She was thinking about the bigger strategic question of the European economies and of how such public health crises might be managed in the future, through joint surveillance, countermeasures, and vaccine development. This functionalist logic, the unfashionable common sense of the globalization era, was Merkel’s lodestar.32 It was not a matter of faith or idealistic commitment to liberal internationalism. It was simply realistic. In a world of complex new challenges, European cooperation was more urgent than ever. The centrifugal tendencies amplified by 2020 had to be stopped. Platitudes of
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