The coronavirus crisis from a Central European view

Discussion Paper

The triple crisis in the emerging New World System and the
autocratization of the NMS in the EU

Attila Ágh

"The farther backward you can look,

the farther forward you are likely to see.”
(Winston Churchill)
Abstract

This is an “open end” long paper written as a Central European message in the midst
of the coronavirus crisis about the emerging New World System (NWO) with a manifest
interest in East-Central Europe. The ECE region in particular, and the new member states
(NMS) in general, shows the ongoing world-wide triple crisis - the cumulated socio-
economic, climate and coronavirus crisis - like the ocean in a drop of water. My long paper
serves for the preparation of a book on the historical trajectory of the new member states
within the EU with its successes and failures. It goes through a theoretical analysis from
the emergence of the New World Order with the ensuing transformations of the European
Union leading finally to the presentation of the fragile, half-made Europeanization of NMS
resulting in a socio-economic disintegration and autocratization with a civilizational crisis.
Thus, this paper deals first with the reconceptualization of the world system due to the
present systemic crisis due to the current change of world systems between the Old World
Order (OWO) and the New World Order (NWO), as the rethinking the international relations
(IR) discipline in general. It is followed in the second part by the case of the EU searching
for a new role in the emerging NWO. Third, the paper tries to outline the negative
externalities of the EU in the NMS leading to the increasing Core-Periphery Divide and to
the downward spiral in the Eastern enlargement. This controversial process of
Europeanization has culminated in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, therefore the paper
concludes with a short report about this unpresented crisis with its devastating
consequences for the NMS and the opportunity for the European renewal.
Key words: Old World Order and New World Order, systemic crisis, EU
transformation crisis, Economic, Social and Political Europe, socio-economic and
civilizational recession leading to the autocratization in NMS

The coronavirus crisis from a Central European view

Discussion Paper

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 The triple crisis in the emerging New World System:
The autocratization of the NMS in the EU

Contents

I. The triple crisis and the emergence of the New World Order (3)

The reconceptualization of the world systems theory

The change of the world systems as seen at the end of the transition
The new multilateralism with the increasing transatlantic drift
The excessive neoliberal globalization provoking the triple crisis

II. The weather forecast about the New World Order for Europe (20)

The new global role of the EU and the fierce debate on geopolitics
The Economic Europe and the institutional crisis cycles within the EU
The rise of Social Europe with the sinking marshland of public services
The revitalization of Political Europe facing the disintegration of the EU

III. The New Member States across the changing world systems (43)

The lopsided EU integration producing disintegration in NMS

Europeanization Revisited: the failure of the catching up project
The NMS crisis within the triple crisis, like “the ocean in a drop”
The NMS “recovery” versus the social recession and the authoritarian rule

Conclusion: The triple crisis as the challenge for the European renewal (59)

The opportunity for a radical reform in the EU by overcoming the triple crisis
Closing words of an open-ended long paper

References: (70)

Notes: (79-82)

(I) The triple crisis and the emergence of the New World Order (3)

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 The reconceptualization of the world systems theory

The basic assumption of this paper is that the present world system is in a systemic
crisis that has appeared in a particular form in the transformation crisis in the EU and the
deepening Core-Periphery Divide has resulted in a regional crisis in the new member states
(NMS). These three levels of crisis have been strictly interwoven on one side and all of
them need a special treatment on the other. The cumulated global crisis as the triple –
socio-economic, climate and coronavirus – crisis appears at all the three levels. The paper
proceeds from the general description of the systemic crisis through the EU crisis to the
specific NMS crisis. The main lesson is that the EU has concentrated the crisis management
on the Core that has led to a benign neglectence of the specific crisis in the Periphery and
it has produced the widening gap between them with a divergence of NMS from the EU
mainstream. The same benign neglectence towards the Political and Social Europe under
the tough dictatorship of Economic Europe has prevented the EU to overcome its own rising
systemic crisis, overburdened nowadays by the coronavirus crisis. The proper EU crisis
management demands a complex, integrated approach instead of the oversimplified,
economy-based functionalism, which preaches that economic growth and market-centrism
would solve everything.1
Due to the systemic crisis nowadays the world systems theory has been again often
discussed in in political science and the international relations (see recently Wilkin, 2020).
This situation needs not only description of the current radical changes in the world, but
also a serious rethinking and reconceptualization of the international relations (IR) theory.
In the recent chaotic years everything is drifting and twisting in the world system, therefore
the different concepts and political slogans are whirling around both in the IR theory and
the public discourse. This paper tries to give a short overview, as a theoretical summary
of the world systems theory against the background of the ongoing radical changes in the
transition between the Old World Order (OWO) and New World Order (NWO) to prepare
the theoretical foundations for the analysis of the EU and its new member states (NMS).
The paper indicates only very briefly the historical trajectory of the world systems before-
1989 (BWO, Bipolar World Order) and it discusses OWO only as a prelude to the incoming
new cycle of NWO by contrasting these periods.
The conceptual framework of this paper is the world systems theory based on the
comprehensive approach of Immanuel Wallerstein, who followed the theoretical traditions
of Karl Polanyi. Accordingly, the world systems have been the big periods of the world
history since the 16th century, embracing all social relations in their complexity from the
economy to the cultural life. Actually, this “world history” in its proper, narrower meaning,
starts only with the “discovery of the world”, with the direct contacts in the basic social

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dimensions around the world. The world order, in turn, is the regulation side of the world
system, its organization structure, in which these social relations are involved in, and
coordinated into, a more or less compact system. Most relationships in a world system are
regulated legally, some others only by the customs. While the legally regulated fields are
relatively stable, the other aspects of this complex system are often changing. Usually, the
world systems change in every half century, in such a way the collapse of the Bipolar World
Order (BWO) in 1989 took place two hundred years after the French Revolution in 1789.
Within the life-cycle of a world system there are two sub-periods with a big turn at the
mid-time, and each period is going through the stages of the emergence, consolidation
and decline, in such a way the world order is also changing in these sub-periods. In fact,
in the declining world system the existing rules are more and more often violated and/or
neglected, so this decline is most observable in the erosion - and finally in the collapse -
of this world order.2
The two world systems can be described briefly in the contrasting terms of
multilateralism, integration, desecuritization and dominance in OWO and unilateralism,
disintegration, securitization and fragmentation in the emerging NWO. The geopolitics has
returned with a vengeance in NWO in the tripartite world system of US, EU and China, as
the main characters, and with Russia, India and Brazil as the much weaker players or
supporting casts in the drama. This gigantic change of the world systems produced an EU
transformation crisis in the Juncker Commission and the EU strategy for the NWO was
prepared. However, its final elaboration and implementation has been left for the Leyen
Commission in the general framework of the climate crisis that has important implications
for the deepening and widening policy of the EU and its Core-Periphery Divide as well. The
paper concludes that the crisis in the Periphery is bigger and deeper than it has been
perceived in the Core. Therefore, without giving up the benign neglectence of the specific
regional crisis in NMS, the EU cannot overcome its own transformation crisis in the
emerging NWO that has produced a new multiple or cumulated systemic crisis.3
In the transition between these world systems, in the era of systemic crisis,
everything is still obscure, since the decline is already felt, but it is not yet clear whether
it is a temporary crisis or the end of the former world system. The contours of the emerging
new world system are not yet visible, or difficult to identify them, and the new rules are
still chaotic. The study of the systemic crisis is a very difficult job for a scientific approach,
and it is even more so for the actors at different levels from the states to the citizens. The
most difficult issue is the differentiation between the main features of the outgoing and
ingoing system to find a new certainty and predictability in this Age of Uncertainty.
Sometimes the collapse of a world system is rapid and evident, as it was the case of Bipolar
World Order in 1989, which meant the end of “the short 20 th century”. Usually the
transitions take long time, and they look evident only from looking back afterwards, as it

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is the current case of the emerging NWO with a long, protracted transition in the 2010s
from OWO, which has also been considered as “the end of the long 20 th century”. However,
when looking back to the history of world systems – in the spirit of the Churchill’s dictum
-, it is easier to understand and conceptualize the emerging NWO and the rather chaotic
transitional stage of systemic crisis between OWO and NWO that has come to an end with
the coronavirus crisis. In this view of the world history, the world systems appear in a
systemic approach as compact systems with their major characteristics and the
predictability of the world order’s rules. Thus, after the emergence of a world system its
main features are well arranged and established, and can be described in a scientific
approach.4
First, in the world systems all states are structured in the hierarchy of their power
structure with a hegemon power in the centre, some intermediary regions in the
semiperiphery and the rest as the periphery. Each part of the world system plays a role or
serves a particular function in this system as a specific process of “regionalization”. The
domestic social structures have been strictly organized according to these three levels in
the world systems’ hierarchy. The main players are the big powers, actively shaping the
entire system, transforming its regions into their dependency with some functions of the
hegemonic power as it has been described in great details e.g. in the British Empire. This
functionally organized territorial-geographic structure of the regions/countries appears in
geoeconomics and geopolitics, whereas from time to time some regions are in the centre
of the world wide confrontations, say, in the Middle East. Second, the world system has
basically three types of actors, the political rulers, the socio-cultural elites and the citizens
in their social organizations. The political rulers on the top “rule the world”, are very active
in the formation of the world order, and they organize major events like the Vienna
Congress to Yalta Conference when they make the “surgery” of the world system. The
political rulers are acting in cooperation with the socio-cultural elites on the middle level
that give a sophisticated form to these regulations and maintain their applicability by
constantly adjusting them to the changing situations. These elites create even various
world-wide organizations from the church organizations to the sport events. The social -
cultural, media, scientific, religious and civic - organizations at the bottom beyond their
direct domestic functions exercise pressure on the above levels in different forms, both as
civic institutions and the movements of citizens. The detailed analysis of these actors,
however, is beyond the scope of this paper, focusing on the triple crisis in the EU and NMS,
nevertheless, their short presentation is needed for the description of this present
transition at the EU and NMS levels.

The change of the world systems as seen at the end of transition

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 The theory of “the drifting of continental plates” can be a proper model to describe
the world system dynamics with the collisions and “subductions” of the plates on the “world
map” as the movements and positions of superpowers within the world systems:
BWO – dual division, Euro-Atlantic plate versus the Eastern plate surrounded by the
Third World as the archipelago of megaregions and smaller islands.
OWO – one dominating centre, US hegemony with the separating US and European
plates and marked signs of the emerging megaregions (BRICS).
NWO – increasing fragmentation with new subductions between the Transatlantic
drift, Pacific drift and Euro-Asian drift, and the emerging triple division of the world system
between the US, EU and China.
In the Bipolar World Order (BWO) the above outlined world systems theory was
conceived as the Wallerstein paradigm, emphasizing the complexity of world system in the
period of these two confronting superpowers with their interlocked economic, social and
political subsystems. This theory has also elaborated the special character and functions
of the regions and countries in the hierarchical world system, which have been integrated
into the world economy as special parts in the international system of division of labour.
The systemic integration from outside produced a deep social disintegration inside, i. e.
the heterogeneity of the internal market, domestic society and forced upon polity in these
units.
Just to the contrary, the OWO introduced the Huntington paradigm, focusing on the
overwhelming universalism with the ruling principle of victory of liberal democracy and
market economy worldwide. Actually, this was a period of the increasing global
marketization under the banner of global democratization, in which the continental,
regional and country specialities were marginalized or forgotten under the ideological
dictatorship of the quasi triumphant democracy. However, the principle of dependency or
“negative externalities” has come back with a vengeance through the excessive global
marketization as the expansion of the developed economies and it has corroded the fairy
tale narrative of global democratization. The excessive global marketization has become
counterproductive even in the economic fields and resulted in the global ecological disaster.
At the same time it has drastically rearranged the groups of winners and losers, and it has
led to the decline of the US role in the world system.
The emerging NWO has produced a new collision and fragmentation of the
“continental plates” instead of the universalism under the US hegemony and it has brought
back the deepening confrontations of superpowers in a geopolitically oriented world order.
The geopolitical world system is based on the over-competing tripartite world – US, EU and
China – taking into account both the integration-expansion drive of big actors and the
specificity of (mega) regions in the running/galloping globalization. Earlier, the term of

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geopolitics meant external forceful transformation, nowadays it is much more a particular
mixture of the external and internal, political and economic, ideological and cultural factors.
In this ongoing global reorganization the ruling principle is that “regions matter”, since in
this transitory stage there is a “challenge of varieties” in the global roles. Accordingly, the
hard and soft power has been increasingly combined in the world politics, and the security
has become a key term across the new world system. Security in its dynamic meaning is
the effort keeping the social fields concerned sustainable and rebalanced despite their close
interactions with the aggressively changing world. This complex security has been opened
to the new and new dimensions of both the soft and hard security, from the side of the
information, health and digital etc. security, for instance in the conceptual mixture like the
hybrid war. Thus, the term of security - with (de)securitization – has been the most often
used expression in both the international and domestic matters for characterizing and
regulating the processes in this “geopolitical” age.5
In the conceptual framework of world system theory it is possible to forecast the
future as the megatrends within a given “long wave”, but very difficult, or almost
impossible, to predict them across the different waves, hence in the early 2020 it is already
possible to describe the main features of NWO in the incoming geopolitical age. The biggest
mistake of many IR theories is that they still consider the former OWO as evident because
they have extended its time horizon from the early nineties to the remote future. Some
political scientists consider the entire era since the end of WWII as one long period, which
is basically an American view as a claim of the continuing hegemony in the present world
order. The emerging NWO has usually come as a big surprise also in the European Studies,
deeply disturbing the status quo-oriented politicians and their loyal experts. Although we
are still in the initial sub-period of the emerging world system, still the main contours of
the New World Order can already be seen.
History does not repeat itself, still the long waves of the world systems show some
similarities through some repeated features in the new world systems. Briefly, the Bipolar
World Order had been a confrontative world system based on the military security and the
dual global civilization, as a stormy and tense period with deeply embedded, hard power
based geopolitical considerations. Although the erosion of the “Socialist World System” was
a long process, the collapse of its international and national institutions came suddenly in
the late eighties. The dual world system in BWO with two inimical parts was followed with
a more relaxed and balanced OWO that was multilateral world order, a quasi-multipolar
system with less “military” securitization and more multiculturalism until the mid-2010s.
In turn, the NWO has entered as a complex resecuritization with the return of military
security in a more sophisticated form, producing sharply conflicting identities across the
widening global networks. It has opened again a new stormy period with many deepening
tensions that has been characterized sometimes as the new Cold War. Focusing on this

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change between the OWO and NWO it is clear that the US dominance in OWO within the
global system has been seriously shaken in this present transition to NWO. In a view of
the longer historical period it can be seen that the US hegemony in the world system is
over. The main question is how the world order will work under the conditions of the
declining US role and how the new global role of the EU will be formulated in the US-EU-
China triangle.6
It is particularly important to distinguish the systemic change in the world - with
the transitory systemic crisis - from the usual short crises because both the public discourse
and the scientific approach has largely inflated the term of crisis, hence the crisis has been
the most often used notion in public and scientific parlance. Still, the systemic crisis of
world systems, in the current case that of OWO turning to NWO, is absolute different from
the usual short crises in its size and relevance. The “there is always some crisis”-type of
the defensive attitude is dangerous, since it prevents the proper reaction in global politics,
although the old technics of crisis management from the OWO have become hopelessly
outdated in NWO. It is common that the deep new crisis phenomena have been
bagatellized, taken into the package of “crisis as usual”. Therefore, the systemic crisis has
not been perceived, but without its perception the crisis management measures have often
been counter-productive by reacting to a former situation and provoking chaos. In the
OWO people had a weaker feeling of security in a well arranged and predictable system,
even if they disliked it, and identified themselves as rational actors in a predictable world.
Unlike in the NWO, in which they are just drifting with the new and new events, and feeling
as not actors but victims, although the new crisis management measures are on the rise
in the EU with the new Strategic Agenda of Green Europe.
In the BWO with the entry of the world system theory in the 1960s there was a
heated debate between “externalists” and “internalists”, and – despite the long series of
the case studies about the Western expansion worldwide – there was no genuine dialogue
between them on the “internalization” of this external influence, as the penetration or
invasion of major powers into the (semi)peripheries. The OWO brought in a big turning
point, since instead of dependency formations the democratization process was put high
on the agenda as the dominant narrative in both the public parlance and social sciences.
It is true that this process has been analysed more and more in its complexity in the
excellent ranking institutes like the V-Dem, still this research in the West has not concluded
in the discovery of its fundamental contradiction between democracy and dependency,
although the “marketization” has dominated in general over the “policy Europeanization”
that has created a dangerous “imbalance” in the EU (Papadia and Cadamuro, 2020). The
EU integration through the West European economic expansion in the “East” has produced
the case of a huge experiment in “Democratization through Europeanization”, in which this
contradiction began to appear in an accelerated way. Still the discipline of European Studies

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was flying blind for a long time in the spirit of shallow functionalism with the imagined
positive feedbacks as well as with an ideological universalism based on the abstract
principle of freedom. Finally, after the global crisis the deep contradiction between
democracy and dependency, development and peripherialization has been more and more
discovered. In the BWO Latin America and in OWO Central Europe has turned out to be the
model case for the dependency theory, in the spirit of “the road to hell is paved with good
intensions”.
Actually, after the decolonization the EU global expansion was switching from hard
to soft power and focusing on economic cooperation with a shift from geopolitics to
geoeconomics. Allegedly the peaceful transfer of the EU norms and conditionalities as the
new transformative power is the solid foundation of the EU’s global role as an economic
giant. Nevertheless, beyond the founding states the EU has become more and more an
alliance of non-equals in economic and social terms, but applying the model of the most
developed founding states directly on the new entrants as a concept of “normalcy” turned
into “conditionality”. After the collapse of BWO the flagship of the EU expansion has been
the democratization that has turned to be the pseudo-name of the hectic marketization in
the “East” during the increasing globalization. Even the good will in the West has led to the
deep disorder in the East through the application of negative externalities of the EU, hence
dependency has prevailed over democracy. The Eastern enlargement has taken place
within this conceptual framework of the over-heated universalism, ignoring the key issue
that Europeanization has been, although it should not be, a one-sided, narrow
modernization project, since in this way it turns of necessity into a soft colonization and
domestic polarization project. Karl Polanyi has admitted that the free market has been a
very important driver of the social progress, but he has warned that in the case of the
missing “social self-defence” as “countermovement” that strictly regulates the market, it
acts as a “beast”, since it results “in the demolition of society” and its “natural environment”
(see Ágh, 2019: 61-64). It is enough to state here that this “beast” has not been properly
tamed during the Europeanization in NMS, thus it is long overdue to domesticate it.

