Securitisation of EU Democracy Policy Risks Backfiring, Warns Think Tank
On the International Day of Democracy, the European Policy Centre (EPC) published a discussion paper warning that the European Union’s growing obsession with countering disinformation—and particularly foreign interference campaigns—is skewing its entire approach to protecting democracy in ways that may ultimately undermine democratic legitimacy. The paper, authored by Carl Dolan, Senior Adviser on Ethics and Transparency at the EPC, argues that while the reality of Russian-sponsored disinformation is “beyond question,” the prominence given to counter-disinformation policies within the EU’s democracy agenda is not justified by the actual impact such campaigns have on democratic life. Dolan contends that the von der Leyen Commission has presented a series of initiatives ostensibly intended to promote “democratic resilience” but which are increasingly focused on the threats posed by hostile geopolitical rivals to the “integrity of the information environment.” This, he says, effectively anchors the EU’s democracy promotion policies in a much more encompassing security agenda—a development that rests on a contestable view of what makes democracy legitimate. He further warns that the securitisation of democracy policy may trigger unintended and counterproductive consequences, including the restriction of civic space and a further erosion of public trust in democratic deliberation. The paper arrives at a critical moment, as Brussels prepares for the June 2024 European Parliament elections, a contest heavily framed in official and media discourse as a likely target for foreign manipulation.
The backdrop to Dolan’s critique is the remarkable proliferation of EU initiatives aimed at shoring up democratic resilience over the past four years, all of which have come to feature counter-disinformation as a central pillar. In December 2020, the European Commission unveiled its European Democracy Action Plan (EDAP), a sweeping strategy to promote free and fair elections, strengthen media freedom, and counter disinformation—initially framed primarily in terms of protecting electoral integrity from foreign interference. Since then, the Commission has layered on a series of additional instruments: the Digital Services Act’s election-related obligations on large platforms; the European Media Freedom Act, which aims to shield journalists and media outlets from political and economic pressure; a set of anti-SLAPP recommendations and a directive to protect journalists from strategic lawsuits against public participation; and, most notably, the “Defence of Democracy” package tabled in December 2023. That package, while presented as a way to increase transparency about foreign influence, was immediately controversial for proposing new registration and disclosure requirements for NGOs and their foreign funding sources, which critics argued could stigmatise legitimate civil society and echo repressive legislation in other parts of the world. Yet it is precisely this kind of measure that reflects the new security-first orientation of democracy policy. Dolan argues that such initiatives, taken together, mark a subtle but decisive shift in how Brussels understands the primary threat to democracy: from internal weaknesses—such as declining rule-of-law standards, economic inequality, or polarisation—to external machinations by geopolitical rivals seeking to manipulate public opinion.
The reality of hostile disinformation campaigns, particularly those emanating from Russia, is indeed well documented. Since 2014, EU authorities, civil society groups, and the European External Action Service’s East StratCom Task Force have identified countless cases of pro-Kremlin fake news sites, social media bots, troll networks, the Doppelgänger operation that cloned legitimate news websites during the French and German election periods, and coordinated efforts to weaponise footage of the war in Ukraine. Anti-EU, anti-migrant, and anti-vaccine narratives boosted by Russian state media during the coronavirus pandemic further reinforced the sense that these operations pose a direct threat to the health of European democracy. In this context, few would dispute the need for vigilance, and the EU has invested heavily in building institutional capacity to detect and expose such campaigns—from the establishment of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) to the rapid alert system of the EU’s Disinformation Code of Practice. However, Dolan’s paper asks a pointed question: does the intensity of policy attention match the actual impact that such campaigns have on democratic outcomes? He argues that the measurable influence of foreign disinformation on citizens’ electoral behaviour or on their underlying support for democratic institutions remains thin and inconclusive. Studies of election interference in Europe and the United States have consistently struggled to demonstrate that such campaigns significantly changed voting patterns; other factors, including domestic media ecosystems, economic conditions, and pre-existing societal grievances, weigh far more heavily on voter choice. The emphasis on foreign interference, Dolan suggests, offers governing elites a convenient narrative that externalises failures and diverts attention from the more uncomfortable task of addressing domestic democratic deficits.
