The flop of vaccines in Europe is not the fault of an incompetent official, as Roberto Burioni is repeating on TV. But it is the result of a political weakness that could not have had any other outcome. And that tells the incompleteness of the Union, the limit of a pact governance, its incurable decline in autonomy in bureaucracy. With the risk now of returning to water sovereignty, which also seemed to dry up. Because it is easy to say that global problems need global answers, if you then discover that an efficient statehood, such as Great Britain or Israel, gives points to a giant of twenty-seven capitals. Without a single big pharma capable of producing vaccines. And without the strength to beat your fists on the table and say: here there is no intellectual property that holds, we are facing a catastrophe of the human species and everyone has the right to use the research of only one.
We can continue to celebrate the myth of European unity in the face of the tragedy of the pandemic and pretend not to see what has happened. Or we can admit that the political convergence of the chancelleries was not enough to prevent the mistakes committed for two decades with the big techs from being replicated with the big pharma. That industrial policy has renounced promoting and developing, and fiscal policy has renounced taxing and regulating.
Europe has discouraged the market and disarmed sovereignty, letting vaccine negotiator Sandra Gallina slalom through the constraints imposed by 27 countries. Who pressed to extend the audience of producers, buy vaccines at the lowest price and attribute the costs of any research failure to pharmaceutical companies. The opposite of the decision-making autonomy of the American and British authorities, who have treated with wide discretion, being able to choose one or more contractors and pay higher prices in order to save lives, thus receiving the vials earlier, and forgoing scientific verification procedures abstractly coherent, but implausible in the face of the need to act quickly. The result is 28 per cent of immunizations across the English Channel, 22 per cent across the Atlantic and only 6 per cent in the Old Continent.
Europe has ruled out the price lever. To prevent someone from paying more, by skipping the line. He forgot that in one way or another there is always someone who skips the line. He thought of distributing the doses as the Soviet Union would, but without being the Soviet Union. Because health centralism, founded on the monopoly of the public hand, has not turned out to be a strong policy, but an elephantine and inefficient organization. When Biden summoned patent holders to the bedside of a sick America, his commitments to Brussels are downgraded to out-of-date promises, with no consequences for defaulters.
Europe, the daughter of a liberal, technocratic and juridical inspiration, has exhibited all the limits of an incomplete sovereignty. Net of the best intentions of the chancelleries, it has shown its difficulty in perceiving itself as a power, at a time when geopolitics returns to being a confrontation between powers with critical mass. And here seems to have confirmation of the censorship that Carl Schmitt moved almost a century ago to liberal thought: that of disregarding the category of sovereignty, since his idea of the order and the state is headless. It always goes back to a fundamental norm, but never to an ultimate decision maker.
Without a decision-maker, a pandemic cannot be faced and won today, an environmental crisis tomorrow, or a military challenge. Without a decision maker, you are dependent on the procedures of a regulatory body, the European Medicines Agency, which the nation states overtake. The Americans give the okay to AstraZeneca’s serum a month in advance, the British follow them thanks to the trials organized in parallel, Hungary clears customs any vaccine that has already been administered to at least one million people. Brussels struggles between the stakes of the regulatory bodies. Showing once again that his compass is not sovereignty but bureaucracy. And helplessly witnesses the evidence that, in the face of an emergency, each producer favors his government.
For this reason the flop is consubstantial with the intergovernmental structure of European sovereignty. The coming months will be the last chance to question it, to ensure that it is not reduced to the power to make laws, but evolves into the power to make the best decisions for the well-being of citizens. The experience of over a decade of flexible and non-binding cooperation between Member States demonstrates its failure in the face of the urgency and asymmetrical effects of major crises. “We need a Europe for all that is essential, for all that nations cannot do”, said Draghi, in the words of Jean Monnet, receiving an honorary degree two years ago from the University of Bologna. He implied the same appeal in his first speech to the European Council, censoring the performance of the vaccination strategy.
It does not mean dreaming of an unattainable federal union, but dividing sovereignty – as Sergio Fabbrini suggested a few years ago in his book “Splitting” – between a Europe that has the political power to decide on major strategic issues and the autonomy of nations in all that remains. Either you take this shot, or you succumb to the crisis, giving up on understanding the reasons. And continuing to tell them with the accusations of an eccentric virologist to a reserved technocrat. Which has the sole fault of having obeyed a technically flawless system of rules. But good for finishing last.
–
