects – direct and indirect – of the Covid-19 infection
validates the point that the pandemic has been a major systemic shock whose long-
term consequence could be a dysfunctional international order or – to the extent it does
work – an order that reflects more closely China’s model of authoritarian capitalism and
Chinese standards for technologies key to future global balances of power, such as digital
telecommunications or artificial intelligence.
Where does the EU fit in all this? Health-wise, several European countries have
recorded massive infection rates, and the EU has lagged behind the US and the United
Kingdom (UK) in terms of vaccine distribution. Economically, the pandemic has brought
about devastation. In most EU member states, including the large ones, the fall in GDP in
2020 is expected to be steeper than the world’s average (the EU’s GDP is projected to
contract by 7.5 per cent, according to Clark [2020]). Geopolitically, the global trends
exacerbated by Covid have worsened the predicament of the Union, which is reliant on
open markets and rules-based arrangements and is ill-equipped to play power politics
(Leonard 2020).
As troubles mounted both internally and externally during the early phase of the
pandemic, it would not have been unreasonable to assume that Covid-19 would
accelerate the centrifugal dynamics that had fractured the pro-EU consensus across
Europe in recent years. As the Union had been struggling to cope with major chal-
lenges such as the Eurozone sovereign debt or the migration crises, the emergence of
a nationalist, anti-EU agenda had become a dominant trend in European politics.
Nothing attested to this more painfully than the 2016 referendum that led to the
UK’s exit from the EU. If Covid-19 truly worked as an accelerator of pre-existing
historical trends, further fragmentation was thus to be expected. Yet, the application of
the ‘Covid as an accelerator’ argument, however apt it is for global trends, has
eventually found a halt, of all places, in European integration. The latter has so far
been the exception to the rule that posits interstate competition as the invariable
outcome of the pandemic.

Internal rebirth: the EU’s new Delorian moment

Concerns that the Covid epidemic would hasten centrifugal dynamics seemed to be
validated by the initial response of member states as well as EU institutions. In March and
April 2020, national leaders resorted to the erection of borders and restrictions to the
export of medical equipment between member states (Herszenhorn 2020). EU institu-
tions stood by in deafening silence or took false steps. The most egregious was ECB
President Christine Lagarde’s off-script remark about the Bank not being in the business
of shielding Eurozone members from widening yield spreads, as the contours of an
economic crisis of massive proportions loomed large in Italy, Spain and other member
states severely hit by the Covid-19 outbreak (Jones 2020).
The pandemic represented the biggest challenge to post-WWII Europe, coming on the
heels of a patched-up constitutional crisis (only partly resolved by the adoption of the
 THE INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR 5

Lisbon Treaty in 2007), and two other major crises the Union barely navigated, namely the
Eurozone crisis in 2010-12 and the migration crisis of 2015-16. In the former, the EU
scraped through doing the bare minimum to save its monetary union. In the latter, it grossly
failed to move forward on a common migration and asylum policy. In both crises, what was
dramatically missing was solidarity, fuelling a surge of Euroscepticism that interlocked with
the growth of nationalist populism across Europe (and beyond). The initial, uncoordinated
national closures in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak had the potential to inflict further,
perhaps irreversible, damage, as, after all, they threatened the very integrity of the single
market that depends on the free flow of goods, services, capital and labour.
Clearly, this must have been front and centre in EU leaders’ minds as they abandoned
their initial hesitations and gradually but steadily got their act together (Erlanger 2020). It
began in April 2020 with a dose of solidarity in the health emergency, notably through
the transfer of Covid-19 patients from Italy and Spain to intensive care units in Germany
and the activation of the European civil protection mechanism.
The economic response came next (Anderson et al. 2020). It first took the form of an
over trillion-euro injection of liquidity through the ECB’s temporary asset purchase
programme and the suspension of the Stability and Growth Pact’s ceilings on deficits,
debts and inflation rates. After much haggling in the Eurogroup, an agreement was found
to reform the European Stability Mechanism, depriving it of its fiscal conditionality and
making up to 2 per cent of a member state’s GDP available to cover the direct and
indirect expenses generated by the health crisis. An agreement was also reached to
channel €250 billion through the European Investment Bank as well as €100 billion
into a new European employment insurance scheme. Most significantly, the European
Council agreed on a €750 billion Next Generation EU Fund, favouring grants over loans.
The Fund was embedded in the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), the seven-year
budget covering the 2021-27 period, the most ambitious in the history of the European
project. Critically, the MFF also featured EU own resources (European Council 2020).
While this has not resulted in member states agreeing to mutualise their national debts,
the EU’s response to the pandemic could be historic in three ways.
First, content. When the von der Leyen Commission took office, three priorities stood
out: the green, the digital and the global (or “geopolitical”) agendas (von der Leyen 2019).
Until Covid-19, these were programmatic ideas with little substance attached to them.
When the European Green Deal was first revealed in December 2019, the funds allocated
to it were approximately a third of what the Commission itself deemed necessary to reach
the goal of climate neutrality by 2050. Now the European response to the pandemic is
allowing the Commission to put flesh on its bones: 37 per cent of the €750 billion Next
Generation EU package should go to the European Green Deal and 20 per cent to digital
programmes.
Second, process. Throughout the EU’s history, there have been milestones, the com-
pletion of the single market for goods and the monetary union prime among them.
However, they all remain unfinished business, or open-ended processes, to this day. The
single market has yet to extend to key areas such as services, digital or energy, the
monetary union is incomplete and lacking a fiscal complement. The Eurozone crisis
laid the first bricks for a banking union, but the momentum for a fiscal union was lost as
the worst phase of the storm was over. Covid-19 resurrected that agenda. Next
Generation EU, while not being a mutualisation of past debt, does entail
6 R. ALCARO AND N. TOCCI

