Nathalie Tocci is director of Istituto Affari Internazionali, a special adviser to European High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell, and the author of POLITICO‘s World View column.
When it comes to the coronavirus crisis, the European Union needs to lift its gaze beyond its borders.
In addition to being a public health crisis with Europe at its center, the COVID-19 pandemic will likely represent an inflection point in the international system, accentuating and accelerating global dynamics that have been building for years.
The jury is still out on whether the coronavirus will help make the EU stronger, or break it altogether. The pandemic’s international implications will soon become just as evidently existential.
In short, the virus has exploded across the planet just as the hegemony that the United States enjoyed as the world’s only superpower has come to an undeniable end.
The recognition of China’s importance as a manufacturer will likely spur a revision of globalization toward shorter global supply chains.
The international order is going from unipolar to multipolar, with Beijing presenting the most prominent challenge to Washington. The rivalry between the two has already kicked off a trade war and a conflict in the digital domain over the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei.
With the coronavirus, the showdown has acquired clear ideological undertones, with China trying to present itself as a model to follow.
Beijing, originally the epidemic’s bête noire as the source of the outbreak and the first to implement measures many regarded as draconian, has spent the past month leveraging two comparative advantages.
As the first country to have successfully curtailed the virus — for the time being — its intrusive and uncompromising approach to containment could influence political trends in Europe and beyond.
Inherent in the Chinese approach is a growing dilemma between public health and privacy. The risk is that fear of the pandemic will result in a pursuit of security at the expense of basic rights.
True, European countries have shied away from putting in place some of Beijing’s harshest control measures and they have not engaged in Chinese-style manipulation of public information. Nor have European authorities undertaken — so far — the extensive collection of citizens’ data to limit contagion that could eventually be used for other purposes.
But all in all, European countries have basically followed the Chinese lockdown model. And some countries, beginning with Hungary, have gone much further, taking steps to put a formal end to their democracy altogether.
USA MIA
Beijing’s other competitive advantage is China’s role as the global manufacturing hub and exporter of masks and ventilators, which it has sought to leverage with highly publicized deliveries of medical equipment.
In the short term, this strategy is already starting to show diminishing returns.
The recognition of China’s importance as a manufacturer will likely spur a revision of globalization toward shorter global supply chains and greater redundancies. And Beijing’s show of solidarity in Europe has now been eclipsed by the fact that EU member countries are being shaken out of their inexcusable lethargy and nationalist instincts.
The EU might undermine Beijing’s efforts to present itself as a model | Leon Neal/Getty Images
Today, EU border policy is coordinated, medical equipment flows within the internal market and patients are being flown from one country to another to receive intensive care. Moreover, Europeans are beginning to do for themselves what China cannot: help each other navigate the dire socio-economic consequences of this epochal crisis.
The EU’s burgeoning success in rising to the challenge may undermine Beijing’s efforts to present itself as a model. But it doesn’t change the fact that when it comes to global leadership, under U.S. President Donald Trump, Washington is nowhere to be seen.
Indeed, the Trump administration’s policies — including a unilateral travel ban on its supposedly closest allies in Europe, an inhuman tightening of sanctions on epidemic-struck Iran, the blocking of G7 unity over a racist insistence to use the words “Wuhan virus” and an embarrassing attempt to secure American rights to a German-produced vaccine — all highlight an unprecedented absence of American leadership on the international stage.
In past decades, the U.S. was applauded by some and despised by others, but no one challenged its influence on world affairs. Today, it is not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with the U.S., but rather of not seeing it on the global map.
Multilateral response
This has important implications for the post-COVID-19 world.
The lack of clear leadership could trigger a further weakening of the rules-based multilateral system, already debilitated by nationalism, protectionism and the beginnings of an economic decoupling between the U.S. and China.
If trade protectionism becomes ingrained and the incentives to protect the shared gains from global economic integration start to dwindle, the global economic governance system built in the 20th century could just as quickly atrophy.
This is why it’s so important that the EU’s coronavirus response looks outward, and not just internally.
As strategic competition between the U.S. and China continues to heat up, the EU must redouble its quest for autonomy, so that it can triangulate between the two rather than being forced to choose between them or to bow to one of them.
The best way for Europe to achieve that is to accelerate its efforts to sustain and upgrade the multilateral rules-based system.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the World Health Organization. Work must be done to ensure a transparent exchange of information and best practices in confronting crises like the coronavirus pandemic.
Likewise, cooperation in the supply of medical equipment is the minimum requirement for an effective international response. No less important is the need to mobilize multilateral forums like the G20 to alleviate the global economic and public health impact of the crisis.
Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, has warned about the dire consequences if the coronavirus is not defeated in Africa — not only because of the devastating human and economic impact on the world’s most vulnerable regions, but also because of the risk of a rebound of the pandemic in Europe and the rest of the world.
As Europeans struggle with the grizzly daily count of their dead and infected, and the social anxiety and economic catastrophe caused by the lockdown, lifting our gaze is not intuitive.
But much like the EU now sees there is no way of defeating this virus by standing alone, we must also recognize that, as Pope Francis put it, we are globally all on the same boat.
It is Europe’s responsibility, first and foremost, to make multilateralism great again.