Sovereignty after the pandemic: what changed and what didn't

The pandemic was, among other things, a stress test for European institutions. Three years on, it is possible to assess the results with something approaching analytical distance — though the political consequences of the assessment are anything but distant.

The standard liberal account holds that the pandemic demonstrated the necessity of European coordination: only through the joint vaccine procurement mechanism, the Recovery Fund, and the coordination of border policies could member states have navigated the crisis as effectively as they did. The standard sovereigntist account holds the opposite: that the pandemic demonstrated the limits of European coordination, with member states that retained control over their own health systems and vaccine programmes generally outperforming those that ceded authority to Brussels.

Both accounts have some truth to them, and both are too simple.

What the pandemic actually demonstrated — what any clear-eyed reading of the data shows — is that the relationship between centralisation and effectiveness is not linear. Some things genuinely benefited from European coordination; others were actively hampered by it. The vaccine procurement mechanism was, on balance, a success for larger countries and a complicated mess for smaller ones. The Recovery Fund represented a significant fiscal innovation; it also concentrated spending decisions in ways that reduced member state flexibility at precisely the moment when flexibility was most valuable.

The lesson I draw from this is not that European coordination is good or bad, but that the question of what to coordinate — and at what level — is more important than the abstract debate about integration versus sovereignty. These are engineering questions as much as political ones, and they deserve the kind of precise, technical attention that political debate almost never provides.