a mutualisation of future pandemic-generated debt and, for the first time, allows the
Commission to borrow from the market extensively.
Third, outcome. Next Generation EU and the other measures adopted by the
Commission and the ECB are meant to reverse the socio-economic divergences between
member states that threatened to tear the Eurozone apart. If the outcome of the Union’s
pandemic response points towards intra-European convergence, it is not unreasonable to
assume that politics will follow. Specifically, Euroscepticism – a dominant feature of
European life in the past decade – may abate. Large shares of the European public seem to
be aware that exiting the crisis requires a European response. The national level is simply
too small to respond meaningfully to the transnational nature and sheer magnitude of
this crisis. Similarly, they seem to appreciate the value of competence, expertise and
science over and above radical demagoguery, with public opinion polling showing
diminishing support for populist forces across Europe (Zangana 2020).
Some described the agreement on Next Generation EU as the Union’s Hamiltonian
moment, as it recalled the first US Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s push
for federalising the states’ debt. While intriguing, the metaphor did not stand up to
scrutiny (Schwarzer and Vallée 2020; Kapoor 2020). More prosaically, it is a very
ambitious crisis management initiative that carries with it the possibility of longer-
term changes – a ‘Delorian’ moment, after Jacques Delors, the European Commission
President who, in the early 1990s, capitalised on Franco-German support to advance the
common currency project.
The Next Generation EU plan of President Ursula von der Leyen was indeed accepted
by member states thanks to a renewed push coming from Berlin and Paris acting in unison
(German Federal Government 2020; von der Leyen 2020). Without that, resistance from
a group of four self-professed ‘frugal’ countries (Governments of Austria, Denmark, the
Netherlands and Sweden 2020) to agreeing to EU-wide transfers, funded also by an
expanded borrowing capacity of the Commission, would have been hard to overcome.
The upshot is that the severity of the economic crisis brought about by Covid-related
restrictions on productive activities profoundly reshaped the preferences of large swathes
of the European public and consequently EU leaders along more integrationist lines. Even
in the countries that resisted the adoption of the recovery fund, the permissive consensus
of the public for fiscal solidarity expanded. With Germany, in particular, abandoning its
ideological resistance to transfers and joining France in calls for an ambitious recovery
plan, EU institutions were given leeway to draw up an integrationist agenda. The
Commission was thus able to increase the share of the Next Generation EU fund covered
by grants, inject initial elements of debt mutualisation to back that up and centralise
further spending coordination through the condition that significant parts of the recovery
fund money be spent on the EU’s digitalisation and climate change response priorities.

External quest: the uncertain fate of strategic autonomy

Whereas the EU’s response to the pandemic offers the potential to substantiate President
von der Leyen’s green and digital priorities, the global (or geopolitical) leg has languished
(Helwig 2020; Tocci 2020a).
Before the pandemic, the global agenda had been spearheaded by the previous EU
political-institutional cycle, which made timid yet historic steps towards a security and
 THE INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR 7

defence union and heralded the notion of “strategic autonomy” in the 2016 EU Global
Strategy (Mogherini 2016). The plans were ambitious. The pre-pandemic expectations
were for a €13.5 billion European Defence Fund, a €6.5 billion Military Mobility Fund
and a €10 billion European Peace Facility (Biscop 2020), on top of a €100-plus billion
development and neighbourhood fund. The von der Leyen Commission came to office
embracing the goal of strategic autonomy and extended it beyond the sphere of security
and defence to other policy areas (von der Leyen 2019). It called for a strengthened
international role of the euro to protect, inter alia, the Union from the reach of US
extraterritorial sanctions. It vowed to toughen regulations in the digital sphere to stand
up to the unconstrained power of high-tech giants as well as to counter disinformation
and fake news coming from the likes of Russia and China. And it suggested that its
European Green Deal would have an international and not merely an internal dimension.
With Covid aggravating pre-existing dynamics that ran counter to EU interests, the
need for strategic autonomy has arguably shifted from pressing to urgent. Yet, the EU has
failed to use the pandemic as the proverbial crisis-turned-into-opportunity for strength-
ening its strategic autonomy the same way it has with fiscal solidarity. Notwithstanding
the ambitious Next Generation EU and MFF, the overall sums earmarked for the defence
fund, military mobility and the peace facility were more than halved to a modest
€13.5 billion in total, while the neighbourhood fund was much less than anticipated
(around €90 billion).
Initiatives to bolster the international role of the euro have yet to persuade the markets
(Financial Times 2021). Actions on the digital and climate fronts are more promising,
although the extent to which they strengthen the EU’s autonomy remains uncertain. The
potential of the Digital Market and Digital Services Acts, which mostly focus on an
extension of the single market to the digital realm, to shape global digital norms is yet to
be tested (Brady et al. 2020; Broadbent 2020). On energy policy, the focus is mainly
internal (work on batteries, hydrogen, critical minerals and renewables) rather than
international (global climate rules).
One area in which the EU has shown international clout is trade and investment,
where its competencies are strong and established. A recent case in point is the
Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) with China, ostensibly aimed at creat-
ing a more level playing field for EU investors in China, which the EU has struck in spite
of strong misgivings on the part of the US. However, prospects for the ratification of the
CAI have diminished since China targeted EU lawmakers, scholars and research institu-
tions with sanctions in retaliation for the restrictive measures adopted by the EU over the
violation of human rights in Xinjiang. The growing tensions between Washington and
Beijing further complicate European choices on China.
The transatlantic relationship features prominently amongst the reasons why the
Covid crisis has not affected the EU’s stated ambition for greater autonomy. The
Europeans’ appreciation of the lingering benefits accruing from US security guarantees
continues to engender a strong preference across Europe for aligning with US foreign
policy. While, as mentioned above, the costs of doing so had risen under the Trump
administration, hopes for a correction course by Washington never abated in Europe.
This reflected the open-ended nature of the US election cycle, as the 2020 presidential
campaign featured a Democratic challenger who had pledged to reinvest in America’s
alliances. Yet, while transatlantic cooperation is likely to rebound with Joe Biden in the
8 R. ALCARO AND N. TOCCI