The new multilateralism with the increasing transatlantic drift

The code to understanding the current change of world system is given by the
increasing fight around the world order between the multilaterists and unilateralists. In the
declining world system there has been a “world disorder”, since the “unilaterists” try to
make separate, bilateral deals by violating the general rules. From the mid-2010s it has
been striking that the hegemon of the previous world system - the US - violates the rules
set and enforced earlier by itself. Trump hailed Brexit in 2016 and the following years of
Merkel and Juncker already reflected to this negative US turn. The family quarrel, leading

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to virtual divorce between the EU and US, began with the clashes between the US and the
other states at the G7 meetings because of the unpredictability of the US global policy. The
turning point was the speech of Angela Merkel (2017) in Munich on 28 May 2017 talking
about the “watershed moment” in the world politics, in which Europe has to take its fate
into its own hands. In the Bruegel Report on “Europe in a New World Order” the leading
experts have characterized the new situation that “the US’s relative weight in the global
economy has declined. The new US administration seems intent on replacing
multilateralism with bilateral deals.” (Demertzis, Sapir and Wolf, 2017: 1). Following these
political and expert statements Thomas Piketty (2018) declared that 2018 was “the year
of Europe”.7
The socio-economic weakening of the US became manifest in the aftermath of
global financial crisis. Seemingly, the US coped with this crisis earlier, whereas the EU was
more sluggish in its own crisis management. But by the mid-2010s it was already clear
that the Anglo-Saxon world was the real loser of the global crisis that was shown by the
Trump’s victory in US and the Brexit referendum in UK. Basically, „unlike his predecessors,
Trump rejects the very foundations of the liberal international order as evidenced by his
contempt for multilateral organizations, his deep mistrust in US traditional allies, and his
unilateralist and transactional view of security and trade alliances.” Therefore, “The future
of transatlantic relations has never been more uncertain than in the Trump era.”
(Dimitrova, 2020: 1, 6). It has become evident that the US has lost its global
competitiveness to a great extent and reacted to the transformation of the world system
with its counterproductive, unilaterist defensive moves in the global trade, which have
widened the gap between the US and the rest of the competitive world. The hegemonic
role of US has evaporated and the temporary power vacuum has indicated for the global
audience that the hegemonic US role belonged to the past world order. Thus, according to
Paul Krugman (2020), the “American Democracy May Be Dying”.8
This is a marked sign of a declining hegemon in an eroding world system, its actions
are counterproductive in the emerging world order in the short run and it will be severely
punished by the accelerating internal decline for the long run. At the same time the rising
actors in the world system - EU and China – elaborate new rules in the spirit of
multilateralism against the destabilising unilateralism and demand to keep the new rules
in order to overcome the systemic crisis. Nowadays, the European and Chinese leaders
openly criticized the US violating its own rules and suggesting tentatively new rules for
NWO. In the global meetings – e. g. Osaka G20 Summit and Munich security conferences
– the EU leaders have openly talked about the transatlantic gap and accused the US for
creating troubles in world politics under the Trump presidency. Indicating that “Only
multilateralism can save us”, Anne Kruger (2020) has noted that “President Donald
Trump’s protectionist policies had disrupted supply chains and ushered in an era of

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heightened uncertainty. … But Trump has shown nothing but contempt for
multilateralism”.9

After the global financial crisis the EU has been engaged in the crisis management
of its “polycrisis” under the conditions of the declining US dominance in the global system.
The European global activity versus the US decline was felt in the second half of 2010s
because the EU began to develop a global policy of its own. In OWO the US ceased to be
step by step the centre of gravity, the normative model of the democratic politics and
society due to its decreasing developmental capacity as well the repeated failures of
democracy promotion abroad, and later by provoking a global disorder under the Trump
leadership. The US-EU strategic divorce starting in 2017 has continued with the US
intensifying trade war with the EU. This confrontative US behaviour finally undermined also
the security cooperation within the Western alliance system as it was seen already at the
Brussels NATO Summit on 11 July 2018 that produced “a missing security umbrella”. It
reached its peak in the G20 Summit in Osaka (28-29 June 2019). The G20 Osaka
Declaration has discussed the global issues in a rather conciliatory way, and only in the
case of climate change has mentioned the deep debate with the US (G20, 2019: 10). This
G20 summit meeting indicated already the entry of NWO with strong statements on both
sides instead of diplomatic niceties, since two camps - the unilaterists, basically US and
Russia, and multilaterists, first of all the EU and China – have been confronting each other
in the fight for a new rule based word order. Just as an indication, China enters the global
arena and is running ahead, with the entire advantage and disadvantage of its rapid
industrialization and urbanization, therefore in fact, it will take some generations in China
to establish a new balance in human investment and in the way of life.10
The deep clash between the unilaterists and multilaterists - between those states
wanting to arrange the issues by bilateral negotiations/confrontations rather aggressively
and those states wanting to arrange a new multilateral rule-based world order for conflict
resolution – became evident for the large public just before the Osaka Summit. It was
provoked by an ill-famed interview of Putin given right before this Summit to Financial
Times (2019). In this conflictual situation the best answer - as the active confrontation
with these aggressive moves, which intended to hinder the elaboration of the new
multilateral, rule-based world order - was given by Donald Tusk, then the President of
European Council and travelling at that time to the G20 Osaka Summit: “Thanks to my jet
lag I was able to read the whole interview with President Putin in the Financial Times. I
have to say that I strongly disagree with the main argument that liberalism is obsolete.
We are here as Europeans also to firmly and univocally defend and promote liberal
democracy. Whoever claims that liberal democracy is obsolete, also claims that freedoms
are obsolete, that the rule of law is obsolete and that human rights are obsolete. For us in
Europe, these are and will remain essential and vibrant values. What I find really obsolete

11
are: authoritarianism, personality cults, the rule of oligarchs. Even if sometimes they may
seem effective.” (Tusk, 2019).
This tough answer of Tusk reflects the spirit of Conclusions of the European Council
before the Osaka Summit, openly confronting the US line and by supporting the Paris
Agreement in climate change, and also drastically condemning Russia for its aggressive
behaviour in the EE region, above all in Ukraine. Although the Osaka Summit document
has avoided any drastic reference to this basic confrontation, but the credo of the EU
indicates the contours of the EU fight with US and Russia in NWO in the coming decades.
It has also important consequences for the entire Eastern enlargement and particularly for
the countering the destabilization role of Russia in the East European region. The
Conclusions, as the basic EU document indicates with a strong statement that “The EU will
remain a driving force behind multilateralism and the global rule-based international order,
ensuring openness and fairness and the necessary reforms. It will support the UN and key
multilateral organizations.” (European Council, 2019a: 10).
The international landscape shows the devaluation of the former complex security
capacities of big global players, US and Russia, both are losers, although it is absolutely
different way. The US has lost not only its global crisis management capacity, but also its
domestic development potential and global competitiveness with “the GDP gap” between
economic growth and human development that has created a wide gap between the rising
expectations of the US population and it declining well-being that has been produced by
the Trump regime. Basically, the US way of life with its shrinking social and human
capacities is not competitive globally that leads to the extremist-populist eruptions of the
former affluent working class. In Russia, after the chaos and power vacuum in the nineties,
this revenge of losers have also been felt in the aggressive international behaviour in
Ukraine and the “near neighbourhood”, but the main defeat has been the loss of the
development potential in the oil boom period in the background. In this return to the old
timer “security policy” by the two big losers, however, there is no Bipolar World Order
again.
Nevertheless, in the returning past in the new disguise, it is necessary to revoke
that the key term to describe the Bipolar World Order is militarism, in which the strong
armed forces should be used in order to win political and economic advantages in the world
politics. The hard power politics goes with the big military establishment and strong military
spirit, by subordinating all other interests to those of military. In BWO the main actor of
militarism was the Soviet Union, and to a great extent also its counterpart, the United
States. Their military spirit was reduced in OWO, but it has reborn in NWO very strongly
with the logic that hard power matters and military force is the ultima ratio. As indicated
above, in the new situation there have been serious debates about the changing concept
of security. In the Bipolar World the security - in its militarised form and with its

12
implications for all fields of society - was the basic conceptual framework of the IR theory.
With the decline of Russia as a global military power and the rise of the EU as a “civil”
global power, in the multipolar OWO the traditional security approach faded away even in
the theoretical considerations. So did geopolitics with its focus on the regional studies and
specificities because of the homogenization of the free, “liberal world”, with the usual US
simplicities of the “American dream” worldwide. In fact, showing its complete insensitivity
to the regional cultural factors, the US Department of Defense in early 2020 discontinued
its Minerva program on the social dimensions of the foreign policy behaviour in the world
politics. However, in the 2010s this simplistic approach was questioned more and more in
the international scholarship, and in NWO the refocus of security has been again high on
the agenda. The international security as a complex issue has become anew the hard core
of the international relations theory, but even its narrowest meaning has further widened
to a great extent from OWO because in NWO it has embraced the technological,
psychological-ideological and cyber dimensions of security, too. The security has also to
be seen in its geopolitical dimension and its regional specificities, again. The alliance of
various states - including their coherence and interrelationships and the internal hierarchy
of participating actors - matters in NWO even more. Thus, the international security system
of NATO has proved to be questionable with the declining status of US. Actually, the present
volatile, non-transparent and unpredictable US behaviour under the Trump presidency -
through the weakening the Western alliance system and launching a trade war against the
EU at the critical times of refugee crisis - is a big security threat for the EU in many ways
in this new, complex meaning of security.
Actually, in the OWO the “Americanization” took place in many ways, therefore the
increasing conflict between the EU and US gives a new perspective for the rearrangement
of the world order with the drastic “De-Americanization”. The political democratization and
the economic welfare were - and still are - only empty slogans in the US drive for the global
democratization seen from the side of the naked reality. At this point, a critical analyses
about the harmful effects of the globalization has to be included to this paper as a
preparation for the following EU and NMS analyses. Although globalization has been
basically a positive process, due the climate change and the coronavirus pandemia it has
been clear that the globalization has been overdriven and it has reached its upper limits.
It has been an excessive globalization with over-connectedness through the global
production and transport chains and networks, including the huge burden – actually
overload - of transport for the global ecosystem. In this way, the negative features of the
excessive globalization in OWO have been closely connected with the Americanization of
the world system in the spirit of the aggressive neoliberalism that has become a big burden
in the emerging NWO. While in the EU case there have been some genuine efforts to correct
and balance the counterproductive strategy of expansive marketization, the US attitude

13
has been “unilaterally” harmful in this respect. As to the Core-Periphery relations in the EU
not only the Europeanization took place, but in some ways “Americanization”, too. But in
somewhat moderate form the neoliberal drive has also been dominant in the EU, and the
softer Europeanized version of neoliberalism has also had harmful effects on the NMS, as
it will be discussed below.11

The excessive neoliberal globalization provoking the triple crisis

After the decades of the over-driven globalization the triple crisis has erupted
consisting of (1) the socio-economic crisis of the global production system with the
reinforced inequalities that has become counterproductive in both economic and social
respects; (2) the ecological crisis by the over-loading and fatally damaging the human
environment; (3) that has been joined finally by the recent coronavirus crisis with its roots
in both the over-connectedness by globalization and in the structural weaknesses of the
public health systems. All the three crises have developed their own sub-system with its
internal logic of workings, and at the same time they have been closely interwoven forming
an interdependent crisis that has reached its final stage as a common and cumulated
systemic crisis.12
Actually, this painful and chaotic transition process between OWO and NWO began
with the management of the global financial crisis and this process has come to an end by
deepening into the triple crisis. The coronavirus crisis has indicated that there is no return
to OWO and the NWO will be organized in a radically different spirit. It is not yet clear
whether this new global challenge will be turning into opportunity to overcome the deep
internal contradictions of the galloping globalization or they will stay with us in a different
form, however, the basic change from the OWO to NWO is irreversible. The triple crisis as
a condensed form of systemic crisis has made evident that the transition between the OWO
and NWO has come to an end and the New World Order has emerged. The outbreak of
coronavirus crisis has pushed the Transatlantic Divide to a breaking point, since the US
turned against the WHO and the EU stands for it. With this event the fight between the
multilaterists and the unilateralists has returned at a higher level. The outbreak of
coronavirus crisis has brutally discovered the deep contradictions of the Old World Order.
The triple crisis has made necessary the further reconceptualization of the world system
and the related domestic developments. In the spring of 2020 due to the triple crisis there
has been again a sharp conceptual turn in social sciences with the whirling of the new
issues and terms that has also indicated a revolutionary change in the mindset of the
populations.
In the 2010s there was still a growing ignorance about the counterproductive
workings of the global production and trade system and how this excessive globalization

14
eroded the world order. The first reactions to the triple crisis management have also
threatened by the further slide to the economic nationalism that provoked the spiral of
retaliation. It has turned out, however, that the national snail shells do not work in
pandemic at all, hence the multilateral cooperation is needed combating it successfully with
more resources at the disposal of the international bodies first of all in WHO because the
weak national healthcare systems will increase the risk of the new waves of pandemic. The
borders cannot be closed any longer, but instead of “long distance globalization” more
“relocalization” and/or re-regionalization is needed with the enhanced viability and
resilience of the countries and/or regions themselves with less dependence on the
excessive globalized supply chains or oversized global circulations of production and trade.
There is an urgent demand to shorten the supply and production chains to make them
sustainable and reliable, including the agreed green conditions in general and the green
landing criteria in particular to reorganize the severely affected airline and travel industries.
The eruption of the coronavirus crisis has revealed that this “hyper-globalization” (with the
terms of Dani Rodrik, 2020) has to be tamed.
Thus, sustainable globalization have to be designed in a new multilateral world
order, instead of the self-ruining globalization based on the outdated industries with the
close causal link to the “polluting” trio of trade, transportation and tourism. This is one of
the typical global “collective action” problems with the empowerment of the international
bodies and global institutions as a multilateral response to the triple crisis. Nowadays, in
the coronavirus crisis the global allocation of resources with the increasing role of planetary
institutions can be a matter of life and death. Better or worse, but no return to the past
anyway. This unprecedented triple or cumulated crisis has manifested the inherent
divergence of the excessive globalization, and its inner contradictions have proved to be
the imminent danger for the future of mankind. It has revealed not only the vulnerability
of the poor and fragile states and/or populations around the world, but also that of the
Western societies after decades of deindustrialization and exaggerated reliance on the
global networks of production and services, trade and transport, in the spirit of high profit-
seeking and the fetish of consumerism. Due to the increasing negative effects of the
excessive globalization, the coronavirus crisis (Covid-19) has drastically displayed the
overload of the global socio-economic and ecological systems in the present form of the
global capitalism.
This kind of globalization is an over-driven process throughout the world across the
global chains of production and service, trade and transport, including the tourist industry.
These global networks have damaged the ecological system “outside” and the social system
by the human over-connectedness “inside”. Thus, the starting point in the content analysis
of the triple crisis is the globalization of production with its complex social preconditions
and consequences in OWO, including the reorganizations of the regions in order to serve

15
their special functions in the socio-economic and political world order. In the early 21st
century it has reached a saturation point with the serious internal crisis of the socio-
economic sub-system. Also, the damage done to the natural environment appeared already
in the second half of the 20th century and it was noticed in the scientific circles but their
warnings – although more and more supported through the UN bodies – were not able to
stop, or even decelerate, the crazy drive of global capital in fatally damaging of the human
environment. Finally, the climate change reached a turning point in the 2010s, and this
crisis of ecological subsystem was put high on the international agenda as one of the main
drivers in the transition between the OWO and NWO. In this situation the third component
of the triple crisis has erupted from the excessive over-connectedness in the global village,
where the deteriorating human environment has also violated the social hygiene and the
public health system as a whole.
The triple crisis has not only displayed the negative features and the
counterproductive character of its sub-systems, but it has also strengthened these
negative features and more closely connected them. Therefore, the triple crisis will be
discussed in the historical annals as one of the biggest turning point in the history of
mankind, since it has expressed the essence of the derailed human development on the
Earth. The “long distance” global economy is behind the triple crisis, which is a waste of
resources elsewhere and ruining the capacity of the natural environment, therefore it is
high time to invent a new kind of world economy based on an ecologically sustainable
distance of the global networks. The derailed globalization has caused, beyond the
ecological disaster, serious social polarization and global vulnerability of societies at both
local and international levels. The burden of the past is the over-globalized economic order
based on the cheap and remote labour at a high ecological price. There has been a basic
conflict in the global system between the short term economic interests of the huge
multinationals - acting as loose cannons in the world order ruining the social structures -
and the human environment, both locally and globally.
The multinationals - the main actors of the over-globalization in the spirit of
neoliberal market fundamentalism - have shifted the financial burden of their harmful
ecological workings to the states and communities. An overly “financialized” business
sector has been siphoning value out of the economy, rather than shoring up long-run
growth by investing in research and development, wages and worker training. The crux of
the matter is that at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries the dominant neoliberal idea of
market populism - with its claim for the super efficiency of the unlimited “free market”
both locally and globally - has proved to be a dangerous popular misperception and
misconception, obscured by the myth of economic/market efficiency. In fact, the costs of
this production system have been transferred to the other social fields by the influential
business oligarchs. It has raised the need for the “myth busters” in order to debunking

16
these neoliberal myths produced by their subservient media and the “industrialized”
scientific forums heavily financed by the multinationals.
Due to the drastic effects of the coronavirus crisis as a devastating cyclone, the
mainstream social science and public discourse has reached by now a turning point with
the consensus about the common substance and the deep connections between the sub-
systems of the triple crisis. The whole system is trembling, therefore even the financial
elite has considered more and more that the prevailing policy direction of recent years had
to be reversed. Even The New York Times has published an article with the title “This is
not the time to let the market decide” (15 April 2020). The Financial Times has also
published a similar article, written by the newspaper’s editorial board, with the title “The
virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract”, in which they have argued that the
proposals such as universal basic income and increased wealth taxes have to be
considered. They have realized that the Western leaders learnt in the Great Depression
and after the WWII to suggest collective sacrifice, and nowadays also a social contract has
to be offered that benefits everyone (see FT, 2020a and also 2020b with the comments of
Pettersson, 2020). Similarly, Dani Rodrik quotes President Macron by declaring that “we
had already the feeling that the established mode of globalization was coming towards the
end of of its life”, therefore a new “grammar of multilateralism” has to be elaborated
(Rodrik, 2020: 1,4). Rodrik has also identified the global public goods in the spirit of the
triple crisis: “many aspects of fighting health pandemics have a global public good nature,
too. Early warning systems, information collection, development of vaccines and medicines
provide benefits to all nations …These considerations clarify why climate change and public
health in particular call for globalising policy.” All in all, he reasserts that “The climate
change and (in many respects at least) public health are obvious global public goods.”
Returning to the reference of the Macron’s standpoint he underlines that the new global
public goods – “education, health, climate, biodiversity” - are different from the former
“global commons” (Rodrik, 2020: 5,6).
The world is facing now an extended triple crises, since the pandemic-induced
health crisis has rapidly ignited a new chaotic economic crisis in the societies paralyzed by
the long-term neoliberal austerity policy. Thus, it is clear that - mostly due to the former
mismanagement of the global financial crisis - the triple crisis has revealed several
problems even in the developed countries, all of which must be solved at the same time.
Beyond the often discussed trends of the reinforced inequalities and the rising precariate,
these societies proved to be vulnerable in many other ways. It is enough to mention just
three main socio-economic contradictions of globalization in the developed countries: the
decomposition and disempowerment of the working population, the increasing fight of
generations and the public service turning to slippery marshland.

17
 First, on top of the other self-inflicted wounds there has been a deep fragmentation
of society with the new sort of “employment” or earnings for living. It is more and more
difficult to describe that part of population which is beyond the organized or official world
of the regular job contracts only with some kinds of temporary contracts, since these
“jobless”, non-standard workers or atypical workers are in fact not “unemployed”. In the
“gig economy” the labour market characterized by the various forms of “employment” with
the prevalence of short-term contracts, or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs.
It is much larger than the self-employed group, being a rapidly increasing part of worker
population. In this permanent jobless world of “employment”, the households have been
depleted of financial cushions, making it harder to afford basic goods like housing and
education. In the triple crisis this large part of population is falling out of the production
and health system at the same time because at the time of the crisis they have been
excluded from the institutional framework of both the economic world and the public
service, health care and social support that discovers and enhances the contradictions of
the entire system of social security. It demands the reconsideration of the social rights of
population, including the social and health protection, since without a proper public health
system the economic development is slowing down, moreover there is also an imminent
danger of the further waves of the virus-based pandemic. This danger demands the
empowerment of population, and the recognition of natural environment with its inner
logic, also in the human contacts with the animal world that may be transferring the viruses
to the human beings.
Second, the triple crisis has sharpened the contradictions between the generations,
in some exaggerated approaches it has led to the “fight of generations”. The underlining
process is, of course, that the incoming generations have always been socialized in the
given period of the socio-economic system with its political and cultural environment and
they have considered the normality seen from this particular generational message. Every
turn from the socio-economic well-being to the social recession means different conditions
for the established and the incoming generations, especially in the case of the big disasters
like the present triple crisis. Although it would be an exaggeration to distinguish the full-
fledged OWO and NWO generations, still in a more nuanced analysis the contours can be
drawn about the main groups of the young, the middle and the elderly generations
according to the axis of the present world system change. Anyway, the cultural reactions
and the political activity of these generations have been not only different, but basically
conflicting, first of all, in the new, “green” generation accusing the elderly generation of
causing the ecological disaster.
Third, the austerity measures caused a wide social recession, in which large masses
have been excluded from some basic social services, first of all in healthcare, which has
painfully pushed into a health desert in the coronavirus crisis. This situation has shown

18
that the public service system even in the most developed countries has become a
marshland, sinking and shaky because it is non-reliable, non-transparent, intensively
unequal and increasingly privately founded system. Hence the deprivation in health system
is cumulated in the “care crisis”. Of course, all these negative developments in the new
crisis situation have appeared much more in the less developed countries through widening
the gap among the more and less developed countries. The erosion of public services with
the declining social security or evaporating social justice has produced a special tension,
since the poor domestic health systems have been unprepared for the shock of the
coronavirus crisis.
Altogether, the global social security approach is almost completely missing when
even the domestic public service systems have been seriously shaken, although a new
effort already can be seen in the EU for the elaboration of the minimal social security in
the emergence cases, leading finally to some kind of the Universal Basic Security in Europe.
In the triple crisis the dysfunctions of the inclusive welfare state have also appeared with
many unintended consequences in congested mega-cities and in the conflicting or
diverging public services policies, including the blurred borders in the health care between
the public and private services. In the public service marshland reinforced by the
coronavirus crisis first of all the civic security is missing for the European citizens both in
the EU and at home. Notably the well-being with the solid, predictable and foreseeable free
space for public life has deteriorated to the walking on springy woodland as a sagging
surface, with subsiding or sinking socio-economic conditions, and sometimes turning to
health deserts in NMS. The lack of civic security can also be exemplified with from social
side with the whirling situation in employment as the potential or actual mass
unemployment with millions of people in the spring of 2020. The sheer absurdity of the EU
“common” labour market along the lines of the Fragmented Europe has become manifest
in the case of the transit – e.g. care and seasonal – workers deeply that has been deeply
disturbed by the coronavirus crisis.
All these sharp contradictions have come to the surface in the young generation
with their increasing percentage of “jobless” people in their deepening confrontations
against the other generations and large involvement in the ill-defined public services home
and abroad as migrants or “travelers”. The entry of the “green” generation and the general
“greening” tendency in the last decade with the incoming issue of “climate justice” has
made it clear that the crisis management of the previous global financial crisis after 2008
was not only half-made and unaccomplished, but it was false and reinforcing the outdated
OWO-type of mismanagement in the neoliberal spirit. The triple crisis as the new global
challenge has proven that a new type of crisis management is needed, since it has swept
away the old evidences with saving the banks “too big to fail” and shifting the costs of

19
crisis to the population through austerity measures, which have only deepened the crisis
and delayed its solution.
In general, after the outbreak of the triple crisis a huge literature has been written
on the contrast between the crisis management of the two global challenges. Most of the
experts have considered that the main raison of the brutality of the triple crisis is that the
former global crisis was mismanaged. Following the global financial crisis the companies
received unconditional state support in the West, and this mistake should not be repeated,
as e.g. an Oxford professor, Mariana Mazzucato (2020) argues. The point is that the
mistakes of the post-2008 era have to be avoided, when bailouts allowed corporations to
reap even higher profits once the crisis was over, but failed to lay the foundations for a
robust and inclusive recovery. The bad news is in her view that the Covid-19 crisis is
exacerbating all problems of the two other crises, but the good news is, in turn, that we
can use the current state of emergency to start building a more inclusive and sustainable
economy. It involves the basic idea that it can only be a common solution of the triple
crisis, with the necessity of convergence between these economic, social and political
reform processes. Even more, there has been a widespread consensus that it is impossible
to return to the previous situation as the status quo ante, since the entire world will be
different after the coronavirus crisis because it catapults also the need for the solution of
the twin - climate and socio-economic – crises.
The triple crisis has shown the inherent connection between the socio-economic,
ecological and health systems as social hygiene from the negative side, in which these
processes have turned against each other in a downward spiral. The new crisis
management can only be successful by establishing their mutual reinforcement in a
positive spiral. In these testing times the new definition of globalization as “the
philosophers’ stone” necessitates to encompass the close coherence between ecology,
economy and education, meaning upward convergence within the population.
Schoenmaker (2020) represents this view by underling that “Governments have multiple
goals including economic growth, social inclusion and environmental preservation…. By
attaching green conditions when granting state aid and guarantees during the COVID-19
crisis, governments could push companies to accelerate the adoption of low-carbon and
circular technologies after the crisis is over, and thus aim for a green recovery.”
Hence, to speed up recovery, the governments have to encourage efforts to
strengthen the mutually dependent pillars of social and health protection embedded in the
fabric of European societies. Overcoming the coronavirus crisis and preventing/escaping
the ensuing global economic crisis is an urgent task by making the global system more
crisis resilient. It will require a new system of social cohesion with the constant retraining
of population and a new wave of solidarity. A large scale of engagement of populations is
needed for an effective crisis management. The cherished principles of neoliberal politics

20
are the optimization of conditions for the financial markets and the strict limitation for the
social and ecological regulation. The opposite strategy can be prioritising at least the
minimal general welfare for the protection of the vulnerable people, since the health
inequality or deprivation is one of the major hindrances of the economic development.

