Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

For the EU, it marked a moment of relaunch.39 Since the climax of the eurozone crisis in 2012, the lack of progress on deeper integration had been demoralizing. Merkel had refused to put Germany’s weight behind Macron’s initiatives. Now suddenly the EU had lurched forward. The unpopular institutional appendices bequeathed by the years of crisis had been sidelined—notably the European Stability Mechanism. Instead, with the UK out of the picture, the powerful mainly Western European members of the euro area had asserted themselves within the EU as a whole. They had established the possibility of EU debt, and on that basis they had given Brussels a meaningful countercyclical fiscal capacity. Skeptics would insist that it was no more than a provisional response to an emergency. Whether any of it would become permanent was an open question, but the precedent had been established. For once, undeniably, the EU had scored a political success.