Is Europe really forged through crisis? Pandemic EU and the Russia – Ukraine war

Abstract

The European Union's response to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed changes and continuity in the structure and the functioning of the European project. In lieu of a conclusion to the Special Issue, this article discusses what those lessons tell us about how Europe responds to the following crisis. We compare European responses to the pandemic to those that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We observe more differences than similarities. The same actors do not always play the central role, solidarity among Europeans is sometimes more challenging to engineer, and the requirements to make the overall project more resilient can point in different directions. Such findings show that any argument that Europe is forged through crisis is unlikely to tell us much about what Europe is or where it may be headed. In that sense, the EU is a sui generis multi-level, multi-faceted actor that can change shape in response to events.

The EU's Socio-economic Development Against the Backdrop of the War in Ukraine

“…Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, public debt has increased considerably. If one supplements this with the debt of the Corona Next Generation EU rescue fund, the ratio increases even more (Anghel & Jones, 2022). Increased energy prices and the outbreak of war in Ukraine further exacerbate the state of public finances (Mbah & Wasum, 2022).…”

“…On the other hand, EU 19 is not the appropriate format and does not possess the required tools to respond to this crisis (Astrov et al, 2022). It has also proved impossible to use monetary policy instruments, such as currency swaps for the Ukrainian central bank or making the Ukrainian currency (hryvnia) convertible for Ukrainian refugees through the central banks of the Eurosystem (Anghel & Jones, 2022;Miao & Fei, 2022).…”

“…The rapidly changing geopolitical environment causes serious challenges to EU economic policy. During the financial and COVID-19 crises, many countries in the EU were already heavily indebted (Anghel & Jones, 2022). The next shock has already afflicted society: the war in Ukraine weakens economic development and requires new spending on weapons, aid for refugees, and larger investments in new energy infrastructure.…”

What European Union in the “Age of Uncertainty”? Weathering the Geopolitical Storms in a World of Perpetual Crises

“…That also became apparent in the debates organised at the Conference on the Future of Europe (2022). Nevertheless, the EU has proven in the past that crisis can be an instigator for structural and functional change, even if such change is uneven and incomplete (see for example Anghel and Jones, 2022;Jones et al, 2016). The EU has also become a faster crisis manager: while it took the EU years to tackle the fi nancial crisis, it reacted in months to the coronavirus pandemic, and only days to Russia's aggression against Ukraine.…”

Energy security and corruption in Central Asia as the main challenges for the European Union energy diversification policy

“…Bearing in mind: that natural gas from the Russian Federation is an environmentally acceptable energy product, that the Russian Federation has been supplying the European Union with natural gas for several decades at favorable prices [9], that there are small available quantities of lique ed natural gas on the world market, while numerous infrastructure and investment problems stand in the way of the introduction of lique ed natural gas as an alternative [10], and taking also into account the lack of uranium in countries that are not involved in the con ict in Ukraine [11], it is not possible to assess with a real degree of certainty the further developments and the position of the European Union when it comes to the supply of this energy product. Moreover, with the aim of reducing the impact on their own economies, certain countries of the European Union express different attitudes and implement different activities when it comes to coal, renewable energy sources, nuclear energy, as well as the continued supply of natural gas from the Russian Federation [12]. Bearing in mind that the European Union imports about 55% of all necessary energy products, and that disagreements exist within the European Union on this issue, it is realistic to expect challenges in all spheres, including the ability of the European continent to reach the status of a carbon-free continent by 2050 [13].The European Union and the EU candidate countries are in a situation where they have to nd and enable a stable supply of natural gas from other sources, which is certainly a challenging task because in 2020 the European Union imported about 85% of natural gas from other countries, whereby the Russian Page 3/23 Federation was the largest supplier [14].…”