By Andrea Widburg

In 2009, the European debt crisis revealed that the European Union, unlike the United States, was not a united republic composed of somewhat independent nation-states. Instead, it was, as it had been since Roman times, a collection of warring tribes that occasionally made common cause. Somehow, though, the EU stuck together.

In 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the EU to floods of Muslim refugees from the Middle East and Africa, the EU took another hit to its unity. The core Western nations reluctantly accommodated the onslaught, but the Central European countries, remembering centuries of Islamic rule, ignored the EU’s open border mandates and closed their borders to the Muslim invaders.

In 2016, British citizens had enough and voted to pull out of the EU. On January 31, 2020, even as COVID-19 was following the path the migrants paved in 2015, Britain finally left the EU. The EU bureaucrats in Brussels sneered that Britain would never recover.

Now, in April 2020, it looks as if it’s the EU that won’t recover. COVID-19 is killing it.

Politico has published an article detailing the myriad missteps by the individual European nations and the EU itself in response to COVID-19’s spread through the continent.

Despite trying to cast some blame on Trump for closing America to European flights, it’s evident from the article that the problem lies deep within the EU itself. It’s being eaten alive because the individual nations will cling to their national interests and because the EU bureaucracy is incapable of reacting quickly to a rapidly changing situation.

The article has too many details to yield to an easy summary, but the highlights are clear: In the beginning, the EU was focused on climate change and the Middle East. As the virus ramped up, the various ministers were much more concerned by events in their own countries than in the EU as a whole. In this regard, America has a tremendous advantage, which is an executive who is dedicated to the nation’s welfare rather than the welfare of any individual state.

The authors say that part of the problem in some countries (i.e., Germany, Italy, and Spain) was that their healthcare systems – all of which are socialized – were decentralized, with control at the regional level. In other words, these countries had the worst of all worlds: The local systems weren’t talking to each other and, as is the case for all socialized systems, they were still proceeding in the usual way: Slowly and with the rationing that is inevitable with socialized medicine.

Additionally, the politicians who rotate through the EU wanted to do spectacular things and were uninterested in the nitty-gritty of disease control. More than that, the politicians reflected strong national biases and couldn’t ignore the crises within their borders. Again, unlike our federal system, which is headed by a dedicated president, there was no single leader whose focus was the entire EU.

While the ministers were fussing about African testing capacities, COVID-19 was spreading. Because nobody was taking COVID-19 seriously, carnival week in February went ahead as usual, with people traveling widely throughout Europe, carrying the disease with them. Meanwhile, as carnival died down, the situation on the border between Greece and Turkey distracted the EU and the individual European nations, for Erdogan had announced that he would unleash onto the EU the Middle Eastern migrants in Turkey.

In the beginning of March, perhaps in response to the EU’s disorganization and perhaps in response to age-old instincts, the various EU countries began to act as stand-alone nations, rather than parts of a federation. France (of course) was the first to announce that nobody was getting its personal protective equipment. Other nations followed suit.

In Spain, the leftist government encouraged people to turn out for the Women’s Day march, a crowded, chaotic event. Many in the Spanish government got COVID-19 there. When things went sour in Italy, none of the EU nations would help, showing again a decided lack of unity for a Union. And now that Italy and Spain are seeking affordable financial support, the rich EU nations are rejecting their pleas.

American leftists used to assure Americans that the EU was the future. It had everything: sophisticated European culture, advanced wokeness, and socialized medicine and industries. What they forgot was the, despite being a coherent continent, Europe was never a coherent culture. This divisiveness grew as the EU kept adding member states from outside Western Europe’s geographic and cultural core.

Between the EU’s inevitable descent into being the usual moribund bureaucracy and the fact that ancient nations turn inward when threatened, the EU’s break-up is beginning to seem inevitable.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/its_possible_that_the_european_union_wont_survive_covid19.html