On the night of 9 September 2025, a cluster of Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace. On October 3, 2025, Germany’s Munich airport cancelled and diverted dozens of flights, as drones were observed in its sky. Beyond the tactical provocation, the incident illuminated a deeper strategic challenge for Europe. Should Europeans collectively interpret such actions as direct provocations, warranting retaliation? Or should they maintain diplomatic restraint to avoid escalation?
This dilemma captures the enduring tension at the heart of European security. Even as leaders increasingly agree on the need to respond collectively to hybrid threats and even as the European Union places defence and security among its top strategic priorities, Europe remains divided on how to achieve genuine strategic autonomy. These divisions constrain the continent’s capacity to design a coherent defence framework – one capable of ensuring security through industrial capability, while remaining faithful to the political and ethical commitments that define the European project.
Meanwhile, threats evolve faster than Europe’s consensus. They manifest not only through direct acts of aggression, such as drone intrusions, but also through indirect interference in domestic politics – visible, for instance, in Georgia, where Russian influence continues to test the resilience of democratic institutions.
Against this backdrop, Poland’s September 2025 decision to deepen its cooperation with Taiwan for drone acquisition and production can be read as a revealing moment. On the one hand, it underscores Europe’s industrial weakness – its failure to provide member states with the technological capacities necessary for self-defence. It highlights persistent gaps in drone innovation and defence industrial integration, further deepening Europe’s technological dependency on Taiwan, already the primary source of the world’s advanced semiconductors. 
Yet the choice of Taiwan may also reflect something more than an industrial necessity. It signals a deliberate partnership with a like-minded democracy – one that faces existential threats of its own yet continues to innovate in defence technologies and to practise a form of diplomacy grounded in democratic values. In this sense, cooperation with Taiwan gestures toward an alternative vision of international politics: one where security and technology are developed within, rather than apart from, democratic ethics.
A Strategic and Industrial Partnership: Between Autonomy and Interdependence
Drones have emerged as a defining feature of contemporary warfare since the onset of the war in Ukraine. Yet beyond this observation, and despite the European authorities’ acknowledgement of their strategic importance, Europe still lacks the ability to scale up. It is telling that the two European countries most advanced in drone manufacturing – Ukraine and Turkey – are not members of the European Union.
Several explanations account for this gap, foremost among them the absence of a coordinated, pan-European investment in research and development. As Mario Draghi stressed in his 2024 report on European competitiveness:
No Member State can effectively finance, develop, produce and sustain all the necessary capabilities and infrastructure that are required to maintain leadership in these technologies. – page 63 of Draghi report
The passage from ‘Europeans can’ to ‘Europeans do’ remains to be achieved. Most of the conditions outlined by Draghi to stimulate the investment required for a dynamic drone industry have yet to be implemented. Although cumulative EU funding for drone research now approaches €1 billion, signalling long-term commitment, Europe’s firms remain specialised in niche applications rather than large-scale production. Drone manufacturing across the Union is fragmented among sectors – defence, agriculture, and logistics – whose technological requirements differ and whose integration requires political as well as social consensus.
To this structural weakness must be added a technological dependency that further limits Europe’s strategic autonomy. The production of drones and the manufacture of microchips are inextricably linked: advanced unmanned systems depend on high-performance semiconductors for navigation, AI integration, and communication. Europe’s vulnerability in one domain thus amplifies its weakness in the other. In this context, relying on Taiwan for drone components may appear as further proof of Europe’s inability to develop its own defence capacities. Yet this interpretation misses a key point: Europe currently lacks the short-term capabilities to bridge its technological gap, particularly in the field of microchips.
Microchips are critical components of all modern defence systems, from aircraft to missiles. The EU itself produces less than 10 percent of the global supply, importing nearly all chips used within the Union – mostly from Taiwan. This dependence represents a major strategic vulnerability, especially since the majority of Taiwan’s most advanced semiconductors are manufactured in a single facility less than 200 kilometres from mainland China, in an increasingly volatile region. The post-COVID supply-chain crisis and Russia’s war in Ukraine have further exacerbated this fragility, producing shortages, cost surges, and prolonged delivery times.
The central question for Europeans, then, is not whether to rely on non-European suppliers, but how to articulate a long-term vision for building autonomous defence capabilities. In the case of drones, this means determining the proper balance between the costs and benefits of developing a domestic industry – which could form the foundation of a broader European defence model – and those of cooperating with technologically advanced partners. While the dilemma is often framed as a trade-off between sovereignty and cooperation, the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The deepening of drone-development cooperation with Taiwan illustrates this point. Partnerships need not be limited to buyer – seller relations but can evolve toward co-development and shared innovation. Taiwan – undaunted by China’s diplomatic pressure – has already engaged in collaborative projects with Lithuania to develop drone technologies. By integrating with Taiwan’s high-tech ecosystem, which spans semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and robotics, Europe can pursue autonomy through knowledge rather than isolation.
