The Deadly Crash of Europe’s Second Wave

It didn’t last. By fall, it was clear that a new wave of infections had arrived on the continent. By year’s end, it was clear that outbreaks had slipped far beyond most governments’ capacity to control. And by late December, dreaded national lockdowns had returned in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, and beyond as policymakers tried to buy time for the arrival of vaccines.

Yet even as the pandemic has pushed Europe to its limits, it has revealed the diversity contained in its political unity: The continent’s response to the coronavirus has followed a common pattern, but each country has done so in its own way and under its own constraints. Sometimes those differences have been windows into national cultural curiosities. Other times they have meant the difference between life and death on a vast scale.

Here are the best Foreign Policy pieces chronicling how Europe handled its second wave.

1. It’s a New Europe—If You Can Keep It

by Adam Tooze, Aug. 7

In the lull before the pandemic’s second wave, the European Union was focused on figuring out whether it could recover economically and politically from the first. Adam Tooze charts the great leap forward that Europe managed to take, setting the foundation for united efforts to deal with virus-related shockwaves to come.

“Acting constructively in the face of both deeply uncomfortable facts and profound internal divisions is a very considerable achievement, one of which the United States has so far proved conspicuously incapable,” Tooze writes. “There is, however, no room for European complacency. As far as COVID-19 is concerned, this may be the end of the beginning. But there is very rough water ahead.”

2. Europe Doesn’t Want Lockdowns. It Wants Government.

by Caroline de Gruyter, Nov. 6

Europeans largely accepted the first round of lockdowns and limits, and populist critics of government shutdowns were often drowned out. But as lockdowns and other restrictive measures returned with the second wave, so did the backlash. Europe’s boisterous street protests against government-imposed public health restrictions earned widespread attention, especially as they veered into occasionally violent confrontation with police.

Caroline de Gruyter examines not only what the protesters were against but also what they were for—namely, greater assurance of more government protection. “Dissatisfaction is growing, and so is the pressure on the state to perform better in this second wave,” she writes. “But as long as citizens are afraid of contagion, citizens will want their governments to do more, not less.”

Medics ready to load a patient infected with COVID-19 into a waiting helicopter to be transfered from Verviers hospital to Antwerp, on November 9, 2020. KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images

3. Why Does Belgium Have the World’s Highest COVID-19 Death Rate?

by Felipe Araujo, Nov. 26

Europe has typically served as the counterpoint to portraits of a misgoverned United States during the pandemic. Yet some of the richest and most developed European states have struggled the most from the pandemic—Belgium’s death rate is the world’s worst. Felipe Araujo examines what accounts for Belgium’s catastrophic public health performance, noting deep regional and political divisions and offering a reminder that even well-off Western Europe has its own patterns of national dysfunction.

4. Switzerland Is Choosing Austerity Over Life

by Joseph de Weck, Nov. 10

Switzerland has a global reputation for good government and orderly rectitude. Joseph de Weck describes how the country’s apparent economic pragmatism, business-first approach, and divided federal government have all combined to make Switzerland’s handling of the second wave disastrous socially—and, ultimately, economically—this year.

“The Alpine country is immune to global crisis—or so the Swiss believe is the lesson from history,” de Weck writes. That has led to a sense of complacency and a widespread refusal to take any measures that could increase government spending or hurt the economy.

5. Europe Needed Borders. The Coronavirus Built Them.

by Caroline de Gruyter, Dec. 4

At the outset of the pandemic, much attention was focused on the reemergence of boundaries within Europe as countries blocked some travel and fought over medical supplies. But the pandemic has illustrated a more consequential long-term development, writes Caroline de Gruyter: Europe put up boundaries with the outside world and in the process reinforced its own identity. Unlike in previous crises, the coronavirus outbreak, and the vulnerabilities it exposed, actually underscored what it meant to be European, a nebulous concept since the founding of the EU—and long before.

“In the euro crisis and migration crisis, European countries fell into the national-sovereign reflex,” de Gruyter writes. “But COVID-19 brought Europeans closer together.”