Minding the Gaps: Solidaristic Transfers and Burden-Sharing in the European Union and its Member States’ Pandemic Response

The paper offers a
hitherto-lacking comprehensive appraisal of solidaristic transfers by European
Union Member States (EUMS) during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. These
transfers include bilateral assistance, collective burden-sharing on the EU
level, and even external EU aid. The article uses data on inter-EUMS solidarity
actions collected by European Solidarity Tracker (EST), a widely referenced
dataset on pandemic-related actions of solidarity. It cleans this data to
address its deficiencies, including by filtering out symbolic and tokenistic
actions, to focus on instances of truly meaningful assistance between EUMS. The
EST is complemented by two further sets of data: an overview of EU-level
measures, as examples of institutionalized and institutionally enabled forms of
solidarity; and, given the global connectedness of the EU, data on pandemic
assistance to developing countries. Based on this broad understanding of
solidaristic transfers, the EU’s response is found to have been significant but
insufficient overall to fill the gaps in pandemic response. The gaps identified
have inevitably fed into the pandemic, contributing to permissive conditions
for its resurgence. EU-level measures mattered, but practical manifestations of
bilateral solidarity between EUMS have been haphazard. Furthermore, while the
EU increased its external health and other development aid considerably during
2020, this by no means made for a well-allocated or adequately resourced
pandemic response globally.<b> </b><b></b>