Europe and the great sovereignty bluff

Europe is being urged to “reclaim its sovereignty” by weakening the institutions that allow it to act collectively. As foreign governments, political mavericks and actors with lunatic agendas exploit its divisions, the continent remains frighteningly dependent on outside suppliers for its energy and digital infrastructure. This promised return to sovereignty could leave Europeans with even less control over their own future.

Author: Szabolcs Kincse

Honestly, I struggle to understand the surprise. Every fresh report of Russian interference seems to provoke another round of disbelief—as though the past twenty years of world politics had somehow passed people by.

Attempts to weaken European cooperation have been visible for years. The more difficult question is how they connect with Europe’s other vulnerabilities: its internal divisions, its reliance on external infrastructure, and the interests of actors who benefit when Europeans cannot act together.

***

There was a time when the conversation sounded very different. I remember the debates around the turn of the millennium about Russia’s place in Europe and the possibility of closer integration. These were also the years when Turkey’s EU membership prospects raised difficult questions about how a large new member would reshape the Union’s institutional balance.

In March 2000, Putin did not rule out Russian membership of NATO, provided Russia was treated as an equal partner. I suspect he expected a warmer welcome than he received.

By June, another register was already audible. Speaking in Berlin about NATO enlargement, Putin warned that if Russia felt threatened, “it would destabilize the situation both in Europe and across the world”.

The immediate context was NATO’s possible expansion into the Baltic states. Yet I read the warning as carrying a broader political message: Russia expected its interests to shape Europe’s security arrangements, and its dissatisfaction could have consequences far beyond its borders. Europe should have taken that warning more seriously.

More than two decades later, Vladislav Surkov, a former Kremlin adviser and an influential architect of Putin’s political system, made the logic explicit. In 2021, he advocated exporting domestic tensions through expansion abroad: “Unite your own, divide the others, and you will rule both.”

Manufacturing or deepening European divisions fits that logic perfectly well.

Some of these operations have left very tangible traces.

An affair turned sour

In 2014, explosions at ammunition depots in Vrbětice, in the Czech Republic, killed two people. Czech investigators attributed the attacks to Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU. Four years later, British authorities identified GRU officers as the suspects in the nerve-agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury. European countries have already experienced what Russian covert operations can look like when they turn physical.

People can be turned into instruments of pressure, too. In 2023, Finnish authorities said actors on the Russian side were facilitating arrivals at Finland’s eastern border of people without the documents required for entry. The government called it instrumentalised migration: using vulnerable people to exert pressure. People were being ferried north, dropped off near the border and sent onwards into bitter cold. Some arrived with frostbite, inadequately dressed for the weather.

In the public sphere, existing social conflicts offer another resource to exploit. The Mueller investigation documented how the Internet Research Agency, financed by the late, much-lamented Yevgeny Prigozhin, operated in the United States through false identities, amplified social divisions and recruited Americans who did not know whom they were helping. The operation could work with grievances that were already there, while concealing who was doing the organising.

An established news outlet’s reputation can be borrowed just as readily as an individual’s identity. The Doppelgänger network spread propaganda through websites impersonating recognised media brands. In 2024, the US Department of Justice announced the seizure of 32 domains. Most revealing of all, an unsealed affidavit alleged that the operation worked under the direction of Russia’s presidential administration.

The methods and the strength of the evidence vary across these cases. The toolkit ranges from physical attacks to deception, the amplification of social conflict and the exploitation of human vulnerability. And influencing public debate can go hand in hand with building political connections. In the case of Voice of Europe, the EU’s sanctions announcement described both a disinformation outlet and a channel for paying propagandists and building networks of influence among European political parties.

That brings us to Russia’s relationships with Europe’s far right, where the connections take several different forms. Marine Le Pen’s party in France took out a €9.4 million loan from a Russian bank in 2014. The debt subsequently passed to a Russian company with military-industrial links. The party announced full repayment in 2023. Here the connection was financial. Elsewhere, parties advertised their political cooperation openly.

Austria’s Freedom Party, the FPÖ, signed a cooperation agreement with United Russia, Putin’s party, in 2016. Matteo Salvini’s League in Italy followed in 2017, although it declared the agreement no longer valid in 2024, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Neither relationship had to be uncovered by intelligence services: both had been formalised by the parties themselves.

That political affinity also found expression in support for Moscow’s territorial and security ambitions. Bulgaria’s nationalist Ataka party called for recognition of the referendum used to justify Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In Serbia, Dveri and other parties signed declarations with the United Russia Party in 2016, advocating military neutrality in the Balkans. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the investigative programme Zembla documented Thierry Baudet’s cooperation with Vladimir Kornilov, whom it described as Kremlin-linked, ahead of the referendum on the EU–Ukraine association agreement. Baudet denied receiving Russian payments.

And, during Viktor Orbán’s pro-Russian rule, Hungary supplied a particularly colourful episode of its own. Béla Kovács, a former MEP for the then far-right Jobbik party, received a final conviction in 2022 for offences including espionage against EU institutions on Russia’s behalf. In this case, the connection to Russian intelligence became the subject of a criminal conviction.

Kovács had already moved to Russia before the final verdict and never returned to serve his five-year sentence.

