Politics infected the EU’s debate over coronavirus travel restrictions — but members of the club recovered and reached a deal Tuesday to reopen their external borders to a select list of countries.

After a pitched and prolonged battle among diplomats that stretched late into Friday night and through the weekend, the Council of the EU on Tuesday agreed to recommend lifting the bloc’s ban on travelers from 14 nations beginning Wednesday.

The highly controversial list notably excluded the United States, where infections are still rising uncontrolled, but added China as a 15th nation, literally with an asterisk. Inbound travel will be permitted “subject to confirmation of reciprocity,” reads the footnote. Travelers from China can enter only if Beijing lifts its own restrictions on the EU.

The decision, taken via written procedure and by a qualified majority vote — in which Poland, Bulgaria, Austria and Portugal abstained in frustration, and Denmark and Ireland opted out using exemptions under the EU treaties — avoided a potentially humiliating failure for the EU just as the bloc’s rotating presidency is being handed off to Germany from Croatia. Around 20 countries supported the decision.

But the fierce fight over which countries’ citizens should be allowed to resume nonessential travel also showed how a decision ostensibly anchored in evidenced-based science — about how best to limit the spread of COVID-19 — was in fact hijacked by an array of political sensitivities and financial interests, notably in those countries heavily reliant on tourism.

The countries that made the cut were: Algeria, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, Rwanda, Serbia, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay and China (with the reciprocity caveat).

“We injected politics into science,” one diplomat said. “If it had only been for science we would open up only to Canada, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand … It’s a calculated risk.”

In the end, excluding the U.S. was among the easiest aspects of the debate despite the protestations of Poland, which served as Washington’s best advocate in Brussels.

The Council recommendation calls on countries in the EU’s Schengen travel zone to judge other nations against “the epidemiological situation within the EU, i.e. the average number of COVID-19 cases over the last 14 days and per 100,000 inhabitants.” And the continuing high rates of infection in the U.S., especially in southern and western states, precluded opening up to America.

EU officials are still sore over President Donald Trump’s unilateral imposition of a travel ban back in March — announced without notice and in a late-night speech — that set off chaos in European airports. But in the end, retribution was not a factor, diplomats said. The U.S. is simply still too sick. And European countries that normally benefit from hordes of U.S. summer tourists could hardly take pleasure in the situation.

In addition to the four cited by the diplomat, the countries that made the cut were: Algeria, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, Rwanda, Serbia, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay and China (with the reciprocity caveat).

National interests

The finalized list ended up less the product of a scientific formula than a balance of national interests. Some capitals wanted to include their former colonies, with France favoring those in Northern Africa. Portugal agreed to exclude Brazil but wanted Angola in. Bulgaria wanted Turkey, Russia and North Macedonia permitted for tourism reasons.

Other diplomats said three countries wanted to send an additional political message to China by specifying Hong Kong and Macau be treated the same as the People’s Republic — a stance guaranteed to trigger a diplomatic explosion in Beijing.

A second diplomat expressed concern that the ban on external travelers would be lifted, even as some internal EU border restrictions remain.

“We are a bit puzzled by how this played out,” the diplomat said. “Reopening should be based on epidemiological and non-politicized evidence. The process should be more objective, and bullet-proof. The way things are being done, it lacks of scientifically solid evidence.”

This diplomat stressed that some countries seemed to be pushing to reopen too fast. “The sense of urgency goes beyond what is reasonable. What is the hurry?”

Shadowing all of those discussions, EU officials and diplomats were under extraordinary pressure to avoid the chaos from the early days of the pandemic. At the same time, they had to fashion a compromise in an area where national law is the supreme authority.

That means the Council decision is a recommendation, not an obligation. The Council recommendation calls for the list to be reviewed every two weeks.

Jennifer Janzen, a spokeswoman for A4E, the European airline trade association, welcomed the agreement, but added that she was “disappointed to see so few countries on the list but we are confident that more will be added as the situation will improve in third countries.”

But one airline executive from a non-EU country said that there may be more flexibility in practice. “What member states decide at EU level is not necessarily what is done,” the executive said.

“The situation and the process remains very confusing,” the executive added. “How can you sell tickets in such a fluid situation?”

A passenger walks through departures at Stansted Airport | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Indeed, EU diplomats acknowledged there are many complications, including how to deal with permitted travelers who might transit through countries whose travelers are still banned.

Some EU diplomats insisted that health concerns — not politics — drove the discussion. “Geopolitics was not involved, it’s wrong to say it that way,” a third diplomat said.