(II) The weather forecast about the New World Order for Europe

The new global role of the EU and the fierce debate on geopolitics

The new global role of the EU has been high on the agenda in the last years deeply
interwoven with the fight between the multilaterists and unilateralists, since the
organization of a new multilateral world order has been the main effort of the EU. This
effort has produced a geopolitical approach of the EU that has become finally the key word
of the Leyden Commission’s global security strategy. Therefore, there has been a fierce
debate in the EU in the current transition between the two world systems about geopolitics,
since it was a “dirty world” in the foreign policy. In OWO its usual meaning was that kind
of competition between great powers which knew only the langue of force. Geopolitics had
its toughest meaning in the Bipolar World System with open and direct use of – often
military – hard power. Even in OWO the hard power politics was followed by the US, Russia
and China, and the EU as a civilian superpower used power politics only in its own soft
way, mostly in the economy. Therefore, two contrasting views have been presented in the
recent discussions about the future of Europe, which have contained the new meanings of
both geopolitics and geoeconomics. The concept of geopolitics is basically about the
interaction between the power and geography, therefore both factors appear differently in
the consecutive world systems. The real challenge for the EU is to have a new active global
role leaving behind the situation of “economic giant and political dwarf” from the former
period. Thus, in the transition between the OWO and NWO there has been a return to
geopolitics in public and scientific debates on this new meaning. Nowadays, in the fierce
debate the proper interlinkage of geopolitics and geoeconomic has been put into the new
perspective, although there have also been some current declarations or publications
presenting them in an extreme way.
First of all, by combining the democratic procedures of foreign and domestic policy
Leyen suggests a new meaning of geopolitics in her Mission statement about the new
Commission: “This should also better align the internal and external aspects of our work.
This will be a ‘Geopolitical Commission’". (EC, 2019d: 2). This statement has been
formulated in the clear contrast with the old-style geopolitics of the US and Russia that still
follows the spirit of direct military confrontations according to the the traditions of the
former hard security concept. In the Strategic Agenda the EU indicates a new global role

21
for itself in the NWO that will be discussed in the two-year long conference about the Future
of Europe beginning – at least symbolically - on 9 May 2020. As to this new concept of
geopolitics, Josep Borell, the High Representative of the EU has made strong statement
about “the geopolitical upheavals…in a world increasingly characterized by raw power
politics”. He has pointed out that “This is a world of geostrategic competition, in which
some leaders have no scruples about using force”. Borell has introduced this new approach
to geopolitics by emphasizing that in this “geopolitical competition” the EU has to “adjust
to the mental map” and “must relearn the language of power and conceive of Europe as a
top-tier geostrategic actor”. Arguing against the former meaning of geopolitics based on
“hard power”, he has underlined that Europe has given a new meaning to geopolitics based
on the soft power, namely “multilateralism, openness and reciprocity comprised the best
model not only for our continent but also for the wider world.” Finally, he has clearly
formulated the task of the EU and the Leyen Commission for 2020 in the New World Order:
“This should be the year that Europe gets traction with a geopolitical approach, escaping
the fate of being a player in search of its identity.” (Borell, 2020: 1,3).
The new situation with the introduction and elaboration of the new global strategy
after this declaration of Leyen about the “geopolitical” Commission, despite her
reconceptualization of this term, has produced a long discussion above all about the
relationship between geoeconomics and geopolitics. The soft versus hard power, or the
soft versus hard security has generated a fierce debate in the EU on the geopolitics. The
new meaning of geopolitics has been outlined by Stefan Lehne in his recent comprehensive
paper (2020). In the former periods the EU was, as Lehne has pointed out, a “free rider”
in the security politics and “forgot about geopolitics”. Therefore, geopolitics connotes for
the EU politicians with “an approach to foreign policy focused on the distribution of military
and economic power”, whereas “the European integration was conceived to overcome the
legacy of power politics … with a new concept of security”. In fact, “This concept succeeded
over several decades only thanks to a particular geopolitical context. European integration
developed in an international system shaped by the United States, which also happened to
be Western Europe’s main protector from the major threat of the era: the Soviet Union. To
a large extent, it was the U.S. security guarantee and global leadership role that afforded
the Europeans the luxury of leaving geopolitics behind.” Altogether, “For several decades,
the EU has ignored power politics and concentrated on economic integration.” Then, in the
mid-2010s the end of “Age of Innocence” came, and “the fatal blow” was the entry of
Trump, since his “disdain for alliances and multilateral cooperation, aggressive trade
policies, and open dislike of European integration removed any doubt that the old
transatlantic partnership had profoundly changed.” (Lehne, 2020: 1-2,3).
Since geopolitics has come back with a vengeance, this situation has called by Lehne
as Geopolitical Age, in which the EU has to adjust to the new reality. To respond to the

22
geopolitical challenge the EU has to elaborate its own geopolitical role. It is evident in a
world “dominated by rival power blocks” that “The union can no longer approach
international economic relations as essentially cooperative win-win partnerships.” His
opinion is that the traditional EU approach to world politics does not fit into the world of
the confrontative hard power politics. In the deteriorating security environment the EU has
to make a strategic shift in both international and domestic politics, therefore the EU needs
“stronger leadership with greater focus, clearer strategic thinking … Geopolitics begins at
home.” (Lehne, 2020: 4,7).
However, Lehne has developed a somewhat rosy view on the global economic
capacity of the EU with an exaggerated view about the overwhelming positive effect of its
economic footsteps in the OWO: “Europeans assumed that the removal of obstacles to
market forces, combined with multilaterally agreed-upon rules, would ensure positive
outcomes for everyone”. In the self-image of the Core, presented by Lehne, the EU has
developed a “transformative agenda”, in which “The prevailing view had been that by
promising financial help and eventual partial participation in European integration, the EU
could convince neighbouring countries to commit to democratic and market reforms. This
enlargement lite policy did not work out, as few neighbours showed interest in the EU offer.
So, faced with the reality of increasing turmoil in the East and the South, the Global
Strategy downgraded transformation and instead focused on protecting EU’s interest and
ensuring stability and resilience.” (Lehne, 2020: 2,3). In this approach, however, the
negative externalities of the EU in the weaker partner countries is completely missing that
leads moving towards the overvalued role of the EU in geoeconomics. Following the line of
functionalism, Lehne presupposes that the spill-overs - generated by the economic
contacts with the EU - are always positive “for everyone”. Therefore, depoliticization by
focusing on the “technical” negotiations appears as positive factor, forgetting about the EU
role of creating economic dependencies and social disorders: “For many decades, the EU
tended to depoliticize difficult issues by submitting them to long technical negotiations until
a compromise was finally reached. “ (Lehne, 2020: 7).
This economic-centred functionalist idea is one of the mainstream approaches in
the European Studies, which bears the signs of the German – or “Nordic” – view, but there
is also a politics-centred idea in the EU, which is a characteristic French – in this case,
“Southern” – view. These one-sided versions may be termed the Nordic “geo-economics”
and the Southern “geo-politics”, and both strategies indicate the typical failure of the
preparation for “the winning the previous lost war”. Actually, in both big member states
there have been some signs of the state capture, namely through the business capture of
the state by the multinationals in Germany or the administration capture of the state by
the “professional political class” in France that determines their ideas about the new
international role of the EU. On one side, some analysts –referring to the increasing trade

23
war and the deepening geoeconomic competition in the last years - imagine the new role
of the EU by further extending its economic capacity to the other fields. They demand an
“integrated approach” to geoeconomics, comprising both economic and security concerns,
as a policy reorientation coordinating economic, technological and security policies to
enhance the global role of the “Geoeconomic Europe”. It is true that the EU as a global
economic power has become even more important given the defensive US attitude in
multilateralism and its aggressive attitude in unilateralism, resulting in the volatile trade
wars with the other global actors in the Trump presidency.
This debate about the geopolitics shows the demand for instrumentalizing the
structural division of the EU as Fragmented Europe between the three regions of the EU,
the North, South and East with their special profiles that comes back in this paper from
different sides. First of all, it appears very characteristically in the treatment of the EU’s
new economic role that has usually been termed nowadays as “Brussels Effect”. This term
refers to the EU’s strong capacity to regulate global markets, to promulgate regulations
that shape the global business environment and leads to a notable Europeanization of the
global trade (see Bradford, 2020). The Brussels Effect entails that the EU has the ability to
set the standards in the diverse areas such as antitrust regulation, data protection, online
hate speech, consumer health and safety, or environmental protection. However, this
approach is over-demanding and sends around the message of an offensive “Economic
Europe” therefore it may be called geo-economics: “This would appreciate three realities:
(1) the centrality of the economic domain for power and security competition; (2) the EU’s
economic power potential via regulation and its market; and (3) the Commission’s need to
cooperate with Member States (MS) – as the EU – to develop European power.” (Gehrke,
2020: 1). This statement about geo-economics as a key message about the global role of
the EU is a double-edged sword. In fact, the emphasis on the economic “force”, with the
penetration to the other regions/countries by “regulatory powers”, outlines a program that
has obviously failed in the entire process of the Eastern enlargement, and elsewhere, and
it has turned out highly counterproductive.13
Although the genuine geoeconomic approach is high on the EU agenda, it is by no
means, the core of the contemporary challenges. Its extreme version is a one-sided
German or Nordic view expressing the global interests of German multinationals benefiting
from the economic extension of the EU and forgetting about the “Eastern disorder” created
by the dependency structures in the penetrated areas, including the South as the
increasing tension in the management of the triple crisis indicates. This goes back to the
“original sin”, as the EU was integrated originally from the similarly developed partners,
but it has been extended to the weaker partners, therefore this overwhelming Economic
Europe has defeated the Political and/or Social Europe more and more. Despite the
enormous efforts to “deepening”, the economy is still the “giant” and the socio-political

24
concerns are the “dwarfs” even within the EU. This “giant” of Economic Europe has also
played the dominant role in the “widening”, hence the EU – and its multinationals – has
appeared in the Eastern enlargement process in the fragile economies of the new member
states as a dominant power that has formed in the East into a functionally dependent
region, subservient to Western capital. It has been turning the NMS into its dependent
unit, absolutely neglecting the harmful consequences of this soft but energetic economic
penetration/invasion producing social backlash and political authoritarianism.
On the other side, based on this big economic potential of the EU, the tendency of
political voluntarism has also appeared as an overdriven “geo-politics”. Looking for an
important role for France in this huge global transformation, Macron advocates for the EU
not only “acting as a global economic power, but also as a strategic power” (Dimitrova,
2020: 4). Turning the EU into an old-type of security giant, Macron sees the strength of
France much more in the active and challenging foreign policy rather than in its economic
transformative capacity. The French tradition is a state-centric view, in which the state has
been governed by the strong, highly educated administrative-political class that advocates
the priority of politics in the international relations, unlike in Germany where after the
WWII the main line of governance has been the priority of economy. The real content of
this French effort in “geo-politics”, however, neglects the complex role of the EU’s
“strategic power” in the new arrangement of the multilateral word order. It is a serious
reduction the “multitasking” negotiating role of the EU, with the Macron’s simple reference
to the unique French nuclear arsenal in the EU. Both the characteristic German and French
approaches are narrow views in their mutual restrictions, emphasizing the over-
dimensioned dominance of economy or politics, which are in this way counterproductive in
the global/international relations.14
This emerging NWO has caused many troubles so far, but the triple crisis has also
offered new opportunities for the EU, including the the further integration to “escape
forwards”. In this watershed moment, the short outlines of world system theory may give
the key also to understand and reform the Core-Periphery relations. The main message of
this paper is that the EU with the excessive dominance of the Economic Europe will not
play its proper global role, and it may face an even deeper crisis by the benign neglect of
the socio-economic crisis in NMS. Some experts see the EU as representing a “neoliberal
plot”, which is a self-defeating concept, since this strong statement of neoliberal plot hides
also the bigger problem that the anti-EU and/or Eurosceptic forces are even more
neoliberal and preventing the further complex integration as the overcoming the “original
sin” of the undue preference for the “market integration” (see Slobodian and Plehwe,
2020). The EU has been a much more complex entity offering also the opportunity to
overcome the infantile disease of its own aggressive marketization, so the EU is not an
“empire” (Balázs, 2017: 85). Moreover, the energetic turn towards the social and political

25
convergence through the further federalization, by limiting the space of Economic Europe,
may lead to the proper role of the Social and Political Europe as a strong social self-defence
or “countermovement” in Polanyi’s term.

The Economic Europe and the institutional crisis cycles within the EU

The dominance of the Economic Europe has gone through the entire history of the
EU integration from the very beginning. The relationships within the EU big policy triangle,
the dominant role of Economic Europe versus the Social and Political Europe, have also
determined the EU’s internal life cycles with its changing institutions of the EU. These short
crisis cycles are normal in the EU history because, under this pressure of the evolving
Economic Europe, the EU develops through the series of the sort crises as the deepening
tensions between the dominant Economic Europe and the subservient Social and Political
Europe. These tensions take the form of the permanent contradictions between the new
policies and their still missing proper institutions. In general, the EU reacts to the external
and internal challenges with direct policy-making in several fields having many “small”
decisions, but there is always big delay in the building of the proper “big” institutions.
Therefore, the basic big institutions have always been half-made, they have constantly
kept an organizational and fiscal delay compared to the new EU policies, which have been
the direct reactions to the external and internal challenges.
Thus, the EU domestic developments can be best characterized by the changing
interrelationships within the triangle of the Economic, Social and Political Europe as the
parallel histories in their cumulated tensions and emerging contradictions. Also, the
rearrangement of the Economic, Social and Political Europe is the essence of the present
crisis management when the coronavirus crisis has transformed Social Europe into an
unreliable public service marshland, and first paralysed then mobilized the surprized
Political Europe. Still nowadays the opportunity for the radical reform after this “creative
destruction” is much bigger, not only by the perspective of Green Europe, but also by the
necessary radical reconstruction of the world order as a whole after the coronavirus crisis.
Altogether, in the EU internal development there have recently been four markedly
different crisis cycles: (1) “the immobility crisis” in 2004-2009, (2) the crisis of the global
crisis management in 2009-2014, (3) “the transformation crisis” in 2014-2019, (4) turning
to the recent management of the triple crisis 2020. It is not by chance that these short
cycles have been connected with the institutional cycles, since the basic institutional
change gives an impetus to solve the cumulated problems for the EU.15
First, the immobility crisis came clearly from this asymmetrical nature of the EU
developments, as “systemic misfit”, because the EU integration was advancing in some
important policy fields, but due to the missing institution-building was not able and ready

26
to move further in some other, closely interrelated policy fields with policy coordination
resulting in the building of the new “big” institutions. Actually, the EU runs ahead with the
economic integration and marketization, but it has been much more difficult to have a
proper match in the other social field, or, just to the contrary, the Economic Europe disturbs
the proper development of Social and Political Europe and prevents their adequate
institution-building. Thus, the economic integration has usually failed completing the
proper institutions for the new economic policy that has created serious institutional deficits
in the other social fields. The establishment of the Eurozone - and the Schengen System -
without the proper institution building are the eminent cases, but the story of the Eastern
enlargement belongs also to the first lines of the Economic Europe’s widening and
deepening list of the missing proper institutions.
Second, as an external shock, the global financial crisis generated a deep “crisis of
the crisis management” that has often been mentioned nowadays as a negative case in
the management of the triple crisis. In the early 2010s there was a painful priority of direct
economic crisis management in the South for saving the Eurozone, with the deepening of
the North-South conflict and the Core-Periphery Divide. With some exaggeration, this crisis
management created more problems than solved, its controversial character and negative
impact on the EU developments will be discussed later when analysing the present crisis
management in the early 2020s. The global crisis clearly demonstrated the structural
weaknesses of the EU due to the long delay in the institution-building in general and in the
case of the Eurozone - and also in Schengen – in particular that caused also high social
and political vulnerability of the EU. This drastic direct crisis management of the Eurozone
marginalized all other vital EU problems – including the special crisis management in NMS
and the neglect of the violations of rule of law - by concentrating on the Eurozone in order
to keep the competitiveness of the EU Core in the turbulent world. The still unfinished
Schengen institutions discovered the structural weakness of the EU institutions and
regulations in the refugee crisis. As an emblematic case, without a proper Schengen system
Europe has been hit hard with the mass migration, but it was not an accident, since the
lack of the full-fledged Schengen institutions, without the proper preparation for such
events was a crucial part of the EU immobility. By the way, all big global powers have been
participants of the Syrian crisis provoking the refuge crisis, and its crisis management has
deepened the transatlantic drift. The EU faulty and controversial crisis management
showed that the EU had to pay a high price for the “systemic misfit” in the EU, also due to
the increasing Core-Periphery Divide in both the South and the East.
Third, due to these unfinished institution-building and the lack of the coordinated
policymaking there was a transformation crisis as a polycrisis during the Juncker
Commission in the second half of the 2010s. In the institutional cycle between 2014 and
2019 the strategy of deep transformation to overcome the systemic misfit in the institution-

27
building and policy coordination was elaborated to a great extent, but not yet implemented.
This “futurology” of Juncker Commission means dealing with the Future of Europe
theoretically and conceptually, as a timely initiative with stated objectives, but it was
coupled with the unwillingness of member states for action. For instance, the Juncker
Commission tried to integrate Social Europe, the European Social Model into the European
Pillars of Social Rights (SPSR). On 26 April 2017 Commission launched the EPSR project,
but in spite of the productive Gothenburg Social Summit with small results. Already during
the early global crisis management of the Barroso II Commission it became clear that the
EU was not prepared for the major shocking effects in the global system and their crisis
management. Instead of temporary measures much deeper reforms were needed during
the Juncker Commission towards the closer integration or federalization.
Juncker was aware of the need for the deep reforms, but the EU did not deliver,
therefore this institutional cycle may be identified as the transformation crisis. The main
conditions for the global competitiveness of the EU as the innovation of the Economic
Europe by its extension to Social Europe were formulated in the reform package of the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). These reforms were high on the agenda during the
Juncker Commission with a long series of the reform strategies in the different dimensions
on the Strategy Agenda. The summary of reform strategies starts with the ten priorities of
Juncker in 2014 and it ends up with the closing documents of the Commission in 2019 (EC,
2019a,b,c). This intensive elaboration of the Future of Europe program began in 2017, as
the special path of the series in the Reflection Papers announced in the State of Union
Address of Juncker, and it concluded in the Reflection Paper entitled as Toward a
Sustainable Europe by 2030. This strategic document has also emphasized the promotion
of the European interests and values on the global stage, as the political heritage of the
Juncker Commission: “The Reflection Paper shows the ambitions of the EU to become the
world leader when it comes to sustainability. It will depend on the next Commission and
the next Strategic Agenda to live up to expectations.” (EC, 2019a: 1, see also Maurice and
Menneteau, 2019).
In the EU domestic policy, the wider program to overcome of the EU transformation
crisis has been formulated in the New Strategic Agenda 2019-2024 attached to the June
2019 Conclusions of the European Council (2019b). The year of 2019, between the two -
Juncker and Leyen – Commissions, was a turbulent year for the EU in both ways: in the
international system as the “foreign affairs” and in the change of the institutional cycles as
the “domestic affairs”. In the new cycle (2019-2024) the EU has to harmonise the changing
policies and institutions with each other, since the series subsequent crises have proved
again the vulnerability of the EU to the new radical changes in the world system,
complicated by the collapse of the US role, and above all the climate change has appeared
high on the agenda. The last message of the Juncker Commission about the Strategic

28
Agenda was followed at the end of 2019 with the tentative new reactions of the entering
Leyen Commission, the new agenda, however, has been outlined by the recent Conclusions
in the first months of 2020, under absolutely different circumstances. This rare historical
moment of the complete transition between the OWO and NWO - somewhat similar to the
collapse of the Bipolar World Order - has offered great opportunity for the internal renewal
under the changing global circumstances, at the same time it has produced new difficulties
for the harmonization in the policy triangle of the Economic, Social and Political Europe.
The international and internal dimensions of the EU developments have to be
analysed separately, although they have closely been interwoven in three ways: (1) in the
global competitiveness or in Sustainable Development Goals (EC, 2019b); (2) in the Brexit
process, which enhances the internal possibilities for a global role of the more federative
EU by getting rid from the British resistance; (3) in the largest Eastern periphery - in the
NMS, West Balkan and EE regions. First, the global competitiveness based on domestic
transformation is the dominant issue because it concerns directly the economic interests
of the Core. Second, the protracted Brexit process also contributed to the transformation
crisis, but with the “exit” it has opened a possibility for further integration, since the British
veto has disappeared. Finally, the Eastern enlargement contained also a paradox of the
high ambitions and the cumulated problems that would have demanded the profound
reform of globalization cum regionalization policy that could also significantly contribute to
the renewal of the EU’s global role. Parallel with the deepening and widening the EU has
developed a policy of globalization cum regionalization, since the close relationships with
the neighbouring regions of the South and East have been important crucial for the EU.
This has led to the organization of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), with the
special approach to the West Balkan region and Eastern Europe. In this framework more
and more an external Europeanization as a particular type of regionalization has taken
place because these Eastern neighbours have been entitled to become members of the EU,
so they have been involved into the widening process.
The NWO has assigned a new global role for the EU in the 2010s, as the highly
important task for the future shape of EU, which was too heavy to complete in the period
of transformation crisis, however it has turned to be more feasible in the new institutional
cycle. This historical trajectory of the EU has been indicated by the shocking contrast
between the two global strategy paper of the EU - European Security Strategy: A Secure
Europe in a Better World (Council of the EU, 2003) and A Global Strategy for the European
Union’s Foreign and Security Policy (EEAS, 2016), since regional politics and securitization
were not in the centre of interest in 2003, but these were already important issues in the
EU strategic document about the “foreign” policy with their strong implications for the
“domestic” policy in 2016. After the outlines of the EU new global role, the entire policy
triangle and the present, fourth crisis management will be discussed at length later.

