EU resilience in times of COVID? Polity maintenance, public support, and solidarity

Abstract

This introduction presents the theoretical framework, aims, and summary of this special issue. We want to explain the European Union’s (EU) response to the COVID crisis from a ‘polity perspective’ (Kriesi 2021; Ferrera 2005). We conceptualize the EU as a compound ‘experimental’ polity which develops along three dimensions: binding (capacity building and sovereignty), bounding (bordering), and bonding (solidarity and loyalty). We structure the contributions around the following themes: polity building and polity maintenance (how did COVID affect policymaking in the EU?); reactions to polity building: public support, populism, and emergency politics (did the European public perceive emergency politics as illegitimate? did the EU’s policy response spur populism?); and solidarity and bonding (to what extent did the crisis stimulate cross-national solidarity?). We show that, overall, the EU weathered the COVID storm better than expected for a potentially fragile multilevel polity. The crisis triggered unprecedented institutional innovation, underpinned by pan-European solidarity, and EU citizens did not backlash against emergency politics.