How the Pandemic Changed Europe

The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine across the European continent has been marred by delays, involving quibbling over contracts with drugmakers, copious red tape, and concerns and confusion about the vaccine from AstraZeneca. With many European countries having administered less than half as many first doses per capita as the United Kingdom or the United States, I wanted to get a sense of exactly where Europe went wrong, and why.

To do so, I called Adam Tooze, a professor of history at Columbia University, who has written books about the financial crash of 2008. We discussed Europe’s vaccine stumbles and a variety of related subjects, including the political fissures on the Continent, how Europeans view the Biden Administration, and the distinct ways that the U.S. and Europe have responded to the two big economic shocks of the past two decades. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Europe has faced a number of challenges in the last dozen or so years, from the financial crisis, to Brexit, to the rise of right-wing populism. Do you see the stumbles around the vaccine rollout as stemming from the same causes as of those earlier problems?

It’s definitely a new challenge, as it is for everyone. If one takes, holistically, the COVID-19 crisis, then one would have to say all of the major states around the world have faced this crisis, and there aren’t very many states other than the handful of familiar East Asian success stories that have done well. But you’re absolutely right that, in Europe, it comes as part of the bubble of complacency that burst in 2008, and they’ve been struggling ever since to reëstablish a more positive narrative. You could argue, in fact, that the bubble of complacency burst in Europe in 2005, when the European constitutional proposals were shot down by the Dutch and the French electorates, and they’ve been struggling ever since to really get on track. Peak complacency in Europe was the early two-thousands, when they had put the euro into effect; they had a constitutional program going; and, on the other side of the Atlantic, you had all the liberal world in indignant outrage about the Bush Administration and the disastrous war in Iraq. So that was peak European complacency, and it’s been downhill ever since.

The current political leadership in Europe came into 2020 thinking they’d found the answer, which was leadership on green issues and the energy transition. And they even felt that, by staying focussed on that through last year, they were demonstrating the kind of strategic leadership that Europe needed to show. And they did put together the Next Generation EU recovery package, which they have reason to be pleased with, because it’s a remarkably complicated political edifice. But, as you say, they’ve now been blindsided by the very badly handled vaccine-policy program.

How do you understand that failure?

It’s important to distinguish three different aspects of Europe’s involvement in the vaccine saga. One is Europe as the world’s leading vaccine producer and exporter, and one of the world’s leading developers of vaccine. Then there’s the question of the E.U. Joint Procurement program. And then there’s the question of the actual rollout on the ground in individual European countries. The rollout has gone varyingly well, depending on where you look. There were some relative success stories; there were some countries that have really lagged. There has been the usual saga of regional and low-level obstructionism of various types, and the embarrassing fact that vaccine uptake in Europe varies by the day of the week—that people don’t go and get vaccinated on Sundays. Several countries or regions shut down vaccination programs over Easter. There is an inexplicable failure to wake up, smell coffee, and realize that this is something that needed to be pressed forward at maximum pace. Germany and France now are vaccinating at not quite the latest record set by the Biden Administration, but at rates that America would have been very pleased with a couple of weeks ago. Once you standardize for population, they’re heading toward the equivalent of about 2.5 million shots a day. So not bad numbers.

But they’re a couple of weeks behind, and we know, in part, this came from the fact that they were slow to actually even license the vaccines. This then moves into the procurement side of the story, which is clearly a story in which they were unlucky and a little bit late to the game. They haggled over price rather than focussing on speeding up production as quickly as they might have, which was all the more important because the most remarkable thing about the vaccine, as far as Europe is concerned, is that, unlike the United States, which has reserved almost its entire production for itself, and unlike the U.K. and Israel, which are huge vaccine importers relative to their needs, the E.U. is a dramatic net exporter of vaccines. Along with China and India, it’s among the biggest exporters. Those three places, between them, account for all of the vaccines which are in global circulation.

