Covid-19 turned the world upside down and thus calls for self-reflections. In light of that, the present paper takes a European legal perspective and unpacks the main responses of the EU to the Covid-19 crisis during the first two years. Also, the closures of borders in the three Nordic EU Member States are analysed as a concrete example of actions and responses. It concludes that within the prevailing limits and in general terms, the EU, after all, did quite well in relation to the handling of the pandemic. The reactions were at first far too slow with extremely tragic consequences. However, that the EU eventually was capable
of setting up a series of actions including in particular the common EU strategy for COVID-19 vaccines and a Recovery Plan appears to be a historically outstanding achievement. Also, the conditionality mechanism - which was encompassed as a kind of side-effect - might hopefully prove to be an extremely important tool in combatting the current rule of law challenges in certain Member States. On the other side of the coin, the internal market and
free movement were severely challenged (both in letter and in spirit) and were not handled fully satisfactorily.