Analyses 8 July 2022 “Double dualisation” and the COVID-19 pandemic. Widening socio-economic inequalities in Europe and the potential for Next Generation EU to stem them By Marcello Natili, Fedra Negri and Stefano Ronchi The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing divides and socio-economic risks. This is particularly worrisome in Europe, where the Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis had already led scholars to speak of a ‘double dualisation’ (Heidenreich 2016). Did the COVID-19 pandemic also worsen income inequalities between insiders and outsiders and between core and peripheral countries?
Analyses 30 May 2022 Angela Merkel’s discursive shift from the Eurozone crisis to COVID-19 By Francesco Di Blasi The euro crisis and the pandemic have put the integrity of the European Union at risk. In the absence of a truly political union, the economic and monetary union between countries as different as EU member states has fuelled inter-state conflicts. However, in contrast to what happened during the euro crisis, over the course of the pandemic, the member states managed to reach an agreement over a recovery plan in a constructive way.
Analyses 23 April 2022 EU economic governance between crises: broken taboos in search of political institutionalization By Francesco Corti and Cinzia Alcidi The pandemic represented a turning point of the debate on the European economic governance. All in all, the combination of existential (public health) crisis and experiential learning from the errors of the Great Recession led EU policymakers, along with the Commission and the ECB at the helm and with strong support from the European Parliament, to adopt a more solidaristic approach to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. In such a context, four taboos were temporarily broken, thus opening the room for a debate on the future of economic governance for the EU.
Analyses 2 April 2022 Walking the road together? Resolving inter-state conflicts in the path towards the NGEU plan By Stefano Ronchi and Joan Miró i Artigas The dramatic socio-economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic reawakened the tensions between Northern and Southern member states that had already shaken the EU during the 2010s. Contrary to what happened during the euro crisis, in the COVID crisis the member states managed to reach an agreement in only about five months. How did EU leaders move past the deadlock of the euro crisis years?