The REGROUP project – ‘Rebuilding governance and resilience out of the pandemic’ – has come to an end, concluding its journey with the conference ‘European politics in turbulent times: Risk, resilience, reaction’, which marked the conclusion of three years of collaborative research. The event, which took place on 24-25 June in Florence, brought together 41 scholars and analysts for a series of roundtables examining the societal and political consequences of the Covid-19 crisis and for a reflection on the broader implications of the pandemic for European democracies.
Covid-19 was not an isolated shock; it marked the tipping point of a turbulent decade that had already tested Europe’s resilience through the Eurozone crisis, the migration wave, and the political rift of Brexit. Far from being an unforeseen event, the pandemic exposed and exacerbated existing structural tensions, raising urgent questions about the capacity, fairness, and democratic legitimacy of the EU’s multi-level governance system. Building on this premise, the REGROUP project, conducted by a consortium of 14 internationally research institutions and coordinated by the University of Groningen, set out to study how the EU could navigate the complex landscape of post-pandemic policy and institutional reform.
The conference opened with a keynote lecture by Maurizio Ferrera, Professor of Political Science at the University of Milan, who examined how successive crises – from the Eurozone collapse to the Covid-19 pandemic – have reshaped the Union’s evolving political architecture. Drawing on a decade of research, Ferrera argued that the EU’s resilience lies not only in institutional innovation, but in a deeper logic of what he calls a “compound polity”, in which national welfare democracies and supranational governance are fundamentally interlinked.
“Crises have revealed the essential fragility of the EU,” Ferrera noted, “but they also prompted leaders to internalise a polity consciousness and engage in exercises of polity maintenance.” He highlighted the example of Angela Merkel, who in 2020 demonstrated this political mindset by shifting from an economic to a political rationale in defending the European project. This shift, Ferrera argued, illustrated how crises can transform leaders’ approaches from transactional bargaining to systemic stewardship.
While the EU remains vulnerable, Ferrera suggested it now holds a stronger potential for resilience than at any time in the last decade.
In response to the question “How has the EU changed since before the pandemic, and how does it demonstrate resilience in turbulent times?”, Professor Brigid Laffan, Emeritus Professor at the EUI, observed, “The EU has been in crisis mode since 2010. Yet the response to the pandemic revealed the resilience of the EU, as it became a significant actor in health policy despite the weakness of its competences. The pandemic also led to the breaking of the taboo on common borrowing. Now the EU must find even greater resilience to respond to shifts in Europe’s security, defence landscape, and global geopolitics.”
Ferrera concluded his keynote with a provocative open question: Can the EU’s hard-won resilience adapt to new threats, from defence fragmentation to democratic backsliding? As REGROUP draws to a close, its findings offer valuable insights not only into the EU’s past responses, but also into how Europe might confront the challenges of the future. In an era marked by uncertainty, the need for resilient, democratic, and fair governance remains more urgent than ever.
Watch the video recording of the keynote lecture by Maurizio Ferrera on YouTube.
The REGROUP project is a three-year long Horizon Europe project which began in September 2022. As a member of the consortium, the European Governance and Politics Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre at the EUI, led the project’s work package on ‘Old and new cleavages in pandemic times’.