By Tyler D.
Spheres of influence, limited sovereignty, and the case for a European state
Permit me a brief preamble on the occasion of this, my first article.
I am nobody in particular, which should make it pleasantly easy for you to ridicule the muddled reflections you will have the misfortune of encountering here from time to time, whenever I manage to steal a few minutes from the thousand petty obligations of an ordinary young man’s life.
Hands up: I surrender. I make no claim to possess revealed truth, nor to know any more than you, my one and only reader. That said, I would like this to become a small space for exchange and reflection on a handful of themes to which I am particularly attached.
At the foot of this article, as of those that may follow, you will find my email address. Do not be shy: feel free to write and inform me that I am an idiot, a dim-witted American stooge, a Kremlin-paid scoundrel, or whatever other diagnosis the moment inspires. I am an incurable contrarian, and I promise never to sue.
This article defends a sharp thesis: there is no full democracy without political, economic, and strategic-military independence. Democracy and subordinate membership in the sphere of influence of a great power are, beyond a certain threshold, incompatible. Democracy, in its minimal yet substantive definition, is the self-government of a political community: the power to give itself its own laws collectively and to choose its own destiny. But a community operating within the sphere of influence of a hegemonic power sees the space of practicable choices systematically narrowed: some options—even when a majority of citizens wants them—are excluded upstream, before they can even be debated. Through a conceptual path (what democracy is, what spheres of influence are) and a broad body of historical and contemporary evidence—from the Brezhnev Doctrine to interference in post-war Italy, from Russia's near abroad to the extraterritorial reach of United States law—the article shows that "limited sovereignty" is not an anomaly but the ordinary condition of provinces. From this follows a counter-intuitive consequence for contemporary nationalisms: invoking more "national sovereignty" in an anti-European key produces, arithmetically, less independence, because a hegemon's power to condition is proportional to the power differential. The conclusion is that, in a world of continental powers, only a sovereign European state possesses the critical mass needed to restore fullness to the democratic will of European citizens and to preserve the continent's authentic system of values.
There is an assumption as widespread as it is rarely examined: that democracy is an internal property of a state, measurable by looking at its institutions—free elections, party pluralism, separation of powers, freedom of the press. If these institutions work, the state is democratic; if they do not, it is not. A country's international position, in this view, would be a separate matter of foreign policy that does not touch democratic substance.
This article argues that such an assumption is mistaken, or at least gravely incomplete. The democratic quality of a political order depends not only on the correctness of its internal procedures but also on the real breadth of the decision-making space within which those procedures operate. A political community may possess the most perfect representative institutions and yet fail to govern itself, if the decisions that truly matter—strategic orientation, alliances, the underlying economic and value model—are taken elsewhere, or are constrained upstream by a dominant external power.
The thesis can be stated thus: democracy and subordination to a foreign sphere of influence are, beyond a certain threshold, incompatible. To belong to the sphere of influence of a great power—by necessity or by opportunity—always means, by definition, ceding variable portions of de facto sovereignty: external influence over political decisions, the preventive selection of those admitted to govern (tolerated only if not too hostile to the hegemon), insertion into a web of treaties and mechanisms that narrow the range of possible policies. When some popular wishes—however much in the majority—are excluded a priori from what the government of a "province" may do, speaking of full democracy becomes illusory. The form remains; the substance is hollowed out.
This is not a moral claim against one power or another. It is a structural claim, valid for the United States as for Russia, for the Athenian empire as for the Soviet one. The pages that follow argue it conceptually and illustrate it with the facts.
To argue that external subordination corrodes democracy, one must first clarify what democracy is. The tradition of political thought offers a convergent answer: beyond the mechanisms, the core of democracy is collective self-government. A people is democratic not merely when it votes, but when it is—in Rousseau's formula—at once the author and the addressee of the laws it obeys, when sovereignty genuinely resides in the will of the community.1
Twentieth-century political science refined, rather than abandoned, this intuition. Robert Dahl, in defining "polyarchy" as the real form of modern democracies, identifies as the ultimate criterion the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.2 This responsiveness presupposes something usually taken for granted: that there exists a public power capable of responding, that is, of translating citizens' preferences into effective decisions. A government that responds perfectly to its voters but lacks the power to enact what they ask—because those choices are foreclosed by an external constraint—is responsive in form and impotent in substance.
