Daniel Fiott

Publications

  • Defence: From Strategic Dependence to European Military Autonomy?

    Given that Europeans do not get to vote in US federal elections, and European governments are having less and less influence over the direction of strategy in Washington, they need to reset their strategic mentality. Along with the long-standing military dependency on the US has come, for many Europeans, an intellectual dependency on Washington. The… Read more

  • “Metro Map” of EU Security and Defence 2026

    I am pleased to share the updated “Metro Map” for EU Security and Defence. First created in 2021, I have been really happy to see the original metro map being used in classrooms and training sessions. I certainly did not suspect it would be so useful. In any case, the EU is constantly evolving, and… Read more

  • Institutionalising Defence Production: Reconceptualising the Role of Institutions and States in European Defence Industrial Policy

    This article analyses how questions about European defence production efforts have been institutionalised at the European Union level, and it does so by drawing on the academic literature on the interplay between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism in the domain of EU defence industrial policy. The creation of financial tools such as the Security Action for Europe… Read more

  • European Defence and Statecraft in 2050: And What Needs to be Done to Get There

    What would European defence look like if NATO were to disband or become ineffective? In the latest paper in CEPR’s Europe 2050 series, Daniel Fiott (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) treats this as a serious thought experiment rather than a remote contingency. His starting point is that the EU, in its current form, is not an obvious… Read more

  • Advancing the Inclusion of SMEs in the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base

    Against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine, and the rapid battlefield adaptation that it has led to, defence innovation and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are being seen as key contributors to Europe’s industrial preparedness, production scalability and security of supply. To this end, recent European Union (EU) policy and financial initiatives have specifically… Read more

  • The Strategy Trap? European Threat Assessments and the Problem of Common Action

    The EU’s 2026 threat assessment demonstrates that while Europe has developed a clearer understanding of its strategic environment, it remains less certain about the political choices required to respond to it. Russia’s war has brought European threat perceptions closer together, but convergence around the existence of a threat has yet to produce a genuinely common… Read more