Europe’s vaccine cooperation isn’t federalist dogma
This week, Douglas Murray argued that the on-going shambles of the European Union’s vaccination effort should be chalked up to federalist dogma. “There is no logical reason why EU countries could not have been allowed to pursue independent vaccine development, procurement and roll-out,” wrote Murray, except that “it has already been decided that an EU-wide approach is always the only approach.”
In fact, there are two rather large reasons that richer EU nations, who would have been better off going it alone on vaccines, chose not to: Russia and China. As Jens Spahn, the German health minister, told the Bundestag in January: “If our Eastern and Southern European partners had not received a vaccine through the EU, who would likely have stepped in? China? Russia? Would we have preferred that?”
Yes, the European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen surely saw vaccines as an opportunity to grab more powers for Brussels, but the member states still had to be persuaded. Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands had already formed their own “Vaccine Alliance.” No doubt what made them acquiesce to von der Leyen was the nightmare scenario of returning to the dynamics which took shape during the first phase of the pandemic. Then, as European countries were squabbling over protective equipment, Russia and China had swooped in with offers of…
