Executive Summary

Europe’s security debate has undergone a profound transformation. Russia’s war against Ukraine, geopolitical competition, hybrid threats, foreign interference, technological disruption, irregular migration, and uncertainty surrounding the future of the transatlantic security architecture have pushed defence and deterrence back to the centre of European policymaking. Governments are increasing military expenditure, strengthening borders, expanding cybersecurity capabilities, and reconsidering assumptions about strategic dependence.

Yet one of Europe’s most consequential vulnerabilities is considerably less visible.

It is the relationship between citizens and the institutions that govern them.

A democratic state may possess capable armed forces, functioning borders, sophisticated intelligence services and strong alliances while simultaneously experiencing declining confidence in political representation, widening distrust between citizens and governing institutions, and growing perceptions that ordinary people exercise little meaningful influence over public decisions. These developments do not automatically produce instability. Nor should political dissatisfaction be confused with democratic failure. Public criticism, electoral competition and scepticism toward authority are themselves essential components of democratic government.

The danger emerges when distrust becomes persistent, politically asymmetric and intertwined with a belief that legitimate democratic mechanisms cannot produce meaningful change.

Recent evidence illustrates the distinction. The OECD’s 2026 survey of institutional trust, covering 33 OECD countries and five accession candidates, found that 40% of respondents reported high or moderately high trust in their national governments, while 43% reported low or no trust. Trust was generally higher in courts, police, local government and the civil service than in national political institutions. Most importantly, the difference between citizens who believed the political system gave people like them a voice and those who did not remained enormous: a 47-percentage-point trust gap.

Europe nevertheless presents a more complicated picture than a simple narrative of democratic decline. The European Commission’s Spring 2025 Eurobarometer found that 52% of Europeans tended to trust the European Union—the highest level recorded since 2007—and the same proportion expressed trust in the European Commission. Eighty-eight percent supported greater rules-based cooperation internationally, while 81% supported a common defence and security policy among EU member states.

These findings reveal an important paradox.

Europe may simultaneously experience significant distrust toward domestic political institutions and relatively strong confidence in supranational European institutions. Citizens may distrust governments without rejecting democracy. They may distrust political parties while continuing to trust courts, civil servants or the European Union. Institutional legitimacy, therefore, should not be measured as a single national approval rating.

This paper argues that Europe should begin treating institutional legitimacy as an element of security and conflict prevention.

This does not mean securitising political disagreement or treating dissatisfied citizens as threats. The opposite is required. A democratic security strategy should protect legitimate disagreement while reducing the conditions under which political alienation can become systemic distrust, democratic disengagement, susceptibility to manipulation, or acceptance of anti-democratic alternatives.

The paper proposes the concept of Institutional Security: the capacity of democratic institutions to maintain sufficient public legitimacy, procedural credibility, responsiveness and social trust to manage political conflict peacefully, withstand internal and external manipulation, and preserve acceptance of democratic rules during periods of severe disagreement.

Under this framework, institutional trust becomes neither an abstract democratic virtue nor a public-relations metric. It becomes part of the infrastructure through which peaceful political competition remains possible.

1. Europe’s Overlooked Security Infrastructure

European security has traditionally been understood through the protection of territory, sovereignty and the state. The core instruments were consequently military forces, intelligence capabilities, policing, diplomacy, alliances and border management.

The twenty-first-century security environment has complicated that model.

Contemporary states can be destabilised without territorial invasion. Cyberattacks can disrupt public services. Foreign actors can manipulate information environments. Economic coercion can exploit strategic dependencies. Artificial intelligence can dramatically reduce the cost of producing persuasive false content. Political financing can create channels for external influence. Social platforms can accelerate narratives across borders before governments or traditional media institutions have time to respond.

The European Commission has consequently incorporated foreign information manipulation, electoral integrity, disinformation, deepfakes and hybrid threats into its democracy agenda. Its European Democracy Shield includes measures intended to counter foreign information manipulation and interference, improve media literacy, strengthen fact-checking capacity, and protect electoral processes against emerging technological threats.

These policies address genuine vulnerabilities. But they raise a deeper analytical question: Why are some societies more vulnerable to manipulation than others?

Foreign interference does not operate in an institutional vacuum.

