Everything in this publication is built to be checked. This page says how, so that a reader who disagrees with a conclusion can find the exact point where we part company.
Four questions
Sovereignty is not one property. It is at least four, and they come apart constantly.
Who owns the thing. Who operates it. Whose law governs it. Who made the parts.
Almost every European instrument tests the first three and stops before the fourth. That is not an oversight to be indignant about; it is a design choice with consequences, and the consequences are what this publication tracks. When a sovereignty claim sounds strong, the useful question is not whether it is true. It is which of the four it answers, and which it leaves alone.
Verified and Reported
Every factual claim carries one of two gradings, and the grading is part of the claim.
Verified means the primary document was opened and read at the passage asserting it. Not the press release about the regulation. Not a summary of the recital. The article, the recital or the annex, at the provision cited.
Reported means the primary text could not be reached, and the claim rests on a named secondary source. Sometimes a document sits behind a wall, sometimes a European database truncates, sometimes a provision lives in a Council working document that is not published as such. When that happens we say so and name what we did read. A Reported claim is weaker than a Verified one and should be treated that way.
Where a term is not defined anywhere, we say that too, because the absence is usually the point. An obligation to pursue something the same instrument declines to define is a fact about the instrument, not a gap in our reading.
What it does not test
Every entry states the boundary of the claim as well as its content.
This is the column nobody else publishes, and it is close to the reason this publication exists. A cloud estate can be certified at the highest available sovereignty level while running entirely on imported accelerators, because the level tests do not reach the silicon. A headquarters test is satisfied by a subsidiary. An establishment and management test says nothing about who ultimately owns the parent. None of that is a scandal. All of it is invisible if you only read what an instrument does test.
The markers
Each development carries one marker, and the markers are the whole scoring system. There is no weighting and no editorial index behind them.
▲ Towards autonomy. The development moves Europe towards controlling something it did not control before.
▼ Towards dependence. It moves the other way.
◆ Both directions. It genuinely does both, and splitting it into two entries would misrepresent it. A European datacentre running American software is the recurring shape.
■ No movement. Announced, proposed, consulted on, or otherwise not yet real. A great deal of sovereignty news lives here, and marking it honestly is most of the work.
A section's net is its up count minus its down count. Nothing else enters the arithmetic. Both-directions and no-movement are counted and reported but do not move the net, because a development that points two ways and a development that has not happened yet are not the same thing as a zero, and averaging them into one would hide both.
Issue zero is the worked example. Twenty-nine developments: fourteen towards autonomy, six towards dependence, three in both directions, six with no movement. Net plus eight. Underneath that, policy and law ran at minus one while defence and space ran at plus five, which is the finding, and it is a finding the headline number would have buried. That is why every section carries its own count and the total is never quoted alone.
Two editions, one source set
Every issue is published in full in English and in Spanish. The sources are identical: the same documents, at the same provisions, in the same order. Only the language changes.
This matters more than it sounds. A translated newsletter that quietly swaps in local coverage becomes two different publications wearing one name, and neither can be checked against the other. If a claim is Verified in one edition it is Verified in both, against the same passage of the same document.
Corrections
Corrections with a primary source attached are applied and credited.
That sentence is the policy in full. Send the document and the provision, and if it says what you say it says, the entry changes and your name goes on the change unless you ask otherwise. Disagreements about interpretation are welcome too, and are treated differently: they may become an added line rather than a correction, because two people can read one recital honestly and differently.
Where an entry is graded Reported, it is provisional by construction. Reaching the primary text is an upgrade, not an embarrassment, and it happens most often because a reader had access we did not.
What this is not
It is not investment advice, and nothing here is a view on any company as an investment.
It is not a vendor evaluation. Suppliers appear when an instrument or a claim makes them relevant, and their own words are quoted as their own words.
It is not a scorecard of countries or firms. The markers score developments, one at a time, against what changed. They do not aggregate into a ranking of anybody, and any attempt to read them that way is reading them wrongly.