Political and Legal Values of the European Union and its Member States: Does the Covid-19 Pandemic Have Transformative Potential?

The article analyzes the transformative potential of the COVID-19 pandemic as regards to the value system of the European Union and its member states. The methodology of the research is informed by certain provisions of transformational theories, the approach of S. Walby conceiving the crisis as a state of disproportionality between cause and effect, and the idea of E. Shils about the dynamics of interaction of value and institutional systems. The value foundations of the EU as an integration project are considered. The article analyzes the regulatory potential of this supranational entity and the effectiveness of its values foundations the crisis COVID-19 pandemic. It discovers the values collisions at the level of the member states of the European Union and their changes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors conclude that the pandemic has become a serious test for the European Union and its members as polities built on the basis of common values which are considered as one of the indisputable advantages of this association. The cascade of crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic questions the entrenchment of many of the fundamental values of the European Union and demonstrate that their rootedness is significantly overestimated. There is a significant disproportion of the response measures and the key values that underlie the Union. The COVID-19 pandemic impacts comprehensively the values of the European Union. The basic European economic model, based on the recognition of the market as the main regulator of public relations, has been criticized, but at the same time, additional opportunities have opened up for adjusting social policy. The status and place of human rights come again into discussion. The conducted research is important for the further development of practices for responding to crisis phenomena.

Keywords: pandemic; values; human rights; human rights implication; COVID-19; European Union