By Siyabonga Hadebe
Johannesburg – The EU is often cited as an exemplary model for regional political and economic integration in the world.
The EU’s political unity and policy coherence were reduced to a category of children’s books in how it dealt with the coronavirus.
When the virus created commotion in Italy, France and other EU member states, each state quickly reclaimed its individual sovereign rights and closed borders. Brussels and Berlin were not their usual self in a state of confusion.
Besides the ongoing war with Astra- Zeneca and Britain, there has never been a pan-European approach or strategy managed from Brussels to guide Covid-19 responses from Amsterdam to Zagreb.
This problem was not only in Europe, South Africa was forced to close borders after scores of people from its neighbours could not produce negative test results for Covid.
The regional approach is in dire straits – leadership has been missing and hiding behind high fences. At the same time, when it comes to vaccines for treating the coronavirus, the EU and the African Union (AU) are suddenly alive and presenting a united front.
The AU vaccine strategy entails sourcing the drug for countries as a collective through the famed Covax facility and purchasing agreements with major pharmaceutical giants. The European Commission has a similar strategy for its 27 members.
It looks like the regional blocs are not acting in their own accord.
Not only did the coronavirus expose the weaknesses in the EU system but the AU, its carbon copy, is known for clumsiness in everything it does.
For example, it has dismally fallen short in dealing with conflict zones and rarely calls out its member states for rigging elections and human rights abuses.
Nonetheless, when it comes to vaccines the two blocs have come alive. Of course, the likes of France and Germany announced that they had made deals with companies “to secure vaccines for their populations and will not purchase them through the international effort”.
It is not clear that the display of unity in the AU and EU has anything to do with money or not.
It, however, appears that their strategies are pushed by powerful pharmaceutical companies that have captured the world market for vaccines through such things as the Covax facility.
As of December 15 last year, a number of countries had signed commitment agreements to the Covax facility.
The US only joined this year but Cuba is not part of the scheme. Interestingly, China also joined the scheme after promising to make its vaccines available as a “global public good”.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also poked holes in multilateralism, at least in the manner that all countries resorted to individualism and claimed sovereignty in the face of a rippling virus. In the name of curbing the spread of the virus, nations banned travellers from certain countries.
There was nothing like “we are in this together, so let’s build a united front”.
But pharmaceutical companies understand the game of annexing markets better than anyone else.
Thus, it was in their interest to push countries into a corner, which now appears as multilateralism, in order to sell to them as a group or groups in the absence of a global trade agreement, in a true sense of the word.
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