European Sovereignty Monitor is a record of what is changing in Europe's technological, industrial and defence sovereignty, and which way each change pushes Europe's dependence on suppliers, systems and law it does not control. New items are published twice a day across four areas: Policy and Law, Compute and Infrastructure, Defence and Space, and Industry, Investment and R&D. A monthly newsletter carries the tally, a note, and the developments that moved most.
Why this exists
European technology sovereignty is argued about constantly and recorded almost nowhere in one place. Search for a publication that collects it and you find the Commission's own pages, a few think tanks, some conference videos. Nothing that reads the Official Journal, the Council register, the procurement notices and the company releases in the same pass and tells you what actually moved. This publication is that record.
It is written for people who need to understand what European sovereignty means across technology, industry and politics, rather than for specialists who already track it.
What it is not
The Monitor is not an initiative and it does not argue for a policy. It records what governments, institutions and companies decided, and what each decision does and does not bind. A national move gets the same treatment as one from Brussels: Germany writing digital sovereignty into its procurement law, France steering state IT purchases to French and European vendors, or a member state buying air defence outside Europe all go in the record on the same terms. Where a country goes its own way, that is recorded too. The reader draws the conclusion.
What it covers
Policy and law, compute and infrastructure, defence and space, and industry, investment and R&D. Legislation moving through Council working parties and Parliament committees, and national laws that bind sooner. Public money entering the compute stack, and where it lands. Procurement that goes to a European supplier and procurement that does not. Capital entering European technology companies, and where it comes from. The programmes deciding who supplies Europe a decade from now.
Four questions, not one
Sovereignty is not a single property, which is why two products launched in the same week can both be called sovereign and mean opposite things. This publication separates four questions: who owns it, who operates it, whose law governs it, and who made the parts. Most European instruments test the first three and stop before the fourth. Reading them apart is most of the work.
How claims are graded
Every item carries one of two grades. Verified means the primary document was opened and read at the passage that asserts the claim: the Official Journal, the Council's public register, a Commission release, a company's own filing. Reported means the primary text could not be reached and the claim rests on a named secondary source, which the item cites. Figures are not repeated from press summaries when the underlying document is available. An approved document is not a verified one, and an asking figure is not a clearing figure.
Every item also states what it does not test. A grant counts as contracted until the money is paid. Co-membership of a consortium is not partnership. A press release is a press release. A funding round says nothing about where control now sits unless the filing does. That line is the publication's editorial position, and it is the column nobody else publishes.
Corrections run on the web edition and in the next issue with the original claim quoted, never edited silently.
The tools behind it
Four open datasets sit underneath the record and are updated alongside it.
The stack map carries Europe's technology stack from silicon to market, each entry scored on jurisdiction and dependency, each with a public source, with the Horizon Europe consortia its organisations sit in and the money contracted to them.
The ledger follows public money across funder, instrument, recipient, supplier and jurisdiction of profit, and records where the trail stops in public. A sourced zero is a finding, and it renders differently from an unknown.
The timeline sets European digital regulation on a true time axis, from proposal to law to first effect, and states what each instrument does not bind.
The index weighs every item against the EU's own sovereignty targets. The editor's key is published; the reader can move it.
All four are open data under CC BY 4.0. A correction with a primary source attached will be applied and credited.
Connect your own assistant
The whole record is open to any AI assistant through one address, with no login and no key. Point Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or VS Code at the connector and ask it what the record says about a tender, a supplier or a programme; every item it returns carries its grade and its boundary line. The Connect page has the address, the tools and the plain JSON API beside it.
Languages
The record and the newsletter are published in English. Because the connector answers in whatever language it is asked, a reader in any European language can already query the record in their own. Further editions will follow the readers.
Who writes it
Reidar Balstad, editor, independently. The news items are drafted by an AI system and each one says whether the editor read it before it went live; the Method page explains how the record is made. The publication takes no funding from any party it covers.
Corrections and tips
Corrections, missing items and disagreements are all welcome, particularly with a primary source attached. Reply to any issue, or write to info@sovereigntymonitor.eu.