Tag: Democracy

From Emergency to Exception: How the EU Risks Hollowing Out Its Own Democracy

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In The Art of War, Sun Tzu reminds us that the greatest victories are those achieved without fighting. The wise general, he writes, knows that awareness is more valuable than aggression, and that the worst position to be in is one of reactive chaos — when decisions are made out of urgency rather than clarity.

That teaching is being tested in Brussels today.

In a move that has gone largely unnoticed outside policy circles, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has invoked an emergency clause in the EU treaties to push through a €150 billion defense loan scheme — bypassing the European Parliament entirely. Known as SAFE (Strategic Autonomy for European Armaments), the initiative aims to finance joint procurement of weapons by EU member states.

The urgency is real. The war in Ukraine drags on. Strategic dependencies on U.S. military support remain. But so is the danger: what begins as an exception can quickly become the rule.

🧠 A Familiar Pattern: Crisis Justifies Centralization

Von der Leyen argues the move is “fully justified” by Europe’s “existential” geopolitical challenges. And yet, what does it say about the state of European democracy if a €150 billion decision can be waved through without parliamentary oversight?

  • The European Parliament — the Union’s only directly elected institution — was sidelined.
  • National governments nodded the plan through in Council.
  • Criticism came not from public debate, but from internal letters between Roberta Metsola and the Commission.

This is governance by executive exception. It echoes a worrying trend we examined in our recent papers:

📄 From Echoes to Reason: Can AI Reinvigorate Democracy?

📄 An Epilogue to Fukuyama, and a Prologue to What Comes Next

There, we warned that:

“Democracy does not collapse in silence. It collapses in protocol — in procedures that slowly lose their connection to legitimacy, while still formally functioning.”

🧭 Europe Is Not Immune

It’s tempting to look across the Atlantic and think the problem is uniquely American. Donald Trump’s return to power, his flippant military gestures, and U.S. senators tweeting memes about political murder — all seem surreal. But Europe is not immune.

Our institutions may be quieter, more technocratic. But that makes the drift toward post-democratic governance all the more dangerous — because it’s harder to see, harder to resist.

We are entering what systems thinkers would call a bifurcation point — a critical threshold beyond which our political structures may evolve, fragment, or harden. Strategic clarity is needed now more than ever.

🕊 Sun Tzu’s Wisdom, Europe’s Choice

Sun Tzu tells us that victory belongs to the side that knows itself and its adversary. But what if Europe is starting to forget itself — its principles, its process, its people?

Strategic autonomy cannot be built on procedural shortcuts. A fortress without legitimacy is a prison waiting to fall.

Let us not confuse preparedness with panic. Let us not trade transparency for speed. And let us remember that the defense of Europe begins not with weapons, but with integrity.

What to think of Edward Snowden?

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When the outcry over the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program broke out as a result of yet another whistle-blower (Edward Snowden) going public with classified information, I had just finished reading a book which, among other related topics, discusses the inevitability of such programs: ‘The New Digital Age’, written by Eric Schmidt, who leads Google, and Jared Cohen, a former adviser of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. After extolling the increased efficiency, innovation, opportunities and better quality of life which comes with this ‘new digital age’, they also write that the “impact of the data revolution will strip citizens of much of their control over their personal information in virtual space, and that will have significant consequences in the physical world.”

They then discuss the phenomenon of whistle-blowing in the new information age, focusing in particular on Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks and the fate of Bradley Manning, the source of much of the classified material which WikiLeaks made public. While they make it clear that they do not agree with Assange’s approach, and while they clearly do not have any sympathy for Manning either, noting that “lack of judgment around sensitive materials might well get people killed”, they also write the following: “How different would the reaction have been, from Western governments in particular, if WikiLeaks had published stolen classified documents from the regimes in Venezuela, North Korea and Iran?” Schmidt and Cohen then conclude that they “expect that future Western governments would ultimately adopt a dissonant position toward digital disclosures, encouraging them abroad in adversarial countries, but prosecuting them ferociously at home.”

This is obviously happening already today. Schmidt and Cohen are optimistic as to the impact of all of this for the future of our democracies. Indeed, they write the following: “While of this digital chaos will be a nuisance to democratic societies, it will not destroy the democratic system. Institutions and policies will be left intact, if slightly battered. And once democracies determine the appropriate laws to regulate and control new trends, the result may even be an improvement, with a strengthened social contract and greater efficiency and transparency in society.”

However, they also note that “This will take time, because norms are not quick to change, and each democracy will move at its own pace.”

I must admit that I am not so sure that ‘our democracies’ will actually move at all and, if they do, that they will move in the right direction. That’s why, for the first time, I actually reacted positively to the Avaaz petition which is currently circulating. I think the ‘lack of judgment’ of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange might indeed have endangered lives. However, for some reason, I feel that this Snowden guy is a different case. For starters, he’s incredibly naive – which is another reason why I think he deserves more sympathy.