Disinformation is more powerful when it confirms suspicions that already exist. Narratives claiming that elections are manipulated, elites are corrupt, institutions serve only privileged groups, or governments deliberately conceal information become more politically effective when citizens already perceive institutions as unresponsive or unfair.

External actors can manufacture false information. They cannot easily manufacture, from nothing, the social conditions that make it persuasive.

This distinction is fundamental for European democratic resilience.

If governments understand foreign interference primarily as a problem of hostile content, their response will concentrate on detecting networks, removing coordinated manipulation, improving cybersecurity, regulating platforms and exposing foreign operations.

All of these measures can be necessary. But they address the transmission mechanism more than the underlying vulnerability.

A more resilient democracy requires something harder: institutions that citizens consider sufficiently legitimate even when they disagree with their decisions.

2. Trust Is Not the Same as Approval

Any discussion of institutional trust must begin with an important qualification.

High trust is not inherently democratic.

Authoritarian governments can generate, manufacture or report high levels of institutional confidence. Democracies, by contrast, deliberately institutionalise criticism. Opposition parties challenge governments. Journalists investigate officials. Courts overturn executive decisions. Civil society organisations protest public policy. Elections allow voters to remove leaders.

A society in which nobody questions authority should therefore not be the objective.

The relevant concept is better described as critical trust: citizens may strongly oppose a government while continuing to believe that elections are meaningful, courts are legitimate, administrative institutions generally follow rules, political opponents have a right to govern if they win, and peaceful political participation remains capable of producing change.

This distinction separates government popularity from regime legitimacy.

A government can be deeply unpopular while democratic institutions remain strong. Conversely, a popular government can weaken institutional checks and balances while retaining electoral support.

For peace and governance institutions, the analytical challenge is therefore not to ask simply, “Do citizens trust the government?”

The more useful questions are: Do citizens believe they can influence political decisions? Do they believe rules apply fairly?

Do they expect public institutions to behave predictably? Do they accept electoral outcomes when their preferred side loses? Do they believe courts can resolve disputes independently?

Do they believe corruption can be investigated? Do they regard political opponents as legitimate competitors rather than existential enemies?

Do they believe peaceful participation remains preferable to political violence? These questions move institutional trust from the field of political sentiment into the field of conflict prevention.

3. The Political Voice Gap

Among the most important findings emerging from recent comparative governance research is the relationship between political agency and institutional trust.

OECD evidence shows that people who believe they have meaningful influence over government decisions are substantially more likely to trust public institutions. Earlier OECD data found that 69% of people who believed they had a voice in government decisions reported high or moderately high trust in national government, compared with only 22% among those who felt they lacked such a voice.

The 2026 OECD survey confirms that this divide remains exceptionally large: the trust gap between those who believe the political system gives people like them a voice and those who do not is 47 percentage points.

This should receive considerably greater attention from European policymakers.

The traditional explanation for political distrust often focuses on outcomes. Citizens distrust institutions, the argument goes, because economic growth is weak, public services deteriorate, migration is poorly managed, housing is expensive, or governments fail to deliver promised reforms.

Performance unquestionably matters. But political agency introduces another dimension. Citizens may tolerate decisions they dislike if they believe the process was legitimate, their interests were considered, decision-makers can be held accountable, and policies can eventually be changed through democratic mechanisms.

Conversely, even technically successful policies may generate resentment if citizens believe decisions were imposed without meaningful representation.

This creates what can be called the political voice gap: the distance between formal democratic participation and citizens’ perception that participation produces influence.

European democracies generally provide extensive formal political rights. Citizens vote, organise parties, establish associations, protest, petition governments and participate in public consultations.

Yet formal access does not automatically produce perceived influence.

A citizen can vote every four or five years and still believe political outcomes are determined elsewhere—by party leaderships, bureaucracies, wealthy interests, corporations, supranational institutions, lobbyists, algorithms or geopolitical constraints.

Whether those perceptions are accurate in individual cases is important, but politically they matter even when they are exaggerated.

Perceived powerlessness can itself influence behaviour.

4. When Distrust Becomes a Security Problem

Not every decline in trust has security implications.

Institutional distrust becomes relevant to peace and security when several conditions begin reinforcing one another.

The first is persistent political exclusion, or the perception of it. Groups that repeatedly conclude that conventional institutions cannot represent their interests may disengage or seek alternatives outside established political processes.

