The EU is a divided house

What does 2021 hold for the European Union? At the end of 2020 Brussels has gone out of its way to engage in unity-signalling, announcing that all 27 members will begin vaccination on the same day and feigning a united front in the face of the UK’s new strain of coronavirus. But in truth its 27 member states are confronted by serious structural divisions in three fundamental areas: economics, culture, defence.

Deep economic divisions surfaced in the EU after the 2008 financial crash along a north-south axis. The split between the richer ‘frugal’ northern economies and the ‘profligate’ southerners was starkest in 2012-13 over Brussels’ treatment of Greece. Papered over at the time, the structural economic weaknesses of the so-called ‘Club Med’ of Greece, Spain, Italy, even France, erupted again with coronavirus. Financing economic protection against the pandemic and re-launching individual economies was feasible for the northern states, but fiscally perilous for the southerners, who were among the most indebted countries in the developed world.