A Normative Alliance: Defending Democracy through Technology
There are two levels to consider in the deepening of Europe’s relations with Taiwan. The first is strategic: partnering with a technologically advanced country capable of supporting Europe’s defence modernisation. The second is normative: viewing the partnership as a joint commitment to defend democracy. Choosing Taiwan ultimately means aligning with a partner whose situation is often compared to that of Ukraine – a society under existential threat, yet standing as one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies.
This dual interpretation assumes that Europe and Taiwan share not only interests but also values, which together form the foundation of a common defence rationale. Both confront authoritarian pressures – Russia’s revisionism and China’s coercive diplomacy – that test not only their military readiness but also the resilience of their political systems. Furthermore, these two pressures appear to be allied: China portrays Russia as an ‘eternal friend’, while Russia demonstrates its friendship with China.
In this context, partnership takes on a deeper meaning: it is not merely a response to shared threats but an affirmation of shared principles. The defence of democracy becomes a collective political project, grounded in the conviction that protecting the integrity of democratic institutions is a precondition for safeguarding the regimes that uphold freedom and the rule of law.
This shared commitment goes beyond rhetoric. The ways in which both Taiwan and the EU respond to threats are shaped by their dedication to preserving democratic life itself. Their approach to disinformation, for instance, illustrates how security can be pursued without sacrificing fundamental rights. In both cases, the challenge of protecting national security is addressed in conjunction with the protection of free expression, reaffirming that democracy must be defended through its own values rather than through their suspension.
It is, however, one thing to share commitments and another to translate them into common ethical norms. Values provide direction, but norms require concrete standards and institutional mechanisms. The integration of artificial intelligence, surveillance capabilities, and autonomous decision-making into defence technologies blurs the lines between efficiency and accountability. These developments demand clear rules on how and why such systems are deployed. While Europe has begun to take steps in this direction, it remains uncertain whether it can credibly promote these norms internationally if it cannot supply the very technologies they are meant to govern. How can Europe justify universal rules of conduct for systems that it depends on others to produce?
EU – Taiwan cooperation offers an opportunity to bridge this gap. Taiwan has demonstrated its ability to develop a high-level defence drone industry domestically while maintaining a credible commitment to defending democracy internationally. This suggests that co-developing ethical frameworks for emerging defence technologies can serve both security and human welfare. By jointly establishing standards for transparency, proportionality, and civilian protection, both partners would not only legitimise the use of these technologies but also transform ethical innovation into a new form of soft power. Embedding democratic principles into the governance of technology could inspire other democracies to join a wider movement for values-based defence cooperation.
Taiwan’s own diplomatic framing of cooperation with Europe already emphasises this shared commitment to democracy. Building on that foundation, Europe and Taiwan could collaborate to design guidelines and ethical standards for the responsible use of drones and artificial intelligence in military contexts. This would not only reinforce their credibility but also demonstrate that ethical restraint can coexist with technological sophistication.
Ultimately, such cooperation could evolve into the nucleus of a broader democratic security community – an informal network of states, from Japan to South Korea, united by the commitment to defend freedom in particular against ‘hybrid threats’. This coalition would show that democracy can adapt to the technological age without surrendering its moral compass. For Europe, this raises a profound question: can the ethical governance of defence technologies become part of its renewed social contract – one that reconciles security, legitimacy, and trust in an age of geopolitical fragmentation?
From Principle to Model: Toward a New Democratic Defense Paradigm
The deepening of EU – Taiwan cooperation in drone development is neither reducible to a tactical partnership nor confined to a symbolic alignment around democratic values. Rather than predetermining a political alignment, this cooperation illustrates the kinds of partnerships Europe may cultivate as it seeks to redefine the balance between autonomy and interdependence. It nonetheless represents a political choice – an effort to align Europe’s security interests with the protection of its democratic institutions. In this emerging model, ‘defence’ acquires a broader meaning: it concerns not only the integrity of borders, but also the preservation of the political order that underpins Europe’s capacity to act as a democracy.
The hybrid threats Europe faces today – disinformation campaigns, cyber intrusions, and now drone incursions – are not confined to territorial aggression. They are instruments of psychological warfare, aiming to test public trust and the coherence of democratic responses. The recent ‘drone affairs’ in Poland and Germany illustrate this logic: military tools are deployed less to cause physical damage than to test the coherence and confidence of European societies in responding to provocation.
Seen in this light, Poland’s choice to deepen its engagement with Taiwan clarifies a broader question: how can the protection of territory become inseparable from the protection of ideas? The legitimacy of power, in both Europe and Taiwan, ultimately depends on its alignment with democratic values. Their credibility as democratic actors depends on demonstrating that security and technological innovation can reinforce, rather than erode, democratic integrity.
Yet to translate this principle into policy, Europe must move from symbolism to structure. Suppose EU–Taiwan cooperation is to become the laboratory of a new democratic defence model. In that case, it should embody three complementary ambitions: strengthening Europe’s industrial base, embedding ethical standards into technological governance, and transforming democratic partnerships into strategic resilience. Achieving this transformation – from ad hoc cooperation to deliberate co-development – ultimately depends on political will, not merely technical capacity.