But a fourth diplomat stressed that in the end, EU countries had to avoid embarrassment. “We could not repeat the chaos we had with the borders at the beginning of the crisis,” the diplomat said. “We needed to send a signal of European coordination. We have an important presidency coming up in a crucial moment. We needed to show we made some progress.”

Maïa de La Baume contributed reporting. 

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LONDON — It tends to be smart to under-promise and over-deliver. Apparently no one told Boris Johnson.

The U.K. prime minister’s big speech on Tuesday was billed as the blueprint for a “New Deal” for Britain after coronavirus. Johnson, clearly not content with invoking Churchill, wants to go one better: Now he’d like you to think he’s Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In the event, the speech was largely a public relations exercise. Yes, the Johnson government has big spending plans, particularly on infrastructure, but these pre-date the crisis. Tuesday’s actual announcements amounted to £5 billion of accelerated spending on renovations for hospitals, schools, roads and town centers. All very welcome no doubt, but it’s not quite the Hoover Dam.

So what was the point of the speech, delivered in the West Midlands town of Dudley in front of a socially distanced audience of half a dozen businesspeople and journalists?

Put simply, Johnson needs to turn a page on the U.K.’s coronavirus story. One of the worst-hit countries in the world, his government has been beset with criticism, and the sooner he can shift attention to the recovery the better. It was therefore unhelpful for No. 10 that the government was, on the eve of the speech, forced to impose the U.K.’s first local lockdown on the city of Leicester, after a flare-up of cases there.

Here’s what Johnson’s speech revealed — and didn’t — about the U.K.’s path ahead:

Jobs black hole 

Johnson himself conceded the speech “may seem a bit premature” given the crisis is not over.

The full extent of the economic damage done to the U.K. is equally not yet known, he said. “We are waiting as if between the flash of lightning and the thunderclap with our hearts in our mouths for the full economic reverberations to appear,” he said.

The greatest fear is mass unemployment, with economic experts predicting the jobless rate in the U.K. could hit levels not seen since the 1980s.

Johnson reiterated plans for a “guarantee” to young people of an apprenticeship or “in-work placement” — but the Confederation of British Industry called this just “a start.”

“Government intervention so far has saved countless jobs, yet anxious months for many still lie ahead,” said CBI Director General Carolyn Fairbairn. “The focus on rescuing viable firms cannot slip while the U.K. looks to recovery, or earlier efforts could be wasted.”

‘Wait to hear from Rishi’

More significant than Tuesday’s outing for the prime minister will be more information next week from Chancellor Rishi Sunak on government support for the economy in the weeks and months ahead, as the highly successful furlough scheme — which has temporarily paid the wages of more than nine million jobs — begins to wind down.

It’s not clear whether Sunak will also lay out the government’s tax and borrowing plan to support the economic recovery but Johnson hinted that more information on this is coming in next few weeks and months. Following through on a big increase in government borrowing while rates are low is already part of the plan. But with Johnson ruling out cuts to public services, there is speculation Sunak may have to go against Tory orthodoxy and raise taxes to balance the books.

Taking questions after the speech, Johnson said his instincts were “to cut taxes wherever you possibly can,” but added, “The difficulty we have is that we have a generational challenge now and we have to take our country forward.” Watch this space.

Pale green

The speech failed to deliver substance to back up the U.K. government’s warm rhetoric about the fabled “green recovery.”

Johnson talked about planting 30,000 hectares of trees every year and dusted off pledges about green buses and greener house-building, but campaigners — who want to see the U.K. setting an example ahead of next year’s COP26 U.N. climate summit — were disappointed.

“We were promised a New Deal, what we got were old announcements, tiny crumbs of investment and too many wrong solutions,” said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace U.K. “It’s hard not to see this as a missed opportunity but now all eyes have to be on the chancellor to make sure he takes the chance next week.”

The U.K.’s biggest conservation charity, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said the government’s plans “fall well short of the global leadership that was promised over recent months.”

Build, build, build

At the center of the speech was a familiar Conservative appeal to “scythe red tape” around the U.K.’s planning laws to make it easier for developers to build and build quickly. A new “infrastructure delivery task force” with the dreadful name “Project Speed” will be set up with the aim of cutting down the time it takes to get infrastructure projects moving.

This includes the 40 new hospitals the Tories pledged at the last election — details of which Johnson said would be revealed by Health Secretary Matt Hancock “in the next few days.”

Precisely how a bonfire of planning regulations fits into the government’s green agenda wasn’t clear, and conservationists were also dismayed to hear Johnson dismiss environmental protections as “newt-counting delays” — a clichéd reference to newspaper stories about the presence of endangered great-crested newts sometimes holds up building projects.

Once again, the real meat of U.K. plans in this area will come later, with the publication of a National Infrastructure Strategy expected in the fall.