29
 The rise of Social Europe with the sinking marshland of public services

At the emergence of the EU in the original Core of the welfare societies there was
some kind of the early harmony in their policy triangle between the economic, social and
political dimensions of integration. They were relatively well developed in their domestic
systems, and “automatically” became part of the EU6 system. These policy dimensions,
however, have been diverging more and more in the long history of the EU, and the EU
still suffers from their deep antagonisms due to the damage done by the ruling
neoliberalism. The history of this triangle of the three fundamental EU policies has some
similarities between the case of Social Europe and Political Europe - mentioned often as
Social Union and Political Union - in their divergence from the Economic Europe. Basically,
the Social Europe has been promoted more and more only instrumentally and subserviently
to the Economic Europe. The same applies also for the Political Europe, although in different
ways and cycles, and therefore they need separate treatment in the analysis of the
deepening and widening process. It has to be noted in advance that in the widening process
the EU has developed an internal territorial structure of Fragmented Europe, in which the
policy triangle has taken different shapes in the North, South - altogether the West, the
old member states – and the East, the new member states. Actually, the historical
trajectory of this policy triangle has developed a Fragmented Europe with their markedly
different structures between the Economic, Social and Political Europe, and in the EU
history these three chief actors – North, South and East – have acted accordingly. Their
particular profiles have appeared very drastically in the major crises, therefore it is very
important to investigate the particular interest structures of these chief actors in the
present triple crisis, especially in the case of Germany as the quasi hegemon in the EU,
representing most markedly the “normality” as seen from the North.
Fragmented Europe has been based on the centrality of the economic domain for
the dominant North and on that of political domain in rebalancing the EU decision-making
for the South, while the East has been focusing on the social domain and longing for a
genuine cohesion policy with upward convergence. The original “organic” harmony within
the triangle was overdeveloped in the Nordic countries (including Austria) that has created
built-in advantages for them in the EU decision-making process, therefore they have
represented the “ideal” or “normal” EU model. The well-developed social policy was missing
in the South, hence they have tried to compensate for it by the bigger political pressure
and pushing for more Political Europe. France has played a characteristic EU behaviour
moving between the North and South, sliding to the South in the sharp crisis periods. The
strong economy has both demanded and allowed the modernization of social policy from
time to time that has come to the surface in the pioneering role of some Nordic states in

30
the reform of Social Europe. Just to the contrary, Political Europe or “politicization” as a
top down approach was high on the agenda in the South, having a state-centric tradition,
while the political action was seen much more as bottom-up approach in the North with
their more mature civil societies. Altogether, the diverging profiles of the North and South
have resulted in the permanent internal tension in the Eurozone and they have been the
main reason of the immobility and inaction of the EU that can turn to be a nightmare in
the triple crisis management.
In the late 2010s, due to the mismanaged crisis with austerity measures, the social
recession – combined with health, educational, cultural recessions – as the acute crisis of
Social Europe became so evident that it was discussed more and more often in the
European Studies and the media with serious warnings. For our guidance, there are some
important complex publications and reports on the historical derailment of Social Europe
based on the Eurostat and OECD data. Since then the “original sin” of the EU emergence -
with deep asymmetries and cumulated deficits during the development of the EU policy
triangle under the pressure of the “the dominant market-building ideology” - has been
widely analysed by the experts with the demand for the “more social face” of the EU.16
No wonder that the devastating consequences of this original sin has been
discovered above all by the NMS experts, driven by the social recession or social deficit in
their own countries. They have urged the application of the idea of the “social market
economy” to elaborate an oppositional approach against the dominant neoliberalism. For
instance, the book, European Union as highly competitive social market economy (Smejkal
et al. 2016) is the honest East-Central European wishful thinking that has been built on
the basic reference to the social market economy as a “goal” of the EU in the Lisbon Treaty
(TEU). This book has not only given an overview of the crucial issue of social policy in the
EU, but it has also suggested the urgent implementation of this progressive model. The
authors have pointed out that “the goal of social market economy does deserve attention
and could be – if handled correctly – a useful guideline for the present and future effort of
the EU.” (Smejkal et al. 2016: 15). They have also underlined that this project is not
another “cry of mythological Europeanism”, or one of “those illusory goals that characterize
many declarations and programmes of the Union’s leaders”. The EU should become,
indeed, “more social… in order to convince citizens that the EU is not a non-democratic
machine to enforce the interests of investors and entrepreneurs in the liberal business
environment, stable currency and a flexible labour market”. By describing the original sin,
they have emphasized that “The founding fathers … made the compromise of entrusting
the supranational bodies of the EEC with tasks of ‘negative integration’ that could be solved
by impartial technocrats on the basis of economic rationality, while the politically sensitive
decisions had been left for the member states. …legislation and case law developed at the
EU level have been focusing first and foremost on market freedoms. On the contrary, the

31
protection of workers and their social rights … have been left in charge of the individual
Member States”. As a “founding compromise” between the German and French approaches
there was a decoupling of economic and social policy at both the EU and member state
levels, since “It was a shared belief that a higher efficiency and faster growth generated
by integrated markets would generate more or less automatically a sufficient well-being of
workers” (Smejkal et al. 2016: 18, 19).
As to the NMS case, the Copenhagen criteria “did not contain the attainment of a
certain standard of social rights or social protection”, and these countries were “exposed
to this persisting social minimalism of the EU … which extended the freedoms of the single
market to countries with much lower absolute level of wages, social services and the overall
quality of life.” The increasing social deficit has accompanied the entire history of NMS in
the EU, and, in addition, the EU has opened the gate to globalization, but has failed to
build defence mechanisms to compensate the losers of globalization. Thus, the social gap
in the 2000s has turned to be a self-enforcing tendency preventing the genuine
Europeanization as a trap with no escape, since this dependent situation has offered the
only way for the NMS developments. Therefore, the authors conclude that the social market
economy - being some kind of synthesis between the Economic and Social Europe - may
be the solution: “This short description of the trap in which the EU is caught nowadays
perhaps sufficiently explains why fulfilling the TEU social economy goal is worth considering
… The present pro-market orientation of European integration needs to be balanced with
a significantly more substantial social orientation, which, in summary, can be referred to
as the search for the social market trajectory of EU’s future development.” (Smejkal et al.
2016: 21,23).
From the point of view of the coronavirus crisis it is particularly important that the
FEPS (Foundation of European Progressive Studies) has published an alarming document
with the title Health Inequalities in Europe (Forster et al. 2018). The prejudice survived in
the depths of the minds even in the most developed countries that the health situation of
people has still to a great extent natural determinants and it does not depends so closely
on their social standing, since this illusion was in harmony with the dominant neoliberal
paradigm. The “socialization” of the health issue in the European Studies as the approach
based on the dominant role of social factors, or considering the health system as a vital
issue in Social Europe, came very belatedly in the late 2010s. Namely the recognition that
the health situation is produced mainly by social factors - and, vice versa, it is an influential
human factor in all other social activities, including employment - has only generated by
the emerging idea that the human investment plays a central role in the production system
of the knowledge based societies. This intricate social feedback has been described in a
volume of Health Inequalities in Europe that has been documented with data taken from
all member states. The health inequalities originate in social inequalities and in turn, they

32
create social inequalities, while at the same time they are the worst part of the inequalities.
The social determination of the public health situation in the population on one side and
the health system as an important driver in the production system on the other side, have
only very belatedly been fashionable topics in the European Studies, when the coronavirus
crisis has shown their close interactions.
The warning about the health inequalities has also been echoed by the ETUI
(European Trade Union Institute) report with a historical overview of the Social Europe
under the title of Social Policy in the European Union 1999-2019 (Vanhercke et al. 2019).
Finally, the FEPS produced a forward looking document entitled as Public Service Futures:
Welfare states in a digital age (Harrop et al. 2020) engaging also in the discussion of the
coronavirus crisis as the unprecedented case of the public health crisis. These documents
are very helpful to describe the decay and delay of Social Europe in the contrast to the
triumphant Economic Europe, which has also been responsible for the triple crisis that will
be discussed below.
The volume of the Social Policy in the European Union 1999-2019 has a
comprehensive approach. The editors have summarized the major changes in Social
Europe and they have given a periodization of its history in the concluding chapter in three
cycles (see Vanhercke, 2019: 187-189). First, the early organization of social policy until
2005, in which the basic regulation of Social Europe was made. The editors consider that
within this initial stage there was an intensive “social period” of the EU between 1997 and
2005, due to the entry of social policy oriented Northerners in 1995, supported by the
social-democratic majority in the European Commission. In this period, the social
responsibility of the governments in the community of the welfare states was relatively
high. Second, this beginning was followed by the decline in the next decade, in the mid-
2000s a negative turn occurred, in which the large part of population became more and
more defenceless, left at the mercy of the aggressive market rules. The social-democratic
parties lost the elections, and the EPP majority among the Commissioners cooled down the
further expectations in spite of the reinforced inequalities and increasing vulnerability of
the average citizen. Otherwise, the social policy statements were sometimes only rhetorical
decorations in the EU documents due to the serious social “infections” by the business
world.
With the Big Bang of the Eastern enlargement in 2004 the focus of Europeanization
was shifted to the Economic Europe more than ever. The social policy in the EU has been
marginalized since then with the drastic decrease of social responsibility of the business
sector and the state. Moreover, even the implementation of the EU social policy has been
a big task in NMS that has had special relevance for the old members, but it was a terra
incognita in this region. In general, the subservient role of social policy became dominant.
The EU “from the 2005 onwards focused on jobs and growth, largely disregarding the social

33
and environmental pillars of the initial strategy.” Social responsibility was pushed into the
background by the “responsibility for the market conditions”. It was a social recession
period following the global crisis under the dominant idea of the neoliberalism. The social
acquis was not raised at all among the conditionalities for the NMS, although the accession
impacted severely on the less educated/skilled part of their population. Although “social
affairs players were able to advance, to some extent, their policy agenda” even in the
subservient function to Economic Europe, “These advances in the social domain
notwithstanding, the impact of historical developments described above demonstrates how
fragile the social domain is; it is ‘simultaneously intertwined with, and subservient to, the
forces of EU economic governance’”.
Third, finally there were some new positive efforts after 2014 in the Juncker
Commission. The editors of the volume see “a social policy revival with some caveats” in
the next period due to the cumulated social misery and increasing inequality, therefore
“Juncker promised and delivered a revival of the EU’s social dimension, notably through
the solemn proclamation of a European Pillar of Social Rights (EFSR) in November 2017.”
However, in the parallel history of the Economic and Social Europe the distance and/or the
inadequacy between them increased both as a dysfunction in their common workings and
as a political tension on the side of the marginalized people and the precariate. This mass
socio-economic pressure was waiting for a political solution, although the Political Europe
felt the social responsibility but it was not able and ready to deliver. The Juncker period
shows the usual contrast between the preparation and implementation of the Strategic
Agenda that awaits for a solution in the Leyen Commission after the new global crisis of
pandemic.
Altogether, between 2008 and 2020, 12 years after the bail-out in global crisis,
after another 12 years of the corporate or business irresponsibility, Social Europe needs
basic reconstruction. This periodization with an open end - after the long inaction looking
for an effective action of the Leyen Commission - , proves that Social Europe has not been
really “integrated” into the deepening process of the EU because this process has been
dominated by the market fundamentalist, neoliberal Economic Europe, which has
marginalized and distorted Social Europe. Obviously, all the three basic policies have to be
developed in a permanent process, and integrated into a common policy. Supposedly, even
in the logic of “the economy first”, the initial period of laying the economic foundations, as
the era of Economic Europe, should have been followed by the transition to Social Europe
when the bigger attention has been paid to the priorities of Social Europe. Nevertheless,
the era of Social Europe with its necessary completion was missing or derailed under the
pressure of the triumphant neoliberalism in the EU during the Juncker Commission.
However, the knowledge based society still demands reconceptualization through the twin
terms of the human and social investment on one side and the human and social

34
infrastructure on the other. This reconceptualization presupposes paradigmatic shift from
the narrow individualized or personal approach to the health systems to the public or
“interpersonal” approach that has become evident in the brutal process of the coronavirus
crisis.
Again, the triple crisis has put the public health system to the forefront and it has
presented that this reconceptualization would have been required also by the inner logic
of Economic Europe, although it has only taken place domestically in the developed
member states, to some extent. After the long debates about “beyond the GDP” in the late
2000s, the turn to the “innovation driven economy” with human and social investment
would have demanded more intensive care about Social Europe, instead, the gap between
the Economic and Social Europe since then has widened. This new transition to the
knowledge based economy with its corresponding knowledge based society with human
and social investment has only been partial, because it has taken place only in the most
developed member states in such a way that it has deepened the gap between the most
and least developed countries in the EU. The social policy has not been Europeanized
properly, i.e. reorganized accordingly in the 2000s at the EU level as the NMS experts
argued above about some kind of the social market economy.
Moreover, in this progressive model of innovation driven development the NMS have
usually appeared as a burden, some kind of obstacle to the transition to the knowledge-
based society. Characteristically, this emerging production system with the harmonization
between the Economic, Social and Political Europe - that offers a chance for a qualitative
approach to the sustainable growth instead of the outdated quantitative, GDP based
economic approach - has not been depicted as an opportunity for the common arrangement
of the catching up process in NMS. The entire philosophy of the EU leadership and
European Studies about catching up in the EU has been still dominated by the quantitative
approach, even after a decade of announcing the development strategy “beyond GDP”. The
annual reports of NMS have still been about their increasing percentages in the EU GDP
average, while their investments in the research and innovation have further declined.
Written in 2019, the editors of the FEPS volume could argue with justification that the
responsibility for this blind alley has shifted more to the NMS themselves, first of all to
their comprador elites. But this “lost decade” after the global crisis was preceded and
determined by the original blind alley of the dependent economic development created by
the older member states in the neoliberal spirit. The Europeanized social deficit, paralleled
by their actual domestic social policy, has deteriorated the NMS development in general.
Moreover it has created a social disorder/disintegration that has been the main driver
behind their emerging authoritarian systems, in which the autocratic leaders have been
the beloved partners of the big Western firms.

35
 The all-encompassing overview of Social Europe can be done from the side of the
public service system described in the volume of Public Service Futures (Harrop et al. 2020)
in a sharp critical spirit at the time of the triple crisis. The public service system has
cumulated all contradictions, deficiencies and disparities as the Introduction asserts: “a
decade of public sector austerity has measurably damaged fundamental dimensions of
people’s lives.” The social security problems have reached a new stage in the digital era
with the personal data security in particular or with the “civic security” in general. It allows
the general description of public service in this book, coupled with the triple crisis in the
early 2020s, which also prepares in this paper the analysis of the three kinds of the recent
global crisis: “Now, in 2020, welfare states in Europe face an unprecedented challenge in
the shape of Covid-19 virus, which is set to test the resilience of and adaptability. The
response to the crisis will shine a light on the best of public service … But it also risks
exposing dangerous vulnerabilities arising from years of cost-cutting and fragmentation.”
(Harrop et al. 2020: XI).17
This volume on the EU public service in fact describes the historical trajectory of the
widening social rights from the innovative works of TH Marshall to the digital age
culminating in the solemn declaration of the European Pillars of Social Rights (EPSR). The
main conceptual issues have been elaborated in the Chapter 12, A Social Europe: Tackling
the EU’s ‘social deficit’ written by Francesco Corti that described the EU’s public service
system as a “marshland”, as a slippery terrain, which is sometimes solid, but not reliable
in the rapidly changing world. In its ideal term, the European Social Model is aimed at
ensuring that all EU citizens benefit from social protection and good public services as the
EU social rights. They are defined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000) and
specified in the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (2009) and further developed in the
EPSR (2017). Due to the unfinished global crisis management after the 2014 EP elections
the Social Europe was at the heart of the European political debate, but because of the
lack of political will it was still marginalized in the decision-making process. As Corti notes,
this permanent postponement “helped the image of the EU as a ‘monster of austerity’ …
as responsible for the social and economic downturn and for the progressive dismantling
of national welfare states and public services.” The EPSR has remained an excellent
“inventory of social rights” and a “political manifesto” without implementation (Corti, 2020:
140-141).
The only issue the Juncker Commission dealt with seriously was the regulation of
labour markets and the EU’s social deficit further increased. It is true that there was an
important innovation, since the Commission proposed a new set of indicators, the social
scoreboard for the implementation of the EPSR that has significantly contributed to the
“socialization” of the European Semester. However, the Juncker Commission did not reach
a breakthrough in overcoming the social deficit of the EU, since “these initiatives tackled

36
only one of the dimensions of the EU social deficit, notably by revitalising the EU social
acquis and relaunching the EU social agenda after a decade of policy inertia. …Addressing
this second dimension of the ‘EU social deficit’ would require tackling the structural
asymmetry of European economic integration, namely the constitutional imbalance
between ‘the market’ and ‘the social’ in the European Union.” (Corti, 2020: 145). Corti
concludes that there is still “a north/south divide on support for pan-European solidarity
measures” among the political elites, although the majority of EU citizens is “ready to
support a more ambitious and stronger social Europe. It is the task of the new Commission
and Parliament to speak to this majority. The road towards a fully-fledged social Europe
remains long and winding“ (Conti, 2020: 146). The main lesson of the full volume points
to the same direction: “So the 2020s are a time of great possibility for public services …
But there are big risks too, because the demands on the public realm will be so high. In
many European countries, public services were already threadbare before the coronavirus
crisis. Without more money, faster innovation and a stronger voice for citizens they could
enter into a declining spiral, where people lose confidence and trust.” (Harrop et al. 2020:
XVII-XVIII).18
Altogether, the hidden paradigm of this book is that in the digital age the public
service system is a better indicator for the progress of a given society than the economic
or production system, therefore the social and human investment is both the main driver
of the general progress of societies and the basic guarantee of its sustainability.
Paradoxically, this thesis can be formulated in such a way that nowadays this new type of
progressive “consumption” is more important than the old-type of routine “production”.
This is the competitive edge of the EU over the US where the socially wide consumerist
over-consumption is a slave of the routine production. This “GDP gap” in the US as a
widening contrast between the economic growth and social well-being with human
development was discussed by Jeffry Sachs already in the early 2010s and revisited several
times: “GDP growth itself is a deeply flawed measure of well-being. High growth does not
guarantee shared economic improvement, and slow growth does not necessarily imply
widespread economic hardship. In recent decades, most of the fruits of US growth have
gone to the richest of the rich, who least need it. Still, even after accounting for data errors,
short term cycles, and the yawning gaps between GDP and well-being, there is little doubt
that the US economy is failing to raise living standards at the same pace as in the past. …
Long-term economic improvement occurs when societies invest adequately in their future.
The harsh fact is that the United States has stopped investing adequately in the future;
slow US economic growth is the predictable and regrettable result. …We are less aware of
how we are shortchanging the science, skills, and natural capital that we depend upon for
long-term progress.” (Sachs, 2016).19

37
 In spite of the many contradictions the outlines of the European social system can
be already seen, but the neoliberal warfare against the just and affordable public services
still continues. It runs parallel against the austerity measures arguing with high financial
burden and low efficiency of well-being measures on one side, and by deconstructing public
services in Europe in the competition with the private services on the other. For sure,
usually there is no room in the EU media coverage for the headlines about the social
recession in NMS, since they have increasingly been preoccupied with the new threat of
the NMS autocracies, but the causes of their emergence in the terms of Social Europe have
not been mentioned, although they have been particularly vulnerable to the incursion of
market forces into public services. This marshland has been in a constant process of
shifting in-between by blurring the boundaries public and private social services, and
cutting the provision of public services in the budget and pushing people to the private
service providers. This institutional complexity of public or private may be the most
vulnerable point of the health care systems in general, but for sure, they have proved to
be the most vulnerable point of the public service in the coronavirus crisis.
The main effort has been, just to the contrary, to codify governments’ enduring
responsibilities to their citizens securing a wider range of universally available public
services what the authors call universal basic services as the good health, education,
housing and living standards for all. The issue of the tackling the EU’s social deficit has
always been coupled with the idea of the strong public domain, collective interests in public
services and the stronger community bonds, especially in the case of upward pressure in
social rights for a healthy environment as an expansion in the scope of the public sphere.
This task of the empowerment of citizen voice by participation and democratic
accountability, with the strategic role for democratic local and regional governments in
designing and coordinating public services in each locality, leads directly to the issue of
Political Europe.

