How supranational institutions benefit from crises: Member states’ solidarity and the EU's image during the COVID-19 pandemic
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165231156846 |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
How supranational
institutions benefitfrom
crises: Member states’
solidarity and the EU’s
image during the COVID-19
pandemic
Achillefs Papageorgiou
Political Science, University of Helsinki, Finland
Waltteri Immonen
Political Science, University of Turku, Finland
Abstract
In this article, we demonstrate how solidarity between member states can have a posi-
tive effect on the image of the EU, even if the latter’s actions in handling a crisis such as
the COVID-19 pandemic are deemed unsatisfactory. Employing data from a special
Eurobarometer survey enriched with data from the Oxford’s COVID-19 government
response tracker, we show that European citizens who are more satisfied with interstate
solidarity have to a greater extent a positive image of the EU compared to citizens who
are less satisfied. We also show that this effect is further pronounced in the case of EU
citizens who are less satisfied with institutional solidarity, which is the solidarity going
from EU institutions to the member states.
Keywords
COVID-19 pandemic, EU image, Eurobarometer, institutional solidarity, interstate solidarity
Corresponding author:
Achillefs Papageorgiou, Political Science, Unioninkatu 37, Helsinki, 00014, Finland.
Email: Achillefs.Papageorgiou@helsinki.fi
Article
European Union Politics
2023, Vol. 24(3) 601–621
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165231156846
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Introduction
Major crises can serve as turning points that either wreck or reinforce the image of supra-
national institutions. On the 24 January 2020, the first European case of COVID-19 was
reported in France and, by mid-March 2020, the World Health Organization had declared
Europe the epicenter of the pandemic. Solidarity is defined as a “set of feelings of belong-
ing together”(Parijs, 2004: 375) that affects both attitudes and expressions of mutual
cooperation (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017). It plays a key role in holding together
complex democratic polities (Ferrera and Burelli, 2019) and is mentioned in various
European Union (EU) treaties (Reinl, 2022).
Interstate solidarity within the EU, refers to mutual aid and cooperation between
member states. It evolved at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic through the dispatch-
ing of medical supplies and collaboration in treating patients. Interstate solidarity was not
without its challenges (e.g., competition between member states for medical supplies),
but member states soon enough realized the need for collaboration in fighting the pan-
demic. The main reason for this, was that all member states were affected by the pan-
demic and no single EU country could be blamed for causing it (Haverland et al.,
2022). This was not the case in either the Eurozone or the so-called refugee crisis that
affected the member states to different degrees. As previous research has demonstrated,
exogenous shocks, such as pandemics (Katsanidou et al., 2022), are more likely to
increase support for interstate solidarity than home-grown crises (Genschel et al., 2021).
At the supranational level, the EU also adopted a series of measures geared towards
containing the spread of the pandemic and accelerating the recovery process of its member
states, e.g. the Next Generation EU (NGEU) recovery package. After hard negotiations
(Tesche, 2022), all member states agreed to depart from the logic of previous rescue packages,
which typically consisted of government-backed loans under strict conditions of fiscal consoli-
dation (de la Porte and Jensen, 2021). The fact that the NGEU package was financed by a col-
lective borrowing from the markets marked an unprecedented act of solidarity (Christie et al.,
2021). In this study, we refer to this type of solidarity—measures adopted by the EU to assist
its member states—using the term institutional solidarity.
Previous relevant literature has focused on uncovering the factors that trigger solidarity
during a crisis (Haverland et al., 2022; Unger et al., 2023). For example, Haverland et al.
(2022) argued that citizens who experience the health and social effects of the pandemic
(but not the financial effects) are more likely to support expressions of solidarity such as
fiscal transfers. In a recent publication, Unger et al. (2023) showed that self-interest, justice atti-
tudes and general support of European integration explain the public’s support for redistributive
EU measures in Austria, Germany and Italy. In this article, we study the consequences of soli-
darity between countries for the image of an institution of which they are members. More pre-
cisely, we examine the extent to which the image of the EU benefits from perceived solidarity
between its member states in times of a common threat such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In
the Eurobarometer survey, the concept “image of the EU”is captured by the question “In
general does the EU conjure up for you a very positive, fairly positive, neutral, fairly negative
or very negative image?”. The question is also relevant to the concept of Euroscepticism/
Europhilia, which expresses doubt/support towards European integration.
602 European Union Politics 24(3)
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