White House, the election of a staunchly Atlanticist president in fact puts European
dependence on the US into even sharper focus than before (Tocci 2020b).
To be sure, nothing suggested that a second Trump administration would make
European life easier. Beyond the content of a second Trump administration’s policies,
it was the approach to world affairs in general and transatlantic relations in particular
that clashed with the essence of European integration. Trump would have continued to
despise multilateralism and favour transactionalism, sought leverage through coercion
rather than partnership and felt more at ease with authoritarian leaders rather than
liberal democratic ones (Wright 2020b).
The Biden administration offers the opportunity for a transatlantic reset, but it is
hardly a panacea (Fried and Haddad 2020; Barnes-Dacey et al. 2020). The US’ strategic
priorities continue to drive it to the Pacific rather than the Atlantic, and in the crystal-
lising of the US-China confrontation, the European predicament under Biden may be
more complex than under Trump.3 Biden has shown greater concern with human rights
abuses in China, from Hong Kong and Xinjiang to labour and environmental standards,
which inevitably means greater scope for US-China friction. Moreover, the drive towards
a decoupling of the US and Chinese economies may be just as strong as it was under
Trump. To illustrate the point, the aforementioned EU decision to adopt sanctions
against Chinese officials over the treatment of Uighurs was part of a coordinated effort
with the US (and others).
For Europeans, taking sides in the US-China contest involves hard trade-offs
(Sarsenbayev and Véron 2020). Decisions on, for instance, limiting the rollout of
Chinese-made 5G systems into European telecommunication networks, screening
Chinese investments or condemning Beijing’s abysmal record on democratic and min-
ority rights involve now greater risks of retaliation from either great power that may feel
that Europe is falling short of expectations (Grygiel 2020). The massive volume of EU-
China economic interactions clearly raises the costs of potential Chinese reprisals,
especially at a time in which European economies have been shattered by lockdowns
and other restrictions enacted to curb Covid-19 infections (ETNC 2020). While in both
the US and Europe there is a resolve to intensify consultation and forge common ground
on China, saying no to Biden is harder in many ways than saying no to Trump, precisely
because there is genuine transatlantic partnership on offer.
The Europeans are nonetheless overly eager to capitalise on that offer. With Biden’s
support, Europeans can make a stronger case not only for transatlantic cooperation but
for multilateralism and global governance in general (Le Drian and Maas 2020; Borrell
2020). This involves a chance for progress on international dossiers in which the EU has
much at stake, including climate, health, trade and economic governance. The Europeans
are also counting on Biden re-embracing the arms control and non-proliferation agenda,
starting with the extension of the US-Russian New START Treaty (which sets ceilings on
deployed strategic nuclear weapons and delivery systems) and the re-activation of the
nuclear deal with Iran (Geranmayeh et al. 2020; Alcaro 2021).
EU countries are generally willing to contribute to these efforts. They do not agree,
however, on whether this should be done by seeking closer alignment with the US (to

3
One only needs to look at the attempt by Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s National Security Advisor, to weigh in on the
Europeans to stop the finalisation of the CAI with China in December 2020 for a taste of what is in store.
 THE INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR 9

augment the latter’s influence) or by balancing the transatlantic relationship through the
development of stronger EU foreign and security policy assets. Unsurprisingly, the
debate on European strategic autonomy surged in the years of transatlantic estrangement
(although it was born before that).
EU leaders diverge on what the project’s contents and ultimate goal are (Tamma
2020). In principle, they agree that the EU should be able to resist pressure from the
outside (especially if applied through tariffs, extraterritorial sanctions or energy black-
mailing) and enact regulations capable of shaping global rules. Yet, they do not appreci-
ate this as the basis for an autonomous global role tout court. The strategic autonomy
project has unsurprisingly been the source of intra-EU strains, with countries such as
France seeing it as a step towards an EU power projection capacity, Germany insisting on
its supplementary nature to the transatlantic alliance and the likes of Poland dismissing it
as delusional (Franke 2020; Blaszczak 2020).
Following Biden’s victory, the existing reluctance of most EU member states to invest
more in the strategic autonomy project – or at least in its security and defence compo-
nent – may well solidify, given the greatly diminished risk of protracted transatlantic
estrangement (Tocci 2020b).

Making sense of Covid’s impact on EU integration

The Covid shock resulted in the EU embracing greater fiscal solidarity but refraining
from significantly strengthening its capacity for strategic autonomy. Underlying this
discrepancy is the different effect that the economic and geopolitical consequences of
the pandemic have had on European public and elite preferences. In the former case,
preferences have shifted towards a greater integration thrust because EU fiscal solidarity
has presented the best chance to mitigate the immense damage that Covid-related lock-
downs have inflicted on the economy of EU member states. In the latter case, by contrast,
and in spite of the direr international outlook for the EU brought about by the pandemic,
the lingering benefits of the transatlantic relationship have worked as a brake on
integration.
In this section, we discuss how exactly these diverging preferences have affected EU
policymaking during the Covid crisis. To do so, we rely on an extensive body of scholarly
literature that has investigated the impact of recent shocks, ranging from the Eurozone
crisis to the migration surge, on EU integration (Jones et al. 2015; Lefkofridi and
Schmitter 2015; Schimmelfennig 2018; Hooghe and Marks 2019). Of special interest
are the works that have concentrated on the dimensions of EU policymaking that have
been critical also in the case of Covid: the balance of power underlying intra-EU response
negotiations; the relative strength of institutional path dependencies; and the political
context, that is, the degree to which domestic politics has been permissive (or not) of EU-
wide action.
The first dimension has attracted scholars from the intergovernmentalist school, keen
to explain why certain shocks have produced a negotiated outcome whereas others have
ended up in stalemate. For intergovernmentalists, the key to power dynamics is the
ability of individual governments to turn the asymmetric interdependence between all
EU member states into bargaining power to advance or block progress in intra-EU
negotiations. In these terms, the sovereign debt crisis resulted in new institutional
10 R. ALCARO AND N. TOCCI