The revitalization of Political Europe facing the disintegration of the EU

Political Europe is the main victim of the aggressive Economic Europe and it bears
at the same time the main responsibility for the victory of Economic Europe throughout
the lost decade after the global financial crisis. Therefore, despite some similarities, the
story of Political Europe has been different from that of Social Europe and it needs a
separate analysis because the connection between the Economic and Political Europe is
more complicated. Basically, the “social gap” has resulted in the “political gap” as a
systemic failure of the participatory democracy due to the polarization of population
between the “voice” and “silence” (or exit). The crisis of the representative democracy in
the member states as well as in the EU has produced the often discussed democracy deficit

38
at the bottom and the decision-making has usually been paralysed because of the diverging
interests at the top. Moreover, in NMS, as it will be pointed out below, there is a rather
close causal link between the tough neoliberal economic policies and the general decline of
democratic order. In the EU policy triangle this effect in NMS has gone through the
worsening social policy and it has led not only to the dysfunctions of their political systems,
resulting in poor governance, but it has eroded the entire political system.
Political integration in the EU proceeds at two levels, as institution-building from
above and participatory democracy from below. The institution-building for democratic
governance involves both the internal and external coordination, i.e. within the political
sub-system and also in its close connection with the economic, social, and cultural sub-
systems. The participatory democracy means the involvement of the citizens in the
emerging common institutions and decision-making processes as the inclusion of the
population into political system in the spirit of the European values and patterns of political
culture. Political development’s overall progress occurs when these two processes meet,
and their linkage works through the participation of the population in the decision-making
of the expanding institutional system. This common political development within the EU
has been a mixture of the international and domestic processes in their special political
integration.20
Again, the regional variety matters, like in the case of Social Europe. No wonder
that this unique transnational political integration of the EU began in the most developed
part of Europe with the political systems at the same level, and it was continued in the
South closely attached to the original Core. This emerging democratic polity of the EU was
joined by some other Nordic countries later without strong conditionalities, since their
political system was already well developed at the time of the accession. The maturity in
the original members and the “overdeveloped” Nordic democracies has been a constant
factor in the political integration. Also, the Southern member states had big advantages of
democratization compared to the East, joining the Western community well before their
own accession. Nonetheless, the transnational political system of this EU15 has also
produced many contradictions, basically in the inertia of the decision-making in critical
situations. Still this cumulated crisis of the EU15 in the “triangle” of the Economic, Social
and Political Europe has not led to the divergence in their mainstream political
developments or to the decline of their basic democratization process (forget about the
British case ending in Brexit), although it has produced a special controversy between the
North and South from the very beginning. The basic political tension began with the entry
of NMS where the political Europeanization – after a short pre-accession stage – began
within the EU much later and at a much lower level, and finally it has been prevented to a
great extent, or even been reversed by their miserable integration in Social Europe.21

39
 The dominance of Economic Europe has been in fact that of the original Core, which
has always been ahead in the economic developments, therefore it has always used and
abused its favourable position considering its situation as “normality” in the EU. The North
has increasingly developed its socio-economic advantages versus the South that has
suffered deepening socio-economic disadvantages, which has given birth to the regular
crisis at the level of Political Europe in the Fragmented Europe, which has also been the
case in the triple crisis management. It has created an imbalanced economic relationship
between the North and South, therefore their structural imbalance has been perpetuated
in the EU15, in the community of the old member states. The Southern member states
have weaker and less dynamic economies, with the sharp ups and downs in their economic
development. In a French critical view, “While the ordo-liberalism that has guided the
economic governance of the Union in recent decades is being put on hold, and opportunity
is opening up to define another economic model.” (Maurice et al. 2020: 4). Thus, this
structural disease between the North and South that comes back in all major crises, when
the frozen conflict, which seems to be tolerable in the boom periods, is heating up in
recession periods. The inherent North-South conflict has been developing into a permanent
trench warfare in the EU, since the vested interests of the strongest member states has
been the keeping the status quo and preventing the crucial decisions. Nevertheless, they
have been forced to negotiate from time to time giving small compromises to the South
with its sluggish approach in economic reforms. However, the same structural imbalance
appears at much higher level between the old and new member states. It hinders the
solution of the NMS problems and by marginalizing them this benign neglect even
aggravates the problems. Therefore, the recognition of the special regional case of NMS at
the very start of the accession process would have been vital for the EU, since due to both
the weak foundations of the NMS political systems and under the pernicious pressure of
Economic Europe, the democratization process in NMS has proved to be reversible, hence
the Political Europe has fallen into a deep crisis between the Core and Periphery. 22
The Political Europe in institutional dimension, in a somewhat closer analysis,
usually approached from the narrowest practical side of governance as the workings of the
political institutions and from the most comprehensive side and the EU democracy, as the
workings of democratic polity. In the Political Europe the most sensitive issue is test of the
political system when a common vital decision is needed for the crisis management. The
historical itinerary of Political Europe has come through a series of Treaties regulating the
political integration of the central decision-making bodies, in which the dynamism has been
given by the increasing role of the interinstitutional cooperation. The constant fight around
the voting mechanism about the necessary majority for decision-making indicates,
however, the legal bottlenecks of these vital decisions. The usual tension between the
Council and EP has regularly produced the inertia of the EU politics due to the claims for

40
national sovereignty, in which the conflicting national interest have often led to inaction
and demobilization in the crucial decision-making periods. Behind the official scenery,
however, the informal business networks have also played an important role, where the
Economic Europe has shown its strength against the formal decisions through influencing
the governments directly and indirectly by the frequently regulated, but not yet really
controlled, business lobbing in the various EU bodies.23
The issue of Political Europe’s inertia became openly controversial during the
immobility crisis in the early 2010s when the necessary political decisions were impeded,
delayed and distorted due to the short term economic interests of the giant business actors.
Actually this situation has been repeated since then new and again. Therefore, the urgent
demand for Political Europe as a Political Union was raised very seriously in the early 2010s
after the direct crisis management, due to the frustration not to have a breakthrough on
the vital issues of the Eurozone. The basic decisions were delayed or derailed by the
institutionalized inaction in the immobility crisis due to the half-made institutions like the
Eurozone and the Schengen System. After a long silence the need for an effective Political
Europe returned with a vengeance during the Juncker Commission in the transformation
crisis and it was re-formulated as the essential part of the Strategic Agenda, and without
significant implication it has been transferred to the Leyen Commission. However, under
the pressure of the coronavirus crisis the impasse in the policy triangle due to the
aggressive dominance of the Economic Europe has led to a long expected revelation in the
West, when Amelie de Montchalin, the French Minister of European Affairs has issued a
strong message in the France Inter radio that “If Europe is just a single market when times
are good, then it has no sense.” The French President Emmanuel Macron added on the
same day. “France will fight for a Europe of solidarity” (Euractiv, 2020).24
The participative side of Political Europe has been formulated in the demands of
Open Democracy for the expected democratic workings of the EU: “The institution of the
political space passes through a coordinated and plural, participatory action of citizenship.”
(Urbinati, 2019: 11). It has turned out that the design of the EU political institutions cannot
be simply neither a strong “EU central government” nor a flexible “EU governance just for
the Economic Europe”, suggested by the opposite French and German approaches for
decades. None of these models have taken into consideration that the old structure of the
representative democracy has become outdated even in the national polities and the old
slogan of the “no taxation without representation” – mentioned nowadays often in the
discussion papers – has gained a new meaning by the demand for an effective participatory
democracy. It contains a participatory governance according to the principle of the
multilevel governance (MLG) and multidimensional governance (MDG), involving both the
coordination of the decision-making process vertically and horizontally, i.e. among the
different territorial levels and the various policies. Against the overconcentration in a strong

41
central government, or being simply subservient of the expansive economic interests by
violating the interests of the other social sectors in the pan-European governance, there
has been a popular pressure for the entry of citizens into the politics. This is the central
topic in the discussions about the democracy deficit nowadays. It is the genuine meaning
of “United in Diversity” because the European political space opened in this way allows
some voice also for the smaller member states and different minorities. This kind of design
can unleash a positive spiral between the constant reforms of both the institutional side
and the participative side of Political Europe. Also, it can be a learning process of democracy
for the NMS populations and the true control over their newly emerged controversial
political systems sliding into autocracy.25
The other dimension of the Political Europe is the participatory Europe with the basic
European values and the patterns of the civic political culture that raises also the issue of
the democratic deficit in the institutionalized Political Europe. This research direction has
been investigated thoroughly under several topics – e.g. “my voice counts” and “European
identity” in the Eurobarometer surveys – that can be summarized in the term of Civil
Europe that has become rather central interest in the last years. This participatory Europe
has been central due to the overdevelopment in the West and underdevelopment in the
East. Namely, Civil Europe has been high on the political agenda in the West because the
general maturity of their political development and this dimension has been lagging behind,
showing a big contrast in the domestic situation. In the East it has appeared as a teasing
issue with a big question mark because the divergence from the EU mainstream has also
marginalized the civil societies on one side and questioned the institutional formalities of
effective political and/or public participation on the other. In this democracy vacuum of
civil societies and actual participatory rights, millions of the Easterners have gone to the
West to become indeed full-fledged European citizens. Right after the accession it could
have been said that the “civilian” integration to the EU is just a question of time, but since
then the process has gone to the opposite direction in the last decade, and the NMS
populations – formally EU citizens – have actually felt more and more “their exclusion from
Europe”.
Among others, the specific NMS crisis also played a role in this revived interest in
the Political Union. While in the Barroso II Commission the debate on the violation of rule
of law in NMS just began, it became already a serious issue during the Juncker Commission
although it did not get a serious attention. This the long term inaction in the case of the
Eastern divergence from the mainstream EU democratic development has been an
important part of the weakness of Political Europe making it naked and evident. The lack
of the meaningful legal instruments in the EU decision-making about this NMS divergence
is clear, but it has been exaggerated, since the main reason behind this lame duck
phenomenon was - and still it is - the missing political will, mostly due the close

42
interconnectedness between the economic interest of multinationals in the West and the
political interests of the autocratic local elites in the East to be discussed below.
Thus, the young researchers in the East have felt that the “NMS Island” has been
drifting away from the European “Continent”. They have noted bitterly that the socio-
psychological effects of their deep frustration have been caused by the imitation of an
unattainable model of the West in the East. They have underlined that “the deceptive
macro-indicators … do not say anything about the living conditions … and what
opportunities people actually have to lead a decent life. … In short: life beyond the nicely
superficial macro-indicators is extremely precarious and uncertain.” (Kováts and
Smejkalova, 2020: 2-3). Referring to the book The Light That Failed of Ivan Krastev and
Stephen Holmes (2020) they state that the Easterners feel humiliation because of the often
mentioned uphill struggle to move from the inferior to the superior way of life. I have
argued similarly in my former book in a separate chapter (Ágh, 2019: 229-250) that the
deepest misery in NMS is not the economic, social or political crisis, but the civilizational-
cultural crisis in the everyday way of life of Easterners. It means that not simply the
catching up process failed, but the naïve expectation for the participatory Political Europe
and European way of life – as “the keeping Europeans together” project – has failed.
Actually, the debate on the Political Europe has been reopened recently due to the
coronavirus crisis that has also produced bitter lessons about the slow and
counterproductive workings of the political system of the EU at the outbreak of the
coronavirus crisis. The criticism has been focused more and more on the institutional side,
on the slow reactions of the EU institutions to the crisis, but it is indeed an open issue for
the time being in both respects of the institutional reforms and the demands for a more
civilian Europe. This – hopefully transitory - immobilism as the prolongation of the EU
transformation crisis can be the case again when the crisis has culminated in the spring of
2020. And there is a danger that the new crisis will be arranged again mostly favourable
for the North.

(III) The New Member States across the changing world systems (43)

The lopsided EU integration producing disintegration in NMS

The historical trajectory of the Eastern enlargement has shown that the promotion
of Economic Europe has gone very much ahead in NMS, and it has produced half-
modernised economies and disintegrated societies, while the promotion of Political Europe
has been a failure because the EU democracy has just turned to be a preparatory phase of
the autocratic systems as an internal Easternization. This process has contained a Western
fallacy that the “peaceful” export of the big formal institutions – the institution transfer by

43
the “judicial integration” (Scharpf, 2015) - combined with the “deep trade” in the market
economy will change everything, since supposedly, as the Western common sense
predicted, some kind of an active civil society exists everywhere in the East. Thus, in this
false EU concept, the constitutional changes with the general legal framework and the
process of marketization with the economic growth will be “trickling down” and
transforming automatically the entire society step by step towards Westernization.
However, as Abby Innes has warned, “The stable party competitions and Weberian states
of post-war western Europe were founded on strong elite commitments to democracy and
socially embedded through sustained productivity growth and universally rising living
standards. But these conditions have never existed in central Europe” (Innes, 2014: 88). 26
The EU has reorganized the NMS region as a functional outlet of the developed Core
by an enforced marketization and lopsided modernization with many advantages and
disadvantages. Regions matter, they have common history in a long term, with a
continuous historical memory and political culture. At the same time the regions are
themselves historical products, and they change with the world systems accordingly. Every
world system more or less reorganizes the whole world into the newly re-created regions
in order to serve with their specific functions and capacities for the given world system,
first of all, for its hegemon power. Regionalization has different meanings seen from outside
or inside. The NMS region has been reorganized by the EU economic and political forces
from outside. The “lands in between” the West and East have always been the European
semi-periphery, moving from time to time between Westernization and Easternization,
back and force. After the collapse of the bipolar world - as the worst period ever of
Easternization in the outer empire of Soviet Union - they have begun their Westernization
that has meant finally a return to the semi-periphery status in Europe as their traditional
place in the world system under the new circumstances. Thus, the crisis of the Eastern
enlargement was felt already in the 2000s in a “covered” post-accession crisis, but it has
turned to an open crisis under the pressure of the global crisis in the 2010s. In the global
crisis management, the EU has solved the basic problems of the South and magnified the
regional crisis by neglectence in the East. There have been parallel intra-regional
developments as well, from the regional cooperation to the regional integration processes,
based on the common traditions and common interests, or on the emerging resistance
against the economic domination through the outside pressure of the multinationals.
Therefore, due to this prolonged crisis, however, the East has been concerned more with
the systemic crisis in the emerging NWO than the South.27
In the midst of global crisis management the vicious spiral of the negative
externalities accelerated in NMS, and the “crisis studies” were high on the agenda already
in the early 2010s. Although the EU leadership was not ready to face the problems of the
negative externalities, to correct or lessen them, there were already series warnings in the

44
European Studies: “The EU is more and more perceived as a problem. The weakest hold
that the EU, and especially core countries in the euro zone, are imposing too much on them
and asking too much from them.” (Emmanouilidis, 2011: 13). This EPC analysis demanded
a “quantum leap” in the EU, and Barroso introduced the term of systemic crisis, indicating
both the high relevance and the complexity of crisis, since this term embraced the various
dimensions into one interlocking system: „The sense of fairness and equity between
Member States is being eroded. And without equity between Member States, how can there
be equity between European citizens? Over the last four years, we have made many bold
decisions to tackle this systemic crisis.” (Barroso, 2012: 1). The weaker states felt that
“fairness” was missing in two respects in the crisis management, first, it concentrated on
the main Core countries, and second, it missed the removal of the negative externalities
from the economic “surgery” in the crisis management. No wonder that this time the term
of negative externalities of the EU has appeared in the NMS “crisis studies” indicating the
harmful spill-overs of the neoliberal economic expansion and the ensuing lopsided social
development. The Juncker Commission did not continue the Barroso’s radical analytical
approach of systemic crisis, instead it introduced the term of polycrisis. Although the new
term expressed the complexity of crisis, but lost the meaning of its systemic character in
the interlocking structures for policy coordination. Altogether this Juncker approach itself,
due to the benign neglectence, belonged to the negative externalities of the EU in NMS.
In the Juncker Commission both the EU official reports and the important analyses
of the leading institutes pointed out that the official narrative of functionalism and the
expectation of the evolutionary catching up based on the mechanism of “ever positive spill-
overs” did not work at all. Just to the contrary, this overwhelming process of the economic
invasion/penetration has contagiously unleashed the De-Europeanization and De-
Democratization process. Namely, there has been vertically a deep social polarization
between the losers and winners and horizontally between the two parts of NMS countries
partitioning them into the “West of the East” and “East of the East” with the horrible
conditions in the latter. In this respect, the most relevant documents of the EU are the
Reports of Eurofound, especially The Upward Convergence (Eurofound, 2018, see also
Eurofound, 2019). The Eurofound research has widely documented that in fact the
expected upward convergence has not taken place in the EU. The original idea of the
evolutionary development was false, nonetheless it has been presented as a scientific
paradigm of functionalism that has become a political taboo of the EU leadership: “The
founding fathers of the European project were convinced that social convergence will arise
spontaneously through economic convergence.” Accordingly, the oversimplified
functionalism has become the main tenet of Europeanization that has been echoed all the
time: “The most obvious advantages of integration come from market integration … Market
integration has brought benefits to every member country.” (Molle, 2017: 17). This false

45
idea has survived in spite of the evident failure of EU integration through the excessive
marketization causing domestic disintegration in the NMS.
In fact, as the above EU document argues, “while the concept of economic
convergence is embedded in the European treaties and has been at the forefront of
European policy discussions for some time, the importance of the upward social
convergence has only recently gained traction.” The accelerating downward negative
externalities “with an increase of disparities across the Member States” have produced
social exclusion, low life satisfaction of population and poor performance of governments.
Due to the pernicious effect of the Economic Europe “Some wealthier Member States or
regions may benefit more than others from the progress of integration – in part due to the
effects of specialisation and of centre-periphery dichotomies.”, although “If there is a
feeling that the single market impedes the growth of Member States and prevents low
income countries from developing, efforts will be made to undermine its functioning”. To
overcome these negative externalities with its downward spiral, this EU document has
described “how the debate around convergence developed as the focus moved from
economic convergence to economic and social convergence”. It has overviewed the new
strategy emphasizing that sustained convergence is “a policy process towards cohesion,
which is the ultimate political objective” (Eurofound, 2018:1-2,5-6). All in all, this EU
document has made a big effort to go beyond the simplified functionalism and market
fundamentalism of the Economic Europe by elaborating a new conceptual framework. In
this way, the upward social convergence as a central term has been opposed to the fetish
of marketization and (the quantitative) economic growth. Moreover, this simplified GDP-
based economic thinking has been presented in this document as the main reason for the
devastating effects of the global crisis for the EU, and later for the ecological crisis
worldwide. Finally, this research document has confronted the taboo of the typical EU
philosophy that the economic growth based development is equally advantageous for all
member states, and it has put the Social Europe and Political Europe on the thinking
horizon with the central term of upward social convergence.28
The most critical analysis has come from EPC by continuing the previous warning
from the early 2010s. At the end of the Juncker Commission the analysis of the prestigious
European Policy Center (EPC) argued an even more critical spirit discovering the deepening
Core-Periphery Divide, or as the EPC analysis terms it, the rise of the Fragmented Europe.
It pointed out that “there are structural differences among the EU27… These divisions do
not only affect political elites in national capitals, but also societies as a whole”. The
Fragmented Europe has produced deep social polarization with “high degree of economic
divergence and rising inequalities” and “widening economic gap between and within EU
countries” – as described above between the North, South and East. As a result, “it seems
as if Europeans are almost living on different planets”. In this false crisis management the

46
populists “are successful when they can tap into people’s grievances and fears about the
future, when the citizens are deeply frustrated with those who have been in power, and
when they are dissatisfied with the existing state of representative democracy.”
Consequently, it is not enough to have a theoretical discussion about the neopopulism in
the EU, but it is necessary to solve those basic problems leading to these increasing socio-
economic and political fragmentation. This EPC document has suggested “cohesion” and
“social justice” as the key terms for the further federalization, namely more differentiation
without a preference for “core Europe” in order to “counter the sources of fragmentation
and polarisation” (Emmanouilidis, 2018: 17,20). The priority of the Economic Europe has
deepened the Core-Periphery Divide and eroded the social solidarity by strengthening the
Core and by weakening the Periphery. Thus, this analyse has proved that the overwhelming
Economic Europe induced by the Core has generated in NMS an “internal Easternization”
instead of the “external Westernization”. This lopsided Europeanization has been
counterproductive and opened the blind alley of De-Europeanization with “fragmentation”
and polarization, instead of Europeanization with “homogenization” and federalization,
producing non-compliance, internal resistance to the common EU actions in the NMS.29
The result in NMS is a from above, politically organized society, in which the Western
multinationals has mostly been “buying markets” and recruiting low paid workers for the
assembly lines of their labour reservoir. There has been a withdrawal of the state from its
genuine functions in providing comprehensive public services and social policy, altogether
the general social security, while at the same time the intrusion of the state has taken
place into those fields where autonomy is needed, namely as the lack of “civic security”.
This downward spiral has damaged first of all the underprivileged and poorest people, and
it has also strictly limited the rise of a European-type middle class. Both have been the
products of the social and political exclusion in different ways, with the loss of civil and
political rights, and increasing deprivation. The mass exodus of young, ambitious and well-
educated people in millions has been the biggest price paid by NMS for this half-
modernization (see e.g. Waterbury, 2018). Even more so, the mass exodus can also be
the the biggest obstacle for the future upward convergence and redemocratization at home
due to the bleeding out, i.e. losing the best resources of NMS for a genuine
Europeanization. This internal Easternization as domestic distortion is certainly the better
elaborated part of the Eastern enlargement in a huge literature, whereas on the other side
the conceptualization and description of the negative externalities by the EU has been
lagging very much behind, and the proper discussion of this issue has begun in the
European Studies only in the last years.

