Fiscal integration in an experimental union : how path-breaking was the EU’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Published online: 05 September 2021This article analyses what made the dynamic of the Covid-19 pandemic so different in political-economic terms. I look at this dynamic through the lens of three significant reforms, which were accompanied by a new crisis politics in which heads of state directly addressed sceptical audiences in other countries as well as their own. I provide evidence that the legacy of failure in the EA crisis spurred attempts by major protagonists to break with a path that they saw as politically disastrous for the EU polity as a whole