The second is affective polarisation. Political opponents cease to be viewed merely as wrong and increasingly become perceived as dangerous, immoral or illegitimate.

The third is institutional delegitimisation. Courts, election authorities, journalists, universities, civil servants or other institutions are no longer criticised for specific failures but portrayed as fundamentally fraudulent.

The fourth is information fragmentation. Citizens increasingly inhabit competing informational environments in which disagreement extends beyond interpretation to basic factual reality.

The fifth is external amplification. Foreign governments, proxy networks, commercial influence operations or ideological movements identify existing divisions and deliberately intensify them.

The sixth is normalisation of extra-institutional action. Political actors become more willing to justify intimidation, political violence, unconstitutional intervention or rejection of legitimate electoral outcomes.

These stages do not form an automatic sequence.

Most societies experiencing political distrust never descend into serious conflict.

But conflict-prevention policy is precisely about identifying combinations of risk before escalation becomes likely.

European governance institutions therefore need indicators capable of distinguishing ordinary democratic dissatisfaction from deeper institutional erosion.

5. The Paradox of European Trust

One of the most interesting developments in European public opinion complicates any claim that the continent is simply experiencing a generalised collapse in institutional legitimacy.

Trust in the European Union has risen.

The Spring 2025 Standard Eurobarometer found that 52% of respondents tended to trust the EU, its highest result since 2007. Fifty-two percent also trusted the European Commission, while 62% expressed optimism about the EU’s future.

This matters analytically.

If Europeans were simply abandoning institutional politics, trust would be expected to deteriorate across institutional levels. Instead, confidence can move in different directions simultaneously.

Citizens may distrust national governments while supporting European institutions. They may distrust parliaments while trusting courts. They may distrust political parties while trusting local administration.

The OECD similarly finds that institutions associated with law, administration and public order generally receive higher trust than national political institutions. Its 2025 data placed trust at 54% for courts and judicial systems, 45% for civil services and local governments, but only 37% for national parliaments across surveyed countries.

This suggests that Europe’s challenge may not primarily be an institutional trust crisis.

It may be a representational trust crisis. Citizens can believe that the state functions while doubting that politics represents them.

That distinction would significantly change the appropriate policy response. Improving administrative efficiency alone would be insufficient if the underlying problem is political agency.

6. Economic Insecurity and Institutional Legitimacy

Trust is also socially uneven.

OECD data show substantial differences between citizens experiencing financial insecurity and those who are not. In its 2023 survey data, 35% of respondents with financial concerns expressed high or moderately high trust in national government, compared with 52% among respondents without such concerns. Trust was also lower among people with lower educational attainment.

These differences should not be interpreted as evidence that economic hardship automatically causes political radicalisation.

Most economically insecure citizens remain committed to peaceful democratic politics.

The significance is structural.

Economic insecurity can change the way citizens evaluate institutions. A government announcing strong macroeconomic indicators may appear disconnected to a household experiencing declining purchasing power. A successful green transition at the aggregate level may be perceived very differently by workers who believe their employment is threatened. A migration policy can appear administratively rational at national level while producing concentrated pressures on particular municipalities.

This creates a fundamental governance challenge: aggregate success can coexist with locally concentrated political failure.

The legitimacy problem becomes especially acute when citizens perceive that the burdens and benefits of policy are distributed unfairly.

Europe’s green transition, defence expansion, demographic adjustment, digital transformation and changing trade environment will all create winners and losers.

The political sustainability of these transformations will depend not only on whether governments implement them effectively, but also on whether citizens consider the distribution of costs legitimate.

This is why governance should increasingly be understood as part of security policy.

A transition that is economically rational but politically illegitimate can create vulnerabilities that hostile actors subsequently exploit.

7. Disinformation Exploits; It Does Not Invent

European governments are correct to take foreign information manipulation seriously.

But democratic resilience policy can become strategically distorted if disinformation is treated as the primary cause of political distrust.

Foreign influence operations usually work most effectively when they amplify existing grievances.

A community already convinced that national elites ignore its economic decline is receptive to narratives portraying the political system as deliberately hostile.

Citizens already suspicious of electoral institutions are more vulnerable to fabricated claims about vote manipulation.

Groups that believe mainstream media systematically excludes their perspectives may migrate toward alternative information ecosystems in which verification standards are weaker.