Here lies the decisive point. Democracy is not only a method for selecting rulers (Schumpeter's "minimal" definition, the electoral competition for the vote);3 it is also the condition under which that selection counts, under which the ballot's outcome can truly change the community's direction. If the perimeter of practicable choices is fixed by an external actor, voters may choose who will administer that perimeter, but they cannot redraw it. You may choose the pilot, but if the route is essentially predetermined that counts for little. Provinces often choose the former; almost never the latter.
This distinction—between procedural freedom and freedom as collective self-determination— is the same one republican thought opposes to the mere absence of constraint. It is not enough, if we are to speak of full democracy, for citizens to be left free within certain boundaries; the community must be the arbiter of its own boundaries. Democracy, in this full sense, is the political form of a people's self-determination. Self-determination, by definition, does not survive its permanent delegation to an external sovereign.
If democracy is self-government, the sphere of influence is the structure that compresses it from the outside. It is worth defining with precision. A sphere of influence is a geographic area within which a great power exercises a degree of control or conditioning over the fundamental choices of the states that fall within it, without (necessarily) formally annexing or occupying them. Provincial states keep their flag, their UN seat, their parliament and government: their de jure sovereignty remains intact. What erodes is de facto sovereignty—the effective capacity to decide.
Political realism has observed this phenomenon for millennia. Thucydides, in the famous Melian Dialogue, has the Athenians say that "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must": the oldest and starkest statement of the principle that, in international anarchy, law holds between equals in strength, while among unequals power prevails.4
Contemporary international relations theory has systematized the insight. In a system lacking an overarching authority, Kenneth Waltz argues, states are compelled to attend first to their own security and to reckon with the distribution of power;5 and great powers, John Mearsheimer adds, structurally tend to build and defend spheres of influence, repelling others' interference in regions they deem vital.6 Stephen Krasner has shown how far "Westphalian" sovereignty—the principle of non-interference—is historically more an aspiration than a reality: an "organized hypocrisy," regularly violated by the powerful when it suits them.7
From this framework follows the fundamental law that runs through the whole article: a hegemon's power to condition a province is proportional to the power differential between the two. The wider the gap—economic, military, technological, financial—the deeper the hegemon's penetration into the province's decision-making space, and the narrower the margin of self-government left to the latter. It is arithmetic, not judgment. A piece of evidence that exposes to ridicule much of contemporary sovereignist rhetoric.
It is worth distinguishing two modes in which limited sovereignty manifests itself. The hard form is coercive and explicit: military intervention, coup d'état, occupation. The soft form is indirect and often nearly invisible: economic conditioning, technological and energy dependence, the extraterritorial projection of law, the "upstream selection" of acceptable political forces. The second is more insidious precisely because it coexists with the intact appearance of democracy—regular elections, heated debate over issues that, however, do not touch the heart of subordination. The average citizen does not see it, does not suffer it. Out of sight, out of mind. The two modes are not mutually exclusive: they are the two ends of a continuum along which all the provinces of history are located.
The thesis does not live on definitions alone. Its force lies in the number and variety of cases in which external subordination has hollowed out—openly or silently—the self-government of formally sovereign countries. We examine four families, deliberately chosen on both sides of the Cold War and in the present, to show that the mechanism is structural, almost natural, attributable neither to a single power nor, still less, to categories of the spirit such as the good versus the wicked, liberal states versus dictatorships.
The case in which the principle was made most explicit is the Soviet one. In August 1968, Warsaw Pact tanks entered Prague to crush Alexander Dubček's "Spring," the Czechoslovak attempt at "socialism with a human face."8 To justify the invasion, a month later, an article in Pravda signed by Sergei Kovalev—titled Sovereignty and the International Obligations of Socialist Countries—openly theorized what the West dubbed the "Brezhnev Doctrine": the sovereignty of socialist countries was limited, subordinate to the higher interest of the "socialist commonwealth." A country could choose its own path only so long as that path did not weaken socialism or draw the country toward the West.9 It was limited sovereignty elevated to an official principle: the majority of Czechs and Slovaks could desire reform as much as they wished, but that desire fell outside the perimeter of the permissible. Twelve years earlier, in 1956, the same logic had crushed the Hungarian revolution. For the entire bloc, the choice of political model did not belong to the peoples who lived within it.