Most of the E.U.’s exports have gone to rich countries, including Canada, which, so far, has received substantial quantities of vaccine only from the E.U. So, from Canada’s point of view, to talk about an E.U. vaccine failure would be rather peculiar, because it’s the only place it’s getting substantial supplies from. But the better question is how on earth have the European bureaucrats allowed the story, which is so complex actually and contains light as well as dark sides, to be basically told and spun as a disaster. And that, I think, is the sort of question where you really have to ask yourself about the political competence of the current commission. Their focus on small-scale bitching with the British, the Punch-and-Judy show with AstraZeneca. Whereas what Europe really ought to have been spinning is this story of, along with India and China, being the only truly coöperative, large-scale provider.

It seems like what you’re saying is that a bunch of European countries have had trouble delivering shots at a more local level, and the E.U. screwed up in haggling over price early on when it should have just been willing to pay whatever price it would take. But, at the same time, there’s a utilitarian case that these doses have to go somewhere, and the E.U., by playing the role of exporter, is doing something important.

Yes. Another element of this is that it’s the only group of states in the world where the decisive question as to whether or not you’ll get vaccines is not market power, in the broader sense of the word. They really do have a committee that allocates its fair share of vaccines to Bulgaria, which is incredibly poor. The gap between Bulgaria’s standard of living and that of Germany is far larger than that between any of the states in the United States. And, very early on in 2020, the E.U. recognized that the most ruinous and destructive thing for the Union would be to have that nationalism operating, the sort of thing that we’ve seen from the odious Chancellor [Sebastian] Kurz, of Austria.

Can you explain what happened there?

Basically, what had happened is a bunch of the poor European countries chose not to take up their allocation of Pfizer, because it was more expensive, and decided to wait for AstraZeneca vaccines. So they were waiting, and they ended up drawing the short straw because of the AstraZeneca supply problems. And then a bunch of Pfizer vaccines became available, and the E.U. decided that, on grounds of fairness and with a view to accelerating immunization in those lagged countries, a disproportionate share should be allocated to those countries.

Austria led a group of countries that objected to this, forcing the E.U. to create an even more elaborate allocation mechanism, which ended up with the Austrians getting less than they would have had under the original scheme. So there was some really serious hardball politics played out there. Most observers see this as an example of the kind of rough-and-tumble, and generally discreditable and delegitimizing, politics we might very well have seen if the commission had not taken charge of the whole thing and imposed this collective program. So it is possible that some of the richer countries would have done better if they had done this alone. But the net impact on the fragile construct of the E.U. would probably have been disastrous.

What is the feeling about what Britain has managed to accomplish outside of the E.U.? It is leading the world in doses administered per capita. Does it make the idea of leaving Europe more appealing?

I don’t think it does, because it’s quite clear that the British are the beneficiaries of the liberal export policy of the E.U. If the E.U. wanted to seriously play hardball with the Brits, they would just simply not export the doses. Two-thirds of the doses in British arms came out of the E.U., because the E.U. is a good-faith partner that is not going to use crude politics like that to punish the U.K. The worst moment was, predictably enough, over Ireland, where the E.U. attempted to prevent leakage of E.U. vaccines from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland and then from Northern Ireland to the rest of the U.K., and that involved them quite suddenly establishing a customs boundary within the island of Ireland, which was one of the absolute red lines of the Brexit negotiations. We’ve seen, in recent weeks, that question does, in fact, risk there being violent protest in Northern Ireland. So that’s as severe as those tensions have become, and in Ireland itself that’s indeed a very serious issue. But I don’t think a lot of the Europeans are looking at this and saying, “Oh, if we left the E.U., too, we can have British styles of immunization rates.” That’s kind of a non sequitur.

The two biggest countries in Europe, Germany and France, are having elections this year and next year. There has been some rumbling about France’s troubles with vaccinations only furthering the appeal of Marine Le Pen, who could be President Emmanuel Macron’s challenger. How do you understand what the COVID-19 response has done to politics, particularly in France?

