Coronavirus: Will Europe Fall Victim to the Virus?

As soon as new leadership in the European Union takes office in Brussels and begins discussing its strategies for the years ahead, a crisis erupts to overtake everything.

A decade ago, after the global financial crash, it was the debt crisis. For a while, it was chaotic, but it slowly got things under control.

Then, it was the refugee crisis that unexpectedly burst onto the scene five years ago.

We saw heads of state heading to Brussels for one meeting after another. The acute problem has been dealt with, but the aftershocks are still felt.Conversation in Brussels until recently was all about a new "European Green Deal" and the coming digital transformation.

Grand policy papers have been published in a steady stream.

So now, it's all back to the new normal — that is, crisis management.

This week the coronavirus hammered the European Union with the greatest test of its political, economic and social framework since the five-year-long refugee crisis.

The ripples from the 2015 European migrant crisis proceed with its double shock to EU solidarity and domestic politics until today.

This sparked a surge of populism and nationalism, Brexit and the political fracturing of Germany following Chancellor Angela Merkel's weakening.

Italy, my country, has now shut down all its people, banning all movements.

The number of reported cases of coronavirus in both France and Germany and the UK is now higher than in Italy when the first warnings were released.

Two weeks ago the Turkish government backed off its 2016 promise to block Syrian refugees from entering Europe, in exchange for 6 billion euro. An airstrike in Syria's Idlib province by Russian-backed Syrian forces followed, killing 33 Turkish soldiers.

Bulgaria responded by sending an additional 1,000 troops to the border with Turkey, and Greek police launched smoke grenades at one crossing to deter migrants.

A Virus is a very different matter.

However, the European Union response could drastically change public opinions about the importance, responsiveness and efficacy of the organisation at a critical historical moment.

The effect of coronavirus on the future of Europe has the potential to be much greater than the migrant crisis, mainly as it unfolds in an almost biblical manner at the top of an epidemic of other European diseases.

They include, but are by no means limited to the economic downturn and potential recession (which is more likely due to coronavirus), increasing populism and nationalism (which is also triggered by the virus), disputes about how to conduct trade talks with the departing United Kingdom, struggles over the European budget, and ongoing German leadership crisis and social turmoil in France.

The coronavirus has morphed into a more global epidemic this past week that experts believe can not be controlled anymore. The stock market hit was $6 trillion, the largest fall since the financial crisis of 2008.

The World Health Organisation recorded more than 127,748 cases and over 4,716 deaths in 53 countries and declared it a pandemic.

It's a pandemic

In Europe, what began as the Northern Italy epidemic, has now entered Spain, Greece, Croatia, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Romania, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Estonia, North Macedonia, and San Marino.

Italians cancelled their Venice carnival and Milan Fashion Week parties. European hotels were placed in quarantine, in Austria, France and the Canary Islands.

On 28 February 2020, in a parking lot in the Zeytinburnu suburb of Istanbul, Turkey, migrants and refugees from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan boarded buses for the Greek border.

While the individual EU Member States set out their own health policies, the EU must coordinate the response to the epidemic and guide its still-open borders.

In most countries, people in these circumstances turn to national leaders for a response. Crisis management is a measure of the organisation itself and the philosophies behind this particular grouping of 27 member states with around 445 million residents and $16 trillion of GDP in a borderless European Union that prides itself about free movement of people and travel.

A lot of attention has thus been given to whether and how individual EU countries, or the EU itself, might leave the Schengen Agreement of 1985, which put 26 of its nations into a passport-free travel zone.

It was one of the EU's biggest sources of unity and identification. Around the same time, the agreement is structured to be much more versatile than is commonly assumed in times of crisis. The regulations require border controls to be briefly reintroduced for reasons that include migrant flows, terror threats and–now critical–health emergencies.

"Paradoxically," argues Benjamin Haddad, director of the Future Europe Initiative of the Atlantic Council, "one might argue that is for times such as these the European Union was made."

That's because, explains Haddad, these times involve the degree of technical cooperation and joint decision-making between countries which is the very foundation of the European Union. The EU operates as a regulatory force through the "regulating" power of its trade agreements and other tools that enforce norms in areas like digital, safety, climate, and all industry areas.

Although enforcing regulatory conditions is a strength of the EU, a weakness remains the rapid response in times of crisis.

As for situations such as the refugee crisis or coronavirus outbreak, member states frequently take back control, as they did in 2015. The coronavirus may provide new ammunition to those who want to restore border controls.

The right-wing, French populist, Marine Le Pen has called for the closing of borders with Italy. In Switzerland, not an EU member but part of the border-free zone, right-wing political leader Lorenzo Quadri said it was "alarming" that at such a time the "dogma" of the open borders should be considered a priority.

While the number of cases of coronavirus in Europe is rising, it seems unlikely that EU and national authorities will be able to prevent stronger border controls being implemented. For example, last Sunday evening Austria stopped several train connexions with Italy at the Brenner Pass after officials announced that two passengers who were infected with the virus had been stopped.

If the EU and its member states react smoothly and in a coordinated manner, the coming days could improve the European Union's collective interest.

If the EU remains ineffective as the epidemic spreads, Europe will be damaged for decades to come.

The French author Albert Camus in his 1945 novel The Plague, "I have no idea what is waiting for me, or what is going to happen when all of this ends".

The epidemic, unfortunately, has been faced by a fragmented world so far, just as the plague isolates people in Camus novel.

Austria rejected trains from Italy, Italy stopped flights from China, only to see the epidemic spread more rapidly with people arriving unchecked via other airports.

It's not early to wonder, whether Europe itself will fall victim to the virus, or rise stronger from this huge challenge.