It would be a mistake—and an intellectual dishonesty—to believe that limited sovereignty was a vice exclusive to the Eastern bloc. The Western order too had its version, softer, more sophisticated, but real. The Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad called it, in a now classic formula, an "empire by invitation": unlike Soviet expansion, the American hegemonic presence in Western Europe was largely desired by Europeans themselves, in search of protection and prosperity.10 "By invitation," however, does not mean without conditions. The price of the invitation was the definition of a political perimeter.
The Italian case is exemplary. In the 1948 elections, regarded as decisive for the country's orientation, the United States covertly funded the Christian Democrats and the other "center" parties in an anti-communist function: later declassified documents and Congressional inquiries (the Church and Pike committees of the 1970s) confirmed covert funding operations—the Agency admitted at least one million dollars of the time—later continued, according to a Defense Department study made public in 2017, at an average of about five million dollars a year until the early 1960s.11 The point is not the single payment—about which I care little; indeed some would have arguments to hail it as a blessing—but the logic. For the entire duration of the Cold War, Italy operated under a conventio ad excludendum, the preventive exclusion of the largest communist party in the West from every national government—not by law, but by the constraint of international alignment. Millions of voters could vote for that party; they could not bring it to govern the country. Gladio—the well-known American stay-behind network—served, as an extreme measure, to avert a red Italy. The route was fixed; only the pilot was chosen.
That the mechanism was structural, and not an Italian exception, is shown by its recurrence elsewhere in the Western sphere: from the colonels' coup in Greece in 1967 to the interference and overthrow of unwelcome governments outside Europe—Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973—in the name of defending the hegemonic order, Venezuela today. The means and the brutality change; the structure remains identical: in the regions a great power deems vital, the choice of political, social, and economic model is never entirely free.
The logic is not Cold War archaeology. Post-Soviet Russia has openly claimed a "near abroad" in which it tolerates no hostile geopolitical drift. The war with Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine from 2014, up to the full-scale invasion of 2022, are the coercive reassertion of a sphere of influence: the punishment of states that had tried to redefine their alliances autonomously.12 The Belarusian case illustrates the "soft- turned-hard" variant: in 2020, faced with mass protests against an election widely judged fraudulent, Alexander Lukashenko saved himself by leaning on the Kremlin, emerging politically intact but deeply dependent on Moscow.13 Here too: the popular will—however mobilized—was neutralized because it fell outside the perimeter tolerated by the regional hegemon.
The most interesting forms, for today's Europe, are not tanks but silent mechanisms. Contemporary political science has called—with a term born precisely in Europe— "Finlandization" the situation of a state formally sovereign and internally democratic that, out of prudence toward a powerful neighbor, self-limits its foreign and sometimes domestic choices. When the hegemon's power is overwhelming, the province behaves well out of fear, without even the need for orders to be issued. Three contemporary channels deserve attention.
The financial and legal channel. The dollar's dominance in the international payments system gives the United States extraordinary leverage: the capacity to apply its own law beyond its borders. The case of the French bank BNP Paribas is emblematic: in 2014 it was forced to pay $8.9 billion in penalties to U.S. authorities for having processed—touching the American clearing system—transactions with Iran, Sudan, and Cuba that were legal under European law but forbidden under U.S. law; it was even suspended for a year from converting currencies into dollars through its New York branch.14 A European economic actor was thus sanctioned for having complied with European foreign policy rather than American. It is limited sovereignty in its purest state, exercised through financial infrastructure.
