Salvati Eugenio
Department of Economics and Management, University of Pavia, Via San Felice, 5, 27100 Pavia, PV Italy.
Chin Polit Sci Rev. 2021;6(1):1-19. doi: 10.1007/s41111-020-00171-0. Epub 2020 Dec 28.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has placed severe pressure on the EU's capacity to provide a timely and coordinated response capable of curbing the pandemic's disastrous economic and social effects on EU member states. In this situation, the supranational institutions and their models of action are evidently under pressure, seeming incapable of leading the EU out of the stormy waters of the present crisis. The article frames the first months of management of the COVID-19 crisis at EU level as characterised by the limited increase in the level of steering capacity by supranational institutions, due to the reaffirmed centrality of the intergovernmental option. To explain this situation, the article considers the absence of the institutional capacity/legitimacy to extract resources from society(ies), and the subsequent impossibility of guaranteeing an effective and autonomous process of political (re)distribution, the key factors accounting for the weakness of vertical political integration in the response to the COVID-19 challenge. This explains why during the COVID-19 crisis as well, the pattern followed by the EU is rather similar to past patterns, thus confirming that this has fed retrenchment aimed at the enforcement of the intergovernmental model and the defence of the most sensitive core state powers against inference from supranational EU institutions.
新冠疫情的爆发给欧盟及时做出协调应对的能力带来了巨大压力，这种应对需能够遏制疫情对欧盟成员国造成的灾难性经济和社会影响。在这种情况下，超国家机构及其行动模式显然面临压力，似乎无法带领欧盟走出当前危机的困境。本文将欧盟层面应对新冠疫情危机的头几个月描述为：由于政府间选择的核心地位再次得到确认，超国家机构的指导能力提升有限。为解释这种情况，本文认为缺乏从社会提取资源的机构能力/合法性，以及随后无法保证有效的自主政治（再）分配过程，是应对新冠疫情挑战时纵向政治一体化薄弱的关键因素。这就解释了为什么在新冠疫情危机期间，欧盟遵循的模式也与过去的模式颇为相似，从而证实这助长了旨在强化政府间模式以及捍卫最敏感的核心国家权力免受欧盟超国家机构干预的紧缩政策。
