DCU Conflict Institute

Between a breeze and a storm of change: EU collective securitisation of COVID-19

By Ricardo Pereira, DCU Conflict Institute

During the 54th UACES annual conference in Trento, the paper about the collective securitisation process of COVID-19 carried out by the European Union (EU) was discussed under the panel The EU as a Global Health Actor – Between Securitisation and Cooperation organised by the EUHealthGov network. The paper aimed to understand how the Union in March 2020 became empowered by the member states to assume the role of coordinator of the EU response against the pandemic and its consequences across social, economic, and health sectors by asking How the EU discourse, particularly the Commission, did reflect the collective securitisation of COVID-19, between 2020 and September 2021. As argued by the literature in EU Health law and policy, the shared competence of the EU on health was unclear at the time the pandemic emerged. The pandemic instigated the debate about the competence of the EU on health as stated by the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, as well as by the Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides.

The ongoing research has already looked at 52 speeches from the Commission between 2020 and 2021 using discourse analysis. It is possible to identify three paths of securitisation: threat construction; security construction; and announcement of measures. The first relates the EU discourse regarding COVID-19 as a threat to referent objects such as EU citizens, EU values, and EU institutions, while the second describes the call of the Union for a unified front against the pandemic. The third path refers to the implementation of measures. These three paths should be seen as interdependent and overlapping, once the analysed speeches presented the EU’s position as a security actor facing a multidimensional threat such as the COVID-19 pandemic through (extra)ordinary measures.

The present analysis took the work of Bengtsson and Rhinard (2019) about the collective securitisation of health in the EU as the initial status quo to analyse the evolution of the Union’s response to the pandemic. Following the model of collective securitisation of Sperling and Webber (2019), the research aims to analyse how the organisation constructed COVID-19 as a threat; how the Union developed its role as a health security actor capable of responding in a coordinated and cooperative approach to such a threat; and understand the recursive interaction between EU institutions that led to the implementation and possible routinisation of measures into new practices, agendas, and vocabulary.

In this vein, the research has tracked four periods of securitisation carried out by the EU already. The first comprises the period between February and March 2020. During this time, COVID-19 was described as a test of EU core values of cooperation and solidarity. The Commission discourse constructed COVID-19 as a threat by defining the pandemic as a global health crisis, following the international community discourse of organisations such as WHO and NATO. Furthermore, the EU called for attention to pandemic consequences for the EU as an institution and its values by highlighting the impact that a sanitary nationalist approach could have. 

At the same time, the Commission called for a central response to the pandemic by appealing to a European memoir of cooperation and coordination. Historical memories such as the reconstruction of Europe after World War II were used to develop a sentiment of unity across member states. Consequently, this move would result in the beginning of the EU’s empowerment to respond to the pandemic with one voice, despite existing divergences across time such as in the cases of Poland and Hungary. The joint procurement of personal protective equipment based on a stockpile under rescEU, as well as the development of financial mechanisms such as green lanes, and the activation of the general escape clause, are some examples of this move.

The second period between April and September 2020 could be named as the Marshall Plan for post-COVID-19. Despite the decrease in infections and deaths, concern regarding damage caused in the economic and financial sectors led the Commission to describe the pandemic event as “the largest recession in 100 years”. The COVID-19 pandemic should be seen this way as a multidimensional event. It has not just impacted people’s health, but also the social and economic spheres around the globe. 

The Commission’s construction of COVID-19 as a multidimensional threat, relying on the interdependence between health, economic, social, and environmental sectors, would create a space for the discussion about the competence of the EU on health. In the summer of 2020 mechanisms such as SURE aimed to support jobs across the Union, also, during this time the draft for a European BARDA started. 

During the third period, the number of infections and deaths rose and the threat discourse was back in the daily EU vocabulary. The role of the EU as an actor in the fight against the pandemic was established and its agenda was focused on strengthening the public health structure of the Union by empowering institutions such as ECDC and EMA, as well as implementing a strategy for vaccination across the EU territory at the end of the year.

During 2021, the fourth and last period of analysis, the Commission framed COVID-19 variants as the new exceptionality of the pandemic. The international role of the EU was coined by the Commission as “the pharmacy of the world” due to its move from scarcity at the beginning of the crisis to one of the main exporters of protective equipment and vaccines in the world. 

In this regard, the EU’s role in the African continent should be also underlined with the construction of vaccine factories, although critique can be addressed to the process of how it was designed. There has not been effective investment in logistical processes to deliver these vaccines to remote populations, and the know-how has not been shared with the communities where these factories are located. At the EU level, extraordinary measures of surveillance were implemented through the use of the digital certificate or the creation of Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA).

Some preliminary conclusions can be highlighted. Regarding the threat construction, the characterisation suis generis by the EU of COVID-19 as a threat through the classification of a global health crisis. As a securitising actor, the EU showed a more stable process of conducting the process. In the words of Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen, the EU member states during the pandemic agreed to empower the Union to respond to the pandemic under three keywords: coordination, cooperation, and solidarity. 

Moreover, the pandemic represents a window of opportunity to discuss the competence of health in the EU as well as new approaches to public health in the Union. To conclude, the next steps of this research will contemplate, empirically, the analysis of the following years of the EU4Health programme. The research aims to assess if measures developed to respond to COVID-19 were routinised on the Union structure. Furthermore, theoretically, the present research pretends to look for representations of security integration in the health domain, arguing this way for the utility of collective securitisation for security and integration studies.

This blog originally appeared on the website of the EU Health Governance Network.