On the International Day of Democracy, a day meant to celebrate the quiet, stubborn strength of ordinary people governing themselves, Carl Dolan has published a paper that asks some uncomfortable questions about the European Union’s current approach to protecting that very ideal. Dolan, a Senior Adviser on Ethics and Transparency at the European Policy Centre, is not writing as a cynic or a critic of democracy itself. He is writing as someone who watches the EU’s democracy-protection machinery and worries that it has become too obsessed with one particular enemy: disinformation. Over the past several years, the European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen has rolled out a steady stream of initiatives meant to strengthen democratic resilience. There are action plans, regulatory frameworks, codes of practice, and strategic communications toolkits. On paper, these are all designed to safeguard elections, counter foreign interference, and protect the information space. But Dolan argues that the deeper logic has shifted. The fight against disinformation has become increasingly fused with a broader security agenda, one that treats hostile geopolitical rivals, especially Russia, as the primary threat to European democracy. The result is a democracy policy that is less about empowering citizens and more about defending the bloc against external enemies. That shift, he suggests, may be quietly reshaping what the EU means when it says it wants to protect democracy.
There is no point pretending that the problem is imaginary. The reality of foreign disinformation campaigns, particularly those sponsored by Russia, is well documented and genuinely alarming. They have sought to meddle in elections, deepen social divisions, undermine trust in public health messaging, and exploit every crisis from the pandemic to the war in Ukraine. None of this should be dismissed. Democracies have every right to defend themselves against hostile actors who want to manipulate public opinion and destabilize institutions. Dolan acknowledges this plainly. But then he asks a harder, more awkward question: why has the fight against disinformation become so central to the EU’s democracy agenda? Is it because disinformation is actually destroying our democracies? Or is it because the threat feels so much more urgent than the slow, unglamorous work of making democratic institutions stronger, fairer, and more responsive? His answer is unsettling. The prominence of counter-disinformation policies, he argues, is not justified by the measurable impact those campaigns have had on democratic life. They are harmful, yes. They are corrosive, certainly. But the scale of the response, the money, the legal powers, the political attention, has grown far out of proportion to the actual damage they cause. And that disproportion should worry anyone who cares about democracy.
Part of the problem, Dolan suggests, lies in a contestable view of what makes democracy legitimate. There is an assumption embedded in much of the EU’s policy work that democratic legitimacy depends on the integrity of the information environment. In other words, if voters are exposed to disinformation, their choices are no longer authentic, and the democratic process is therefore corrupted. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But it rests on a very fragile theory of democracy. Democratic legitimacy has never depended on citizens being perfectly informed. It depends on the right to participate, the freedom to deliberate, the protection of minority views, and the ability to change the government through peaceful means. Democracies have survived wars, depressions, scandals, and yes, plenty of lies. The idea that voters are so easily manipulated that a few foreign memes or bot networks can hollow out the entire system is not just pessimistic; it is also profoundly anti-democratic. It treats citizens as passive consumers of information rather than active agents who can argue, reflect, doubt, and make up their own minds. It also ignores the uncomfortable truth that domestic politicians, tabloid newspapers, and social media algorithms do far more to distort public debate than any foreign intelligence service ever could. By focusing so heavily on external interference, the EU may be looking for the enemy outside the gates while missing the rot inside the house.
The consequences of this securitisation of democracy policy are not merely theoretical. Dolan warns that framing democracy protection as a security problem can lead to measures that restrict civic space, chill dissent, and further erode public trust in democratic deliberation. If governments have the power to decide what counts as foreign interference, they may be tempted to use it against inconvenient voices, including human rights defenders, investigative journalists, and grassroots campaigners who simply hold unpopular opinions. The line between protecting democracy and policing it becomes dangerously thin. In the name of fighting disinformation, authorities might create systems of surveillance, content removal, and source monitoring that make ordinary people feel watched rather than protected. And here is the cruel irony: every time a government removes a piece of content or labels a view as manipulative, it reinforces the suspicion that the system is rigged. People become more cynical, not less. They lose faith in the very institutions the policy was meant to defend. The EU may end up weakening democracy from the inside while trying to save it from outside threats. That is not a victory for democratic resilience. It is a self-inflicted wound, delivered with the best of intentions.
What would a healthier approach look like? Dolan does not call for the EU to drop its guard or to pretend that disinformation is harmless. He asks instead for proportionality, humility, and a return to first principles. Democracy is not protected by making the information environment sterile or by treating citizens as children who need to be shielded from bad ideas. It is protected by making institutions trustworthy enough that lies lose their power. That means investing in independent journalism, media literacy, and open public debate. It means strengthening democratic participation at every level, not just during elections but in the spaces between them. It means ensuring that governments themselves are transparent, accountable, and honest, because the best antidote to disinformation is the credibility of the truth-teller. It also means being honest about the difference between foreign influence and legitimate criticism. Not every critical voice funded from abroad is a Russian agent, and not every uncomfortable report is part of a destabilisation campaign. If the EU wants to defend democracy, it must be willing to tolerate the messy, noisy, sometimes irritating conversation that democracy actually is. The answer to bad speech is more speech, not less. The answer to foreign manipulation is a society strong enough to reject it, not a state powerful enough to suppress it.
On a day dedicated to democracy, Dolan’s paper is a timely reminder that the greatest threats to democracy are often the ones taken in its name. The EU has every right to be concerned about disinformation and foreign interference. But it should be even more concerned about losing sight of what democracy is for. Democracy is not a machine that needs to be protected from contaminants. It is a living, breathing practice that requires trust, participation, and freedom. When that practice is reduced to a security problem, when citizens are treated as targets of information warfare rather than as sovereign actors, something precious is lost. The fight against disinformation becomes just another reason for governments to expand their power, restrict dissent, and decide what the public is allowed to hear. That is not democratic resilience. It is democratic decline wearing a security uniform. Dolan’s message, delivered quietly but firmly, is that the EU must resist this temptation. It must measure its success not by how many threats it has neutralized, but by how much trust it has rebuilt. It must remember that the best way to protect democracy is to practice it, with all its imperfections, all its conflicts, and all its noise. Because in the end, a democracy that is free enough to be vulnerable is also strong enough to survive.