Europeanization and Health Policy in the European Union During Covid‐19 Pandemic: The Case of Greece

ABSTRACT The main purpose of this paper is to study and evaluate the efforts to respond to the covid‐19 pandemic in the EU and Greece, and to understand the capacity of the Greek health system to deal with such crises. The main questions we are called to answer are: What initiatives have been developed at EU level to address the covid‐19 pandemic? Have these initiatives affected the Greek health system? To answer these questions, this article will use the theoretical lenses of Europeanization to make evident the interplay between European and national policies to address the covid‐19 pandemic. As argued in this paper, from the EU's perspective, Europeanization was promoted as a top‐down process and characterized by the efforts of the European institutions to mitigate the economic consequences of the covid‐19 on national economies while promoting the development of tools and mechanisms to strengthen the national health systems against the effects of the pandemic. As a bottom‐up approach, it seems that Greece influenced the EU's pandemic policy considerably. For the first time, Greece actively influenced EU's responses to the pandemic crisis uploading various innovative ideas, such as the PLF's and the EU's Covid Digital Certificate to the European level. Finally, studying the case of Greece, we observed interesting signs of the dynamic character of Europeanization where the feedback provided by Greece helped in the refinement of the EU's guidelines and policy recommendations.