I think that it’s confirmed Macron’s existing unpopularity. I’m not sure that COVID-19 has dramatically shifted the balance. Macron’s Presidency has been unpopular throughout, and the gilets jaunes protests were a vivid demonstration of that. There was deep resentment toward what is perceived to be a government by a bunch of rather arrogant, out-of-touch yuppies, to use a somewhat anachronistic term. It’s difficult to describe Macron as anything else. He’s a preppy, arrogant, aggressive élitist, and that goes down very badly with the French public.

It has very much to do with, on the one hand, Macron’s personality, and, on the other hand, the agenda issues. In other words, peeling back the privileges of public-sector workers, the privileges of French pensioners; forcing through an agenda that is perceived as being pro-business and pro-entrepreneurial rather than the solidaristic, welfare-type policies that enjoy huge popularity with a large percentage of the French population. So it would not have surprised many people if we had been in the situation we’re in right now regardless of the coronavirus, with a view to the opinion polls between Macron and Le Pen.

Do you think something similar about Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel had a sterling reputation in the early stages of the pandemic for her handling of the crisis, which has now been damaged a little bit?

In Germany, the profile of the coronavirus crisis is quite different, in terms of popularity. Merkel entered 2020 on a low—it’s easy to forget that she was already being written off in the beginning of 2020. Then the crisis hits, and you see a fifteen-percentage-point leap in the popularity of the Christian Democratic Union, her party, which pumped Merkel back to the sort of numbers that she’d seen in her prime. She’s not somebody who’s scoring fifty or sixty per cent, but, at her peak, she commands forty-per-cent electoral support, which, in a complex polity like Germany, is a lot. That sustained all the way through the fall, and then you saw this collapse in support for the C.D.U., down to the lows of early this year.

In the German case, there is a much clearer pattern of a temporary high provided by Merkel’s success in managing the crisis and then a return, and this is where the German story might converge with the French story, on a sense of a political disillusionment that was prevailing before the crisis. In France, it’s much further advanced, but in Germany, as well, you’re seeing the decomposition of the twentieth-century party model. In the nineteen-eighties, the two big parties, the C.D.U. and the Social Democratic Party, had seventy-five per cent of the German vote between them, maybe as much as eighty per cent in some elections. And now they wouldn’t even be able to assemble a majority. In the first round of the French elections, the vote will be split between six or seven contenders, and no one will get more than about twenty-five per cent of the vote.

The financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 reshaped politics in a lot of ways. And it seems what you’re describing now, with COVID-19, is not so much a reshaping of politics as a continuation of fragmentation that was already going on. It doesn’t seem like we are seeing the same anti-incumbent sentiment around the world as we did after the financial crisis, either. Do you think that’s accurate?

One obvious answer would be that, in a sense, the incumbents could quite reasonably be blamed for the financial crisis of 2008. It was a product of our social and economic system. It was the liberalization of financial markets, the encouragement of the formation of big banks, the danger of speculation. The crisis wasn’t an event that struck us from the outside; it came from within. And so, unsurprisingly, it had a delegitimizing effect on the people who were reasonably blamed for it. And then, of course, in Europe the mountain of recrimination grew, so it’s not just that the élite brought on the crisis but they then showed themselves to be inept at handling it in the aftermath. The least you can say for the American élite is that it closed ranks and got the job done and put the show back on the road, even if the recovery was painfully slow.

With the coronavirus crisis, there isn’t the same causation. In a sense, what’s happened is that a biological crisis hit societies from the outside. And, yes, it was the easiest thing in the world—even for quite unpopular politicians, somebody like Boris Johnson—to surge into huge popularity, even as he was bungling it, just by appearing jolly in press conferences.

Andrew Cuomo.

Exactly, somebody like Cuomo who, after all, in New York, presided over a disaster. And, nevertheless, because he appeared resolute and manly and articulate and clearheaded, he was able to gain a huge popularity bump. There’s no doubt at all that, yes, for the European political élite, this has been another opportunity botched to come out of this well. And it’s a shock, because it looked as though, with Next Generation EU, they’d actually somehow solved the Rubik’s Cube. And then they find themselves once again failing, in a new way, over the vaccine program.

