National Review
Dishonored European Union, Brexit Vindicated in Vaccine Blocking Dispute
Since the coronavirus arrived in Europe, the European Commission has been throwing gasoline throughout its reputation. At the end of last week, the bureaucrats who run the Commission finally lit the metaphorical match and involved the whole European project in the fire of their own incompetence. For the past five years, the British and Irish governments have been at each other’s throats because of Brexit. The same is true for Leavers and Remainers within the UK itself. The militant wings of Protestant unionism and Catholic separatism in Northern Ireland, meanwhile, have literally been at war for most of the past century. And yet, within a few hours on Friday, the European Union has managed to bring all these factions together in opposition to itself. The Commission (the executive branch of the European Union) is in a panic over how far the EU has lagged both in the UK and the United States in the race to vaccinate the public. Since the EU did not make any requests for the vaccine from suppliers until three months after the British government, Europeans are now watching millions of doses of vaccines manufactured in Europe being sent via the channel to Britain. Pfizer and AstraZeneca, both manufacturing large quantities of the vaccine in Europe, are contractually obliged to fulfill their commitments to the Government of Her Majesty before prioritizing EU contracts, which were acquired much later. Ironically, the European Union appears to be “at the end of the line”. On Friday, the Commission announced its plans to remedy this situation through export controls. Restrictions would be imposed on the ability of Pfizer and AstraZeneca to send vaccines to countries outside the EU. To retroactively violate the principle of the free contract in this way would be bad enough in normal times. But in the current circumstances, such a plan is simply unfair. The Commission was essentially threatening the UK with a vaccine blockade at a time when hundreds of vulnerable Britons are dying of COVID-19 every day. And it gets worse. In order to put its export controls into practice, the EU was planning to trigger Article 16 of its Withdrawal Agreement with the United Kingdom. Article 16 is a kind of emergency glass breaker measure that belongs to Northern Ireland. This would allow the EU to create a customs infrastructure at the Irish border (the only land border between the UK and the EU) in the event of an extreme emergency. The Commission clearly thought of its own inability to obtain sufficient doses of the vaccine as such, because it signaled its intention to impose the export controls in question across the Irish border. To understand the depravity of this movement, it is necessary to really assess the political use of the Irish border by the EU during the Brexit negotiations, which have consumed half the last decade. EU negotiators have repeatedly proclaimed that demanding regulatory controls at the Irish border would be an act of supreme irresponsibility. This would jeopardize hard-won peace in Ireland, pushing the issue of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status back to the forefront of the Irish mind, inciting and persuading dormant terrorists to return to activity in the process. The EU used the widespread popularity of the open border in Ireland to push for the UK’s perpetual submission to the EU’s regulatory and customs regime. Since Northern Ireland had to remain in regulatory alignment with the Republic of Ireland (an EU member state) in order to guarantee peace, and since Northern Ireland is in the United Kingdom, the entire United Kingdom has had to remain within the EU regulatory framework after leaving all institutions that write the regulations. This syllogism is so fatally flawed that not even the EU itself really believed, as I wrote here. It was a cynical political game used in an attempt to bureaucratically annex the entire UK first and then, when that failed, only Northern Ireland. No invading armies, just invasive regulations: a milder type of tyranny. The fact that the EU priestly caste thought of violating the sacred phrase “peace on the island of Ireland” last week at the first sign of political difficulty is a welcome development. This exposed the great political football game that they have been playing against that battered country for years and that, please God, they will never be able to play again. Fortunately, as soon as the Commission’s ossified apparatchiks announced their planned export controls on Friday, the entire civilized world fell on them like a ton of under-regulated bricks. The respective prime ministers of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland immediately alerted the Commission to their fury, while Arlene Foster, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, called the plan “an act of aggression”. Tony Blair, a former prime minister and one of Brexit’s most ardent opponents, called the EU’s behavior “very foolish”, and the International Chamber of Commerce actually wrote a letter to EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen , begging