January to March: Vaccinating Europe

The three European Council meetings which are discussed in these Notes covered a wide range of subjects and included sessions with the new US president and NATO's secretary general. They were nevertheless dominated by the pandemic and more particularly by the efforts of the EU and its member states to vaccinate their citizens as rapidly as possible. It was not an easy task and the EU rollout during the first three months of 2021 was significantly slower than that of either the UK or the US. There were many explanations, including the European Commission's failure to invest enough money early enough, inefficiencies at member state level and the production difficulties of the manufacturers in general and of AstraZeneca in particular. As the months have passed, many if not most of these difficulties seem, however, to be less consequential than they did at the time. The Commission and most of the member states learned from and made good their early failures and, AstraZeneca apart, BioNTech and the other manufacturers succeeded in delivering even more vaccines than they had promised to do. These improvements were already beginning to make themselves felt before the end of the first quarter. They were not widely acknowledged however, either inside or outside the political class. Partly because good news is always slow to drive out bad news, but still more because the debate about the vaccination rollout was driven by forces which were only loosely connected with the pandemic, including in particular the German-German debate in an election year, the British government's need to find and proclaim a post-Brexit success and the blunders of the European Commission's president. The politics of the rollout are indeed as interesting as, if not more interesting than the objective challenges which policymakers grappled with. Above all because the process highlighted once again the significance of the European Council. Despite strong countervailing pressures in the media, which continued to propagate the story of 'Europe's failure' and widespread dislike of von der Leyen's management style, the European Council maintained its commitment to an EU-wide rollout strategy and endorsed a string of initiatives, including an EU certificate, which aimed to defend the Union against the corrosive effects of the pandemic. The non-Covid business which the European Council addressed between January and March may have been overshadowed by the pandemic but it was far from unimportant, and the debates which it provoked anticipated both the concerns and the language of European Council discussions later in the year about the EU's role in a rapidly changing world order. The sessions with Jens Stoltenberg and Joe Biden in February and March respectively were reassuring rather than dramatic, but it was already apparent, particularly in the debate before and during the February meeting, that the lines between 'Atlanticists' and 'Europeans' have shifted significantly and that the buzz words of the emerging EU consensus – 'resilience', 'the reduction of dependencies' and 'a European capacity for autonomous action' – were well on the way to becoming common currency.