It’s very common in the United States to say that our politics are much to the right of Europe’s politics. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once said that she and Joe Biden would be in different parties if they were in Europe. But, in the last dozen years, we’ve had two gigantic global crises, and it seems that, in some ways, the Americans dealt with both of them more skillfully, with an unwillingness to go toward austerity in the first case and the gigantic fiscal stimulus we have seen in the past year. Do we have to update how we view the U.S. and the E.U. in terms of their political positioning?

I’m as much as an Atlanticist on the 2008 crisis as you’ll ever meet, in insisting that European banks were deeply involved—but it’s important to emphasize that the crisis hub was America. On COVID-19, the crucial thing to remember is that, as things stand right now, a significantly larger percentage of the American population has died of this disease than Europeans have. It was a public-health disaster of the first order in the United States last year, and there was never a moment in Europe—and this, of course, comes down to the phenomenon of [Donald] Trump—where a government in Europe simply said, “We’re not doing this anymore. We’re giving up on the disease." That’s uniquely American.

And Trump was able to get forty-seven per cent of the vote after he said that.

So that remains. But does the Democratic Party contain genuinely progressive elements? Yes. Does the umbrella of the Democratic Party, because it’s such a broad church, enable very powerful people with lots of money and lots of sway to be joined in a coalition with quite progressive agendas in moments of emergency? Yes. That’s harder for Europeans to do, precisely because A.O.C. is not in the S.P.D. or the C.D.U. So there are moments, and we’re seeing that now in the United States, where the left-wing group within a broad-church center party like the Democrats can exercise leverage in quite a dramatic way. It’s effectively a center-left coalition that’s governing the U.S. right now, with zero coöperation from the right, which means that both Joe Manchin and A.O.C. have pull. So that’s a particular configuration in which that works.

I would also say that the Democratic Party, and competent macroeconomically-minded technocrats, and the very incestuous relationship between business and power in the United States did lead to more expansive policies in 2008 and 2009, and in 2020. Such policies made sense from a technocratic point of view. They are actually good for business, too. And, in 2020, the penny has dropped in Europe, too. Their subsidies for business this year have been very generous indeed.

But, yes, you’re absolutely right, the United States has passed an unbelievably expansive fiscal package since 2020. It also needed to do that, because what America does not have is a robust labor-market administration, a robust system of unemployment insurance, or even, frankly, a robust system of general health insurance. So it needed to do these emergency interventions. In March of last year, and none of us will ever forget it, the United States was seeing just the most terrifying social crisis I’ve certainly ever lived through, where you had six million people losing their jobs in a week, and tens of millions of people losing their jobs in a matter of weeks. Something had to be done. In Europe, none of that happened. No one lost their jobs, because they had ways of keeping people in employment. So their fiscal response didn’t need to be the same sort of panic-driven, emergency-driven measures that the United States had to take.

Let’s think our way back to December of last year. If they had not passed that second stimulus bill, millions of Americans would essentially have found themselves penniless at the beginning of 2021, with no means of support. Millions of people would have faced eviction. None of that’s true in any of the European states, because, at a structural level, there are protections, and, indeed, creative mechanisms for supporting workers in employment relationships. The short-time working system is really a remarkable innovation of the last year. It’s not totally new, because the Germans ran it in 2008 and 2009, but it’s been expanded to all of the E.U. That meant that the social crisis was much, much more moderated in Europe, with far lower levels of insecurity. And that’s where the structural difference comes back into play.

I also think there’s something else going on here, because I don’t think people like A.O.C. had a ton of influence on the stimulus bill. I do think there’s a way in which Democratic Party élites around Biden, who are nobody’s idea of radicals, are to the left of some Europeans on how to think about a fiscal response after a crash.

