The EU’s anxious debate over the bloc’s economic response to the coronavirus pandemic is at heart about the nature and competing visions of the union.
It is a perennial question found lurking in the background of all EU negotiations over long-term budgets, not least the most recent inconclusive and toxic talks in which north was pitted against south.
But it comes now at a time of dangerously raw emotional upheaval when popular opinions on the worth of institutions are peculiarly malleable.
The question being posed by events is whether there is enough of a sense of kinship among EU citizens for national governments to back the most radical of the burden-sharing plans proposed to rebuild the eurozone economy as one. And if not, can the Italians, in particular, be convinced of the added value of the union?
For all the inevitable prevarication, ill-concealed by a smokescreen of Eurojargon and acronyms, we are approaching what Emmanuel Macron has described as a moment of truth.
The European economy is in a slow-motion car crash with the coronavirus. Initial impact has been made. The full scale of the damage will not be clear for months to come.
There will be a vast number of deaths. There will also be a savage economic recession. Analysts predict a near doubling of unemployment in the EU, with whole swathes of industry collapsing.
The depth of the crash and its repercussions in the political sphere will be decided to a significant degree by the nature and range of spending in the immediate months and years. That will involve huge debt, and with that comes the question of where liability for it lies and who controls how the money is spent.
If governments try to come out of this crisis through national borrowing alone, it is possible, even probable, that the debt accrued by the least productive economies will come to be seen as unsustainable by the markets. Economies could slide into despair, risking further joblessness, hunger, destitution.
Some countries might seek to restrict their borrowing for fear of such an outcome, but they risk their economies shrivelling in relation to their EU neighbours.
In either scenario, the EU would be in a dangerous predicament in which cries of betrayal would be strongly heard as some stride out of the pit of the crisis for which all European countries are equally blameless.
The Italian answer to this has been the so-called coronabonds under which eurozone countries would, from now, commonly raise debt on the markets and be jointly liable.
That concept goes some way to presuming there is an EU community of people in support of a transfer union, where the richest help pay the way for the poorest and the countries more strongly positioned in this crisis sacrifice for the weakest.
“Europe has to come up with an answer,” the Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, demanded.
The Netherlands, Austria, Finland and Germany are opposed to the concept of coronabonds. They raise the issue of moral hazard in that such a policy would seemingly punish those countries that had saved for a rainy day, and say it could risk further fiscal irresponsibility.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has raised the issue of democratic accountability by suggesting there is not sufficient political union among the 27 for such shared debt. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, well aware that the forces in support of “Nexit” – led by characters such as the Eurosceptic politician Thierry Baudet – could make mischief, has said such bonds would be in breach of the EU treaties.
There are ways out of this dilemma, as there have been in the past. Should Italy stop presenting agreement on coronabonds as a test of solidarity, the commission has suggested a €300bn recovery fund in the 2021-27 budget. The commission would also borrow €320bn from the capital markets for targeted spending.
Perhaps Italian and Spanish voters will regard this as satisfactory. Their leaders have, however, set a high bar for the EU, which it is not at all clear it is able to meet.