Europeanization Revisited: the failure of the catching up project

47
 Actually, after three decades of systemic change in NMS there is a common
understanding in the relevant literature that the Eastern enlargement has not been a
success story as it has been clear from two recent representative volumes on the NMS
developments. The first volume, Europeanization Revisited: Central and Eastern Europe in
the European Union, (Matlak et al. 2018) has been written by a team in the European
University Institute and the second volume - Social and Economic Development in Central
and Eastern Europe (Gorzelak, 2019) by the regional experts in NMS. The first volume has
suggested the term of “Europeanization Revisited” with justification and in this vein, the
main message of both conceptual Introductions of these volumes is that the failure after
30 years it is already evident, given the peripherialization of NMS in the EU, since there is
still no innovation driven development or upward convergence. The editorial team of the
first volume has argued that the reason for revisiting Europeanization is that the earlier
literature focused only on the formal, legal-institutional Europeanization, therefore they
“studied Europeanization as a process with a uniquely positive direction and outcome. …
Negative Europeanization or ‘de-Europeanization’ appeared irrelevant. Yet in the post-
accession period of the new member states … de-Europeanization is an indispensable part
of the outcome range.” (Wozniakowski et al. 2018: 10). In the same spirit Gorzelak (2019:
3), the editor of the second volume has summarized his message as follows: “the specificity
of the central and eastern part of the European continent and its historical background
have had a clear bearing on its economic, social, environmental, instructional and
demographic structures, thus shaping in a special way the processes of transformation. …
The reversal of the pro-democratic political and institutional reforms would support the
hypothesis that these changes induced from the outside were at the end of the day
relatively shallow.” Thus, neglecting the regional specificities, the Europeanization of the
NMS has remained mostly on the surface in the legal-constitutional formalities and its
“economization” has in fact acted to a great extent against the qualitative catching up.30
The international factor in general, and the current word systemic change in
particular, has appeared very radically in the historical trajectory of the Eastern
enlargement, therefore its analysis can shed light also on the substance of systemic crisis
in the EU. Namely, the widening project has been the weakest and the most vulnerable
part of Europeanization, in which the structural mistakes of the whole Europeanization
process have come to the surface in the most intensive way. Thus, the analysis of the
Eastern enlargement discovers also the common negative features of the EU developments
and its lessons help for the improvement of the entire federalization process. The
assumption is that the Eastern enlargement has been from the very beginning a good goal
combined with the serious mistake of neglecting the regional specificities. It has brought
the dominance of functionalist “geo-economics” over the wide spectrum of sober
geopolitics (globalization cum regionalization), dealing with all regions/countries according

48
to their specificities in order to reach and reproduce the situation of the “E pluribus unum”
(One out of many), or “Unity in Diversity”, for an all-European reform strategy.
The EU could not get adjusted to the NWO properly without solving this deepening
Core-Periphery Divide. The twin goals of deepening and widening within Europe has been
both necessary and feasible, but the Europeanization process has remained captive of the
EU original integration project of the narrow minded economic functionalism. The Economic
Europe has defeated the Political Europe in the original Core, and much more drastically
later, in the enlargement process as the “original sin”. The entire EU integration project for
its start was solidly based on the dominance of economic integration in the original member
countries that had been already closely cooperating. The welfare society was born in the
original Core where the social resistance or self-defence in their domestic democracy was
strong enough to withstand the pressure of the aggressive market forces, as it has been
described by Karl Polanyi. The extension to the South in the bipolar world system through
the overwhelming economic integration created already many negative externalities
because of the inherent dominance of the Economic Europe over Political and Social Europe,
and given the social and political weakness of Southern states compared to the original
Core. This process, however, was less conflictual in the South than later in the East because
the Southern countries belonged to the West after the WWII, they had intensive economic
and social contacts with the original Core, and at the time of accession the painful period
of democratic transition was already behind them. Yet, the Southern states proved to be
very vulnerable in the global crisis, and their crisis management was a big burden, but
specially managed by the Core in the early 2010s, (Magone et al. 2016), although it has
come back with a vengeance in the triple crisis.
The situation in the East was basically different and more severe at the time of the
EU accession, since these countries were in a very difficult position in both external and
internal dimensions. Whereas the analysis of the EU15 needs only a usual “structural”
approach as consolidated democracies that of the NMS would necessitate a “genetic”
approach in the weak and vulnerable emerging democracies, since sustainable democracies
cannot be established overnight by simply passing a democratic Constitution. The Yalta
Agreement gave the NMS region to the Soviet empire, therefore they had very restricted
contact with the West for decades. Their domestic development in socio-economic and
political terms had gone to the opposite way by weakening their previously existing
European heritage. The EU transformation capacity - as the EU capacity to transform the
NMS by economic, social and political means – was just seemingly better in the “East” than
in the “South” due to the huge contrast of the development level between the Core and
NMS. Actually, the opposite was true. Although the new member states were too weak to
resist to the EU demands for the economic penetration and legal formalities, this strong
but misdirected pressure was not enough to initiate and accomplish the deep social

49
transformation according to the European design, so counterproductively it has led to the
social disorder and finally it has produced De-Europeanization.
This overwhelming socio-economic and political dominance of the EU is just the crux
of the matter, since the EU15 applied the oversimplified functionalism in the just liberated
states that could have worked to some extent in mature democracies in a structural
approach, but it did not work at all in the weak, emerging democracies through the
imagined “ever positive spill-overs”. Supposedly, Europeanization meant also to influence
them softly by the normative role of the EU and providing a model case like a gravity centre
but it could have been working only by the recognition of regional specificities in a “genetic”
approach. Given their neglectence, the EU had no idea about the mechanism of domestic
transformation or the reform capacity of NMS in the starting period that was in fact much
less than it expected. Simply said, at the collapse of the Bipolar World System these
countries were weak, chaotic and “defenceless”, in fact, they were in some kind of social
and political anomie. Europeanization did not meet serious resistance at the start, just to
the contrary, the easy and rapid Europeanization project acted as a social drogue to lessen
the pain of the radical changes in the situation of this drastic disorientation. The drastic
“regulative power” of the EU in general has worked in the Eastern enlargement on the
surface, but it has not produced that evolutionary or linear development what was foreseen
and promised in the early nineties. The economic penetration/invasion of the EU has
created a controversial and lopsided modernization in the East with a dependent dual
economy, deeply polarised society and rising authoritarian political system, but no genuine
development. Altogether, in this case the total neglectence of the “genetic” approach in
the Europeanization in an emerging weak democracy based the regional speciality was a
fatal mistake of the EU that has backfired. Thus, parallel with Europeanization, it has also
launched the process of De-Europeanization from the very beginning. Finally, the NMS
have become a new functional, dependent region of the Economic Europe, i.e. adjusted to
its functions as a low cost – low wage – low hope economy, where the cheap labour has
been based on the weak labour rights in the Labour Code (see Schering and Szombati,
2019). The new comprador elites have made a compromise with the multinationals: “The
politicisation of fighting dependency is combined with the quiet politics of subsidising
foreign direct investment in manufacturing, and the noisy politics of protecting pensioners
and middle-class families parallels the erosion of future-oriented social investment.
Notwithstanding the radical turn in development rhetoric, the actual path correction has
merely shifted the pattern of dependency without breaking out of it.” (Bohle and
Greskovits, 2019: 1069).31

The NMS crisis within the triple crisis: like “the ocean in a drop”

50
 The systemic crisis appears globally at all levels, in all regions and countries. Its
analysis gives a key not only to understand this NMS regional crisis, but offers also the
opportunity to overcome the EU crisis. Although the NMS region is only a small part of this
process, still the macro vision appears concentrated in the micro vision like the ocean in a
drop. The present situation is a deeply frozen conflict between the Core and Periphery, in
which the NMS societies have been more and more aware of the contradictions of the
Europeanization process. In the last years the German multinationals have appeared in the
NMS public parlance as the main actors in the negative externalities and the harmful spill-
overs. Also, the German economic giants as strange bedfellows have been by far the most
active partners of the NMS comprador political class. This “shared sovereignty” means that
this external economic dependence is in fact the interest of the domestic political class not
just by the foreign investments, but first of all getting the political protection through the
multinationals from their governments concerned as a shield against the disciplining effects
of the EU. However, as Daniel Hegedűs (2019) has argued, this process has been
counterproductive for Germany and it cannot be kept any longer, since - although it may
be suitable for the German multinationals in the short term - it does harm to the German
“Eastern policy” already in the mid-term. The global crisis has increased further the
“economization” of German foreign policy, and it has taken centre stage with a clear
primacy in the EU decision-making over the compliance with the Copenhagen political
criteria of democracy, rule of law, and human rights in NMS. This shift has opened the way
for the conscious autocratization strategies by the NMS comprador elites, which have
wanted to get rid of any checks and balances that could constrain their power and
benefitting from the systemic corruption. In short, the long term geopolitical dimension of
German engagement has faded away and a short-sighted geo-economic approach of
multinationals has become dominant.32
In the aftermath of global crisis the oversimplified functionalism promising more or
less direct relationships between economic growth and welfare or between the economic
and political integration has proved to be hopelessly outdated. It has become clear that
these processes produced a lot of unwanted side effects and intricate relationships. So in
this way, the complexity management in Europeanization has been high on the agenda in
the debates about the emerging negative externalities. In this spirit, e.g. Grüner in a
Commission research document has analysed “the joint dynamics of economic interaction
and political integration” leading to “the counterproductive process of disintegration”. He
has emphasized that in the diverging relationships between the economic and political
integration “particularly puzzling as policy externalities have actually become stronger in
many important areas. Externalities can only be dealt with efficiently if the actors involved
somehow coordinate their activities. … Economic interdependency and emerging
externalities should both make political integration more valuable.” (EC, Grüner, 2017: 5).

51
Although he deals only with the workings of the EU at general level – as “the adverse
externalities abroad” - and not with the special problems of NMS with the negative
externalities, this approach about “the dysfunctional procedures” in the EU is applicable
also to the special NMS case. Thus, the harmful effect of negative externalities has been a
serious research item in the EU documents, also as the new issue of the complexity
management that has been formulated into the problem of sustainable development. In
such a way, both the conceptual poverty and the harmful effect of the oversimplified
economic growth theory has become evident because the threatening global ecological
disaster. This reconceptualization has received even more emphasis with the climate
change (Ziolo et al, 2020:1). In the new theoretical framework of the Green Europe there
is an easier access also to the explanation of the NMS crisis by the overcoming the
aggressive functionalism of the former EU development studies. In fact, the issue of climate
change has only been high on the agenda since the late 2010s, starting as an UN program
on 1st January 2016, but it has received much greater emphasis in the EU at the change
between the Juncker and Leyen Commissions, and even more with the coronavirus crisis.
This complexity management has gained increasing relevance for the further stages
of the Eastern enlargement, or in general in the EU’s “globalization cum regionalization”
policy in the West Balkans and Eastern Partnership. Although the sharp distinction and the
intensive interaction between the soft and hard power has gone through the analyses of
the European Studies and it has recently received a high prominence in the EU debates
about the next steps in the widening policy. The crux of the matter is, as Péter Balázs
(2017: 87-89) pointed out earlier – with a reference to the historical trajectory of “Three
Europes” – that Central Europe has more or less completed the nation-building, but in the
Eastern Europe there is still a zone of “unfinished states”. They are still in a protracted
nation-building process that has caused divergence in these regions between soft and hard
security agendas.33
In sum, the NMS region is already within the EU formally-legally, but regarding the
real, effective membership it is still just partially in the EU with a “thin” membership. The
Eastern enlargement has not been so far a full accession, only a partial one that has to be
completed through the upward convergence within the EU. Due to the stubborn benign
neglectence about the harmful effects of the negative externalities on the Core side, the
contrast between the legal uniformization and the socio-economic fragmentation in the EU
has produced the typical Eastern infantile disease on the Periphery side. In the current
stage the spiral of confrontations has evolved between the old and new member states.
The main structural mistake is the Western fallacy, non-recognition of the regional
specificities, as the special road of the Europeanization. The “regulatory power” of the EU
may be counterproductive, if it takes the form of the economic invasion/penetration of
market economy that creates direct domination of the Western economic interests in the

52
Eastern member states without the genuine “positive spill-over” as the transfer and
implementation of the social and political values with an effective protection of economic
and social rights and participative democracy in the countries concerned. After this recent
fierce debate on the systemic crisis in the EU, the final lesson has crystallized: the crisis in
the Periphery as the complex disintegration has been provoked by the lopsided economic
integration and it is much bigger and deeper than it has been perceived in the Core. Without
closing the blind alley of the benign neglectence of the NMS in its crisis management, the
EU cannot overcome its own systemic crisis in the emerging NWO.

The NMS “recovery” versus the social recession and the authoritarian rule

The deepening Core-Periphery Divide with the devastating social consequences and
the ensuing tendency of “autocratization” – with the term of the V-Dem Institute - has
been a recurring momentum in this paper that has also come back nowadays as one of the
serious problems in the ongoing EU triple crisis management. The triple crisis has also
meant a turning point in the Core-Periphery Divide, since “the pandemic not only exposes
double standards regarding health and safety concerns in the context of the crisis, but also
unravels how risk and burden within labour is unequally distributed along Europe’s core-
periphery dividing line.” (Bogoeski, 2020: 2). Although the direct health consequences of
the coronavirus crisis have been worse in the South than in the East, the general economic
and social recession has sharpened and manifested more in the East due to the extensive
dependency relationships between the West and East. The difficulties of the NMS recovery
have to be analysed through the EU policy triangle as its situation in the triangle of the
Economic, Social and Political Europe as well as in the context of triple crisis. From this
complex task there is here a short summary of the current socio-economic and political
recession in NMS seen from the aspect of the coronavirus crisis.
First, the socio-economic recession during the coronavirus crisis has been reinforced
by the near collapse of the labour market in NMS leading to the widening unemployment
and shrinking consumer demand, cumulated in the increasing threat of the mass poverty.
The derailed the Europeanization of the new member states transformed them – as it has
been discussed above - into the global semi-periphery of the Core as the cheap labour
extension of Western economies and societies. Due to the lopsided modernization the NMS
have proved to be much more vulnerable to the socio-economic effects of coronavirus
crisis, since they are weak and therefore more open to the global changes than the old
member states. Their transitory social structure is still more fragile with a half-way
Europeanization and with the emergence of the large mass of the new losers in the triple
crisis. All contradictions of this dependency relationships have appeared in a much stronger
form during the triple crisis than before. This special dependence can be shortly best

53
presented in the characteristic case of the migrant, cross border or occasional workers
from the East within the EU that has been revealed drastically by the coronavirus crisis.
This case has been one of the favourite topics in the critical papers/essays during the crisis.
These papers usually emphasize that not only the Western firms needed the cheap labour
in many fields of production, but also the Western health care systems - even before the
triple crisis - needed the Eastern cheap manpower to avoid their “care crisis” (see e.g.
Euractiv, 2020). The medical doctors have also migrated in large numbers from East to
West, so this dependent relationship has siphoned the skilled manpower from the NMS,
thus is this way they have “financed” the transition to the well-being and to the knowledge-
based society in the Core countries. It is not a blame game, just a simple reference to that
particular situation in which the East-West cooperation has been a big loss for the NMS
societies, including the missing supply of their health systems in highly skilled manpower
during the crisis.
The labour market for the migrant, cross border and/or seasonal workers has
become a regular part of production and services – prominently in agriculture and health
care - in Western countries. However, at the outbreak of coronavirus crisis due to the
imposed strict travel bans, travel was massively restricted and the free movement of
manpower was effectively suspended. The production fields and services concerned have
been stopped or deeply disturbed, threatening workings in the agriculture and producing
“care crisis” in health services. As a quick reaction, temporary measures have been made
to build transport bridges for the transit workers given the deep concern of some Western
countries. The borders were still closed for long weeks when many airplanes carried the
agricultural and care workers from the East to West. Nonetheless, after the gradual return
to “normalcy” in the activity of migrant workers abroad, they still face at home the “normal
absurdity” of their own low income levels and social security provisions, with the widening
distance between the Western and Eastern public service systems. In fact, these moving
millions are the characteristic products of this yawning gap in the Fragmented Europe
between East and West. They reproduce this gap for the next generations by
abandoning/neglecting their own countries and families, living in health deprived regions.
On the policy and financial side, behind this regular mass movement of transition workers
there is an EU cooperation disease as a soft abuse of these Easterners by the Westerners
through the private financing of those workers for whom their domestic austerity regime
has made a health desert with a much higher level of the permanent “care crisis”.
The paper of Bogoeski (2020) about the “asparagus saga” offers a wider view about
this story by arguing that this case “reveals three important aspects of the world of work
in Europe… first, the division of labour in EU, second, free movement as forced migration
and third, the structural deskilling and devaluation of work in sectors dominated by migrant
workers.”, since “these markets are entirely dependent on labour from the Eastern

54
periphery…the Covid-19 also exposes the dark side of the EU’s free movement – its
greatest and most contested achievement.” (Bogoeski, 2020: 2,3). This “asparagus saga”
describes the underpaid and overworked health care employees in the institutionalized
human supply chain, emphasizing that in the labour-intensive sectors workers are
predominantly taken from the East: “The EU’s free movement has only made domestic
outsourcing in this sector easier” (Bogoeski, 2020: 3). He has analysed the Core-Periphery
Divide very critically in strong statements, notably “United in diversity as Europe’s vocation
becomes divided in material inequality, as the reality of Europe’s core-periphery
constellation, where free movement alternates between a noble choice or a forced exit,
depending on whether the beholder looks at it from the core or periphery. …Recognising
the material inequalities inherent in the EU’s core-periphery constellation and underlying
the current division of labour across the continent, as well as the challenges regarding
worker mobility and protection, offers a starting point to rethink the EU’s integrated world
of work beyond the commodified and utilitarian understanding of mobility, citizenship and
workers’ protection – not only during the pandemic but in general.” (Bogoeski, 2020: 3,4).
At the same time the employers create the myth of “unskilled” labour, although most of
this work requires skill and experience, since “Framing particular labour as unskilled, and
also often in highly ethnicised terms – as it is the case with agricultural seasonal workers
in Germany – contributes towards sustaining low labour costs and unfavourable working
conditions.” The conclusion from the asparagus saga is “When precariousness is
instrumentalized, free movement becomes a purely romantic narrative, while labour
mobility actually resembles forced migration.” (Bogoeski, 2020: 2,3,4).
All in all, in the weaker in EU member states the triple crisis has taken place in an
extreme form, where the neoliberal type of the EU integration has led to the social
disintegration and political decline as the “death” of democracy, furthermore it has turned
to the main obstacle of the innovation driven, knowledge based society. The divergence of
the NMS regional development from the main line of mankind’s progress has rather
characteristically cumulated the negative features of these global processes because in
these countries both the socio-economic structure and the health system have been much
more vulnerable than in the developed member states. The disempowerment of NMS in
the EU and the social recession of new losers in the NMS countries is still an ongoing
process. After the outbreak of the triple crisis this special aberration of the socio-political
development has become more evident in the international scholarship and media. It has
been regularly mentioned that Hungary is “the poster boy” of the authoritarian system in
Europe, thus „To see how a modern democracy can die, look at events in Europe, especially
Hungary, over the past decade.” (Krugman, 2020).34
Second, the major trend of the critical analysis on the new member states in the
international scholarship has focused more and more on the politics. The NMS are the