arrangements because Eurozone member states had an interest in preserving the com-
mon currency. Yet such arrangements largely reflected the preference for fiscal austerity
of a German-led group of financially healthy countries, which could thus impose their
solutions on member states in distress. Conversely, negotiations over the redistribution
of refugees coming into the EU ended in stalemate because countries adamantly opposed
to any burden-sharing formula, such as Poland and Hungary, faced no cost for blocking
progress (Schimmelfennig 2015; 2018; Biermann et al. 2019).
The degree to which path dependencies – the second dimension – have brought about
institutional changes as a result of shocks has been the focus of neofunctionalist theorists.
These have insisted on the lingering validity of the spillover effect, according to which
integration in one policy area eventually creates the need for integration in other related
policy areas. Attesting the point are such novelties as the ECB’s venturing into monetary
policies not explicitly envisioned in the Bank’s original mandate (asset purchases in
secondary markets) and the establishment of an initial banking union, both originated
from the Eurozone crisis; as well as the minimal adjustments to the Schengen system
following the migration surge (Bauer and Becker 2014; Schimmelfennig 2018; Niemann
and Speyer 2018).
The third dimension, namely the domestic roots of EU action or inaction, has been
investigated by “postfunctionalist” theorists, who contend that EU policymaking has
become increasingly dependent on the ability of national actors to turn support for or
opposition to EU integration into a political strategy to achieve and maintain an
advantage over their domestic opponents (Hooghe and Marks 2008). In this reading,
the crises of the 2010s have contributed to increasing resistance to supranational solu-
tions, whereby new integration arrangements have been limited and could only be
fashioned along an intergovernmental character (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2016;
Börzel and Risse 2018).
As interesting as these theoretical accounts are on their own merit, they are remark-
able because they are not just compatible with, but complementary to, one another
(Schimmelfennig 2018; Hooghe and Marks 2019). If valid for past crises, there is every
reason to assume that the cumulative explanatory capacity of categories drawn from
different theoretical strands can also be applied to the Covid case.

Explaining the steps forward in fiscal solidarity

The bargain underlying the Next Generation EU fund can be easily explained with the
liberal intergovernmentalist categories of asymmetric interdependence and bargaining.
The interdependence dimension was reflected in the general understanding among
member states that helping those hardest hit by Covid re-launch their economy would
be instrumental in preserving the capacity of the single market to continue operating.
The loans-cum-conditionality recipe applied during the Eurozone crisis was widely
perceived to be economically counterproductive, however, as increasing further the
costs of servicing already high levels of debt could have severely hampered the prospects
of economic recovery in the worst-hit countries. Therefore, this time asymmetric inter-
dependence worked to the latter’s advantage. After Germany joined France in supporting
the ambitious recovery plan put forward by the Commission, the ‘frugal’ countries lost
any hope to shape the recovery fund according to their own preferences. While they
 THE INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR 11

could theoretically use their veto power, they had no incentive to block progress. The
costs of stalemate – reputational but also economic, since all four are relatively small and
open economies deeply reliant on the single market – were too high. They could only
bargain to obtain concessions, which they got in terms of higher rebates and a slight
reduction of the grant component in the grant/loan mix of the recovery fund.
In neofunctionalist terms, path-dependency and spillover effects explain how supra-
national institutions such as the ECB and the Commission were able to bring forward an
agenda for greater fiscal integration. Both institutions could point to the scale of the
Covid-induced calamity to make the case for economic steps that had been discussed but
not followed through previously. While expanding its capacity as the Eurozone’s ‘lender
of last resort’, the ECB conveyed a strong message that monetary policy needed a fiscal
complement. The Commission’s recovery plan expanded this spillover logic. Not only
did it introduce elements of debt mutualisation but also directed the additional spending
capacity to EU-wide digital and climate agendas, thus creating the basis for deeper
integration in these domains.
However, it is arguably postfunctionalism that best explains why integrationist gov-
ernments won the day. The external origin of Covid invalidated the argument that fiscal
imprudence was responsible for the difficulties of the worst-hit member states –
a dominant theme in the Eurozone crisis. European integration thus became less
politically divisive. In addition, with Covid spreading across Europe, fiscal transfers
could be construed as necessary to the health and welfare of all member states. Pro-
integration parties and groups could therefore achieve political advantage domestically
by combining national welfare with EU solidarity.
In conclusion, the shift in European public and elite preferences affected all dimen-
sions of EU policymaking. The magnitude of the economic crisis raised the costs of
vetoing progress, thus tilting the intra-EU balance of power against those resistant to
fiscal transfers. EU institutions, most notably the Commission, seized on this to re-
activate an integrationist agenda that had been discussed in the past but not brought
forward. Eventually, however, an agreement was possible because political parties had
now greater leeway to reconcile electoral advantage with a pro-EU agenda.

Explaining the steps backwards in strategic autonomy

Intergovernmentalist, neo- and postfunctionalist categories can also be combined to shed
light on the EU’s modest response to Covid in the foreign policy remit. In intergovern-
mentalist terms, the bargaining logic driving the negotiation over the MFF worked
against putting substantial resources into those European public goods that would bolster
the EU’s strategic autonomy. The need to soothe the frugal countries’ concerns so that
they would give up opposition to the recovery fund entailed cuts to other parts of the
budget. That security and defence instruments ended up being halved can be explained
neofunctionally by the fact that progress in these areas was too limited and recent to
generate strong path dependencies (although, it should be noted, other more commu-
nitarised policy areas such as research took a hit as well). Postfunctionalism adds that an
integration drive in foreign policy could have given Eurosceptic forces ammunition to
politicise the whole process and threatened to derail the consensus on fiscal transfers, by
far the most important objective in the negotiation.
12 R. ALCARO AND N. TOCCI

