Liberals have long maintained a contradictory attitude to the idea of sovereignty. The idea of the rule of law administered within the territories of the nation-state was central to the emergence their preferred political system in the 19th century. On the other hand, those same liberals’ subsequent embrace of globalisation and universal values also implied a withering of that state’s power: throughout the latter half of the 20th century, economic interdependence, and a deference to collective - and, in the EU’s case, supra-national - arrangements became part of the Liberal International Order’s modus operandi.
In the West, the result was the emergence of what political scientists like Adler and Barnett described as a ‘security community’; a cluster of states between whom war had become unthinkable. Centred on the United States, underpinned by shared liberal values, norms, and institutions, this select group represented the pinnacle of the global order. There may have been occasional divergences - emerging, in no small part, from America’s claims to ‘exceptionalism’ - but the overall direction of travel was the same: one where the world, and the security community itself, was to be ‘made safe for democracy’, or, in a more cynical vein, shaped to the requirements and preferences of the dominant West.
Mutual trust was the common currency of that community; it ensured that dependencies were not seen as a problem. Europe might have been lethargic in its defence spending, but it trusted America to maintain a sufficient interest in its security to get away with such free-riding. Intelligence sharing was, again, done quite matter-of-factly, especially between the members of the so-called ‘Five Eyes Alliance’. The penetration of open societies by American tech titans, their access to the personal data of Europeans, their control of the information space was not seen as problematic. Sovereignty became an afterthought in this world of ‘shared values’.
This nonchalant attitude will now come to haunt liberals in the West, and throughout the world, in the most unexpected ways. Indeed, the extent to which its operation in favour of liberal order was dependent on the good graces of the unipole – the United States – as a liberal power was often taken for granted. Open societies with near-transparent borders – at least regarding capital and information – are all very well when a liberal hegemon dominates the resulting flows; it’s an entirely different matter when that power turns illiberal. At that point, the lack of sovereignty turns into an absence of firebreaks against subversion and state capture.
Europe has made itself vulnerable to manipulation in a borderless world. Its leaders were overly complacent when they allowed their states to become energy dependent on Putin’s Russia, all in the name of the supposedly conflict-suppressing wonders of ‘interdependence’. They also allowed their belief in the Transatlantic ‘security community’ to blind themselves into complete subservience to America’s tech titans: indeed, rather than supporting an indigenous IT sector on this side of the Atlantic, the mantras of ‘free trade’ and an ‘open internet’ led to the outsourcing of our IT, and, crucially, virtual information spaces, so Silicon Valley.
Europe’s elites were asleep at the wheel. And while this was somewhat excusable in an era when the United States was seen as a bulwark of liberal democracy, now that a rentier tech billionaire class has allied itself with a retrograde nativist cabal in DC, it is no longer an option. Elon Musk’s appropriation of the platform formerly known as ‘Twitter’ as his personal plaything is a harbinger of even darker things to come; as is Jeff Bezos’ evisceration of Washington’s newspaper of record into a Pravda-like ideological mouthpiece for neoliberalism.
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is the plausible deniability of control and manipulation, and the use of ‘freedom’ as an empty slogan geared towards justifying a free hand for this plutocratic alliance. By nature, contemporary social media appear democratic and open, a free-for-all where even the most insignificant individual can make a mark; Artificial Intelligence allows for what, again, appear to be innocent flows of information from machine to citizen.
Scratch the surface, and the control of algorithms and machine-learning models becomes of paramount importance. For tech billionaires, nothing would be more desirable than having a free and self-serving hand in surreptitiously shaping and distorting the very essence of debate and knowledge, rather than having to defer to democratically elected governments upholding their respective societies’ fundamental values, including limiting their plutocratic influence. Musk’s and Bezos’ antics, coupled with the allied Trump administration’s ostentatious and transparently hypocritical declarations on ‘freedom,’ align perfectly with this logic.
This brings me back to the value of sovereignty. If, in the past, it was seen, by liberals, as a relic of the past, in this 21st century, it deserves a thorough reappraisal. Perhaps not in its national form - which would probably condemn Europe to the status of easily divisible, relatively small, squabbling states and statelets – but as a result of a further deepening of European integration, and an abandonment of the messianic universalist fantasies of the past. Insisting on a regulatory firewall should be the order of the day, rather than the delusion that Trump’s United States - or, indeed, a chainsaw-wielding Musk - could be relied upon, like before, with our citizens’ data, and outsized control over the information sphere and the knowledge economy, as Keir Starmer appears to do.
Other forces – including the need for stronger defensive capabilities against Russia, and the uncertainties of increasingly walled-off manufacturing economies – may, or may indeed not, drive Europe towards that updated appreciation for the need to create and maintain high-tech information capabilities that stand on their own, rather than defer to the vagaries of the American oligarchy. Meanwhile, it’ll have to stand together and pool sovereignty, or lose it as it is squeezed between more coherent units – like the United States and China – who dominate the sectors of the future today. The clock is ticking, and time is not working in the continent's favour.
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