***

A loan, a party agreement, ideological sympathy and a criminal conviction are different things. Their existence, however, cannot reasonably be dismissed as a collection of malicious suspicions.

The political incentive is straightforward. Ultranationalist movements that deepen distrust of shared European institutions make collective action harder. That is particularly consequential in foreign and security policy, where many decisions require unanimity.

The often unaddressed grievances these movements draw on are quite real: unaffordable housing, declining living standards, failing institutions and the absence of meaningful representation. External actors can exploit those grievances and help steer the argument until Europeans come to regard one another as their principal enemies.

A separate deal, a single veto or months of delay can be enough to obstruct a common response. For Moscow, paralysis is already a useful outcome. A destabilised, increasingly uncompetitive Union would be better still.

And it’s not just Russia

But let’s not believe for a second that it is only the Russians who have a malicious agenda when it comes to the Great European Project. Other powers are just as eager to benefit from a divided Europe. 

China has reasons to value the European market and a functioning EU—for now, at least. It also has reasons to prefer negotiating with individual member states when a collective European position would be less accommodating.

In 2017, Greece blocked an EU statement at the United Nations criticising China’s human-rights record. That does not establish that Beijing instructed Athens. It illustrates how one member state’s objection can shield an outside power from collective scrutiny.

Some prominent figures on the American far right — surprise, surprise — have been more explicit. In 2018, Steve Bannon said of Brussels: “If I drive the stake through the vampire, the whole thing will start to dissipate.” Everyone’s favourite, Elon Musk, put it more plainly in December 2025: “The EU should be abolished.”

And the best part is that we now have an official US government document spelling it out. The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy makes “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” a policy priority. It welcomes the growing influence of “patriotic European parties” and describes the EU and other transnational institutions as undermining political freedom and sovereignty. Its preferred Europe operates as a group of aligned sovereign nations.

The document also calls for a strong Europe capable of taking responsibility for its own defence. Nevertheless, its hostility to supranational institutions and encouragement of domestic resistance point, in my reading, towards weakening the political basis of European integration.

And that matters. The United States, one of Europe’s most important allies, has made changing Europe’s political direction an explicit foreign-policy goal. Its strategy proposes to encourage resistance to Europe’s current course from within European countries themselves.

A Europe capable of acting together has greater bargaining power and can impose rules that are harder to evade. In a fragmented Europe, it is easier to find a government willing to make a separate arrangement.

Into the digital abyss

Europe has paid dearly for learning the political consequences of dependence on Russian energy. It should also pay attention to the concentration of its replacement supplies. In 2025, the United States accounted for almost 58 per cent of the EU’s liquefied natural gas imports. That is the share of LNG imports, rather than Europe’s total energy supply, but it is a substantial concentration.

Yet we take digital dependence far more casually, as though it were no more troubling than getting hooked on a Marvel franchise.

According to the European Commission, the EU relies on non-EU countries for more than 80 (!) per cent of its key digital products, services, infrastructure and intellectual property. 

The dominant platforms through which Europeans discover news, debate politics and encounter other people’s experiences are almost exclusively American or Chinese. These systems rank what we see, what gets repeated and what remains practically invisible. They help shape our sense of what concerns other people, what “everyone” thinks and which problems deserve attention.

AI adds another layer. Systems that once directed us towards information now also supply explanations, summaries and ready-made answers. For growing numbers of users, they may become intermediaries through which the world is understood.

OpenAI and Anthropic are still privately held. But a stock-market listing would, in itself, provide greater visibility mainly into financial and corporate-governance matters. It would still not tell us exactly how a system constructs its answers, which priorities it favours or how those priorities change.

The EU has attempted to address parts of this problem. The Digital Services Act includes requirements concerning recommender-system transparency, options that do not rely on profiling, and data access for researchers studying the largest platforms.

Those measures provide tools for scrutiny. Their existence does not guarantee that the systems shaping public debate become sufficiently transparent, or that regulators can consistently hold their operators to account. And let’s face it: the tech giants running these platforms seem distinctly unimpressed by Europe’s attempts to regulate them and protect our right to information.

As if China, the American Trumpists, Russia and their paid or gullible minions were not enough, we also have to reckon with the politics of the people running these enormous platforms — and their attitudes towards European institutions and oversight. We should, of course, not assume that every platform systematically promotes the far right. However, the narrower point is already significant: companies resisting European oversight can benefit from the weakening of the institutions that enforce it.

***

Meanwhile, more of our everyday activities depend on this behemoth of an infrastructure. The capacity to organise a public debate, as well as the rules governing it, is becoming part of Europe’s wider struggle over political power.

European sovereignty needs a practical meaning: 

• usable European alternatives, 
• meaningful scrutiny of the systems affecting us, 
• and the capacity to enforce collectively agreed rules.

When outside actors control essential energy supplies, technological infrastructure and the channels through which we encounter public life, weakening our ability to act together compounds our dependence.

The particularly uncomfortable part is that, somehow, surrendering our collective power is sold to us as “taking back” our sovereignty.

Cover photo: Szabolcs Kincse

For more insights on Central European political risk, EU institutional developments, and transatlantic relations, follow CEA Magazine and the CEA Talk podcast.

Support independent analysis and journalism at CEA Magazine: https://centraleuropeanaffairs.com/donation