What Europe Must Dismantle to Make International Law Enforceable Again

Europe keeps asking international law to do a job it no longer has the power to enforce. In two earlier chapters, Telegraph Online set out the contradiction and then the mechanism: Europe invokes rules, but increasingly applies them only where the costs are tolerable, because coercion travels through choke points it cannot yet control. The next question is the only one that matters now: what must Europe dismantle inside its own system if it wants law to function as constraint again, rather than as language recited under pressure.

The central European illusion is that values produce power. In practice, power is what allows values to be enforced. When enforcement fails, the problem is usually described as a deficit of courage or unity, as if a stronger speech or a more dramatic summit communique can substitute for capability. That is how Europe ended up in its current trap: it keeps issuing declarations, while the underlying system continues to produce dependency.

If Europe wants international law to bind allies as well as adversaries, it needs something more demanding than moral consistency. It needs the capacity to absorb retaliation, the ability to deny leverage, and the political machinery to act quickly when the legal threshold is crossed. That requires dismantling several internal features that were tolerable in a gentler era, but are now lethal.

The unanimity myth

A system that requires unanimity on foreign and security policy is not a sovereign actor. It is an assembly. In a world of coercion, assemblies are easy to jam. One veto becomes a strategic weapon. One captured party can delay, dilute, or block action. This is not a moral complaint about specific governments. It is a design flaw under modern pressure.

The practical remedy is not a new philosophical conversation about European unity. It is a narrower institutional change: expand qualified majority voting in external policy domains where delay itself is the harm, and create a protected mechanism for emergency action that cannot be halted by a single holdout. Without that, Europe will continue to treat law as optional whenever a veto threatens internal cohesion.

The procurement fragmentation that keeps America inside the system

Europe cannot escape security dependence while it purchases its forces in fragments. Procurement is where alliance becomes custody. When critical systems, maintenance chains, spare parts, targeting dependencies, and upgrade cycles sit outside Europe, political autonomy is limited regardless of how much money is spent. This is why headline spending targets do not automatically translate into sovereignty. Spending can deepen dependency if it is channelled outward.

Europe must dismantle the internal incentives that reward national prestige projects over pooled production. It needs a small number of standardised platforms, common training and logistics, and a rearmament plan anchored in industrial reality rather than parliamentary theatre. In practical terms, that means less variety, fewer bespoke national procurements, and more shared manufacturing at scale.

The political barrier is obvious: jobs, patronage, regional factories, and domestic contracts. But that is exactly why this is the core test of seriousness. If Europe cannot organise its defence industry across borders, it will remain a consumer bloc inside someone else’s security architecture.

The fiscal posture that turns every security decision into a culture war

Europe’s strategic debate collapses into populism because fiscal choices are presented as moral betrayal. Defence spending is framed as stealing from health and pensions. Energy transition is framed as punishment of households. Industrial policy is framed as cronyism. This is not inevitable. It is the result of the way Europe currently allocates risk and explains it.

If Europe wants enforceability, it must dismantle the habit of pretending that security can be funded without visible tradeoffs, or that tradeoffs can be imposed without political consent. The necessary move is an explicit sovereignty budget, presented as a national insurance premium, not as a fashionable cause. That budget should be tied to measurable outputs: munitions capacity, grid resilience, critical minerals stockpiles, cyber redundancy, port and undersea infrastructure security.

The energy custody transfer dressed up as diversification

Europe replaced one exposure with another and called it strategy. Reliance on Russian pipeline gas was substituted with heavy dependence on imported liquefied natural gas, much of it routed through American supply and pricing dynamics. In a cooperative era, this would be manageable. In an era of coercion, it is a vulnerability that can be translated into political leverage.

The internal dismantling required here is blunt: stop treating energy as a market technicality. Energy is sovereignty. Grid resilience is sovereignty. Baseline power is sovereignty. Europe needs a portfolio that cannot be squeezed through a single supplier, a single shipping lane, or a single pricing regime. That means building redundancy, expanding strategic storage, accelerating interconnectors, and deciding, openly, what role nuclear and domestic production will play.

It also means refusing to dilute industrial decarbonisation into mere symbolism. The energy transition is not only climate policy. It is a long war for autonomy. The political difficulty is real. The alternative is perpetual exposure.

The digital dependence Europe refuses to name

Europe speaks of sovereignty as if it were mainly military or fiscal. But coercion now runs through platforms, clouds, data, and payments, and Europe remains structurally dependent on systems it does not control. This is why enforcement becomes selective. When the counterparty can trigger retaliation through financial rails or platform infrastructure, law is quietly softened.

The internal dismantling here is not censorship or protectionism. It is maturity. Europe must enforce its own digital regulation consistently, including on the most politically connected platforms, and it must build credible alternatives for critical public sector functions. Sovereignty cannot exist where enforcement depends on the goodwill of external gatekeepers.

The refusal to define what Europe will do when an ally crosses the line

The hardest dismantling is psychological. Europe still behaves as if allied coercion is unthinkable, and therefore does not plan for it. That is why legal doctrine becomes fog under pressure. It is why responses degrade into procedural language, dialogue, restraint, monitoring.

Europe needs a doctrine for the internal breach: what it will do when coercion comes from inside the alliance, whether through threat of force, economic punishment, or overt interference in democratic processes. That doctrine does not need to be theatrical. It needs to be credible. It should specify response ladders, including diplomatic isolation, targeted economic measures, legal action, and coordinated refusal to participate in coercive acts.

Without that doctrine, Europe will continue to improvise. Improvisation is how rules die.

The conclusion Europe has been avoiding

Europe’s current condition is often described as a choice between confrontation and submission. That framing is childish. The actual choice is between rebuilding enforceable capacity or accepting permanent coercibility. In the first case, Europe can insist that international law binds allies as well as adversaries because it can survive the retaliation. In the second case, Europe will keep speaking the language of law while quietly treating it as negotiable under pressure.

The dismantling described here is not ideological. It is mechanical. It is the removal of internal features that allow external actors to jam decision making, capture procurement, exploit energy dependence, bypass regulation, and turn every strategic choice into a domestic revolt. The prize is not a fantasy of perfect autonomy. The prize is the ability to enforce a line, defend a rule, and sustain an alliance without living inside someone else’s leverage.

Europe does not need grandstanding. It needs enforceability. Without that, international law will remain what it is becoming: a language the weak recite, while the strong decide which clauses matter.