her to reconsider and explaining the multiple catastrophes that can arise from a disruption in global vaccine supply chains. Spectator has compiled a list of tweets from the European Union’s most expressive supporters, condemning the Commission’s actions in the harshest terms. The compilation is surprising to read, though perhaps not as surprising as this critical editorial from The Observer, which until then was a pro-EU article. The license vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum won 52-48 percent. If the referendum were held again today, the victory license margin would likely expand considerably. On Saturday, the Commission had backed down, calling its original plan a “gross error”. Britain’s trade secretary, Liz Truss, told the BBC that Boris Johnson’s government had “European Union guarantees that these contracts will not be interrupted”. She went on to say, “We are pleased that the EU has admitted invoking Article 16.. . because the border in Ireland was a mistake and now they are not doing that. . . . It is vital that we keep borders open and resist vaccine nationalism and resist protectionism ”. It is worth considering for a moment how the European Union came to such an obviously dire decision in the first place. At each stage of the EU’s response to COVID, we see not only individual incompetence (although there is a lot of it), but the consequences of a technocratic, centralizing and managerial ideology, which has manifested itself in order to expose the endemic deficiencies of the entire European project. When the coronavirus first appeared in the western world last spring, the Commission allowed four EU member states – Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands – to conduct negotiations with potential suppliers. In June, however, Von der Leyen and his health commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, changed their minds about this approach. Their reasons were not medical, scientific, or even logistical. They were politicians. Von der Leyen wanted to involve all 27 EU member states in centralized vaccine procurement negotiations to demonstrate the unity and solidarity of the EU’s single market. These negotiations turned out to be heavy and still. The EU AstraZeneca contract negotiated by the German, French, Italian and Dutch delegations was ready to be signed in June. Von der Leyen’s ideological turnaround in negotiating tactics delayed signing until August. During the intervening three months, AstraZeneca was busy preparing to deliver tens of millions of doses to the door at 10 Downing Street. Vulnerable Europeans are now more than six feet tall because Von der Leyen and his Euro-Federalist colleagues were clinging to a grand vision of uprooted Belgians, Greeks and Lithuanians walking hand in hand in a post-COVID era singing “We Are the World “. The whole case for the EU was that the pale global benevolence of a senescent Bonapartist technocracy would be of greater benefit to the human race than the liberal democratic nation-state. But the agile regulatory freedom of a post-Brexit UK and the contrasting sclerosis of the emerging European superstate has brought about a state of affairs in which thousands of vulnerable people are alive in Britain who would be dead if they lived on the continent. The EU’s “founding fathers” – men like Altiero Spinelli and Jean Monnet, who sought to rescue the world from democracy – would have been shocked. The Commission has tried to transfer the blame for vaccination failures in Europe to the pharmaceutical companies themselves. Von der Leyen pointed the finger last week at the technical problems that AstraZeneca had with the vaccine’s performance at its European production facilities. “Companies must deliver,” she said. When asked about Von der Leyen’s complaints during an interview with the Italian newspaper La Republica, AstraZeneca’s CEO, Pascal Soriot, was somewhat perplexed. He noted that the UK, the USA and Australia faced similar problems with income. But “the UK contract was signed three months before the EU contract,” he said, “so, with the UK, we had another three months to fix all the flaws we experienced.” In other words, the European Union can only blame itself. Von der Leyen’s decision to pause Europe’s response to COVID for three whole months to turn it into a cosmetic test post on the road to the United States of Europe is what is costing Europeans daily. The EU’s disastrous response to COVID and its reckless but short-lived flirtation with a medical block should perhaps be seen as a providential warning to those of us who have retreated in horror at the populist turn in American politics. The European Union is an experience of anti-populism. Its institutions were conceived and built to isolate those who hold political power from the will of the popular majorities, as much as possible in the modern world. If populism were the source of our current discontent, we should expect the EU to look like a bright city on a hill. But of course, these people have no idea what the hell they are doing. Ultimately, there is simply no major political issue in today’s world to which the European Union is the answer.