While traditionally (Continental) Europe has not been known for an in particular debtor‐ or restructuring‐friendly insolvency practice, in recent decades, important reforms were implemented that would foster restructurings in Europe. In this article, we comparatively look a the status quo of insolvency and restructuring practice in five different European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, UK). We place our observations into the context of the preventive restructuring directive, to be implemented within the next two years after its publication on 26 June 2019. The directive leaves quite some room implementation, from a watered‐down restructuring tool with high access threshold to a pre‐insolvency debtor‐friendly US‐style restructuring procedure.

While the harmonisation of insolvency law in the European Union (EU) has been a top priority on the European institutions' agenda in the last decade, it is well known that this endeavour has been slow and has often met resistance from the Member States. The COVID‐19 pandemic revealed that top‐down harmonisation of insolvency (i.e., introduced at EU level) has been temporarily halted. The urgency to control or mitigate the economically and financially destructive effects of the pandemic has, nevertheless, forced European governments to adopt domestic strategies and laws in the area of insolvency. Interestingly, however, such measures show that insolvency and restructuring law responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic, albeit largely uncoordinated, reflect a phenomenon of bottom‐up harmonisation (i.e., introduced by Member States) indicating a convergence towards common approaches. This paper interrogates the insolvency law responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic in six European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom). It uncovers the inadequacy of the EU's harmonisation language, and the limits of harmonisation strategies in insolvency and restructuring law. Finally, it promotes the formulation of a wider‐encompassing definition of “legal harmonisation”.

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