The COVID-19 pandemic posed unprecedented challenges to the European Union (EU), its member states as well as the international economic and political order. This workshop has three main aims: to explain the political and economic responses of the EU to the pandemic; to assess the implications of this crisis on the institutions, policies and politics of the EU; and to draw lessons from it, relating these findings to long standing debates in EU studies and political science. The crisis generated by the pandemic raises several important questions addressed by the papers presented at this workshop: i) how has the EU responded to the pandemic and why? ii) what have been the repercussions of the pandemic crisis for the institutions, policies and politics of the EU? iii) What theoretical lessons can we drawn from these studies?
The papers presented at the workshop speak to a number of major themes in EU studies and political science. They include: the choice of deepening economic and political integration in the EU versus the risk of a falling apart of this project; the tension between the EU and its member states (and, occasionally, subnational units) concerning the distribution of competences, and the extension of EU’s competences to new terrains in times of crises; the redistributive issues triggered by the pandemic within and across countries (‘north’ versus ’south’ and ‘east’ versus ‘west’, for instance), generating ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ as well as political discontent; the effects of the pandemic as a manifestation of globalisation; the effects of the crisis and its management on public opinion and political parties, in particular support (or otherwise) for the EU, but also the occurrence of protest events; and finally further international cooperation more broadly, including complex dynamics concerning cross-border regional (EU) and international political and economic cooperation. The workshop will also discuss the response to the Pandemic in Canada in comparative perspective.
Participation to the workshop is by invitation only.