How Covid-19 Hit Brussels and Beyond: The EU’s Crisis Management Tested by a Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The EU is certainly not unfamiliar with crisis management, at least not in the broad sense of the term. Its history is marked by crises and the last ten years were even labelled a polycrisis. This seemed to end after the 2019 European Parliament elections with a new Commission that wanted to prepare the EU for geopolitical policy-making that went beyond crisis management. However, the Covid-19 pandemic caused one of the biggest crises to ever hit the Union. After initial hesitation and criticism, the EU’s institutions showed remarkably strong resilience, combining short-term crisis management with mid-term policy-making and long-term innovative solutions for a number of long-standing political hot topics. This chapter analyses the EU’s response by looking at its institutions and discussing how they behaved—vis-à-vis the Member States and on the world stage—as primary actors of its Covid-19 crisis management. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.