55
losers in the triple crisis in the socio-economic aspect, but as a “self-inflicted wound”, the
political elites have been using the crisis for their own political power games: “some
governments, such as in Hungary, where the state of emergency could be extended
indefinitely, are taking advantage of this to strengthen their power and reduce political
freedoms.” (Maurice et al. 2020: 5). The Hungarian case therefore has been very much
exposed in the international literature about the coronavirus crisis, although at the same
time it has to be emphasized that the introduction of the state of emergency has been a
global process. Accordingly, the V-Dem Institute has described the Pandemic Democratic
Backsliding at the global level by constructing the Pandemic Backsliding Risk Index with
four types: Green Law Risk, Orange Medium Risk, Red High Risk and Black Closed
Autocracy. The V-Dem Institute has also established democratic standards for emergency
situations and outlined the rules for preserving the rules of the democratic process during
the pandemic. The theoretical foundation of this ranking has been given in the paper of
Lührmann and Rooney (2020) in the paper entitled as Autocratization by Decree: States
of Emergency and Democratic Decline. Basically, they have argued that some political
leaders have recently abused the emergency situation by introducing excessive measures
and keeping these provisions in place after the situation improves. As the most
characteristic case, the Institute’s rankings paper, the Pandemic Democratic Backsliding
has indicated on its front page that the Hungarian parliament on 30 March 2020 ceded
extensive powers to its Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, for his indefinite rule by decree in the
Enabling Act.35
No wonder that after the outbreak after the coronavirus crisis there has also been
an eruption of critical literature on Hungary as the worst case scenario in the triple crisis
as to the “autocratization” process using the term of the V-Dem Institute. The Orbán
regime has become ill-famed as a “Potemkin democracy” that looks like a democracy from
outside and from a distance, but its seemingly democratic institutions are just a paravan
of the autocratic political system. Therefore, Hungary has most often been discussed in
politics and rule of law, although the deepening social recession in Hungary has also come
to the surface during the present triple crisis in the education, health and innovation, or in
general in the public service, or the civic security and media freedom (see e.g. CoE, 2020:
41-42). For the general presentation of the NMS case it deserves to deal with the Enabling
Act for two reasons that will be presented in very short outlines. First, although it concerns
directly Hungary, but is discovers the general tendency in NMS and beyond. Second, this
rampant violation of rule of law has wider implications in the entire society, including the
media freedom and cultural life. It has been explored for instance in the analyses of Bárd
and Carrera (2020), Hegedűs (2020a,b), Kovács (2020) and Scheppele (2020), presented
as follows on in great outlines.36

56
 Kim Scheppele is an eminent expert of the rule of law violations in the new member
states who has discussed the entire legal historical trajectory since the 2010s. In the recent
analysis of “Orbán’s Emergency” she has focused on the latest developments of the rule of
law violations through their condensed legal form in the Enabling Act. This Act “would give
him dictatorial powers under cover of declaring state of emergency to fight the
coronavirus…The law hands to Orbán the fully-fledged dictatorial powers he would need in
order to cling to office.” Notably, “The Hungarian Fundamental Law once built reasonable
checks into its emergency powers, but those checks would be circumvented by this
emergency law.” This analysis put the emphasis on the contrast between the current
emergency legislation in the democratic countries and its Hungarian “dictatorial” case: “In
short, Orbán’s emergency gives him everything he ever dreamed of: The absolute freedom
to do what he wants. …Governments all over the world are using emergency powers to
deal with the very real threats posed by the COVID-19.” This contrast leads already to the
wider implications of the coronavirus crisis. Scheppele has pointed out that the tough
situation in Hungary is “the product of Orbán regime in the last decade: Hungary is more
vulnerable than most countries in the developed world because its health system was in a
state of near collapse even before the virus appeared on its doorstep.”
The analysis of Bárd and Carrera goes along this line opening up for the wider legal
and political implications of the Enabling Act for the society as a whole in the Orbán’s
“pandemic politics”, since “Even if a policy measure has been found to be ‘effective’ in
responding to a public health need, the wider ramifications must also be considered for it
to be deemed ‘legitimate in a democratic society’, chiefly on its impacts on the rule of law
and human rights.” As they have pointed out, in general and also in the particular
Hungarian case, “Pandemic does not create autocracies. … The pandemic has just made
the shift towards authoritarianism more visible.” (Bárd and Carrera, 2020:2-3). The
authors have concluded about the “rogue government” in Hungary that “The novelty of the
‘Enabling Act’ is that through it, the Hungarian government has abandoned even the
semblance of democracy.” Finally, Bárd and Carrera have suggested that the EU has to
end “the absurd situation of supporting autocracies in violation of EU values out of EU
funds.” (2020: 6, 9).
Along the same line, Kováts (2020: 2-3) has described this “lockdown of
democracy”, in which the checks and balances have been decreased further because the
midterm elections and referenda have also been cancelled. Moreover, new rules have been
introduced to curb the remaining free press by criminalising the publication of “false facts”
about the crisis management for the “successful protection” of the public. She has drawn
attention to the fact that “Under Orbán, Hungary has become a deeply militarised country”
and the “war rhetoric” has gone through the history of the Orbán regime. It has reached
its peak in the management of the coronavirus crisis, since “The Coronavirus Operational

57
Group consists of more military than healthcare professionals.” Accordingly, “The strong
man image Orbán” is trying to convey the message that the government has been able “to
comfort people and integrate society. On the contrary, all of his political steps have had
the effect of paralysing public services, turning people against each other and weakening
the cohesiveness of society.”
The “reports” of Hegedűs have underlined that the “state of danger” situation in
Hungary has belonged to the very nature of the Orbán regime because the Enabling Act is
only the peak of the state of emergence legislation since 2015 when it was first introduced
with the reference to the migration crisis and it has been prolonged by the two-third
majority of Fidesz. By now, according to Hegedűs (2020a: 3) “Hungary has reached a point
where the democratic appearance of the regime has evaporated.” This is indeed a new
“state of danger” also for the EU, since there are similar developments present in the NMS
region as well because in various ways the new member states have ignored their treaty
obligations. The EU has to counter “the autocratization trends” in NMS, since “The
deterioration in democracy and rule of law in Central and Eastern Europe has been alarming
for some time and coronavirus pandemic can make it much worse.” (Hegedűs, 2020b: 3).
This situation turns us back our analysis to the ongoing crisis management of the EU in the
spring of 2020, starting – at least symbolically - on 9 May 2020, the Europe Day with a
reinforced effort.

Conclusion: The triple crisis as the challenge for the European renewal

58
 The opportunity for a radical reform in the EU by overcoming the triple crisis

The excessive, aggressive globalization and marketization has been a serious

contagion by an antisocial “virus” that has penetrated and disintegrated the social fabric in
the EU on both domestic and EU levels. The intensive long-distance inter-connectedness
has shown the limits of the galloping globalization, and the coronavirus crisis has been the
latest warning sign about this overdriven process. This kind of globalization has become
counterproductive in the economy due to the too long production, transportation and trade
networks based on the search for cheap labour or cheaper products, which has reached its
oversaturation point with the entry of China as the “cheap” production superpower.
Moreover, this global economic system as a loose cannon has has drastically hurt the
ecological system, and its negative effects have been overburdened by the global mass
tourism and many other factors both from the developed and the underdeveloped worlds.
This has provoked the waste of global resources and the squandering the human resources
by worsening the living conditions leading even before the coronavirus pandemia of the
global and local “health crises” through other viruses. The prodigality of the global system
in its complexity has been evident in the last decades, but the meaningful actions have
been prevented by the global multinationals and the hegemonic US self-interests. The
eruption of the new global crisis, the coronavirus crisis in 2020, has shown that the global
answer to this new global challenge has become unavoidable, there is not too much time
to waste.37
In a sudden turn since January 2020 the shocking effects of the the coronavirus
crisis have dominated the international media coverage. The media has raised fundamental
questions about the recent crisis and it has challenged former the dogmas about normality.
The triple crisis has sent socio-economic and political shockwaves, brutally undermined the
status quo and carried the message that it cannot be maintained any longer. The most
concerned societies have been caught in the triple crisis more and more between the health
dangers and economic losses. Actually, however, this has been the most creative period of
the European politics and thinking, with an avalanche of the fresh ideas, projects and
strategic programs acting in, and discussing of, the triple crisis in its complexity. It is a
pity that the European public life have been waiting until the last minute, to such a deep
tragedy in order to understand the depth of the global crisis and to reach the readiness
acting and thinking properly. After the first shocking times the public discourse and the
media interest shifted gradually to the issue of “recovery” or simply to the “after” the crisis,
first of all about the possible schedule of overcoming the coronavirus crisis. The EPIN
(European Policy Institutes Network) Report (see Russack, 2020) has described this short
period since the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis in three stages that characterizes well
its entire historical itinerary.38

59
 The first stage in the first two month of 2020 was the immediate reaction of the
member states unilaterally closing borders and focusing on the direct crisis management
at home with a trial and error method. This was a real political stress situation due to the
unprecedented events in an unprecedented crisis, an era of strong debate with mutual
accusations among the member states due to the surprise effect and unpreparedness to
this new type of crisis. Although the new Commission entered on 1 December 2020 and it
made some preparations for the crisis management in the EU, but this strategy became
suddenly outdated in the early 2020 as an old-style “pre-crisis” scenario (see the overview
of the year 2019 in the FEPS volume, Andor et al 2020). Not only the individual member
states, but also the EU headquarters were deeply in trouble in the sudden new crisis
management, as a collapse of normalcy in all respects, including the everyday life of the
citizens. Regarding back, this stage has still been mistakenly criticized for the lack of the
European solidarity and EU governance, since it has been, indeed, an unprecedented crisis
and nobody could prepare for it strategically and acting properly from its first moment. Its
evaluation is still full of the mutual accusations of states, although the triple crisis came as
a big surprise and for this kind of crisis neither the EU nor its member states were prepared.
Thus, the exaggerated and biased arguments about the disintegration of the EU are not
justified, and this stormy stage has provoked an innovative rethinking about the EU future
with the radical rupture from the previous dogmas.39
The position paper of the ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations) has also
overviewed these stages of the coronavirus crisis and it has stated about its start that “In
the throes of crisis, the panicked responses that governments are taking to reassure their
citizens that they are in control of the situation are exacerbating long-standing tensions
between EU member states. To prevent fragile healthcare systems from cracking under
the pressure, governments across the EU are putting in place emergency laws of various
types, all with the immediate intention of blunting the impact of the coronavirus.” This
“panic reaction” appeared also in the major powers, “The initial French and German
decisions to block, in mid-March, the supply of medical equipment to other countries –
including EU member states – seemed to confirm that the ‘nation first’ logic had fully taken
hold.” However, after their quick reactions the member states have arrived at two lessons.
First, they have realized that there has been an emergence of the “caring society” in the
EU: “the coronavirus means that health will now become the number one security concern
for Europeans. European citizens, ECFR’s polling reveals, expect EU institutions to play a
role in keeping them safe and secure. In the coming months and years, security will be
primarily about handling the coronavirus and preventing its recurrence.” For the second,
in the crisis management all member states have introduced some kind of the transitory
legal-political emergency measures: “Governments may differ on the extent to which they
are willing or able to use data surveillance, the military, or the threat of severe penalties

60
to enforce social distancing, isolation, and quarantine. Yet, one by one, all affected
European states are accepting that the Chinese approach of a total lockdown – which
shocked them at first – is necessary. (Dennison et al. 2020).
The second stage in the next two months was more organized and Europeanized,
and it overcame the first inward-looking turbulent stage by realizing the need for the joint
strategic crisis management at the EU level in tackling of this unprecedented crisis. The
second stage demonstrated that both with the transnational added value in the EU
governance and the mobilized special capacities of the member states is possible
overcoming this unprecedented crisis. These early results of the partial consolidation,
however, had to face the growing economic stress because of the cumulative disastrous
effects of a new type of economic recession, close to the paralysis of the economy, but the
perspectives are the “greener Europe” as a series of the insightful papers have indicated
(see e.g. Anderson et al. 2020, Grevi, 2020, Lamy, 2020, Midoes, 2020, Pisani-Ferry, 2020,
Pornschlegel, 2020). The normal workings of the economy stopped or at least decelerated
through the domino effect of the nearly collapsing international cooperation, only with
some survival exercises on the still working fields of production and services. The
immediate EU reactions to the deep economic recession did not lessen the economic stress
and the all-European debate sharpened about the necessary common EU actions. The
pressure increased for the innovating thinking about the ongoing crisis management in
both ways, for the temporary measures and for those leading to further integration,
producing a widening gap in the debates between the short-term, mid-term and long-term
perspectives. Altogether, the ECFR paper has also emphasized that - after the conflict zone
in the first stage among the member states - in the second stage they realized that the
“European governments can only defend their citizens effectively if they cooperate at a
European level and reinforce multilateral structures based on openness and information
sharing.” The ECFR paper has suggested several health security efforts for the common EU
coronavirus crisis management in particular, and for the EU strategy in general: “The
climate challenge and the implementation of the European Green Deal, which totally
occupied the minds of policymakers in EU institutions just weeks ago, has not gone away.
But a stimulus package can reinforce efforts to combat climate change if Europeans
prioritise investment in clean technologies and incentivise companies to support a green
recovery.” (Dennison et al. 2020).
The third stage in the late spring of 2020 has entered with the relative success of
taming the coronavirus crisis when a new public debate has erupted about the relaunching
the economy paralysed by the crisis with the big, comprehensive and ambitious economic
recovery strategies of the policy institutes (see e.g. Anderson, 2020 and Lamy, 2020). This
debate on the next agenda has reflected not only the interests of the business actors, but
also those of the wider population with the increasing unemployment and exhausted by

61
the collapse of the “normal” everyday life around them as a stage of the civic stress. At
the same time this demand for the “recovery” raised the danger of the too early return to
the economic recovery with the still continuing virus crisis or with its rising second wave.
The outlines of the tensions between the economic and ecological approaches have risen
due to the powerful interest groups behind, including the threat of the return to the past
of the neoliberal polluting practice in general. Thus, the third stage in the late spring of
2020 has opened the obvious conflict between the short time economic crisis management
measures and the long term ecological gains. In this stage of “opening” or recovery it has
to be decided what kind of the global or domestic crisis management will be applied for the
long run and what kind of the mixture of the economic and ecological approaches the
recovery should come through step by step in a gradual process of tackling the crisis.
Nowadays, as the EPIN Report asserts, “It is a ‘moment of truth’ that will define
whether the EU was just a single market or a political project where the human factor is
prioritised over economics.” Anyway, the contrast with the former period of the Juncker
Commission - having big plans and no implementation due to the permanent
postponements of the pressing problems and the regular suspense of decision-making -
has become manifest: “the EU should now take the lead in coordinating the exit strategies
across Europe. Public support for greater EU competences in dealing with this public health
emergency should encourage member state governments to put more energy into finding
ways of sharing both the benefits and the burdens of EU membership.” (Russack, 2020:
2-3). Due to the increasing threat perception of the returning coronavirus crisis, the other
“exit scenarios” elaborated in the recent stage have also emphasized the complex solutions
in the creation of a “social-ecological state” (Laurent, 2020 and Pochet, 2020).
The Strategic Agenda of the EU has also moved in this direction, elaborating a huge
social investment package for the period after the Covid-19 crisis and further discussing
the complexity requirements of EU’s “Just Transition”. In this regard, the new European
Commission has presented its flagship programme, the European Green Deal accompanied
later by the Just Transition Fund as a social buffer for the most affected sectors and regions.
The Green or Just Transition is a social “shock absorber” and/or a complex “stimulus
package” within the EU. Moreover, its specific mission is the assuming of the leadership in
global climate action, which is the best lever to defend also its multilateral vision of the
world order: “The reasons why the new commission has decided to define itself as a
‘geopolitical’ commission, while setting the green cause as a priority, are compelling:
today, the green agenda is also a geopolitical instrument for Europe. It represents a lever
to claim Europe as a global player which upholds international governance, based on co-
operation, rules and dialogue.” (López, 2019).40
The triple crisis has been a learning process for the EU, both in the European Studies
and in the public opinion, in which despite the emotional debates, there has been a

62
fundamental paradigmatic shift in European Studies, paralleled in the everyday public
discourse with the changing idea about the “normalcy” in the human and social life. The
term “unprecedented” has been most frequently used word in the official and public
parlance. The rising new consensus can be summarized in the demand for the “European
sovereignty” in the global world and it has been crystallized in three main tenets of the
new European thinking as the principles of complexity, federalization and regionalization.
First, the complexity as the interdependent crises becoming a common, systemic
crisis - that needs the cooperation and convergence in the three kinds of the parallel crisis
management - has become the dominant idea in the EU in the solution of the triple crisis.
Accordingly, the unemployment benefit and the public health care have converged into the
extended meaning of the public goods that has come close to some kind of the minimal
income and/or to the universal basic services.
Second, the federalization as a common solution for the common problems, since
the overcoming of the triple crisis is possible only through the further integration with the
increased role of the European Governance in many new fields, like the public health. The
extended role of the European institutions means at the same time the reduction of the
national sovereignty in the new fields concerned, but according to the subsidiarity principle
it has to be combined with recognition of the country specificities. It has been clear in the
announcement of Ursula von der Leyen on 4 April 2020 about a need of a Marshall Plan for
a sustainable and resilient Europe.
Third, the regionalization of globalization as an urgent task for the EU because the
excessive, long-distance over-globalization in its present form is counterproductive and
harmful and it has to be radically tamed. A sustainable system of globalization has to be
elaborated by rationalizing the globalization with the relocation of global chains focusing
on Europe. Some kind of the European reindustrialization can provide safe and sustainable
development instead of hubris of the excessive globalization that may provoking again a
sudden crisis with the state of emergency: “In the wake of the Corona crisis, global supply
chains are already reorganising. Shorter supply chains … create more stability.
Technologically, Europe must become sovereign again. To do this, we need to cooperate
much more closely in research and development.” (Saxer, 2020: 6).
In the EU there have been three layers of the crisis perception and discussion, first
at the level of the EU institutions, second, prepared and summarized by the big policy
institutes like EPC, CEPS, Bruegel and V-Dem – accompanied and assisted by the OECD –
and third, the innovative and provoking papers, essays, and the longer or shorter
publications in the European Studies and the international media, in which many blogs
have been written by eminent social scientists. The ranking institutions deserve more
attention, since they are much ahead of the EU decision-making and they prepare the
relevant crisis forecasts with the prediction of the social preconditions for the special crisis

63
management measures, like the possibility of the next exposure to health risks in virus
pandemia. The activities and concepts ecological organizations like the E3G, the Third
Generation Environmentalists, deserve also a special attention. The most interesting field,
however, has been the short publication area of the “blog science literature” with the strong
and well-argued statements. The coronavirus crisis has generated a vivid intellectual life
in Europe, and this long paper has profited a lot from this innovative flow of the fresh ideas.
The main message of this new progressive thinking at all of these three levels is
that - instead of chaotic and counterproductive moves of the individual member states and
their political elites - there is an urgent need for a common Europeanized crisis
management with the empowerment of the actors both at the top and bottom. First of all,
the empowerment of the transnational EU institutions is needed for its effective and
initiative role in the management of the triple crisis and for the cooperation in public health
protection as a common self-defense in the pandemic case. The extension of the EU
integration in the minimal health services against new wave of the virus pandemic is an
urgent issue, since the domestic health care systems alone are weak to cope with this
challenge. Moreover, the contacts within the EU are so intensive in all fields of life that the
isolated treatments in the health care will necessarily fail. Characteristically, the health
care systems of the individual member states are usually weaker than their social security
systems, and their public health care systems are more unequal than in their economic
systems in general. To avoid the eruption of anger among the populations, exhausted by
the social recession and seriously hit by the civic recession in the coronavirus crisis, the
public health protection has to be considered as a genuine part of social rights, with the
empowerment of the population to have a voice in the public health service reform. It
includes the participation in the design of the new, crisis-resilient Europe in general,
especially in the respect of a virtual new virus crisis wave that can produce an even deeper
EU-wide “care crisis”.
Here comes the next step, the management of the full recovery package. Again,
the contrast between the former and the present strategic crisis management is high on
the agenda. While the management of the global financial crisis after 2008 was a failure -
discussed above as the crisis of crisis management -, since it was dominated by the
neoliberalism, the new crisis management has to make a radical change as Saxer argues:
“The age of neoliberalism, in terms of the primacy of market interests over all other social
interests, is coming to an end… With the crisis, long-dormant sphere of politics has been
set into motion…What is certain is that the Coronavirus could lead to a breakthrough of a
number of trends that have long been hidden. All of these developments are mutually
influencing each other at breathtaking speed. This complexity suggests that this crisis will
go deeper than the 2008 recession.” The key issue for this radical change is the public
health that, due to the built-in contradiction of turbo-globalization, has demonstrated the

64
vulnerability of the EU member states in the coronavirus crisis: “After years of austerity
programmes have cut health care systems back to a bare minimum, now every effort must
be made to enable the system to cope with the many sick people. The closure of municipal
clinics, the chronic undersupply of nursing staff and the pitiful state of technical equipment
are now taking their toll… the debate has begun as to whether it was really prudent to
subject our social life to the dictates of the market… the common goal of all that will be
the central focus of public services.” (Saxer, 2020: 4,6).
In the recovery project the significance of the communication strategy with all
actors, generations and general public is very big, especially to explain the intensive and
intricate relationships of the closely interdependent crises. Therefore, it is high time to
elaborate the strategy for a recovery in several stages and with changing focus on the
different targets as the OECD document (2020) suggests. In simultaneous health and
economic crisis the human costs are enormous, the EU has to cope with improving health
outcomes gradually in order to prepare the economic recovery. No doubt, however, that
the social returns are high on the health investments, especially by containing the spread
of crisis and in strengthening the resilience of the population to the future health crises.
The health symptoms have to be regularly studied to elaborate the proper political and
policy treatment of the other crisis processes. Policies have to be elaborated not only to
mitigate the adverse impact of the present crisis, but also to the newly emerging health
and economic challenges. The further adaptation to the fast changing circumstances needs
an inclusive recovery strategy with strong and sustained popular support.
The progression towards gradual recovery and the solution of the triple crisis can
only be anticipated after a potentially long transition phase. Policies have to match the
countries’ specific circumstances, since there are no “one-size-fits-all” responses. The
recovery - or the “after” in the popular parlance - has to be a mixture of the several
interrelated openings, as the careful and gradual, safe return to work. In the late spring of
2020 the collision of two camps in crisis management has increased between solving
basically the virus crisis and restarting the production as early as possible and to restore
carefully the continuity of the economy. The “when and how” questions are permanent,
since a too early restart may be inviting the second wave of crisis. The careful preparation
for the next turn with the mobilization of the European institutions needs to prevent the
inaction and confusion, or the overload of health services leading to the disruption of
management of epidemic At the juncture of the two issues - overcoming the coronavirus
crisis and relaunching the economy through a coordinated strategy and careful
management – the main problem is to avoid the resurgence of Covid-19 crisis and not to
weaken the economy. This problem creates tensions between economists and ecologists
because the EU recovery will take place in an uncertain international environment.
Nowadays, “the crisis has shifted from health and public order problems to the questioning

