An Expanding Union during the Covid-19 Outbreak: A Result from Supranational Entrepreneurship or out of National Interest?

The World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 outbreak a ‘pandemic’ on March 11, 2020. The European Union faced an unprecedented, transboundary health crisis, which affected society and businesses alike. The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the European initiatives that have been launched to contain the Covid-19 outbreak and bolster the European integration project. For this purpose, the study will investigate three European-led initiatives (Pandemic Crisis Support, Advance Purchase Agreements and the Digital Covid Certificate) and determine which European integration theory (Neofunctionalism or Liberal-intergovernmentalism) is better equipped at explaining the development of three initiatives. This study will take a qualitative case study approach, applying a mixed-method design composed of an analysis of code frequency and an in-depth congruence analysis. The data for this study will be derived from 30 official (Regulation, Decisions, Communication, etc.) and non-official (speeches, statements, reviews, expert opinions) documents. Based on the findings neofunctionalism seems to be the best at explaining development of CM initiatives during the Covid-19 outbreak. Across all initiatives there seems to be a stronger congruence between the empirical situation and the neofunctionalist propositions. The main limitation of this study was that the selected documents were primarily EU-centric, and lacked details regarding individual MS’ interests, positions or actions. Future research should address this limitation, to complement and validify findings of this study.