The military channel. Europe's dependence on U.S. weaponry has deepened, not lessened. According to SIPRI, between 2020 and 2024 the European member states of NATO imported 64% of their arms from the United States—the highest share in twenty years, sharply up from 52% in the previous five-year period.15 Every major American weapons system purchased entails years of maintenance, spare parts, and software updates controlled from overseas: a dependence that extends far beyond the act of purchase and that, as the Draghi report observed, structurally limits the development of an autonomous European defense industry.16
Provinces buy weapons that can be rendered unusable and harmless by a switch-off decided by the hegemon's political leadership thousands of kilometers away.
The technological and economic channel. The Draghi report on European competitiveness (2024) captures a systemic dependence: Europe imports over 80% of its digital technologies and services—cloud, advanced semiconductors, intellectual property— mainly from the United States.17 Whoever controls the digital infrastructure underpinning a continent's economy and administration holds a permanent lever of conditioning. On the commercial front, the EU-US tariff agreement of July 2025 shows the asymmetry to the naked eye: to avert tariffs threatened as high as 30%, the Union accepted a 15% rate on its own exports, zeroed out duties on U.S. industrial goods, and undertook commitments to buy $750 billion of American energy and to invest $600 billion by 2028.18 A negotiation between equals does not produce such outcomes: they are produced by a relationship between a hegemon and an economic power lacking strategic autonomy.
Taken together, these channels sketch a precise condition: a Europe democratic in its internal procedures but with a progressively eroded margin of strategic self-government. Not by an enemy, but by an ally—which makes the subordination more comfortable and, for that very reason, harder to recognize.
From this analysis follows the sharpest refutation of an illusion now widespread: that of the "sovereignist" nationalisms that invoke the recovery of national sovereignty in an anti- European key, presenting the Union as the cage from which to break free in order to "take back control."
What control?
The argument self-destructs as soon as one applies the law of paragraph 3: a hegemon's power to condition is proportional to the power differential. A European nation-state that "takes back sovereignty" by abandoning the common framework does not return to a world of equals: it returns, alone, to a world of continental powers five or ten times larger. The power differential between a single European country and the United States, China, or Russia is incomparably greater than that between the Union as a whole and those same powers. By reducing its own scale, the province does not reduce its dependence: it increases it. It gains more formal sovereignty (no constraint from Brussels) and less de facto sovereignty (greater exposure to external conditioning). Exactly the opposite of what it promises. Chapeau.
National sovereignism, in other words, confuses nominal sovereignty with real independence. The question is whether it does so deliberately for mere electoral ends (the better case) or out of the rampant obtuseness of its ruling cadres (the worse one). It mistakes the absence of horizontal constraints—those, negotiated and reversible, toward European partners—for freedom, while surrendering defenseless to the vertical constraints, unnegotiated and often invisible, imposed by the global hegemon of the day. In the twentieth century this trade could even appear advantageous: so long as the Western hegemon was also the uncontested and relatively benevolent global hegemon—roughly from the 1970s to the 2010s—life in the province was comfortable and prosperous. But it was, precisely, a time-limited condition, and one with a price: limited sovereignty, limited democracy, a tendential homologation to the hegemon's socio-economic and value system. Now that this hegemon is withdrawing, negotiating in a predatory manner, and demanding choices of alignment, the price becomes visible and the bill arrives.
The question a conscious European citizen must therefore ask is not "nation or Europe," but: do I want autonomy, full sovereignty, real independence, and substantive democracy—or do I knowingly accept remaining in a province? If the answer is the former, the unit of scale capable of sustaining it is not the nation, now too small, but the continent.
A solid thesis is measured by its capacity to withstand the best objections. We consider four, the most serious.
First objection: "The American umbrella guaranteed peace and prosperity; sovereignty shared with the U.S. was a rational and advantageous choice, not a subordination suffered." The objection is partly well-founded and should be granted without reticence: the Pax Americana did indeed pacify Western Europe, neutralize its centuries-old civil wars, and make possible the post-war economic miracle. The point is not to deny it, but to place it in time. A choice can be rational in one context and become ruinous in another. Hegemonic protection is worthwhile so long as the hegemon is strong, uncontested, and interested in protecting; it ceases to be worthwhile when the hegemon weakens, turns its attention to other theaters (the Indo-Pacific), and redefines the relationship in transactional terms. It is an arc Lundestad himself describes: from "empire by invitation" to "transatlantic drift."19 Recognizing the historical value of American protection does not amount to making permanent the dependence that flowed from it. At the very least, let it be a conscious choice and not a drift of unawareness; on the contrary, precisely because it was a choice, it can and must be renegotiated when the conditions that justified it fall away.
