Will Coronavirus Kill the EU?

While managing the COVID-19 outbreak in the short-term, countries around the world are looking ahead.

The Hemicycle of the European Parliament in Strasbourg during a plenary session in 2014. (photo: Diliff)

World leaders have been singular in their focus these past weeks; COVID-19, the novel coronavirus outbreak from Wuhan, China, has drawn every eye, every inch of newsprint. Scientific experts have long been predicting such a crisis, and even knew it was brewing in the poorly-regulated live-animal markets of China.

Now that it has spread around the world, leaders of each country afflicted by the virus have stepped-up efforts, to varying degree of effectiveness and success, to mitigate the worst of the damage.

COVID-19 is a threat to world-health, though perhaps not an unprecedented one. It is the economic aftermath that might be unprecedented, not only on a global and local scale, but at the geopolitical and social level as well.

That it will reshape attitudes about political issues such as immigration, globalization, and global politics is only beginning to be understood by the world’s political and religious leaders.

Just how much it might change attitudes and policies depends largely on what takes place over the next 60-days.

Some of the fall-out might not be good for the European Union and the world leaders who run it. It was incumbent of the leaders of the EU to…