EU solidarity in times of Covid-19

European solidarity is in high demand as the Covid-19 pandemic delivers a deep and asymmetric shock to EU economies and societies. Will there be sufficient supply? The European Council meeting of 17-21 July has agreed on a historic €750bn EU recovery fund. Yet, it has also exposed deep rifts among governments about the appropriate level and scope of European solidarity. The success of the agreement ultimately depends on voter attitudes. Will they support – and pay for – European solidarity or will they oppose it? We use new survey evidence (April 2020) to assess public support for European solidarity in 13 EU member states and the UK. Our analysis yields a number of important findings: support for solidarity varies by geographical distance, by issue, and by the perceived net-benefit to the own country; support is motivated by expectations of reciprocal benefit rather than feelings of moral obligation or common identity; in terms of instrumentation, most respondents prefer permanent EU arrangements of risk and burden sharing to ad hoc mutual assistance; a relative majority of respondents prefers a Europe that protects to a market Europe or a global Europe aspiring to international leadership. 1. Solidarity: high demand but short supply What’s new? In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, European solidarity is in high demand, bringing back haunting memories – a déjà vu if there ever was one – from the 2010-2015 eurozone sovereign debt crisis and the 2015-2016 migration crisis, when the supply of solidarity remained meagre at best. Practically overnight, European institutions, from the Schengen open border agreement to the single market have come under siege. The freedom of movement was suspended, first by Austria and then by 21 more EU member states. The spread of the pandemic brought havoc first to Italy and Spain and then to Germany, the Netherlands and other member states. It exposed economic divergences that had been hidden behind the veil of a timid recovery in recent years. Some member states were much better placed to fight the downturn with discretionary fiscal measures than others, thus reinforcing the contentious quest for European solidarity. Trying times for EU solidarity, but there are silver linings too. Compared to the eurozone crisis, when EU leaders wavered to do the bare minimum to keep the EU together and to save the euro, the coronavirus crisis response proved more expedite and better coordinated. The ECB moved fast to contain interest rate spreads in the Eurozone in March. The member states agreed on a loan-based first aid package of 1 An earlier version of this article was published in mid-July as a Policy Brief, before the EU leaders reached a deal on July 21 on the bloc's long-term budget and economic recovery fund after four days of intense negotiations. 2 Lorenzo Cicchi is Research Associate at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and coordinator of the European Governance and Politics Programme; Philipp Genschel is Joint Professor of European Public Policy, Department of Political and Social Sciences and the Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies; Anton Hemerijck is Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Department of Political and Social Sciences; Mohamed Nasr is PhD researcher, Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute (EUI) and assistant lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. 3 We would like to thank Stephan Shakespeare and Jonathan van Parys for stimulating feedback on the paper and generous support for the EUI-YouGov EU Solidarity Survey, as well as Waltraud Schelkle for comments. 540 billion Euros in April. In July, they passed an EU recovery package of 750 billion Euros, a large part of which is grants-based. While some have hailed this as a breakthrough towards more European solidarity, the fraught negotiations also revealed the divisiveness of the issue among government leaders anxious keep their voters happy. But how critical are voters really? When do they support and when do they oppose solidarity with other member states and why? Our analysis is based on the third iteration of the EUI-YouGov survey on Solidarity in Europe. The survey covers 13 EU member states and the UK. It was conducted in April 2020 at the height of the Corona pandemic in Europe. As in earlier (2018, 2019) renditions of the survey, it explores how support for European solidarity varies by issue (solidarity for what? ), instrument (solidarity how? ) and by member state (solidarity by whom for whom? ). In addition, the 2020 survey contains questions on the ‘kind of society’ and the ‘kind of Europe’ citizens wish to live in. The dataset is available for download in Open Access from the EUI research repository through this link. 2. The multi-dimensional political space of (European) solidarity Solidarity as insurance. Organized solidarity provides the members of a community with an insurance mechanism against ‘bad luck’. This allows individual members to accept more risk, thereby enabling the group as a whole to pursue more ambitious goals and to more effectively defend its community cohesion under conditions of adversity. That is the overriding advantage of solidarity. Yet, this advantage only materializes in the long run and before the victims of bad luck are known. Once the veil of ignorance is lifted, and the identity of the victims is revealed, there are also short-run problems (as highlighted in the 2018 report): i. Solidarity is costly. It requires that group members pass some of their own physical, financial, human or organizational resources to other members of the community in order to improve the well-being, or reduce the suffering of these other members. Solidarity involves sharing in a real, that is material sense. In the short-run this may be perceived as a net-loss rather than a beneficial insurance premium for the long-run. ii. Solidarity is uneven. Solidarity involves transfers from better-off to less well-off members of the community. The transfers are zero-sum, at least in the short term. They flow from good risks to bad risks, from givers to takers, from net-contributors to net-beneficiaries with no immediate compensation. This may give rise to perceptions of inequity and unfairness. iii. Solidarity breeds the suspicion of moral hazard. Solidarity unburdens actors from the need to selfprotect against bad risks. This may induce careless or even openly exploitative and fraudulent behaviour that elicits unnecessary bad risks, i.e. risks that could have been avoided through appropriate self-protection, and this further increases the costs of solidarity. Even when victims act with all appropriate care, the sheer suspicion of carelessness can lead to distrust and denial of solidarity. There are solutions to each of these problems but they are ambiguous. To reduce the costs of solidarity, risk should be put on many shoulders. Hence, the risk pool should be relatively large. To avoid the same actors always ending up at the paying-end of the solidarity relation, the risk pool should be 4 Total sample size was 21779 adult respondents (2151 from the UK, 2014 from Denmark, 1005 from Finland, 2033 from France, 2004 from Sweden, 1007 from Greece, 1032 from Hungary, 2021 from Italy, 1013 from Lithuania, 1136 from the Netherlands, 1012 from Poland, 1017 from Romania, 2281 from Spain). Fieldwork was undertaken between 17 and 29 April 2020. The survey was carried out online. All figures are based on data taken from the YouGov survey. heterogeneous so as to increase the chances of turn-taking in solidary giving and taking. Yet, to reduce (the suspicion of) moral hazard, the risk pool should be small and homogeneous. People tend to trust people who are like them because they have more scruples before betraying their own kind. The EU is large and its societies are diverse. This makes European solidarity potentially very rewarding for all, but also very fragile. Does European solidarity exist? European solidarity is real. In the EUI-YouGov survey, we ask respondents on a 0-10 scale whether they think national governments should spend national resources only on their own country and the welfare of their own people or also on other EU countries and other people. We summarize the answers in Figure 1. The figure shows the country averages (left-panel) and maps these averages geographically (rightpanel). It shows two fairly coherent regional clusters: the least resourceful South-Eastern bloc of countries shows more willingness to pay for others, whereas the more resourceful North-Western bloc shows less willingness to pay. Support levels in the North-Western group fall below the European average (represented by the vertical dashed line) whereas the seven South-Eastern countries in our sample are above average. This chimes with the entrenched divisions in the European Council between Northern creditors and Southern debtors, the ‘Frugal Four’ and the ‘Friends of Cohesion’. Note, however, that the European average is fairly high and the spread around the average is fairly compressed. General support for solidarity varies from moderate (an average of 5 for Denmark) to moderately-high (average 7 for Romania). Hence, the overall picture is quite positive. Figure 1 – Support for spending national resources on other EU countries. The left-panel represents country averages with 95% confidence intervals. The right-panel represents the European map, where darker colours express more support for solidarity. The survey question is: “Some people think that the member states of the European Union should mostly spend their resources on their own countries and the welfare of their own people. Other people think that the member states of the European Union should pool their resources and spend them on all countries and all people across the whole of the European Union. What about you – on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means 'Spending resources