These explanations are plausible, yet not exhaustive. The missing element is, to our
best judgment, an account of the role of the transatlantic relationship, which has
remained a decisive (arguably, the decisive) factor affecting EU member states’ calculus
on strategic autonomy, Trump notwithstanding.
Regrettably, the transatlantic relationship does not feature prominently in European
integration theories. Historical narratives on the matter – of which there is no shortage –
highlight a non-linear trajectory, whereby the US shifted from being the engine of early
European integration (Rappaport 1981; Ellwood 1992; Lundestad 1998; Berend 2016) to
acting as a brake on integration once it started perceiving it as a quest for independence
from US tutelage (Peterson and Pollack 2003; Peterson 2004; Devuyst 2007).
International Relations scholars have contended, though, that the US has affected
European integration in more indirect, and arguably profound, ways than just through
expressions of support or, alternatively, caution. The Europeans could carry out the
integration project also thanks to the creation of a US-promoted “security community”
across the Atlantic, in which conflict would always be addressed peacefully (Pouliot 2006;
Adler 2008), and the establishment of a US-centred multilateral order, in which the EU
has become an influential rule-maker (Peterson et al. 2016; Damro 2016; Bradford 2020).
For the Europeans, the pursuit of integration has been a way to strengthen the solidity of
the Atlantic community (initially upon explicit US insistence), but also – and increasingly
so – to have more sway in international rule-setting, thereby partly limiting US influence.
In theoretical terms, these calculations can be reduced to the motives of followership
(Jesse at al. 2012) and soft balancing (Pape 2005; Posen 2006; Paul 2018). Soft balancing
is a kind of limited resistance fully compatible with an asymmetric partnership, especially
one that has its roots not just in strategic calculations but also extensive societal connec-
tions, cultural commonalities and political identity overlaps like the Atlantic ‘security
community’. This said, followership has remained the prevailing motive. In the eyes of
most Europeans, the benefits of followership, namely territorial protection through US
security guarantees and the enabling of European international influence through the US
commitment to the multilateral order, outweigh its costs (Alcaro 2016; 2020). This entails
that the default preference of most, if not all, EU member states remains for a foreign
policy empowered by transatlantic convergence.
The Trump administration tested this proposition, as the former US president hardly
showed any interest in cultivating ties with Europe. As mentioned above, the Covid shock
magnified the trend towards transatlantic estrangement. Nevertheless, most EU member
states never truly contemplated a break from the followership pattern, in part because
there was uncertainty about Trump’s re-election prospects but especially because EU
autonomy is by no means a comparable alternative to US security guarantees. Had
Trump been re-elected, the clash between the logics of autonomy and followership
could have short-circuited EU policymaking, given the reluctance of certain EU member
states, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, to imperil their military relationship
with the US. By contrast, Biden’s stated intent to revive the ties with the European allies
makes followership an appealing option again.
As recalled above, however, European integration has evolved in a way that is not
perfectly consistent with this pattern. The degree of autonomy attained by the EU in
trade, standard-setting and other non-security matters falls beyond the bounds of
followership. The leader/follower framework is a necessary analytical lens to explain
 THE INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR 13

how transatlantic relations work, but it does not capture the full picture. Notably, it fails
to account for the potential of the Atlantic security community to accommodate a more
balanced transatlantic relationship. EU member states’ agency remains a critical vari-
able for the shape this community can take: one of followership or more equal partner-
ship. EU autonomy has been limited partly because it has invariably hit the ceiling of
followership. Yet, there is no structural impediment to EU countries moving from
followership to a more balanced partnership, which is conceivable in a security com-
munity. In this case, Europe’s strategic autonomy would not just rebalance but revive
the bond with a US that is invariably destined to invest its resources away from Europe
and towards Asia.
For proponents of EU strategic autonomy, this is the pandemic’s major geopolitical
lesson for the Union (Tocci 2021). Others have taken the opposite view, namely that the
more volatile world Covid has brought about increases the appeal of followership,
especially now that transatlantic cooperation is again a viable proposition in
Washington. In the end, the lingering effect of the dual shock of Covid and the turbulent
years of the Trump presidency has been to contribute to articulating the case for or
against strategic autonomy in clearer terms.

Conclusion
The world on which Covid-19 unleashed its destructive force in early 2020 was already
one where the EU and its multilateral vision of the world were ill at ease. The devastating
economic impact of extensive lockdowns, combined with trends exacerbated by Covid
such as growing geopolitical rivalries and the declining authority of multilateral institu-
tions, bore heavily on Europe’s integration project. However, the risk that the pandemic
could have stretched intra-EU ties to breaking point has not materialised. On the
contrary, Covid-19 spawned an ambitious integration drive. It is not unreasonable to
assume that, in the otherwise horrific legacy of the pandemic, there could also be a more
cohesive EU. This may result in a greater capacity of EU institutions to advance
ambitious digital and climate agendas, both internally and internationally.
However, the scaling down of the foreign and defence policy components of the
next EU budget laid bare the absence of a consensus on endowing the Union with
the amount of resources needed to make ‘strategic autonomy’ more than an aspira-
tional goal. A major variable affecting the trajectory of the EU is, as it has been for
70 years, the state of the transatlantic relationship. A US administration led by an
old-fashioned Atlanticist as Biden may be a mixed blessing, because Europeans will
be tempted to interpret America’s reinvestment in the transatlantic bond as a return
to a leader-follower relationship. This pattern may still apply to certain – indeed
fundamental – dimensions, beginning with the US nuclear umbrella. But on other,
increasingly pressing dimensions (including trade, technology and climate regula-
tions), European followership has become less sustainable. In a Covid world, EU
member states should seize on the greater cohesion brought about by their internal
response to the pandemic to press ahead with their external autonomy agenda,
cognizant of the fact that, far from acting to the detriment of the transatlantic
relationship, they would actually reinforce it.
14 R. ALCARO AND N. TOCCI

Acknowledgments
This publication has been made possible through the financial support of the Compagnia di San
Paolo.

Notes on contributors
Riccardo Alcaro is Research Coordinator and Head of the Global Actors Programme of the Istituto
Affari Internazionali (IAI), Rome, Italy.
Nathalie Tocci is Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), Rome, Italy, and Honorary
Professor at the University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany. She is Special Advisor to the
European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
Email: n.tocci@iai.it; Twitter: @NathalieTocci