65
the functions of the Schengen area and the single market – two of the foundations of
Community integration.” Accordingly, the Europeanization or federalization of crisis
management, on 2 March 2020 a “response team” was set up from the directly concerned
Commissioners tasked with the special crisis managements across the EU, but with serious
limitations, since the healthcare belongs to the authority of the member states. Therefore,
“Just as Europeans must plan their response to any eventuality, they must define sectors,
goods and equipment that will allow them to deal with any future crisis in an autonomous
and sovereign manner and to be able to come to the support of populations in need.”
(Maurice et al. 2020:2,5).
Although the main trends of EU integration in the crisis management are rather
encouraging, it is still too early to predict whether this new global challenge can turn into
opportunity for the mankind because the US-China global controversy is not so much
promising. Even within the EU there is a danger that business as usual approach may
prevail, and the old patterns of the rules of the financial markets come back with austerity
policies cutting social and human investments and mismanaging the ecological crisis. At
the same time, the crisis has fundamentally changed the everyday life of people, it has
shaken their way of life more profoundly than the previous crises, therefore “The crisis has
made it drastically clear to the populace that the status quo cannot continue.” (Saxer,
2020: 7).
Finally, in the late spring there has been an increasing media coverage on the
tensions in the Fragmented Europe and dealing with the “European asymmetries”, at the
same time indicating that the coronavirus crisis has widened the rift in the EU. Charles
Grant (2020: 2), the director of the Centre for European Reform has issued a warning that
“Now the coronavirus has struck the EU asymmetrically. The southern countries,
particularly Italy and Spain, have suffered more coronavirus deaths than most others,
started the crisis with higher levels of debt and depend on industries such as tourism that
are badly affected. They want solidarity from the north, ideally in the form of some sort of
“eurobond”: the EU as a whole would borrow money and then disburse grants to the worst-
affected countries.”
Most analyses in the European Studies have focused on the central role of Germany
in both the cases of the short recovery and the long term EU strategy. There are two
important issues in this case: the latest “half-compromise” of the European Council on 23
April 2020 on the financial side of the European solidarity and the preparations for the
German Council Presidency. The first issue has been dealt with by the Berlin-based Jana
Puglierin (2020) and by Hornkohl and van’t Klooster (2020). Puglierin starts her analysis
with the joke originated from the soccer world, describing this game in which “at the end,
the Germans always win.” Puglierin considers that after the European Council’s video
conference on 23 April 2020, some of its participants must have felt the same. It leads us

66
back to the structural imbalance between the North and South discussed above, in which
the North has increasingly developed its socio-economic advantages versus the South that
has suffered deepening socio-economic disadvantages, which has given birth to the regular
crisis at the level of Political Europe in the Fragmented Europe.
Puglierin notes that in the days leading up to this Summit meeting, the political
leaders presented their far-reaching visions for sharing the financial burden of the
coronavirus crisis, invoking the spirit of solidarity to describe the future of the European
Union. One reading of the summit is that the German government has once again fallen
short, with the assistance of the four “frugal states” in the North. Those who had hoped
that Angela Merkel would use her political clout to push through unpopular measures in
her own party and among the German population were disappointed. However, Puglierin
thinks that, in reality, Berlin has shifted its position in this Summit. By supporting the €500
billion package put together by the eurozone finance ministers – in particular by supporting
the access to loans from the European Stability Mechanism without conditionality – the
German government has already made concessions that would have been hard to imagine
before Covid-19. Merkel has linked her commitment to a European recovery fund to the
promise to pay considerably more into the EU budget. Puglierin points out that this is a
fundamental departure from Germany’s previous demand to limit EU budget contributions
to 1 percent of the bloc’s GDP because the German leaders are profoundly convinced of
the need to help crisis-hit countries as soon as possible. It is why they have reached for
instruments that are already deployable within the framework of existing treaties and the
German constitution.
Puglierin concludes that “Decisions around the upcoming multiannual financial
framework provide the least-worst opportunity to do so: it is an easier sell back home to
support more money for the European budget as an investment in Germany’s own future.
A more sustainable, more digital EU ultimately sounds better to German ears than
‘transfers’ or ‘grant money’. At the same time, Merkel needs to ensure that the countries
most affected by the crisis do not feel like losers in this game. Crucially, limited fiscal
transfers and redistribution mechanisms should be allowed within the recovery fund.
Because, this time, the eurozone may not survive if Germany again comes across as an
economic occupier, flanked by smaller member states of frugal views and depriving Italians
and Spaniards of their livelihoods. The ideas and preferences emerging from Berlin are
proving powerful in shaping the future of a Europe in crisis. But to shape a Europe that
lasts, they must create winners throughout the EU – not in Germany alone.” (Puglierin,
2020: 2).
Hornkohl and van’t Klooster (2020) have indicated in their recent paper that since
March 2020 the European Commission has granted large exemptions to EU state-aid rules.
This gives companies in rich member states an immense advantage over their competitors.

67
The rules usually prevent states helping their businesses to obtain a competitive advantage
over firms of the other member states in order to creating a level playing-field in the EU.
In general, all member states enjoy the same freedom to use the new rules, but all these
temporary aid measures have been widely used in the spring of 2020 and much more by
some member states than by others. Like in the wake of the 2008 crisis, once again there
is a marked inequality in how state-aid measures have been used and granted. While
wealthy member states are responsible for the majority of the cleared measures, other
member states are left behind. Germany alone accounts for 52 per cent of aid approved
and it has created again a big advantage for the German firms in the EU.
The second, interrelated issue is the start for the recovery with the preparations for
the German Council Presidency that has been analysed in the recent paper of Linn Selle.
Germany will be taking over the presidency of the European Union in the second half of
2020. Earlier it looked as if climate neutrality and the negotiations over the future EU
budget framework were going to be the key topics of the German Council presidency (see
the former German position in Bofinger, 2019), but Germany had to give up its carefully
planned presidency agenda in favour of the recent crisis management. Now, the
presidency’s agenda will be dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic and its grave
consequences for the social cohesion, the ailing economy and the return to a borderless
Europe. Germany has to bring the EU out of the crisis during its Council presidency with
an effective negotiation management that requires decisive handling. Also, Germany has
to take the opportunity to shape the new start for Europe, since its aspiration for a future-
oriented EU policy has to be implemented in reality. According to Selle (2020: 1) the
following subjects should be at the forefront of the Council presidency: First, coordinated
efforts to overcome the crises, second, joint reconstruction with a strong EU budget and,
third, the initiation of a dialogue about a future Europe that is resilient in the face of crises.
The pandemic has revealed the EU vulnerability, it has also again shone light on the fact
that the EU is not sufficiently resilient to crises when the going gets tough. The European
Council came to an agreement on 23 April 2020 over aid and reconstruction measures and
schedules for loosening the restrictions. Alongside overcoming the crisis, Germany’s EU
presidency is also facing a difficult task to moderate the discussions on financing the
upcoming Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) of the EU and bringing these to a
conclusion by the end of the year.
Furthermore, “Germany is facing the challenge of bringing about a quick agreement
to raise the future EU budget framework to far more than 1 per cent of the Gross National
Income (GNI) of EU member states and to connect this to the political priorities.
Considering the current crisis, the distribution of funds must, in addition, be made more
flexible in the future seven year budget period and new sources of income must be
identified for the EU budget. … The Commission also announced a proposal to increase the

68
own funds ceiling from 1.2 to 2 per cent of GNI to generate money for the reconstruction
fund on the capital market with the additional resources. While the idea is welcome, it will
be difficult to structure its implementation. This is because it is not only the Council that
has to unanimously agree on increasing own funds but all national and individual regional
parliaments must also each approve the decision by majority.” (Selle, 2020: 2).
The Conference on the Future of Europe offers the possibility for the member states
to discuss issues which have been stagnating for years between governments, since the
recovery process has made it very clear that the innovative debate on the future of Europe
is necessary, more than ever. Thus, Selle concludes on the Conference that “The two year
process must therefore start after the end of the restrictions on physical contact, in the
winter of 2020-21 at the latest, if it is to present results by the time of the European
elections in 2024. Regrettably, no word on the conference is mentioned in the first draft of
the priorities of the German EU presidency. Here it would be important for the German
government to change course and anchor a look into Europe’s future in the presidency’s
programme. Europe cannot be rebuilt solely via new funds and aid packages. Broad
dialogue close to the citizens is needed for a new start in a crisis-resilient Europe!” (Selle,
2020: 3). Thus, indeed, the management of the triple crisis in its culmination in the
coronavirus crisis may be closed only by the end of the German Council Presidency.41

Closing words of an open-ended long paper

We are still in the midst of the triple crisis and the end of the first wave of the
coronavirus crisis not yet can be seen, although already there are some positive signs of
its crisis management. It is clear that this paper has to be continued, following the
footsteps of mainstream progressive analyses, and rewritten new and again. On 9 May
2020 – symbolically on the European Day - the Conference on the Future of Europe starts
about the EU strategy for the renewal, it is a good point the finish the first version of this
paper.42
At the crucial time of the triple crisis and in decisive moment of the EU history on 1
July 2020 the German EU presidency begins its work on the preparation and
implementation of the EU’s Strategic Agenda. It is also a historical opportunity for the
German role within the EU and in the emerging NWO. It it will turn out whether Germany
is ready to give up some of its cumulated privileges and built-in advantages in order to use
its unique potential to secure both the sustainable development and the new global role of
the European Union.

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69
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Notes:

1
This long paper has been prepared as the first draft of the Introduction of my next
book entitled as East-Central Europe in the European Union (2004-2020). It relies to a
great extent on the former book, Decline of democracy in East-Central Europe (2019) that
has focused on the “domestic side” of the NMS historical trajectory. This introductory paper
deals with the three levels of the systemic, transformation and regional crisis, focusing on
the NMS region. My latest publications (Ágh, 2020a,b,c) have also been preparations for
the next book and with their more detailed analyses on the NMS, they are closely
interwoven with this long paper. Of course, this long paper has to be updated in the process
of the recovery from the coronavirus crisis. As a technical note, in the case of short essays
and papers from the internet the usual pagination cannot be implemented.
2
This paper depicts the world systems mostly from the side of the world orders,
using these two terms parallel: mentioning system when it is about the system in general
and order when it is about its concrete, organized form. Although the basic feature -
syncronity, simultaneity or contemporaneity – has played an increasing role in OWO and
in the rise of NWO, still the closer study of globalization stages goes beyond the scope of
this paper, since it would demand a detailed overview of the history of world systems.
3
The analysis of the EU’s internal structure – North, South and East – is just
indicated here, it will discussed later, including the central role in Germany, especially in
the “recovery” from the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis.
4
This innovative drive in the world systems literature can be seen e.g. in Dimitrova,
2020; Echle 2018; Hakverdi, 20129; Hockenos, 2019; Khutkyy and Chase-Dunn, 2017;
Maurice and Menneteau, 2019; Outhwaite and Turner, 2017, Wilkin, 2020 and Woods,
2019, see also the Kondratieff theory e.g. in Grinin, 2014.
5
The three levels of crisis – systemic, transformation and regional – can be
approached across the subsequent world systems through the analysis of the dominant

79
“security” concepts, see from the huge literature for instance the security documents of
the EU (Council of the EU, 2003 and EEAS, 2016), and the publications in the relevant
fields e.g. Dahrendorf Forum, 2020; Deubner, 2016; Latoszek, 2017 and Turcsányi an
Vorotnyuk, 2017, etc.
6
More and more publications have recently indicated this declining US role in the
world system, first of all referring to the Trump presidency and to the change from the
multilateral approach to the bilateral confrontations, see e.g. Grevi (2019), Hockenos
(2019), Tyler (2018) and Woods (2019), and also Delanty (2017) and Khutkyy and Chase-
Dunn (2017), as chapters in the Sage Handbook of Political Sociology.
7
The main turning point in the word order has been formulated in the official
speeches of Angela Merkel (2017) and Jean-Claude Juncker (2018). The transatlantic drift
has been finally formulated as “Westlessness” (Wintour, 2020) at the latest Munich security
conference.
8
Exceptionally, even the Freedom House has been very critical about the US
democracy, the latest global report (Freedom House, 2020a: 8) has indicated the drastic
decline of the US democracy to its 94th place in 2009 to the 86th in 2019. See also Krugman,
2020.
9
The US scholarship has also made a profound diagnosis about the US socio-
economic crisis. E.g. Jeffry Sachs described “the GDP gap” between economic growth and
well-being in US already in the early 2010s (WHR, 2012). Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) have
also indicated the political crisis as “death of American democracy” in the late 2010s.
10
The present chaotic situation with the re-entry of Russia as a challenger in the
world system and the rise of China as a new global player cannot be discussed here, see
e.g. Hakverdi, 2019 and Shi Ming, 2019.
11
Kopstein (2006) has described the “Transatlantic Divide over Democracy
Promotion”, Wetzel et al. (2015) have overviewed this long debate and Tyler (2018) has
underlined that “European democracies can teach America”. I have dealt with the deep
contrast between the European and American democratization concepts at length in my
former papers (2020a,b.c).
12
Since the eruption of the coronavirus crisis there has been an avalanche of
literature on the triple crisis, namely of three kinds: (1) official declarations and decisions,
(2) longer overviews of processes and (3) short analyses and/or essays with marked views.
This conclusion has tried to summarize the mainstream progressive literature and the
emerging consensus on the major issues out of publications of the almost “library” size.
13
In this fierce debate see also Balfour (2019), Browning (2018), Grevi (2019),
Kagan (2015), Nitoiu and Sus (2019) and Steinicke (2020).
14
In this paper I can only indicate the failure of the EU in managing the enlargement
in the Western Balkans and Eastern Partnership, and switching from the enlargement policy
to security policy that has been indicated by Macron’s famous proposal of stopping the
enlargement in 2019 (see Ágh, 2020c).
15
This sub-chapter indicates only the former cycles and it focuses on the
transformation crisis and on the very beginnings of the Leyden Commission in its current
literature, from the huge literature see e.g. Bloj and Schweitzer (2019), Darvas (2020),
EC (2019a,b,c) and EESC (2019).
16
This paper relies also on the EPC publications discussed in my former papers at
a great length, but with a shorter reference in this current paper.
17
The “Social Europe Dossier” has been published by the FES (Inequality in Europe
edited by Meyer, 2019), and in some ways it is a precursor of the Forster volume and a
good preparation for the Harrop volume.
18
This volume covers also the climate change and somewhat the coronavirus crisis,
this part will be discussed at the analysis of the triple crisis.
19
In a later interview (Mahima, 2019) Jeffry Sachs has suggested the need for the
same “shortchanging” to the human investment and innovation for the European
Commission’s to keep the sustainability and economic development “under its new chief”,
Ursula von der Leyen.
20
In the Handbook political science the international political integration involves a
group of nations coming to regularly make and implement binding public decisions by
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means of collective institutions and/or processes rather than by formally autonomous
national measures. Political integration implies that a number of governments begin to
create and to use common resources to be committed in the pursuit of certain common
objectives and that they do so by foregoing some of the factual attributes of sovereignty
and decision-making autonomy, in contrast to more classical modes of cooperation such
as alliances or international organizations.
21
My recent book (Ágh, 2019) has described this process at length, analysing the
East-Central European countries as a region in the complexity of the policy triangle.
22
The presentation of the North-South controversy goes very much beyond the
scope of this paper, but it is very important to emphasize its blocking role in the East-West
controversy.
23
The elaboration of this issue goes well beyond the scope of this paper, it is enough
to mention here that the influential Western business networks are in close connection with
the Eastern oligarchs and government circles.
24
The necessity of the strong Political Europe in solving the triple crisis comes back
later several times, e.g. see its overview in the Commission’s research paper of Grüner
(2017).
25
The French approach has been described in a series of position papers (see
Chopin et al., 2012, Dullien and Torreblanca, 2012, see also the summary of Kreilinger,
2013), the German approach has usually been developed not directly about the Political
Europe but in the long analyses about the proper ordoliberal political governance in several
fields of Economic Europe like the Eurozone, the Fiscal Europe etc.
26
There has been a huge literature on the deep socio-economic and political crisis
of the NMS with various references to the negative externalities of the EU, see e.g .Andor
(2019, 2020), Blokker (2015), Charlemagne (2019), Cianetti et al. (2018), Grüner(2017),
Gorzelak et al. (2019), Kaplan (2017), Kováts and Smejkalova (2019), Magone et al.
(2016) and Schweiger and Visvizi (2018).
27
Wójtowicz and Rachwal (2014: 100) - following the footsteps of Ellingstad (1997)
- have pointed out that the big multinationals have built up the NMS regionalization in such
a way that “this type of investment strongly resembled” in Brazil, Mexico and Central
Europe, namely “The main point of this investment was to take advantage of lower labour
costs in Central Europe”.
28
See also the efforts the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) about the social
policy of the EU as “the long and winding road”, discussed above (Vanhercke et al. 2020).
29
This is a short summary of the Core-Periphery Divide that that I have described
since the early 2010s as De-Europeanization and De-Democratization, analysed in my
latest papers at length, see Ágh, 2020a,b,c.
30
See also the paper of Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2019) after its first
version in the Matlak volume, and e.g. Charlemagne (2019), Kaplan (2017), Kováts and
Smejkalova (2019), Magone et al. (2016), Önis and Kutlay (2017), Schweiger and Visvizi
(2018).
31
There is no space here to characterize at length the different roles of the three
actors – the comprador political elite, the dependent social elites and the civil society of
citizens controlled by the state colonised media, but the following sub-chapters will outline
this topic, especially in the case of the autocratic elite.
32
The concept of Kundnani (2011) on the contrast between geo-economic and geo-
political interests plays a big role in the argumentation of Hegedűs. E.g. Ozsvath (2019)
has also described the relationship of foreign multinationals and the NMS governments. As
a symbolical event, on 19 August 2019 Angela Merkel and Viktor Orbán had an official
meeting in Sopron (Hungary). After the stormy period between the EPP and Fidesz, Merkel
had actually no critical remark on the violations of the EU rules and values by the Hungarian
government. She had an empty rhetoric like “Let us continue on the path of freedom,
democracy and unity” (Kovács, 2019), which caused a deep disappointment in the
Hungarian democratic public opinion.
33
It is necessary to indicate here the conflicts around the further steps of the
Eastern policy of the EU, because it has also been high on the agenda in the first period of
the Leyen Commission, but this issue cannot be discussed in this paper.
81
 34
The autocratic systems have taken the opportunity of the coronavirus crisis to
strengthen their overwhelming power. The eminent case is the “Enabling Act” of Orbán in
Hungary on 30 March 2020 that has given a quasi-total power to the government without
a time limit. There have been similar efforts elsewhere in NMS, above all in Poland.
35
The latest Nations in Transit Report has noticed the general decline of democracy
in NMS and Hungary has received the worst score in this region (Freedom House, 2020b:
25).
36
There are many interesting papers on the Hungarian autocratic case, see also
e.g. Antal (2019), Applebaum (2020), Hughes (2020), Kováts and Zacharenko (2020) and
Wilkin (2018).
37
The analyses of the triple crisis can also be followed through the series of Think
Tanks’ Report on COVID-19 by the Council and by other regular international reports.
38
The detailed presentation of the EU crisis management process goes beyond the
scope of this paper that could only indicate its periods and main outlines. There have been
some publications regularly reporting about the “European Responses”, see e.g. Maurice
et al. (2020). For the detailed description of these three stages see also Bertoncini (2020),
Brenon (2020) and Grevi (2020). The Eurofound (2020) published its first findings on
“living and working” or quality of life in the EU at the time of Covid-19 in April 2020 and
the final results on the impact of these changes will come out in September 2020.
39
About the first stage in general and the border management in particular see the
detailed and long analysis of Carrera and Luk (2020), underlining the main rule that “giving
particular importance to the free movement of goods, over the one of people inside the
Union” (Carrera and Luk, 2020: 14).
40
The presentation of all EU actions in crisis management goes very much beyond
the scope of this paper. It is enough just to mention briefly here that The Commission is
building up a stockpile of medical equipment, which would be distributed where it is most
needed through the EU’s RescEU, the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. The Brussels
bureaucracy much derided for its infamous red tape and cumbersome decision-making, is
providing the competent, cool and nimble leadership so invaluable in a crisis. In a yet more
uncharacteristic move, the Commission has introduced an unemployment reinsurance
scheme—Support to Mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency (SURE)—which is to
be financed through bonds issued by the EU itself. The scheme is to supply aid to areas
that have been hit hardest, by providing reinsurance to state-financed income-support
programmes for workers affected by the crisis.
41
The open-ended paper stops here, and it will be continued with the recovery
strategy, e.g. with the debate about the decision of the German Constitutional Court –
including the strong Statement of the President von der Leyen on 10 May 2020 “that EU
law has primacy over national law” and other further complications.
42
There are many analyses on the occasion of the Europe Day (see e.g. Bartha et
al. 2020) and official declarations opening symbolically this long debate on the EU’s Future,
see e.g. the overview of the Fondation Robert Schuman (https://www.robert-
schuman.eu/en/special-page-on-may-9).

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