Nationalism is deepening Europe’s fragmentation.
Today, defence ministries buy tech like Apple customers: powerful hardware, closed ecosystem, someone else’s rules. A consumer in a walled garden.
But to be even more accurate, this analogy should describe a user that has never thrown anything away. Missions planned on an Apple I; logistics put through a Lisa; a Newton personal digital assistant that is ‘mission critical’; and iPod Nanos on the front line. Because little is ever retired, any new system needs to mesh into this multi-decade tangle of architectures that were never supposed to work together.
I can tell you first-hand just how many hacks and bodge jobs exist in defence to allow users to climb over, around and under those walls every single day. But usually, the fix isn’t a piece of software: it’s a person. Our digital systems are glued together with expensive, hard to train, fragile humans.
At some point you stop asking how we can make all the old layers talk to each other and start thinking about what the architecture could look like if it were built for modern missions. Distributed sensing, autonomy at scale, resilient communications – all in real time.
And when you imagine what this could be if it were started from a blank sheet of paper, one word comes up over, and over, again.
Sovereignty.
People have spent a lot of time trying to define this word, or at least capture the subtly different ways that tech sovereignty has been unpacked in numerous sources. But despite this significant body of work, there remains no agreed definition.
At its core, we use the word “sovereignty” because we are trying to describe a type of independence, an ability to independently manage infrastructure, data, and decision-making within the framework of one’s own national laws, values, and priorities.
In other words, it means control.
Yet I routinely hear the word sovereignty used in a very different, more nationalistic way.
Having a sovereign capability is now routinely (mis)understood as having a national capability, as though control can be gauged by the colour of a founder’s passport, where a company is incorporated, or what percentage of a company headcount is within your national borders.
I think the reason we see the word used in this way, is a proxy for the relationships between degree of control and depth of trust in a contract.
The problem with judging trust and thereby control/sovereignty through the nationality of the team or the address of the headquarters is that it assumes these identities are static – that, for example, British founders can be trusted to be ‘good chaps for King and country’ irrespective of market conditions or global opportunity.
It might sound reassuring in policy circles, but this is not how high-growth businesses work. Startups expand, relocate, sell equity, and hopefully, exit. Their governance, investors, and leadership evolve as they scale. Building sovereign capabilities on the assumption of patriotism isn’t strategy. It’s wishful thinking and dangerously short-sighted.
Right now I’m hearing a lot of elevator pitches that start with “We are the Anduril of country A,” or “The Skydio of region Z.” This in some ways is an attractive framing for the founders of early stage start ups, which is where I spend the bulk of my investment life.
If sovereignty is framed through nationality, then you have a ready-made moat. But it’s also a narrative that can be reworked once a domestic market is captured and thoughts turn to scaling. And we now see shifting narratives towards, for example, “Anglo-Americanism.”
Herein lies the key problem with the nationalistic framing of sovereignty.
You might capture your home market. You might capture a regional market.
But then what? Buying and selling this way drags procurement, particularly in Europe, back into a pre-Westphalian dynamic: hyper-fragmented regional markets, local loyalties, and a myriad of often conflicting tactical alliances and economic priorities.
Regional cooperation models like NORDEFCO are helpful, but they are still too small to create the kind of scale defence-tech companies need. Buying scale short of pan-NATO leaves startups boxed into national and regional silos and caps markets. If a company is well-capitalised they might M&A their way into a new geography. But if they’re early and looking for VC money, it can kill the pitch. Above all else, VCs want to see scale.
A little-discussed feature of defence and security-facing technologies is community. If I had a limited partner for every time a senior official, looking at new tech at an international exercise, says, “I want what they have,” I’d have raised my venture capital fund a lot faster. Founders in defence should lean into this “community” curve. Early revenue is attractive. Early revenue from signal customers in two or more compatible geographies is exciting.
But nationalistic procurement blocks cross-border scaling. It shrinks the total addressable market. Small markets scare off venture capital. This way of thinking also incentivises localised clones and deepens fragmentation as politicians start fighting to push forward their national “flag carrier.” That’s not because their tech is the best, but because now we have drifted into a messy conversation on tech’s role in national and regional prosperity.
Everything in defence and security comes down to trust. Our trust should rest on control of our infrastructure, data, and decisions, not on bad proxies like flags.
Nicola is the General Partner of Twin Track Ventures, a London-based pre-seed and seed deeptech fund focused on dual-use technologies. Nicola spent her early career in the Royal Air Force in a range of operator roles, mainly on international operations or in the teams planning them. She also served at NATO HQ, collaborating on information sharing and complex operational planning with multinational partners and international allies.
