And let’s not forget where we are in the course of this pandemic — and what we’ve sacrificed to contain it. In the West, we’re now 12 months on from the first round of lockdowns. As the UK begins to unlock stage by stage, millions of Europeans face a second spring of confinement. Italy — the first European country to lockdown a year ago — is locking down again as cases surge.
Whatever the medical justifications, one has to ask if lockdown is politically, socially or economically sustainable. If Europe doesn’t achieve herd immunity levels of vaccination by the summer, the pressure to unlock regardless will be immense. It will be argued that if enough of the Continent’s elderly and vulnerable people have been jabbed then that will constitute ‘focused protection’ — thereby allowing the less vulnerable population to take their chances with the virus. Wouldn’t it be an irony if something akin to the strategy set out in the Great Barrington Declaration were to be implemented by the Continentals instead of les Anglos?
Of course, that would provide the new variants of the virus with a vast pool of hosts to splash around in freely. Through the use of mass testing and genomic sequencing, the authorities might be able to monitor and manage the spread and evolution of the variants — but this assumes that sufficient capacity to do so is in place. It isn’t. According to evidence given to the European Parliament by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control most European countries are not where they need to be in order to do the necessary tracking.
How do they get away with it? The EU’s politicians, I mean. Well, it helps that in Europe there’s always somebody else to blame. It might be another country, another institution or one of the EU’s five presidents. The choice is never ending. It also helps that, in times of crisis, people rally behind their governments. Not unreasonably, they put their trust in those politicians with the greatest experience of governing — a tendency that benefits establishment politicians over their populist rivals.
Nevertheless, there are signs that voters are beginning to lose their patience. In Germany, the ruling CDU — until recently surfing on a wave of support for Angela Merkel — crashed to defeat in regional elections. In France, polls continue to show a disturbingly tight second round run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. In Italy, populists account for three of the four main parties — and the non-populist fourth party (the centre-left, pro-European Democrats) are losing ground. In Spain, support for the hard Right Vox party continues to grow — even to the extent of overtaking what had been the main opposition party.
I’d like to think that this week’s renewed attack on AstraZeneca is evidence of a political panic. “Let’s blame somebody else before the voters blame us” would be a logical, if cynical, motivation. However, I fear that it’s not cynicism at work here, but a much more dangerous force: self-righteousness.
When you read the words of Charles Michel, a disturbing thought hits you: the people actually believe their own rhetoric. Consider this passage, in which Michel favourably compares the EU to Russia and China: “Europe will not use vaccines for propaganda purposes. We promote our values.”
I wonder, where were these “values” when they tried to impose a hard border on the island of Ireland? Or, now, as they cause millions of people to fear a life-saving vaccine?
But then, for the European Union, self-righteousness is not a character flaw, it’s a necessity. The EU is an enterprise — the “European project”, in fact. As such, it is unlike a real country. A nation, like a family, isn’t defined by what it does and still less what it thinks. It has no need to state its purpose or justify its existence.
The phrase, “my country, right or wrong” is widely regarded as the classic statement of jingoistic nationalism. But properly understood, what it means is that you can admit that your country is wrong, because that won’t change the fact of its existence — or of your belonging to it.
Not so with an enterprise. If it doesn’t work anymore, then it shouldn’t continue — because it is no more or less than it what it does. To fail a test as big as Covid — and in particular the vaccination effort — has existential implications for the European Union.
It is therefore not a question of the EU asking itself whether it’s got this one fundamentally wrong. By its own internal logic, it cannot be fundamentally wrong — certainly not on a matter as important as this one. Rather, the question is how it reconciles this basic assumption with reality.
I really hope the gap between the two narrows, because I fear the next set of answers.
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