Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse, Free University of Berlin

Has the coronavirus pandemic made the EU’s neighbourhood more resilient? We would argue that it is the other way around: resilience has helped the European neighbourhood cope with the pandemic. Limited statehood and order contestations, which characterise these countries, should undermine their capacity to fight the pandemic and cope with its economic consequences. Yet, the numbers tell a different story. Ukraine is the sad leader of the eastern neighbourhood countries with more than 332,000 coronavirus cases. Georgia, in contrast, features not even a tenth of the cases (less than 23,000).

How do we account for this variation? Based on our research, we would expect that social trust, legitimacy, and the design of health institutions have mitigated the negative effects of limited statehood and order contestations on the capacity of eastern neighbourhood countries to cope with the pandemic. The more citizens trust each other and bestow legitimacy unto their governments, the more health governance can be effective and cope with pandemics. The same holds true for fair and transparent health institutions, such as hospitals or local health authorities.

Moussa Bourekba, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs

Despite the initial alarming headlines about the ravages of the pandemic in Africa and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (“a catastrophe waiting to happen”), several countries from these regions have successfully contained the pandemic’s first wave in the spring and summer of 2020.

In the MENA region, governments were quick to anticipate the spread of the new coronavirus through border closures, control of internal displacements, and lockdown of cities and economic activities. Morocco and Tunisia were even praised internationally for their resilience to the virus.

While these measures were key to stemming the tide of the global pandemic, they also paved the way for harsher restrictions on civil liberties such as the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly. The crackdown on Algerian protesters, the prosecution of over 90,000 Moroccans for breaking the “state of health emergency,” the new laws adopted in Egypt and Turkey to silence journalists and in Israel to curb anti-government demonstrations are only few instances of that dynamic.

In times characterised by a global acceptance of repressive responses to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, these authoritarian drifts are more than concerning. More than the pandemic itself, authoritarian rule contributes to weakening the social fabric in these countries. The (un)intended consequences of anti-coronavirus measures will put societal resilience to a test in the coming months when a second wave might hit these regions.

Agnieszka Legucka and Maria Piechowska, Polish Institute of International Affairs

The coronavirus outbreak was a crash test for Europe’s eastern neighbourhood. The pandemic has shown not only the weakness of the region’s healthcare systems but also its politicians’ lack of governing skills and inability to manage the crisis. People in Belarus have lost trust in President Alexander Lukashenko, whose obstruction during the pandemic has turned to deep economic and social problems, in effect weakening societal resilience.

In Ukraine, local administrations and oligarchs took advantage of the chaotic decisionmaking of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his administration by trying to fight the crisis on their own. The result has been the ruling party’s loss in local elections that took place on October 25, 2020.

In Georgia, the initial success in dealing with the pandemic has changed with the second wave of infections. The outbreak of armed conflict in Nagorny Karabakh has both overshadowed the tragic coronavirus statistics in Armenia and Azerbaijan and worsened the situation among people in the disputed territory.

The numbers of new coronavirus cases in Ukraine and other eastern countries are not shocking compared to the rest of Europe, but the coming months will be a real test for the governments there, which will face not only the spread of infections but also a painful economic crisis.

Amichai Magen, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya

The coronavirus pandemic sweeping across the globe has already exacted a high toll in terms of human lives and an even higher one in terms of human anxiety, economic misery, domestic political dysfunction, and a further shift in geopolitical power away from liberal democracy and towards authoritarianism.

In all these dimensions, the pandemic is not a standalone force. A recent study highlighted by the Economist, for example, reveals that the arrival of mobile internet in parts of the world where it did not previously exist leads to a drop in public trust in governments. When citizens go online, faith in governments decline. The phenomena—which appears to be universal—is not caused by the coronavirus pandemic, of course, but it may have far-reaching implications for the ability of connected societies to manage public health and other crises.

The more general point here is that the pandemic is now interacting in complex and unpredictable ways with pre-existing and emerging cultural, economic, and technological trends. In doing so, it exposes underlying state vulnerabilities, exacerbates social and ethnic fissures, and corrodes some of the most important advances achieved by the liberal international order, notably the spectacular fall in global rates of extreme poverty seen over the past three decades.

It is difficult to see, therefore, how the coronavirus pandemic could possibly enhance the resilience of states or societies in the EU’s eastern and southern neighbourhoods.

What I want to draw the readers’ attention to, however, is an aspect of the pandemic that has so far gone unappreciated, but which may prove hugely consequential for EU attempts to enhance resilience at home and abroad. The effects of the pandemic, so far at least, have been such that we are unable to draw a clear pattern of order effectiveness and ineffectiveness.

Some democracies have done better in containing and responding to the virus than some autocracies, but the reverse is equally true. There is no clear “democratic advantage” or “authoritarian advantage” in responding to the pandemic.

More confusing still is the fact that some seemingly highly fragile states and territories—such as Mali, Mauritania, and Sudan—appear to have coronavirus mortality rates that are dramatically lower than those of Belgium or France. Whether this reflects genuine reality or is the result of under-detection in areas of limited statehood is unclear. But the general picture emerging is a disorienting one: So far at least, the virus is obfuscating our thinking about resilience, not sharpening it.