References
Adler, Emanuel. 2008. The Spread of Security Communities: Communities of Practice, Self-
Restraint, and NATO’s Post-Cold War Transformation. European Journal of International
Relations 14 (2): 195–230.
Alcaro, Riccardo. 2016. The Paradoxes of the Liberal Order: Transatlantic Relations and Security
Governance. In Riccardo Alcaro, John Peterson and Ettore Greco, eds. The West and the Global
Power Shift: Transatlantic Relations and Global Governance: 197–219. Basingstoke and London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Alcaro, Riccardo. 2019. The Fraying Transatlantic Order and Europe’s Struggle in a Multipolar
World. In Justin Massie and Jonathan Paquin, eds. America’s Allies and the Decline of US
Hegemony: 143–60. London-New York: Routledge.
Alcaro, Riccardo. 2020. Ideology, Not Strategy, Explains the US Troop Withdrawal from Germany.
IAI Commentaries 20/56. Rome: Istituto Affari Internazionali. https://www.iai.it/en/pubblica
zioni/ideology-not-strategy-explains-us-troop-withdrawal-germany.
Alcaro, Riccardo. 2021. Europe’s Defence of the Iran Nuclear Deal: Less than a Success, More than
a Failure. The International Spectator 56 (1): 55–72.
Allen, John, et al. 2020. How the World Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic. Foreign Policy,
20 March. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/20/world-order-after-coroanvirus-pandemic/?
mc_cid=fd10b720ea&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Anderson, Julia, et al. 2020. The Fiscal Response to the Economic Fallout from the Coronavirus.
Bruegel datasets, November update. https://www.bruegel.org/publications/datasets/covid-
national-dataset/.
Antràs, Pol. 2020. De-Globalisation? Global Value Chains in the Post-COVID-19 Age. Harvard
University Working Paper, 16 November. https://scholar.harvard.edu/antras/publications/de-
globalisation-global-value-chains-post-covid-19-age.
Barnes-Dacey, Julien, et al. 2020. A New Transatlantic Bargain: An Action Plan for
Transformation, Not Restoration. ECFR Policy Brief, 26 November. https://ecfr.eu/publica
tion/a-new-transatlantic-bargain-an-action-plan-for-transformation-not-restoration/?mc_cid=
8aea4076da&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Bauer, Michael W., and Becker, Stefan. 2014. The Unexpected Winner of the Crisis: The European
Commission’s Strengthened Role in Economic Governance. Journal of European Integration 36
(3): 213–29.
Berend, Iván T. 2016. The History of European Integration: A New Perspective. London and
New York: Routledge.
Biermann, Felix, et al. 2019. Political (non)Reform in the Euro Crisis and the Refugee Crisis:
A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Explanation. Journal of European Public Policy 26 (2): 246–66.
 THE INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR 15

Biscop, Sven. 2020. European Defence and PESCO: Don’t Waste the Chance. EU-IDEA Policy
Papers 1, May. https://euidea.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/euidea_pp_1.pdf.
Blaszczak, Mariusz. 2020. Europe’s Alliance with the US Is the Foundation of Its Security. Politico,
25 November. https://www.politico.eu/article/us-poland-europe-alliance-foundation-security/.
Borrell, Josep. 2020. Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the European Council and
the Council: A New EU-US Agenda for Global Change. High Representative for Foreign Affairs
and Security Policy, Brussels, 2 December. https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/joint-
communication-eu-us-agenda_en.pdf?mc_cid=7c9b9e2728&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Börzel, Tarja A., and Risse, Thomas. 2018. From the Euro to the Schengen Crises: European
Integration Theories, Politicization, and Identity Politics. Journal of European Public Policy 25
(1): 83–108.
Bradford, Anu. 2020. The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Brady, Hayley, et al. 2020. The Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act: A New Era for Online
Regulation within Europe. Herbert Smith Freehills LLP, 15 December. https://www.lexology.
com/library/detail.aspx?g=9b8a63c9-cc50-4a77-9e5d-5d2100d4631b.
Brattberg, Erik. 2020. The Pandemic Is Making Transatlantic Relations More Toxic. Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, 29 April. https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/04/29/pan
demic-is-making-transatlantic-relations-more-toxic-pub-81675?mc_cid=49ff5c9f45&mc_eid=
5323acf69e.
Broadbent, Meredith. 2020 The Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the New
Competition Tool. CSIS Report, 10 November. https://www.csis.org/analysis/digital-services-
act-digital-markets-act-and-new-competition-tool.
Chudik, Alexander, et al. 2020. Economic Consequences of Covid-19: A Counterfactual
Multi-Country Analysis. VoxEU, 19 October. https://voxeu.org/article/economic-
consequences-covid-19-multi-country-analysis.
Clark, D. 2020. GDP Growth Rate Forecasts in Europe 2020-2021. Statista, 6 November. https://
www.statista.com/statistics/1102546/coronavirus-european-gdp-growth/#statisticContainer.
Damro, Chad. 2016. Competitive Interdependence: Transatlantic Relations and Global Economic
Governance. In Riccardo Alcaro, John Peterson and Ettore Greco, eds. The West and the Global
Power Shift: Transatlantic Relations and Global Governance: 179–96. Basingstoke and London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Devuyst, Youri. 2007. American Attitudes on European Political Integration – The Nixon-
Kissinger Legacy. IES Working Paper 2/2007. Brussels: Institute for European Studies. https://
www.ies.be/files/WP_Youri_Devuyst_0.pdf.
Ellwood, David W. 1992. Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar
Reconstruction. London and New York: Longman.
Erlanger, Steven. 2020. One Crisis Too Many: How the Coronavirus Pushed Germany to Shift
Course. The New York Times, 19 May. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/world/europe/
coronavirus-germany-merkel-france.html?mc_cid=1f554e66e9&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
ETNC (European Think-tank Network on China). 2020. Covid-19 and Europe-China Relations.
A Country-level Analysis. 29 April. https://www.ui.se/globalassets/ui.se-eng/research/asia/etnc-
special-report_covid-19_-2020.pdf?mc_cid=8ddf375754&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
European Council. 2020. Special Meeting of the European Council (17, 18, 19, 20 and
21 July 2020) – Conclusions. EUCO 10/20, CO EUR 8 CONCL 4. Brussels, 21 July. https://
www.consilium.europa.eu/media/45109/210720-euco-final-conclusions-en.pdf.
Financial Times. 2020a. EU Trade Chief Seeks Revived talks to Close Transatlantic Rift. 11 May.
https://www.ft.com/content/e4eb5ed9-97ed-4c78-a139-84c4d7dcdf87?mc_cid=7cee1
d11aa&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Financial Times. 2020b. From AI to Facial Recognition: How China Is Setting the Rules in New
Tech. 7 October. https://www.ft.com/content/188d86df-6e82-47eb-a134-2e1e45c777b6.
Financial Times. 2020c. WHO Chief Says Lack of Global Leadership Has Prolonged Pandemic,
12 October. https://www.ft.com/content/972b3194-45fc-4635-bb42-39ac9f3d1616.
16 R. ALCARO AND N. TOCCI