This suggests a useful distinction between information vulnerability and institutional vulnerability.

Information vulnerability concerns the ability of malicious actors to distribute deceptive content.

Institutional vulnerability concerns the social conditions determining whether citizens believe it.

European policy has increasingly developed sophisticated tools for addressing the first problem. Platform regulation, fact-checking networks, media literacy, cybersecurity and election monitoring all have important roles.

The second problem cannot be solved through content moderation.

It requires trustworthy institutions.

Indeed, excessive reliance on censorship-like approaches can sometimes worsen the underlying problem if citizens perceive anti-disinformation policies as attempts to suppress legitimate disagreement.

The democratic objective should therefore not be to create an information environment without falsehood—a technologically impossible goal.

It should be to create institutions resilient enough that falsehood has less political leverage.

8. Toward a European Doctrine of Institutional Security

Europe should develop a broader concept of Institutional Security alongside existing doctrines of military, economic, cyber and energy security.

Institutional Security can be defined as:

The capacity of democratic institutions to preserve sufficient legitimacy, procedural credibility, responsiveness and public confidence to manage political conflict peacefully and maintain constitutional continuity under conditions of social, economic, technological or geopolitical stress.

This definition deliberately avoids requiring high approval ratings. A secure democratic institution can be unpopular.

What matters is whether citizens continue to recognise it as legitimate. Institutional Security would therefore rest on several pillars.

Procedural Legitimacy

Citizens must believe that political rules are applied consistently and that electoral outcomes are genuine.

Political Agency

People need credible mechanisms through which participation can influence decision-making between elections as well as during them.

Administrative Reliability

Public institutions must demonstrate basic competence in services that citizens encounter directly.

Institutional Integrity

Corruption, conflicts of interest and improper political influence must be investigated credibly and transparently.

Information Resilience

Citizens need access to pluralistic, independent information environments capable of resisting manipulation without suppressing legitimate political disagreement.

Constitutional Resilience

Courts, legislatures, election authorities and civil services must retain sufficient independence to function during periods of intense political pressure.

Peaceful Conflict Capacity

Political institutions must preserve mechanisms through which highly polarised groups can negotiate, compete and lose without treating political defeat as existential.

Together, these elements would move democratic resilience from reactive crisis management toward preventive governance.

9. An Institutional Resilience Early-Warning System

The European Union already monitors rule-of-law conditions and democratic vulnerabilities through multiple instruments. These mechanisms could be complemented by an early-warning framework focused specifically on institutional legitimacy.

Such a system should avoid producing simplistic national rankings.

Instead, it could track changes across several indicators.

The first would be the political voice gap: the proportion of citizens who believe people like them have meaningful influence over government decisions.

The second would be the institutional trust distribution, separating confidence in government, parliament, courts, local authorities, civil service, police and European institutions rather than combining them into one figure.

The third would measure electoral legitimacy, including citizens’ willingness to accept election results when their preferred political side loses.

The fourth would examine affective polarisation, particularly whether supporters of opposing political groups increasingly perceive one another as threats.

The fifth would monitor political violence tolerance—not merely recorded violence, but changing social acceptance of intimidation or violence for political purposes.

The sixth would measure information fragmentation, including the degree to which major political communities operate within mutually incompatible factual environments.

The seventh would monitor institutional capture risks, including pressure on courts, election authorities, public broadcasters, civil services and regulatory bodies.

The eighth would assess external amplification, distinguishing domestic political grievances from organised foreign attempts to intensify them.

No single indicator would demonstrate democratic instability.

The analytical value would come from convergence.

A country experiencing low government approval but high electoral legitimacy, independent courts, strong political participation and low tolerance for violence would not necessarily face a serious institutional security problem.

A country experiencing declining political agency, collapsing electoral trust, extreme polarisation, institutional capture and increasing tolerance for political violence would present a fundamentally different risk profile.

This is the distinction conventional opinion polling often misses.

10. Peacebuilding Must Begin Before Violence

European peacebuilding has traditionally focused heavily on societies already experiencing conflict or emerging from it.

Institutional Security suggests a preventive approach.

Peace is not only the absence of armed conflict.

It is also the existence of institutions capable of processing disagreement without violence.

From this perspective, parliamentary procedure is peace infrastructure.

