The EU’s vaccine strategy: A glimpse of protean power?

Abstract This article examines whether the EU has been projecting protean power on the global stage within the coordinative Europeanisation mode. Protean power is about an actor’s ability to confront external challenges by innovating and transforming itself. The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated the EU’s capacity to innovate and transform itself in light of an external challenge. It has given rise to a new governance mode called ‘coordinative Europeanisation’ with more bottom-up participation of EU member states in the design of emergency policies by EU institutions (Ladi and Wolff 2021). This new mode of coordination has been characterised by a high degree of adaptability of EU institutions, a coordinative reflex which has spread to various policy areas, and is characterised by informality and rapid policy response. This article argues that although this coordinative response demonstrated the EU’s agility internally with strong evidence of inter- and intra-crisis learning, it was not enough for the EU to project protean power. Control power often surpassed the EU’s protean power response to crisis. We empirically illustrate our argument by showing how coordinative Europeanisation took place in the EU vaccination strategy. We then focus on the international dimension including COVAX and the strengthening of Team Europe in global health policy and discover that coordinative Europeanisation does not always translate into protean power. The perceptions of those on whom power is projected need to be taken into account, as well as the substance of norms projected.