The EU must take action on security. Sometimes on its own, sometimes through shared capabilities
Europe can regulate the services used within its own market without necessarily controlling all the technologies that enable their provision. Regulatory power and industrial power are not one and the same. The consequence is neither to pursue autarky nor to extend the scope of military action indefinitely
Key points
The multiple crises of the 2020s highlight just how much the scope of European security extends far beyond the continent’s physical and political borders: from the pandemic to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the chokepoints in the straits, everything serves to demonstrate that defending the limes no longer serves to protect everything on which Europe depends. Energy, goods and data, in fact, pass through territories and corridors over which the EU exercises no sovereignty.
This reveals a profound transformation. In the wider Mediterranean, three geographical dimensions overlap: the political, the infrastructural and the operational. Vulnerability arises from the fact that these do not coincide.
Signs of systemic fragility
On 10 November, the Minister of Defence, Guido Crosetto, criticised the lack of concrete contributions from EU Member States to the Aspides mission in the Red Sea. According to Assarmatori, around 40 per cent of Italia’s international trade passes through the Suez Canal. Whilst the economic interest is shared, the willingness to assume the risk of providing protection is far less so. Around the same time, Brussels announced up to 50 million euros to establish a maritime security centre in the Black Sea by 2027, coordinated with Romania and Bulgaria, to integrate surveillance, satellite data and intelligence following attacks on commercial shipping. A necessary investment, which nevertheless highlights a distinction: knowing what is happening is not the same as being able to prevent it.
On 11 November, the European Commission launched MED-OP and Secure Borders, two initiatives with the countries of the southern Mediterranean that include combating cyber and hybrid threats, thereby recognising that part of Europe’s internal security must be built outside the Union, in partnership with states that do not necessarily share all of Brussels’ priorities.
The G7 declaration issued in Paris makes this contradiction even more evident. It refers not only to the protection of submarine cables and satellites, but also to the capacity of specialised repair vessels, components, ports and authorisations which Europe may not have directly at its disposal.