Independent courts are peace infrastructure.

Local government is peace infrastructure.

Professional civil services are peace infrastructure.

Independent journalism is peace infrastructure.

Election authorities are peace infrastructure.

Civil society organisations are peace infrastructure.

Their contribution to peace becomes visible precisely when political disagreement becomes intense.

Strong democratic institutions do not eliminate conflict. They transform its form.

Instead of settling disputes through coercion, societies settle them through elections, courts, bargaining, legislation, protest and public debate.

Institutional decline reverses that process.

This is why democratic governance should occupy a more central place within European conflict-prevention strategy.

11. Policy Recommendations

European policymakers should resist the temptation to interpret institutional distrust primarily as a communications problem. Citizens who believe they lack political influence are unlikely to be persuaded simply by more effective government messaging.

The priority should instead be institutional responsiveness.

National and European institutions should develop stronger mechanisms demonstrating how public participation affects final decisions. Consultations that gather thousands of submissions but produce no visible connection between participation and policy risk reinforcing cynicism rather than reducing it.

Governments should also distinguish administrative trust from political trust. Digitising public services, reducing bureaucracy and improving service delivery can strengthen confidence in state capacity, but these reforms cannot substitute for political representation.

The EU should incorporate institutional legitimacy indicators into democratic resilience and conflict-prevention assessments while maintaining strong safeguards against politicisation. Such monitoring should examine trajectories rather than simply ranking member states.

Anti-disinformation policy should be integrated with governance reform. Foreign manipulation should be countered aggressively when identified, but policymakers should simultaneously investigate the domestic grievances that make particular narratives persuasive.

Local government deserves particular attention. Municipal institutions often represent the point where citizens most directly encounter the state. Strengthening municipal capacity can therefore produce governance benefits disproportionate to its visibility in national political debate.

European governments should also develop protocols for maintaining institutional legitimacy during emergencies. Pandemics, wars, terrorist attacks, economic crises and major migration events can require rapid executive action. These are precisely the moments when transparency, parliamentary oversight, judicial review and clear sunset mechanisms become especially important.

Finally, democratic resilience policy should protect disagreement rather than attempt to minimise it.

The objective is not consensus.

It is legitimate conflict.

Conclusion: Europe’s Invisible Defence Line

Europe is investing heavily in visible security.

It is purchasing weapons, strengthening NATO’s eastern flank, expanding cybersecurity, protecting critical infrastructure and developing strategies against foreign interference.

These investments respond to genuine threats.

But Europe’s first line of defence remains less tangible.

It is the willingness of citizens to continue resolving disagreements through institutions.

The evidence does not support a simplistic narrative that Europeans have abandoned democratic governance. Trust in the European Union reached an 18-year high in 2025, and support for European security cooperation remains strong. At the same time, comparative OECD evidence demonstrates persistent weaknesses in trust toward national political institutions and, above all, a profound divide between citizens who believe they possess political agency and those who do not.

These developments can coexist.

That is precisely why Europe’s governance challenge requires greater analytical sophistication.

The critical question is not whether citizens approve of their governments.

It is whether citizens who profoundly disagree with their governments still believe that institutions provide a legitimate path to change them.

When the answer remains yes, political conflict can strengthen democracy.

When the answer increasingly becomes no, distrust can evolve from dissatisfaction into institutional vulnerability.

Foreign interference, disinformation and political extremism matter partly because they can exploit that vulnerability. Countering them therefore requires more than policing the information environment. It requires reducing the institutional conditions that give manipulation its power.

For European peacebuilding, this leads to a broader understanding of prevention.

A society does not suddenly become polarised on the day political violence occurs. Institutional legitimacy can deteriorate gradually, through repeated experiences of political powerlessness, perceived unfairness, unresponsive government and contested rules.

Those changes are measurable before they become crises.

Europe should measure them.

More importantly, it should act on them.

The security architecture of a democracy is ultimately composed not only of soldiers, borders and intelligence services, but also of citizens who believe that losing an election is temporary, that courts remain available when governments overreach, that political opponents retain legitimate rights, and that peaceful participation can still change the future.

That is the security of trust.

And in an era of geopolitical confrontation, technological disruption and political fragmentation, protecting it may become one of Europe’s most important forms of conflict prevention.