A public affair

“Where is Europe when you need it?” was the question asked everywhere in the spring of 2020 as the virus sowed sickness and ruin in that part of the world. An initial cry for help in Italy and Spain, it reverberated across the Union and soon echoed back as a sneering gibe from Moscow and Beijing, and even from Brexit London. The situation was of course grave. On 11 March 2020, the WHO declared the Covid outbreak a worldwide pandemic and two days later it identified the European continent as its epicentre. That professional assessment by the global health authorities shook a continental sense of safety. “Here? At home?” Meanwhile images of virologists in spacesuits, abandoned dead in hospital corridors and cavalcades of Covid coffins fed the fear for life and limb. Against this macabre backdrop it was striking that the European Union at first did nothing at all to ease the suffering, and the breathless defence that the Brussels institutions had no formal competence in the field of public health was experienced as feeble in the extreme.

The actions of the European states and their Union in the Covid crisis should be judged through the lens of eventspolitics. History was knocking at the door. On such occasions a lack of formal powers is no excuse (nor necessarily a reason for criticism). What counts is the capacity demonstrated in the situation at hand to engage jointly in events-politics, to identify and parry a shock affecting all citizens, to improvise, to convince straight away and, by extension, to anticipate events and strengthen the system. This benchmark is dynamic and relates specifically to the active deployment of political responsibilities.