A threefold response

As an event the coronavirus crisis is reminiscent of those concentric ripples that form when a stone is tossed into a pond. The first circle represents the immediate impact of the virus: fear, sickness, death. The next stands for the initial protective response, such as the closing of borders, while the third expanding circle is that of increasing unemployment and shrinking economies. The fourth and final circle represents geopolitics. How great powers manifest themselves on the world stage during such a crisis – which depends in part on how successfully they have tackled it at home – can determine essential global strategies for years if not decades to come.

A chronicle of the European response to the first three consequences of the pandemic – for public health, freedom of movement and economic activity – makes clear how, in essence, events-politics works. The fourth consequence, its geopolitical impact, deserves a separate analysis, which follows in Chapter 5. In the unprecedented dilemmas with which the Covid crisis confronts policy-makers, these three consequences can rarely be addressed separately, yet the lens of events-politics focuses best when they are each taken in turn; this is why the chronicle in this chapter proposes separate timelines, in part parallel (within each Act), in part sequential. To absorb and parry the shock to public health, the Union, poorly equipped, could at the start do little other than improvise a response. In recent crises it had gained experience in border politics and financial policy, so in those two areas we should in theory have been able to expect a more rapid and effective performance.

Each government is responsible for the health of its own citizens, according to the rules of the Union. What