Financial Times. 2021. EU Faces Barriers to Boosting Single Currency’s Global Status. 19 January.
https://www.ft.com/content/135742b0-e775-4a25-a1c6-d592678b0334.
Franke, Ulrike E. 2020. What Are We Actually Fighting About? Germany, France, and the Spectre
of European Autonomy. ECFR Commentary, 23 November. https://ecfr.eu/article/what-are-we-
actually-fighting-about-germany-france-and-the-spectre-of-european-autonomy/.
Fried, Daniel, and Haddad, Benjamin. 2020. Biden Knows Europe, and Europe Knows Biden.
That’s Not Enough. Foreign Policy, 19 November. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/19/biden-
knows-europe-and-europe-knows-biden-thats-not-enough/?mc_cid=e83a139609&mc_eid=
d16e402c97.
Galindo, Gabriela. 2018. Trump: EU Was ‘Set Up to Take Advantage’ of US. Politico, 28 June.
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-eu-was-set-up-to-take-advantage-of-us-trade-
tariffs-protectionism/.
Genschel, Philipp, and Jachtenfuchs, Markus. 2016. More Integration, Less Federation: The
European Integration of Core State Powers. Journal of European Public Policy 23 (1): 42–59.
Geranmayeh, Ellie, and Lafont Rapnouil, Manuel. 2019. Meeting the Challenge of Secondary
Sanctions. ECFR Policy Brief, 25 June. https://ecfr.eu/publication/meeting_the_challenge_of_
secondary_sanctions/.
Geranmayeh, Ellie, Slavin, Barbara, and Shah, Sahil. 2020. Renewing Transatlantic Strategy on
Iran. Atlantic Council/ELN Issue Brief, November. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content
/uploads/2020/11/Transatlantic-Strategy-Iran-IB.pdf?mc_cid=55f1136ebc&mc_eid=
5323acf69e.
German Federal Government. 2020. A French-German Initiative for the European Recovery from
the Coronavirus Crisis. Press Release, 18 May. https://www.bundesregierung.de/resource/blob/
975226/1753772/414a4b5a1ca91d4f7146eeb2b39ee72b/2020-05-18-deutsch-franzoesischer-
erklaerung-eng-data.pdf?download=1&mc_cid=e43cb120de&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Gordon, Phillip H., and Shapiro, Jeremy. 2020. The Atlantic Alliance Had Pre-existing Conditions.
The Pandemic Will Worsen Them. War on the Rocks, 13 April. https://warontherocks.com/
2020/04/the-atlantic-alliance-had-preexisting-conditions-the-pandemic-will-worsen-them/?
mc_cid=49ae2719e7&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Governments of Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. 2020. Non-paper EU Support
for Efficient and Sustainable COVID-19 Recovery. Undated. https://www.politico.eu/wp-
content/uploads/2020/05/Frugal-Four-Non-Paper.pdf?mc_cid=b53edb2b28&mc_eid=
5323acf69e.
Grygiel, Jakub. 2020. Europe’s China Blindspot. No, We Can’t Just Get Along. The American
Interest, 15 May. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/05/15/no-we-cant-just-get-
along/?mc_cid=1b160b964c&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Haass, Richard. 2020a. The Pandemic Will Accelerate History Rather Than Reshape It. Foreign
Affairs, 7 April. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-04-07/pandemic-
will-accelerate-history-rather-reshape-it.
Haass, Richard. 2020b. Trump’s Foreign Policy Doctrine? The Withdrawal Doctrine. The
Washington Post, 27 May. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/27/trumps-
foreign-policy-doctrine-withdrawal-doctrine/.
Helwig, Niklas. 2020. Covid-19 Calls for European Strategic Autonomy. FIIA Comment 13.
Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Affairs, May. https://www.fiia.fi/wp-content
/uploads/2020/05/comment13_covid-19-calls-for-european-strategic-autonomy.pdf?mc_cid=
dc772ed619&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Herszenhorn, David M. 2020. Coronavirus Border Controls Imperil EU Freedoms. Politico, 16
March. https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-border-controls-imperil-eu-freedoms/?
mc_cid=50ace53498&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Hooghe, Lisbeth, and Marks, Gary. 2008. A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration:
From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus. British Journal of Political Science 39
(1): 1–23.
Hooghe, Lisbeth, and Marks, Gary. 2019. Grand Theories of European Integration in the
Twenty-First Century. Journal of European Public Policy 26 (8): 1113–33.
 THE INTERNATIONAL SPECTATOR 17

