The EU Towards the Global South During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

Pandemics have accompanied mankind since the dawn of time; they have claimed countless lives and given rise to political, socio-economic, and demographic changes. The coronavirus, which has been spreading around the globe since December 2019, prompted WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to declare a pandemic on 11 March 2020, caused for the first time by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. To date, the death toll amounts to 6.35 million lives.

The current COVID-19 pandemic is not only a health crisis, but also a crisis which, in times of globalization and interdependence, impacts the world economy and individual countries, exacerbating their problems with economic growth, unemployment, public debt or foreign trade disruptions, among others. It is also a crisis that affects all social groups in both rich and poor countries, albeit in different proportions, leading to dangers such as social exclusion, a deteriorating situation of women, a lack of access to remote education, and increased xenophobia or psychosocial disorders caused by lockdowns. Finally, it is a crisis that in the very near future will lead to a deepening of existing development inequalities in the modern world, questioning the feasibility of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Jayati Gosh, a member of the United Nations High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, said, “In the North, there are signs of economic recovery as vaccination rates increase, but in developing world this crisis is just starting and the world needs to respond with more urgency.” The foregoing sentence best reflects the situation of the world’s poorer countries, which will experience the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to the utmost severity.

The poorer countries are interchangeably referred to as “developing countries” and the countries of the Global South in this publication. This term is commonly used in literature to describe a group of countries with a low level of socio-economic development. It is a broad concept comprising a variety of states with diverse levels of economic, cultural, and political influence in the international order.¹ The problem, however, may be the methodology of distinguishing developing countries since there are no uniform criteria that qualify individual ←7 | 8→states to the group of developing countries, with the exception of the Least Developed countries (LDC) constituting a specific sub-group of developing countries. This leads to freedom in the application of methods to divide countries in terms of their economic development, as is the case with various international organizations, such as the World Bank, the United Nations, OECD, the International Monetary Fund, or the World Trade Organization. Without going into the academic discourse regarding the validity and different dimensions of the interpretation of the term Global South, for the purpose of this publication the term refers to countries classified by the World Bank as low- or middle-income countries per capita, located in Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and the Caribbean.2

The European Union (EU) does not use the term Global South in its official documents, instead it applies the terms “developing countries” or “partner countries.” In the document ‘The European Consensus on Development’, it was clearly stated that developing countries are included in the Official Development Assistance (ODA) recipient list prepared by the Development Assistance Committee under the OECD.³ This list encompasses all countries whose Gross National Income (GNI) per capita as calculated by the World Bank falls under the low- and middle-income categories, except for G8 members, EU Member States and countries with a firm date for entry into the EU. The list of ODA recipients also includes LDC countries as defined by the United Nations. Similarly, the analysis of another document – ‘The New European Consensus on Development’ – shows that the EU identifies developing countries with low- and middle-income economies. They are the main beneficiaries of the EU’s development cooperation policy (commonly referred to as development policy), which, by becoming part of the EU’s external action, contributes to sustainable development and the eradication of poverty, the supporting of democracy and protecting human rights through international partnerships that endorse and promote European ←8 | 9→values. The EU collaborates with partner countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

In 2012, the European Union recognized that the concept of developing countries as a group is becoming irrelevant because of the economic transformation of the previous decade and the growing role of China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies at the fore of global economic growth.4 The variety of developing countries, in turn, implied changes in the selection of EU policy instruments addressed to developing countries, as well as a diversified EU approach to the volume of assistance and the nature of partnerships. In accordance with the principle of a differentiated development partnership, LDCs as well as fragile and conflict-affected countries are at the heart of EU development policy, followed by middle-income countries that continue to struggle with poverty, social inequalities, and social exclusion. With more advanced developing countries, the EU announced the development of the “innovative cooperation,” because, in its opinion, these countries need less preferential forms of assistance or do not need it at all. Nevertheless, these countries are of key importance for the 2030 Agenda and since they are large economies, they exert influence within their regions, and creating a partnership with them will contribute to the implementation of global challenges through the exchange of best practices, technical assistance, and knowledge sharing.⁵ The idea of a diversified partnership is consistent with the European Union’s trade instrument supporting socio-economic development, i.e. the General System of Preferences (GSP), which since 2014 has been addressed only to countries classified by the World Bank as low and middle-income economies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented crisis for the present-day European Union since the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC), which forced it to undertake internal and external actions, limited by the specific management system of the European Union and the division of competences between the EU and its Member States. After a brief period of chaos and a lack of cooperation in key areas such as public health, economy and the Schengen area, the European Commission began to coordinate the European response to the pandemic, although Member States themselves are primarily responsible for health protection and the EU only complements national health ←9 | 10→policies in terms of public health. The EU’s external response to the COVID-19 pandemic reflected the “EU’s external action” set out in Title V of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, relating in particular to development cooperation and humanitarian aid activities where EU and Member State actions complement and support one another.

The world of science has been dominated by the subject of the pandemic, and the extensive literature relating to COVID-19 acknowledges that fact. In the case of the issues discoursed in the publication, there are no studies comprehensively presenting the European Union initiatives supporting the fight against the pandemic in developing countries and falling within the scope of the EU’s external actions. While there are publications relating to the impact of the pandemic on developing countries in various dimensions: economic, social, educational, and environmental,6 it is difficult to find them when we want to analyze EU actions taken in developing countries during the pandemic. For this reason, individual chapters are based primarily on source materials, in particular on European ←10 | 11→Union documents, reports from various international organizations or statistical data on EU development assistance and humanitarian aid and the global vaccination status against coronavirus. Interesting texts relating to the EU’s response to the pandemic are among the publications of the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), mainly by authors such as San Bilal, Mariella Di Ciommo, Katja Sergejeff, or Dirk Wilem te Velde. A reference to the impact of the pandemic on EU development policy can be found in a study by Svea Koch, Ina Friesen, I. and Niels Keijzer N. called EU Development Policy as a Crisis-Response Tool? Prospects and Challenges for Linking the EU’s COVID-19 Response to the Green Transition, issued by the German Development Institute. Due to the topicality of the COVID-19 pandemic, websites of the EU, WHO, COVAX, the WTO, the IMF, and others were extremely helpful in the pursuit of data and information. It should also be highlighted that a lot of valuable, current information on the pandemic and developing countries can be found on the websites of non-governmental organizations such as OXFAM, or on the DEVEX development media platform or the EURACTIVE online journal.

Research methods characteristic of social studies were applied in the publication. The research process was underpinned by inductive reasoning, which, through empirical determination and factual analysis, allowed for an emphasis ←11 | 12→of certain regularities in the EU’s development and humanitarian policy towards the countries of the Global South during the pandemic. The fundamental research method was the observation method since it enabled the collection of research material on the EU’s global response during the pandemic and its impact on the countries of the Global South. This method was applied to describe the phenomena in the relations between the EU and the countries of the Global South resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the authors (Chapter V) enhanced his observation by conducting a survey among ambassadors and high-ranking diplomats of EU delegations in the Asia-Pacific region. Furthermore, the work also incorporates the following methods: source and statistical, which were used to analyze and subsequently to verify EU documents and instruments of other international organizations involved in the fight against the pandemic, as well as to collect and analyze statistical data on coronavirus morbidity rates, the level of vaccine manufacturing and their availability, and the number of people vaccinated, among others.