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The rule of law is a living framework that must be continuously weighted against political realities, collective imperatives, and the hard lessons of experience. Proportionality — in the fullest sense of that principle — is the indispensable instrument for that balance between hard realities and ideals of European laws. Europe faces converging pressures that demand a candid reassessment.
The very challenging security situation presenting existential threats to the European Union and its Member States and to the rule of law as we know it, unprecedented concentration of private power in digital markets, the risk of political capture of independent institutions, and the erosion of coherent enforcement, all threaten the equal and predictable application of law that the rule of law requires.
At the same time, geopolitical realities compel a more sober reckoning: security, economic resilience, and genuine strategic sovereignty preconditions for any functioning legal order. Europe must invest seriously in real-world capabilities — economic, technological, and military — and not rely on normative frameworks alone.
This requires rebalancing. An overemphasis on granular regulation at the expense of collective goals — national security, societal resilience, European strategic autonomy — distorts proportionality rather than serving it. Individual rights and regulatory ambition must be weighed honestly against duties to the collective and the objective needs of a credible, capable Union. Truly common European solutions, grounded in what is objectively necessary and reasonable, are long overdue.
The rule of law ultimately lives in practice. Lawyers — across sectors and jurisdictions — bear a particular responsibility as voices of reason and proportion and in defending and explaining the value of the rule of law based international system and domestic governance, with the understanding of realism.
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