At the heart of this misplaced emphasis lies what Dolan describes as a contestable view of the conditions necessary for democratic legitimacy. The implicit theory behind many counter-disinformation policies is that democracy is legitimate only when citizens make free and unmanipulated choices—and that external actors, through deceit, contaminate the communicative space, thereby delegitimising any outcome they may influence. On this logic, the role of the state becomes not merely to provide fair electoral institutions, but to act as a guardian of the public’s epistemic integrity, protecting citizens from being “disinformed” before they exercise their political will. Yet, as the paper points out, this understanding is deeply problematic in practice. All political communication, even in the most healthy democracies, involves persuasion, selective framing, and emotional appeal; the line between disinformation and ordinary political advocacy is nowhere near as clear as the policies assume. Furthermore, the guardian-state mentality presumes a radical account of manipulated publics: citizens are effectively reduced to passive receivers of information, assumed incapable of critically evaluating what they read or hear unless the state intervenes. This stance not only underestimates citizens’ agency but also threatens to stigmatise opinions that diverge from a supposed official consensus, as seen in parts of the EU where scepticism about vaccines or foreign policy has been uncritically labelled as the internal echo of foreign influence. Dolan insists that democratic legitimacy cannot be built by trying to ensure that the people think the “right” things, but rather by robustly protecting the rights of all citizens—whatever they think—to participate in open political contestation.
The securitisation of democracy policy, Dolan argues, is not just intellectually shaky; it is also likely to produce harmful unintended consequences that contradict its stated goals. First, it risks restricting civic space. The Defence of Democracy package, by introducing targeted transparency duties for organisations receiving non-EU funding, has already triggered alarm among civil society groups, who fear that they will be cast as potential agents of foreign influence by reaching out to international partners. Similar dynamics in some member states have led to the creation of “foreign agents” registers, laws that, although couched in democratic defence language, have been wielded against human rights organisations and independent media. Second, the security framing tends to erode rather than strengthen public trust. When political leaders and institutions continually tell citizens that their minds are being manipulated by hostile external forces, they sow profound scepticism about the entire sphere of public deliberation: citizens begin to suspect that the news, elections, and even their peers’ political choices are not authentic, a perception that feeds cynicism and disengagement. Third, the heavy focus on counter-disinformation crowds out investment in the slower, harder work of democratic education, media literacy, and the strengthening of independent journalistic ecosystems—the very conditions that provide genuine resilience. In place of these, the EU increasingly allocates resources to monitoring, penetration-testing, and scenario-planning exercises in which citizens are treated as targets to be defended, rather than as participants to be empowered.
Against this backdrop, Dolan’s paper concludes with a call for a clear-headed reassessment of priorities. The EU should take foreign interference seriously, of course, but it must cease inflating this threat to justify sweeping interventions in the public sphere. Instead, democracy protection should be re-anchored in a positive agenda: upholding the rule of law, guaranteeing media pluralism and independence, defending the civil liberties of citizens and NGOs, promoting evidence-based civic education, and cultivating a public culture that is resilient not because it is shielded from “bad” information, but because it is empowered to engage with it. Moreover, the securitisation of democracy should itself be questioned as a policy paradigm; folding democratic legitimacy into the broader logic of strategic competition risks turning the EU’s democracy agenda into an instrument of geopolitical containment, with profound implications for the EU’s credibility at home and abroad. The paper is available in full on the EPC’s website, where it is explicitly framed as a contribution to the ongoing debate ahead of the European elections. Carl Dolan is Senior Adviser on Ethics and Transparency at the European Policy Centre; the EPC’s support for its publications does not constitute an endorsement of their contents, which reflect the views of the author alone. As European citizens prepare to cast their ballots, this timely analysis urges a moment of reflection: protecting democracy may require not more surveillance of the information space, but more trust in the people who inhabit it.