Jesse, Neal G., et al. 2012. The Leader Can’t Lead When the Followers Don’t Follow. The
Limitations of Hegemony. In Kristen P. Williams, Steven E. Lobell and Neal G. Jesse, eds.
Beyond Great Powers and Hegemons: Why Secondary States Support, Follow, or Challenge: 1–32.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jones, Erik. 2020. Old Divisions Threaten Europe’s Economic Response to the Coronavirus.
Foreign Affairs, 6 April. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2020-04-06/old-
divisions-threaten-europes-economic-response-coronavirus?mc_cid=261263db71&mc_eid=
5323acf69e.
Jones, Erik, Kelemen, Daniel, and Meunier, Sophie. 2015. Failing Forward? The Euro Crisis and
the Incomplete Nature of European Integration. Comparative Political Studies 49 (7):
1010–34.
Kapoor, Sony. 2020. This Isn’t Europe’s ‘Hamilton’ Moment. Politico, 22 May. https://www.
politico.eu/article/this-isnt-europes-hamilton-moment/.
Le Drian, Jean Yves, and Maas, Heiko. 2020. Joe Biden Can Make Transatlantic Unity Possible. The
Washington Post, 16 November. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/16/ger
man-french-foreign-ministers-joe-biden-transatlantic-unity/?mc_cid=dca6fcb7e3&mc_eid=
5323acf69e.
Lefkofridi, Zoe, and Schmitter, Phillippe C. 2015. Transcending or Descending? European
Integration in Time of Crisis. European Political Science Review 7 (1): 3–22.
Leonard, Mark. 2020. Geopolitical Europe in Times of Covid-19. Europe’s Future Project,
21 September. https://europesfutures.eu/vault/geopolitical-europe-in-times-of-covid-19 .
Lundestad, Geir. 1998. Empire by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945-
1997. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Mason, Paul. 2020. How Coronavirus Could Destroy the Western Multilateral Order. New
Statesman, 25 March. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2020/03/how-
coronavirus-could-destroy-western-multilateral-order?mc_cid=6a901092aa&mc_eid=
5323acf69e.
Mogherini, Federica. 2016. Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe. A Global Strategy
for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy. High Representative for Foreign Affairs
and Security Policy, Brussels, 2 June. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/
3eaae2cf-9ac5-11e6-868c-01aa75ed71a1.
Moravcsik, Andrew. 2020. Why Europe Wins. Foreign Policy, 24 September. https://foreignpolicy.
com/2020/09/24/euroskeptic-europe-covid-19-trump-russia-migration/?utm_source=
PostUp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25595&utm_term=Flashpoints%20OC&?
tpcc=25595.
Niemann, Arne, and Speyer, Johanna. 2018. A Neofunctionalist Perspective on the European
Refugee Crisis: The Case of the European Border and Coast Guard. JCMS: Journal of Common
Market Studies 56 (1): 23–43.
Pape, Robert A. 2005. Soft Balancing against the United States. International Security 30 (1): 7–45.
Paul, T. V. 2018. Restraining Great Powers. Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Peterson, John. 2004. America as a European Power: The End of Empire by Integration?
International Affairs 80 (4): 613–29.
Peterson, John, and Pollack, Mark A. 2003. Europe, America, Bush: Transatlantic Relations in the
Twenty-first Century. London and New York: Routledge.
Peterson, John, Alcaro, Riccardo, and Tocci, Nathalie. 2016. Multipolarity, Multilateralism and
Leadership: The Retreat of the West? In Riccardo Alcaro, John Peterson and Ettore Greco, eds.
The West and the Global Power Shift: Transatlantic Relations and Global Governance: 45–73.
Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pompeo, Michael R. 2020. Communist China and the Free World’s Future. Speech at the Richard
Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, 23 July. https://it.usembassy.gov/communist-china-
and-the-free-worlds-future/.
Posen, Barry R. 2006. European Union and Defense Policy: Response to Unipolarity? Security
Studies 15 (2): 149–86.
18 R. ALCARO AND N. TOCCI

Pouliot, Vincent. 2006. The Alive and Well Transatlantic Security Community: A Theoretical
Reply to Michael Cox. European Journal of International Relations 12 (1): 119–27.
Rapp-Hooper, Mira. 2020. China, America and the International Order after the Pandemic. War
on the Rocks, 24 March. https://warontherocks.com/2020/03/china-america-and-the-
international-order-after-the-pandemic/?mc_cid=8e8f83b178&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Rappaport, Armin. 1981. The United States and European Integration. The First Phase. Diplomatic
History 5 (2): 121–49.
Sarsenbayev, Madi, and Véron, Nicolas. 2020. European versus American Perspectives on the Belt
and Road Initiative. China & World Economy 28 (2): 84–112.
Schimmelfennig, Frank. 2015. Liberal Intergovernmentalism and the Euro Area Crisis. Journal of
European Public Policy 22 (2): 177–95.
Schimmelfennig, Frank. 2018. European Integration (Theory) in Times of Crisis. A Comparison of
the Euro and Schengen Crises. Journal of European Public Policy 25 (7): 969–89.
Schmucker, Claudia. 2020. The Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on US and European
Commitment to the Multilateral Economic Order. IAI Papers 20/39. Rome: Istituto Affari
Internazionali, November. https://www.iai.it/sites/default/files/iaip2039.pdf?mc_cid=
2f3b9b4c9e&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Schwarzer, Daniela, and Vallée, Shahin. 2020. Pushing the EU to a Hamiltonian Moment. DGAP
Policy Brief 10. Berlin: DGAP, May. https://dgap.org/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/dgap-
policy_brief_2020-10-en_0.pdf?mc_cid=3650fae0a5&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Tamma, Paola. 2020. Europe Wants ‘Strategic Autonomy’ – It Just Has to Decide What That
Means. Politico, 15 October. https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-trade-wants-strategic-
autonomy-decide-what-means/.
Tocci, Nathalie. 2020a. International Order and the European Project in Times of COVID-19. IAI
Commentaries 20/9. Rome: Istituto Affari Internazionali, March. https://www.iai.it/en/pubblica
zioni/international-order-and-european-project-times-covid19.
Tocci, Nathalie. 2020b. Europe and Biden’s America: Making European Autonomy and
a Revamped Transatlantic Bond Two Sides of the Same Coin. IAI Commentaries 20/81.
Rome: Istituto Affari Internazionali, November. https://www.iai.it/sites/default/files/iai
com2081.pdf?mc_cid=06eebd0d5d&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Tocci, Nathalie. 2021. European Strategic Autonomy: What It Is, Why We Need It, How to Achieve
It. Rome: Istituto Affari Internazionali. https://www.iai.it/sites/default/files/9788893681780.pdf.
von der Leyen, Ursula. 2019. Speech by President-elect von der Leyen in the European Parliament
Plenary on the occasion of the presentation of her College of Commissioners and their
programme, 27 November. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/SPEECH_
19_6408.
von der Leyen, Ursula. 2020. Speech at the European Parliament Plenary on the new MFF, own
resources and the Recovery Plan, 13 May. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/
en/speech_20_877.
Wright, Thomas. 2020a. Stretching the International Order to Its Breaking Point. The Atlantic, 4
April. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/pandemic-lasts-18-months-will-
change-geopolitics-good/609445/?mc_cid=dccf9f6021&mc_eid=5323acf69e.
Wright, Thomas. 2020b. What a Second Trump Term Would Mean for the World. The Atlantic,
30 September. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/what-trump-second-term-
would-do-foreign-policy/616536/.
Zangana, Azad. 2020. Has Covid-19 Killed Off Populism in Europe? Schroders, 28 September.
https://www.schroders.com/en/insights/economics/has-covid-19-killed-off-populism-in-
europe/.