The high representative and the Covid-19 crisis: a preliminary assessment

ABSTRACT

In the first half of 2020 national and EU leaders faced the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. As chair of the Foreign Affairs Council (FAC) and as Vice President (VP) of the European Commission, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP) might play an important role in EU response to the Covid-19 crisis. Our article provides a preliminary assessment of the third post-Lisbon HR/VP Josep Borrell during his first seven months in office, with special attention to the outbreak of the global pandemic. By doing so, it also highlights the problems and prospects that the global pandemic revealed about EU foreign policy.

KEYWORDS:

• EU
• High Representative
• covid-19
• EU foreign policy
• EU crisis management
• Borrell

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maria Giulia Amadio Viceré is a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Adjunct Professor at LUISS University (Rome, Italy). She is also a Research Associate at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) (Rome, Italy). Before that, she has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Leiden (NL). Over time, she has held visiting positions at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy); at the University of Washington, as an EZ Founders Scholar (Seattle, WA, USA); and at the Policy Institute at King’s College (London, UK). In 2020, she was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, to be conducted at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute. She is the author of The High Representative and EU foreign policy integration: A comparative study of Kosovo and Ukraine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Giulia Tercovich is Assistant Professor at Vesalius College – VUB. Giulia has a double doctoral degree from the University of Warwick (UK) and Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). She has worked for the United Nations Liaison Office for Peace and Security (UNLOPS); for the European External Action Service in the Crisis Response and Operational Coordination Department; and for the Italian Permanent Representation to the EU. Giulia has published peer-reviewed articles on the EEAS Crisis Response System (Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 2014), on the European return to UN Peacekeeping (International Peacekeeping, 2016), and on the Italian approach to UN Peacekeeping (International Peacekeeping, 2016). She has recently co-edited (with Joachim Koops) the International Peacekeeping Journal Special Issue on “A European return to United Nations peacekeeping? Opportunities, challenges and ways ahead”, as well as the Routledge book on “European Approaches to United Nations Peacekeeping: Towards a stronger Re-engagement?” (2018). Moreover, she has published several briefing articles on the EU’s comprehensive approach and on EU’s Interregional relations.

Notes

1 While both the EU neighbourhood policy and the EU enlargement policy are formally supranational, their decision-making processes are characterized by intergovernmental practices.

2 Since the end of March 2020 EU intergovernmental forums have taken place by video conference.