The EU Institutional Architecture in the Covid‐19 Response: Coordinative Europeanization in Times of Permanent Emergency

In this article we explore the EU’s reaction to the Covid-19 crisis and we argue that a new mode of Europeanization that can be best described as coordinative Europeanization has emerged. Moving from ‘coercive Europeanization’ (Leontitsis and Ladi, 2018) that had characterised the Eurozone crisis with conditionality and monitoring of EU member states by EU institutions, coordinative Europeanization is defined as a bottom-up process where the member states are actively involved in the policy-making process early on in order to guarantee the highest level of implementation possible. It is a pragmatic approach to Europeanization and the channels of member states’ involvement are often informal and online. The Commission has played a leading role and has offered innovative tools in this process. The new ‘permanent’ state of emergency caused by the Covid-19 crisis brought to the EU a realisation of what interdependence really means and the need to coordinate in order to find policy solutions even if they are just ‘good enough’. The article is organised in four sections. First, we analyse how Covid-19 revealed that the state of emergency in the EU could be more permanent than temporary, how the EU institutions reacted and how the coordinative mode of Europeanization emerged. In the next two sections we go deeper by analysing two key EU policy responses: the Recovery and Resilience Facility and the coordination of freedom of movement within the EU despite Covid-19 restrictions. These two policy areas were selected to compare and contrast two responses that followed a different pace but where the coordination between member states and institutions has been central for their design and remains central for their successful implementation. The concluding section summarises our findings and offers some ideas for further avenues for research.