The EU's "Hybrid War" Is A Licence To Crush Dissent

On 16 September, the European Parliament passed a resolution on ‘hybrid warfare’. The Rapporteur (or drafter) of the report was a Lithuanian MEP named Rasa Juknevičienė.

Juknevičienė has long been obsessed with the delicate minds of Europe’s citizenry. Back in 2022 she told us, ‘We need to understand that the Kremlin's lies machines are not media – but a massive weapon of mind, brain destruction.’ In 2025 she told a Lithuanian outlet: ‘The aim[is] to take control of people’s minds and prepare the ground through collaborators,through “useful idiots.”’

Is she just a kook, you might ask? Someone we can safely ignore? In another time and place, maybe. But in the one we currently inhabit, unfortunately not. She is a former Lithuanian Minister for Defence, and a member of the EPP, the European Parliament’s largest and most dominant political group. And her narrative of ‘mind control’ is replicated in the European Parliament’s ‘hybrid warfare’ resolution, which was passed by 470 votes to just 129, representing almost all of the ‘mainstream’ groups in the European Parliament. Of the Irish MEPs, Seán Kelly, Barry Andrews, Billy Kelleher and Aodhán Ó Riordáin all voted in favour. The other Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael MEPs didn’t bother to show up.

This resolution holds that the EU is under attack from ‘sophisticated cognitive-psychological methods’ which include ‘reflexive control, a technique rooted in Soviet military theory that introduces specific informational inputs to limit a target’s perceived choices and steer decisions toward the influencer’s strategic goals’. It holds that ‘there has been a drastic increase in cognitive warfare’ on the citizens of the EU, and that ‘the success of modern military operations and the effectiveness of public institutions increasingly depend on the control of cyberspace and on the strategic use of digital resources and information systems.’

How did we get here? How did we get to a point where 470 MEPs are comfortable going out and telling the world that ‘cognitive warfare’ is at the root of citizens’ discontent rather than the manifest decline in most people’s living standards across the EU over the past number of years? How did we get to a point where 470 MEPs are so confident of themselves and the power of their positions that they don’t appear to have had a moment’s concern about coming across to their publics as, well, completely mad?

If you look around the ‘information space’ in the EU at the moment, you can begin to understand their confidence. Newspapers and broadcasters blare about drones in our skies, and it’s no use anyone pointing out that those drones were in reality cargo planes or police helicopters - the original stories are never corrected, and politicians and the media keep talking about things like ‘a drone incident’ at Brussels airport long after that ‘drone incident’ has been revealed to be a police helicopter going about its unremarkable police helicopter business. The people with all the megaphones never have to admit they were wrong, and so they are free to come up with ever more fantastical explanations for why the world they’ve built and sustained is collapsing into chaos all around them.

Efforts of this sort have a long historical pedigree - from third century Rome, when Christians were accused of having ‘cursed’ the city and being the cause of an economic, social and political crisis in reality provoked by plagues and natural disasters - to Nazi Germany, with many more in between.

And efforts of this sort always end in the widespread persecution of the innocent.

Cognisant of how such elite derangement (whether real or leveraged it doesn’t matter) has given rise to monstrous injustices throughout history, we created a series of structures to protect our societies from it - in the liberal tradition, the rule of law and fundamental rights are the obvious ones. Over the past number of decades, we have congratulated ourselves on these structures, endlessly. They were what distinguished ‘the garden’ from ‘the jungle’, in Joseph Borrell’s infamous phrasing. For the EU in particular, these structures are essential to its institutional identity. Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union says that the Union ‘is founded on the values of respect for…the rule of law and human rights’. These ‘values’ are central to the EU’s claims to legitimacy.

But what are wars and emergencies good for if not for the suspension of rights and obligations? In every (structural) crisis there is opportunity.

