In November 2025, the European Commission unveiled its “European Democracy Shield”, promising coordinated action against threats to European democracy and creating a new European Centre for Democratic Resilience to detect and deter them. This response, focused on countering information manipulation and interference paired with a discourse of urgency, follows a script I am familiar with. Three years earlier, within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Council of the EU banned the Russian broadcasters RT and Sputnik, declaring their propaganda “a significant and direct threat to the Union's public order and security”. Twenty-five other media outlets were later added to the list of this broadcasting ban. My own research published in International Affairs traced how the EU built, in a matter of weeks, the apparatus for this unprecedented emergency response. In stark contrast stands the machinery for everyday democratic participation, which the EU never built with the same urgency. That asymmetry is what this piece examines: why security framing has become the EU's default response to democratic decline, and what it would actually take to build the infrastructure it keeps compensating for.

Framing a political problem as a security threat — “securitisation” in the vocabulary of political scientists — lets institutions bypass the slow, deliberative procedures democratic politics normally require. My research showed this is happening collectively inside the EU: the RT/Sputnik ban was negotiated in closed-door “confessionals” between ambassadors and fast-tracked under crisis pressure, with minimal debate or oversight. Carnegie Europe's Ricardo Farinha and Richard Youngs have since mapped the same reflex across EU foreign policy more broadly, from defence spending to migration and economic policy, diagnosing what Josep Borrell openly called Europe’s “crisis mode”. Security framing brings the advantage of fast, binding decisions. It is also the one lever Brussels can reliably pull, even when the Union’s supranational competences are restricted. Elections, civic education, and media ecosystems remain, by treaty design, largely a national competence. So, when democracy itself became challenged under both internal and external pressure, the EU reached for the tool it had: framing it as an existential threat.

The issue is that this approach is expected to compensate for a structural gap it cannot fill. International IDEA's Global State of Democracy 2025 found that 94 countries — 54% of those assessed — recorded a decline in at least one measure of democratic performance in 2024, with global representation scores at their lowest since 2001. Turnout among young Europeans in the 2024 European Parliament elections fell to 36%, and OECD data shows 53% of people no longer believe their political system gives them a say. Meanwhile, the public sphere has been ceded to platforms whose incentives run directly against public interest. Courts have found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately addictive design and researchers are now warning about “AI swarms”, coordinated fleets of agents capable of manufacturing synthetic consensus, harder to detect than any bot network. Every new problem in this environment produces the ideal impetus for restrictive legislation, emergency measures, and new institutions tackling emerging threats to democracy, without ever addressing the underlying need for citizens to feel better heard and represented in society.

The hidden cost of leaning on securitisation when it comes to democracy is that it puts the legitimacy of the response at risk, and it treats the symptoms while the underlying deficit widens. The Jacques Delors Centre has already warned that the Democracy Shield offers soft answers to hard problems. My own research points to why: a securitising move can earn time-sensitive compliance, but not durable public trust, especially when it restricts something as fundamental as media freedom, as the RT/Sputnik ban did. Security-oriented responses can win a battle against misinformation and still lose the war for credibility in a multipolar world where every move is scrutinized and utilized in a global conflict of narratives. Liberal democracies like the EU are particularly vulnerable because they differentiate themselves from other regimes through their moral values centred astound human rights and liberties.

What would the alternative look like? If Europe responded to the structural challenges to democracy it is currently facing, instead of addressing the surface-level issues that emerge from them, it would focus on infrastructure. Democratic infrastructure deserves the same seriousness Europe has brought to energy or defence. Scholars such as Law professor Alberto Alemanno have proposed a permanent European Citizens’ Chamber, selected by sortition and wired directly into the EU's legislative calendar, rather than one-off consultations. Beyond institutional scaffolding, Europe must unlock considerable capital for public-interest technology, develop European-built social infrastructure on open protocols, and provide common impact measurement standards, so that the platforms structuring political life are optimised for democratic resilience by default. This is the wager behind the initiative I lead at the Global Society Foundation: that the democratic deficit is primarily a gap in infrastructure. This gap needs to be closed with the same instruments that Europe uses to build anything else it considers essential to its survival, i.e. capital, joint standards, and autonomy.

None of this makes the emergency toolkit obsolete. Some threats genuinely call for fast and strong responses, and Brussels will keep reaching for them. However, a Union that only knows how to defend democracy in crisis mode will keep having crises to respond to. The measure of whether Europe takes its own “Democracy Shield” seriously won't be how quickly it can ban the next hostile broadcaster or dismantle foreign interference machinery. It will be whether, three years from now, there's more for European citizens to participate in, not just less for them to be protected from.

About the author:

Dr. Sophie L. Vériter was a EURISGA Teaching Fellow for the Jean Monnet Chair Honours Class “A better world is possible: the future of human security and global justice”. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Global Society Foundation, where she leads work on democratic resilience and civic technology infrastructure. A political scientist specialising in misinformation, strategic communications, and democracy, she holds a PhD in Security and Global Affairs from Leiden University and an MPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford. Her research has appeared in International Affairs, the Journal of Common Market Studies, and The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, as well as Tech Policy Press and Carnegie. Sophie’s work has been recognised with international awards and fellowships including from The Europaeum, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Kofi Annan Foundation.

This blogpost is part of a series of contributions in the context of EURISGA – The European Union’s Role in Security and Global Affairs. It is a Jean Monnet Chair funded by the European Commission (Grant Agreement Number: 101085789)