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In the five years since the last European elections, EU countries have suffered three successive and closely related shocks: the Covid-19 pandemic; the energy crisis; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which turned into an all-out war in the heart of Europe.
All three shocks produced collective EU responses of unprecedented scale. Whatever their effectiveness, these responses made common European policies highly visible in the lives of citizens, albeit with huge variations from country to country and not always with a positive impact.
Covid-19 vaccines; the Recovery and Resilience Facility; common European borrowing; joint LNG orders; electricity subsidies; and the arming of Ukraine against Russia – all might be seen as signs of a dramatic trend of “more Europe” in the lives of 450 million Europeans.
But this “more Europe” has in turn triggered new crises and, above all, revealed some fundamental contradictions in the EU’s institutional set-up. In particular, none of the EU’s unprecedented responses to the three major shocks would have been possible without activating the Stability and Growth Pact’s “general escape clause”, the safety valve that allowed the EU’s fiscal “straitjacket” to be loosened for four years.
