E.watch Since the coronavirus first arrived in Europe, the European Commission has been throwing gasoline over its own reputation. At the end of last week, the bureaucrats running the Commission finally lit the metaphorical match and enveloped the entire European project in the fires of their own incompetence.
For the past five years, the British and Irish governments have been in each other’s throats over Brexit. The same goes for Leavers and Remainers in the UK itself. The militant wings of Protestant unionism and Catholic separatism in Northern Ireland, meanwhile, have literally been at war for most of the last century. And yet on Friday, in the space of a few hours, the European Union managed to unite all these factions against itself.
The Commission (the executive arm of the European Union) is in panic about the extent to which the EU is lagging behind both the United Kingdom and the United States in the race to vaccinate the public. With the EU only placing orders for the vaccine from suppliers three months after the UK government did not place orders for the vaccine, Europeans are now watching for millions of vaccine doses manufactured in Europe to be shipped through the channel to Britain.
Pfizer and AstraZeneca, both of which manufacture large quantities of the vaccine in Europe, are contractually bound to honor the commitments they made to Her Majesty’s government before prioritizing EU contracts, which were purchased much later. Ironically, the European Union seems to be ‘at the back of the line’.
On Friday, the Commission announced its plans to remedy this situation through export controls. There would be restrictions on the ability of Pfizer and AstraZeneca to ship vaccines outside the EU. Retroactive violation of the free contract principle in this way would have been bad enough in ordinary times. But under the current circumstances, such a plan is simply unscrupulous. The Commission essentially threatened the UK with a vaccine blockade at a time when hundreds of vulnerable Britons are dying from COVID-19 every day.
And it gets worse.
In order to put in place its export controls, the EU planned to activate Article 16 of its Withdrawal Agreement with the UK. Article 16 is a sort of break-glass-in-case-of-emergency measure relating to Northern Ireland. It would allow the EU to set up customs infrastructure at the Irish border (the only land border between the UK and the EU) in the event of an extreme emergency. The Commission clearly considered that it would not itself be in a position to purchase sufficient doses of the vaccine in such an emergency, as it stated its intention to impose the relevant export controls across the Irish border.
To understand the depravity of this move, one must really appreciate the EU’s political use of the Irish border during the Brexit negotiations that have taken half the past decade. The EU negotiators have repeatedly stated that requiring regulatory controls at the Irish border would be an extremely irresponsible act. It would jeopardize the hard-won peace in Ireland by bringing the issue of the constitutional status of Northern Ireland back to the forefront of the Irish mind, and re-instigating sleeping terrorists into the process. The EU used the widespread popularity of the open border in Ireland to push for the continued submission of the UK to the EU regulatory and customs regime. Since Northern Ireland had to remain in compliance with the Republic of Ireland (an EU member state) to ensure peace, and since Northern Ireland is in the UK, the entire UK had to remain within the EU regulatory framework after it had writing regulations. This syllogism is so fatal that even the EU itself did not really believe it, as I wrote here. It was a cynical political play used in an attempt to bureaucratically annex the entire UK first and then, once that failed, only Northern Ireland. No invading armies, just invading rules: a softer kind of tyranny.
That the EU’s priestly caste thought, at the first sign of political trouble last week, that they were violating the holy shibboleth of “peace on the island of Ireland” is a welcome development. It has exposed the great political football that they have been playing with that battered little country for years and that, please, they will never be allowed to play again.
Fortunately, the Commission’s hardened apparatchiks had not announced their planned export controls on Friday when the entire civilized world was approaching them like a ton of inadequately regulated rocks. The respective Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland immediately alerted the Commission to their anger, while Arlene Foster, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, called the plan “an act of aggression”. Tony Blair, former Prime Minister and one of the most ardent opponents of Brexit, called the EU’s behavior ‘very silly’, and the International Chamber of Commerce even wrote a letter to EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, in which he implored her to reconsider and describe the many catastrophes that could result from a disruption in global vaccine supply chains. The Spectator has compiled a list of tweets from the loudest supporters of the European Union, condemning the Commission’s actions in the harshest terms. The compilation is astonishing to read, although perhaps not quite as astonishing as this excellent editorial The observer, which until now was a pro-EU document. The leave vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum won 52-48 percent. If the referendum were held again today, Leave’s profit margin would likely increase significantly.
