The European Union is ill suited for crisis. Its 27 members are happy to feed at the common trough in sunny times, but storms tend to turn them into squabbling rivals. The financial collapse of 2008 and the following refugee crisis are memorable for their bitter recriminations and disunity. It’s all happening again over Covid-19, this time amplified by fear and death on a continent struggling with half of the world’s 1.4 million confirmed cases.

Borders are being thrown back up. Italy and Spain, Europe’s hardest-hit countries, facing economic collapse on a grand scale, accuse the prosperous north of being deaf to their cries for help. The north sees itself once more called on to bail out a profligate south. Hungary sheds a few more vestiges of its democracy. China and Russia, quick to seize on an opportunity to demonstrate the fickleness of democracy, bring in medical supplies that the European Union is purportedly failing to share. This week, the head of the union’s top scientific research body, Mauro Ferrari, quit after just three months on the job in a storm of mutual recriminations.

As in crises past, old enmities surfaced. A group of Italian politicians bought an ad in a German paper to remind the Germans that they were not compelled to pay off their debts after World War II. And once again, a chorus of commentators questioned whether the union can survive.

Part of the problem with this picture, as in the past, is a misunderstanding of what the European Union is and what it is capable of doing. The bloc is an alliance of sovereign countries, not a central government, and Brussels has control only over external trade and competition. For the rest, its executive branch, the European Commission, can only seek cooperation, not order it. The states that share the euro do not have true fiscal union, under which wealthier parts of the bloc would prop up the poorer.