The ‘hybrid war’ resolution doesn’t just talk about ‘cognitive warfare’ and ‘reflexive control’. It also holds that defence spending in regard to ‘internal security’ is ‘equally required’. In most EU states, internal security is usually a matter for the police, and is financed through the budgets of interior ministries or departments of justice. Opening up a new revenue stream for internal security has obvious benefits for elites in a time of increasing economic insecurity and the social unrest that goes with it, with the additional benefit that such defence spending could be undertaken outside the EU’s (highly restrictive) fiscal framework with a little policymaking creativity. An additional benefit of bringing internal security under the rubric of defence, of course, is that it could allow for the reduction or removal of civilian oversight and accountability mechanisms rooted in the rule of law and fundamental rights and that apply, however patchily, to policing.

The resolution goes on to tell us that the EU is in a state of ‘phase zero’ warfare, and that ‘existing EU foreign and security policy frameworks, calibrated for consensus-based deliberation, generate structural latency that adversaries actively exploit; [and] this in-between state demands a fundamental reassessment of EU decision-making architecture in the security and defence domain.’

The ‘problem’ that needs to be’ solved’ here - or the obligation that needs to be suspended, to put it another way - is the requirement for the unanimous agreement of all EU member states to be secured for foreign and security policy decisions. The EU is not a state, nor is it a political union or a federation. Individual foreign and security policies are matters for individual Member States - Ireland’s foreign policy is not Latvia’s foreign policy, and until recently, this was viewed, broadly, as a necessary quirk of the EU structures rather than a problem.

But now, we’re told we’re in an emergency, and, we’re told - in the grating thick-tongued language of US security discourse - that consensus decision-making generates ‘structural latency’. We need to be able to act faster, together. Just who will be making rapid decisions on security and defence for 500 million people is, of course, not specified. It’s none of our business, presumably, and given the resolution’s aspiration for this unseen decision-maker to have ‘control of cyberspace’, the aspiration is equally that we never reliably find out.

This slipperiness characterises both this resolution and the entire discourse around hybrid war. Anything can be an act of hybrid warfare - speech, migration, protest, ‘religious institutions and faith networks’, culture: you name it, it’s a potential vector. This licences crackdowns and repression of potentially unlimited scope; with whoever holds power at a given moment empowered to designate any activity as an act of hybrid war and punish it as such without the need for the usual rule of law requirements (investigation, charges, a fair hearing, a right of appeal, and so on). We can see this in action already - the EU’s ‘hybrid’ sanctions regime has seen EU citizens and residents, including at least one journalist covering pro-Palestinian protests in Germany, sentenced to ‘civil death’, with their bank accounts frozen, their ability to work effectively blocked off, and travel outside their own countries prohibited. These individuals were neither charged nor given a trial - the first they knew of their having been accused of spreading ‘Russian disinformation’, being found guilty, and sentenced for it was a letter in their door informing them of their punishment and that its application was immediate. Equally, policy and budgeting decisions can and are being made on the basis of ‘acts of hybrid warfare’ that have not been investigated and for which no evidence has been produced and formally adjudicated on. Ireland announced a €19 million investment in ‘anti-drone technology’ in 2025 in response to an alleged act of hybrid war - a ‘drone sighting’ during the visit of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that has never been formally investigated and evidenced as either a drone or a drone piloted with malicious intent. Indeed, a lack of conclusive evidence and formal investigative mechanisms appear to be essential prerequisites for an act or an incident to be defined as hybrid warfare. We could as well say we’re under attack by demons, or ghosts.

The potential for structures established to fight ‘hybrid warfare’ to be used against ordinary civic activism and protest is therefore essentially unlimited. The ‘primary objective’ of hybrid warfare, we’re told, is ‘to destabilise, divide and undermine the EU and its Member States’. Criticism, dissent, political action, union organising, community organising - all of public and social life consequently contains within it lurking threats. And those who govern us are equipping themselves with a comprehensive framework to discipline and punish. For all of us, this should be terrifying. But if we can take one small sliver of hope from all of it, it’s to hold on to the knowledge that they wouldn’t be doing all of this if they weren’t afraid of us.