Second objection: "But a European federal state too would limit the sovereignty of the nations. One cage is swapped for another." The objection confuses two radically different phenomena. Ceding portions of sovereignty upward, within a political community of which one is a co-decider—with a vote, a seat, a representation in the federal institutions—is not losing self-government: it is exercising it at a larger scale. It is the difference between the citizen who contributes, with their vote, to making the law of the state of which they are part, and the subject who suffers the law of an external power over which they have no voice. In the first case sovereignty is pooled; in the second it is taken away. A Lombard is not "less sovereign" because the laws are made by the Italian Parliament rather than the regional council: they are sovereign together with other Italians. A European federal state would transform Europeans from objects of others' decisions into co-authors of their own, at a scale finally adequate to the challenges. It is not a bigger cage: it is the only room in which one truly votes on the things that matter. Moreover, let us be clear: the European citizens are us—me, and you who are reading me. European values are our millennia-old values. A European people exists; there is no European-American people, nor a Eurasian one.
Third objection: "There are fully sovereign, prosperous small states— Switzerland, Norway. Size is not necessary." The objection mistakes formal sovereignty for strategic autonomy. Rich and stable small states exist, but they are price-takers: they prosper by adapting to rules set by others, not by contributing to write them. Switzerland effectively applies much of the European single market's regulation, on which it does not vote; Norway, through the European Economic Area, adopts Community rules it does not help decide; both, in any case, live under someone else's security umbrella. It works so long as it is a matter of adapting to the margins of a stable order guaranteed by someone else. It is not a model of self-determination: it is a niche inside the self-determination of greater powers. And a niche is not a strategy replicable for half a billion people who intend to count in the world.
Fourth objection: "This is a realist and cynical vision that sacrifices values on the altar of power." The opposite is true. Realism here does not deny European values—the dignity of the person, freedom, democracy, the rule of law, humanism: it takes them seriously enough to ask how they are defended. Values without power to sustain them are good intentions at the mercy of those who hold the power. A continent that proclaims human rights but cannot prevent its destiny from being decided elsewhere is not protecting those values: it is hanging them on the goodwill of third parties. Power, in this perspective, is not the alternative to values: it is their condition of possibility. To want European values and refuse the material instruments to defend them is the most naive—and the most dangerous—of contradictions.
The thread of the argument can now be tied together. Democracy, in its full sense, is collective self-government: a people's capacity to genuinely choose its own route. Spheres of influence compress that capacity in proportion to the power differential between hegemon and province. History—Soviet and Western, twentieth-century and present, coercive and silent—shows that provinces are countries of limited sovereignty and limited democracy: they keep the forms, they lose the substance of the choices that count. And national sovereignism, promising to restore independence through shrinkage, offers the exact opposite of what it declares.
From this follows the conclusion. In a world of continental powers, the unit of scale capable of escaping the spheres of influence of Washington, Beijing, and Moscow—and of restoring fullness to the democratic will of its citizens—is not the old nation-state, now too small to carry weight, but a sovereign European state: endowed with economic critical mass, technological and energy autonomy, a credible common defense, and therefore capable of deciding for itself its own alliances and its own model. Only such an entity possesses the power—social, economic, political, military—needed for the will expressed in democratic forms by European citizens to translate into effective decisions rather than shatter against constraints decided elsewhere. And only it can prevent homologation to the value system of the hegemon of the day, preserving the authentic patrimony of the European West—the one that runs from Roman law to the democratic constitutions of the post-war period, from humanism to the centrality of the person and their needs, including collective ones.
It is not a choice between the nation and Europe. It is the choice between remaining provinces—comfortable while it lasts, subaltern by definition—and returning as subjects of history. European democracy, to be truly such, needs a European sovereignty. The one is not given without the other.
I have bored you enough; until next time.
Tyler.
To comment on or respond to this text, write to tyler@generationeurope.eu.