On Saturday, the Commission had withdrawn, calling its original plan a “blunder”. British Trade Secretary Liz Truss told the BBC that Boris Johnson’s government had “been assured by the European Union that those contracts will not be disrupted”. She went on to say: “We are pleased that the EU has admitted the recourse to Article 16.. . because the border in Ireland was a mistake and they will not continue with that now. . . . It is vital that we keep borders open and we oppose vaccination nationalism and we oppose protectionism. “
It is worth considering for a moment how the European Union came to such an obviously disastrous decision in the first place. At every step of the EU’s response to COVID, we see not only individual incompetence (although there is plenty), but also the ramifications of a technocratic, centralizing, conducting ideology, which has played out to reveal the endemic shortcomings . of the entire European project.
When the coronavirus first appeared in the Western world last spring, the Commission allowed four EU Member States – Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands – to negotiate with potential suppliers. In June, however, von der Leyen and her health commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, changed their minds about this approach.
Their reasons were neither medical, nor scientific, nor even logistical. They were political. Von der Leyen wanted to involve all 27 EU Member States in centralized negotiations on vaccine acquisition to demonstrate the unity and solidarity of the EU internal market. Those negotiations turned out to be cumbersome and came to a halt. The EU AstraZeneca contract negotiated by the German, French, Italian and Dutch delegations was ready for signature in June. The ideological turnaround of Von der Leyen’s negotiating tactics caused the signature to delay until August. In the intervening three months, AstraZeneca was busy preparing to deliver tens of millions of doses to the door of 10 Downing Street. Vulnerable Europeans are now no longer in number six feet, as Von der Leyen and her fellow Euro-federalists were married to a grand vision of confused Belgians, Greeks and Lithuanians walking hand in hand into a post-COVID era as they ‘We Are the World ‘sang.
The whole thing for the EU was that the pale globalized benevolence of a senescent Bonapartist technocracy would be a greater boon to humanity than the liberal democratic nation-state. But a UK’s nimble regulatory freedom after Brexit and the contrasting sclerosis of the emerging European superstate have created a situation where thousands of vulnerable people in Britain live who would be dead if they lived on the mainland. The “founding fathers” of the EU – men like Altiero Spinelli and Jean Monnet, who tried to save the world from democracy – would have been shocked.
The Commission has tried to put the blame for the failed vaccinations in Europe on the pharmaceutical companies themselves. Last week, von der Leyen pointed her finger at the technical problems that AstraZeneca has had with vaccine yields in their European manufacturing facilities. “The companies have to deliver,” she said. Asked about Von der Leyen’s complaints during an interview with the Italian newspaper The RepublicPascal Soriot, AstraZeneca’s CEO, was somewhat baffled. He noted that the UK, US and Australia all faced similar yield issues. But “the UK contract was signed three months ahead of the EU contract,” he said, “so with the UK we had an extra three months to resolve all the issues we’ve encountered.” In other words, the European Union has no one to blame but itself. Von der Leyen’s decision to pause Europe’s COVID response for three months to turn it into a cosmetic staging post on the way to the United States of Europe is killing Europeans every day.
The EU’s disastrous response to COVID and its unwise but short-lived flirtation with a medical blockade should perhaps be taken as a providential warning to those of us who recoil in horror at the populist turn in US politics. The European Union is an experiment in anti-populism. Its institutions were conceived and built to isolate as much as possible those wielding political power from the will of popular majorities in the modern world. If populism was the source of our current discontent, we would expect the EU to look like a radiant city on a hill. But it is clear that these people have no idea what the heck they are doing. Ultimately, in today’s world, there is simply no major political question to which the European Union is the answer.
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Originally published