That’s clearly true, and it’s two phases, right? I’ve just got this big piece coming out about the intellectual biography of Paul Krugman, which speaks directly to this, in the sense that the informing economics around the American élites and the cluster around the Democratic Party is M.I.T.-style New Keynesianism. In a crisis of demand, they may quibble, and they may have issues about debt sustainability, but they don’t fundamentally doubt the need for a large-scale fiscal stimulus. That’s not actually hard for them to wrap their heads around. What we’ve seen going on from there, and this goes to your point about the people immediately around Biden, is that they learned the further lesson tailoring their fiscal-policy response to what they thought was sensible, responsible politics was a mistake. It handed political success to the G.O.P. in 2010, in the midterms. That is not a mistake that they can responsibly repeat this year, because we’ve now seen how toxic G.O.P. politics has become.

From the point of view of setting economics aside, from the point of view, as it were, of the safety of the Republic, the future of American democracy, it’s crucial not to lose those midterms. So there has been a fundamental shift, and people like Janet Yellen are real bellwethers of this. Yellen oddly has a reputation as a left liberal, but, on fiscal policy, she has always been quite hawkish, and now she is underwriting trillion-dollar spending packages. That shift has happened.

It wasn’t there in Europe, as you rightly say, from 2008 to 2010. The German S.P.D., which you would think of as left wing, perhaps, or center-left, at least, held a hard line on austerity. What’s very interesting to see is how they changed last year. You have to credit the fact that, in Europe right now, no one is really seriously interested in talking about austerity. They’re not talking about reimposing the budget rules until 2023 at the absolute earliest. They’ve taken the fiscal brakes off. Germany has run very large deficits and built up substantial debt over the course of 2020 and 2021. They’re proposing a Biden-style, multiyear, large-scale investment program, which might actually, when it’s cashed out, look slightly larger than the Biden investment program. So I would agree, there’s been learning on both sides. The floodgates are really open. In fact, the example of the Biden Administration exercises pressure on the Europeans.

The Democratic Party, for whatever its myriad flaws, has now won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. Which is a pretty impressive for a party in a democracy, while all the center-left parties in Europe, as you said, are giving way to the Greens and other groupings. Is there some lesson that you think the center-left in Europe should be taking from the Democratic Party, or is this just more a function of America having a two-party system?

It really is an effect of the constitutional structure. It’s a two-party system, and also the right wing in the United States has bunkered itself into a position where it’s just simply not obvious what their majoritarian offer is. It’s not clear how the G.O.P. conceives of itself at this moment as a majoritarian party. And that’s kind of terrifying, because they obviously think they can win, and they’re not going to win by winning majorities. Many social scientists have been saying for a long time that the Democratic coalition, in its capaciousness, stretching from monied white élites to minorities, including a preponderance of women and educated people, is the majority of the future. But, as we also know, the American Constitution provides ample opportunities to prevent that majority from ruling, and that is also part of the American story. I don’t think anyone in Europe looks at America and goes, “Oh, my God, I wish we could be the Democrats.” Because that would imply winning elections and then not holding power, and ending up with the other people rigging the judicial system to the point where, even if you do hold power, you can’t actually exercise it. There’s very little about the American political system, I think, that anyone outside of America would envy.

Not even in America.

Exactly. I see the current generation of Democrats as basically wracking their brains over how they jump the fence. Their majority is so large that it overcomes this massive set of constitutional obstacles to actually becoming the de-facto government of the United States, which is what it should clearly be. But I do take your point. I grew up in West Germany in the seventies and eighties, and my childhood was shaped by the social-liberal coalition, the S.P.D. with the liberal party. That was, it seemed then, a kind of narrow fifty-two, fifty-three majority of German society forever. And then the liberals flipped over foreign policy, Cold War issues, into the C.D.U. camp, and then the left was decomposed into not one or two but three camps. Green, S.P.D., and Die Linke, the far-left party. And that captures German society better than the Democratic Party does. It responds to A.O.C.’s comment, but it makes it very difficult for them to construct the sort of coalition that we’re seeing in power in the United States right now.