Jean Monnet once foretold: “Europe will be built through crises, and it will be the sum of their solutions.” European intelligence cooperation provides a telling example of the tortuous process of shaping structures and institutions which nevertheless remain below the threshold of efficiency required to overcome the constraining dissensus among EU Member States. Fragmentation along national lines, shaped by distinct security cultures, legal traditions and threat perceptions, hinders genuine progress in intelligence cooperation and calls into question the viability of establishing a reliable intelligence entity at the EU institutional level. The strategic surprise of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 revealed deep deficits in the EU’s intelligence capabilities and generated seemingly strong incentives for closer cooperation.
However, the existing forms of institutional and functional intelligence cooperation and sharing remain insufficient for preventing and combating persistent hybrid threats, cyberattacks, sabotage and disinformation operations. This is partly due to the essentially intergovernmental nature of collaboration, which restricts access to intelligence – both raw and processed – to authorised national services. It is also attributable to the lack of political will among EU Member States with regard to the development and enhancement of capacities for data collection and intelligence production by EU agencies and bodies.
As an international actor marking its global presence through diplomatic engagement, as well as crisis management and peacekeeping missions and operations under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), the EU began in the early 2000s to develop strategic awareness and situational assessment capacities intended to provide its institutions and bodies with reliable, up-to-date, all-source intelligence. This process started with a small analytical unit, SITCEN (Situation Centre), which – following the Lisbon reform of the EU treaties – evolved into the EU Intelligence and Situation Centre (EU INTCEN). Concurrently, the EU developed intelligence capacities through its agencies (the Satellite Centre for geospatial intelligence; Europol for criminal intelligence; Frontex for situational intelligence at the EU’s external borders; and the EU Military Staff’s Intelligence Directorate (EUMS INT) for defence intelligence). Importantly, the EU sought to foster synergy among these diversified formats of intelligence cooperation. The Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity (SIAC) framework, linking INTCEN and EUMS INT, has been progressively strengthened as a civilian–military analytical format.
These intensive activities, particularly throughout the 2010s, marked what may be termed the “intelligence turn” in European security governance – a gradual shift from ad hoc information exchange towards more structured analytical cooperation. However, this trajectory soon became stalled for several reasons: (1) the denial of formal EU intelligence prerogatives by the European Commission; (2) the strategic sensitivity of intelligence cooperation; (3) low levels of trust in EU intelligence capabilities among Member States; (4) divergent legal and oversight frameworks; (5) limited sharing of highly classified information with EU institutions; and (6) recurring espionage scandals in several EU countries. The unsuccessful attempts to create a coherent European intelligence cooperation structure revealed significant obstruction on the part of Member States. They effectively adopted a dual approach: endorsing the development of intelligence capabilities at the EU level, whilst simultaneously failing to provide substantial input into EU intelligence production.
Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered an intensified debate on the EU’s response to the war in its neighbourhood, including the strengthening of its intelligence capacities. Yet the prospects for more effective European intelligence cooperation remain bleak. None of the previously identified impediments to deeper cooperation has been significantly mitigated or overcome. Moreover, the European Commission has demonstrated a proclivity for the multiplication of intelligence-related entities. The recent proposal, reported by the Financial Times in mid-November 2025, to establish an intelligence cell within the European Commission’s Secretariat-General has raised eyebrows among observers and intelligence professionals alike. While this initiative may be interpreted as consistent with von der Leyen’s decision to establish the “Security College”, comprising the 26 Commissioners and the President of the Commission, it simultaneously risks downgrading EU INTCEN as a situational centre and reducing its role primarily to supporting CFSP activities. Such an internal manifestation of institutional distrust bodes ill for the coherence and credibility of the Union’s intelligence architecture.
Jagiellonian University
Kraków
Poland
