Manifesto

The word has been worn thin. ‘Sovereignty’ is used to sell cloud services, to reassure a board of directors, to bring a parliamentary debate to a close. The word sounds serious. It hardly means anything anymore.

The version we hear on television boils down to three reflexes. The nationality of the shareholder is said to guarantee independence. A label on a brochure is said to guarantee protection. And sovereignty is seen as a matter of flags, a reflexive retreat. All three are false. A company can be owned by a thoroughly French fund and yet run on technology it does not control. You can display a certification and still be disconnected overnight. As for withdrawal, it has never made anyone sovereign; it has only made them poorer and just as dependent.

Let’s get back to basics. Being sovereign means retaining the ability to decide, and not being able to be disconnected against one’s will. A political condition, a physical condition. Neither can be reduced to a flag.

It remains to be seen what this means, on a case-by-case basis. Because sovereignty does not take a single form. It depends on what one is looking at.

When it comes to vital goods, it means independence. When something is essential and no substitute exists, we must control it ourselves. Energy follows this rule. We do not entrust our ability to generate electricity to someone who controls the tap.

For most other goods, it means control. And control depends on numbers, not on the supplier’s flag. Several players of comparable size and quality, interchangeable, subject to the same laws as us, without prohibitive exit costs: that is a sovereign market. A single supplier, even a national one, even a certified one, has you in their grip. The right question is never ‘is it French?’, but ‘can we switch suppliers within six months without causing chaos?’.

In the case of certain rare areas of expertise, it means the ability to do the work. To retain them, maintain them, and rebuild them as needed, even if that means forming alliances to do so. A skill that has been allowed to die cannot be bought off the shelf the very morning it is needed.

And everywhere, always, it means resilience to disruption. That’s the detail almost no one looks at. A compliant contract offers no protection if the technology and the people operating it remain external, and if a decision taken far away can bring everything to a halt. The contract says yes. The connection, however, remains accessible to someone else.

June 2026 provided a clear illustration of this. A cutting-edge artificial intelligence model was released on the 9th. Three days later, access to it was suspended for all customers worldwide, following an export directive from a single state. Nothing illegal, no breach of contract. A sovereign decision taken abroad, and the tool used on Monday had vanished by Thursday. That is the cut-off. It comes without warning.

Hence a simple rule, applicable to the cloud as much as to everything else. Certification is necessary. It is never sufficient. A reputable certification covers part of the legal risk associated with the data. It says nothing about control. To confuse the two is to rest easy on a dependency that one has not examined.

Let’s be clear. Sovereignty does not mean self-sufficiency. Producing everything ourselves is impossible and ruinous. Interdependence is a strength when it is a choice and when we can break free from it. What we are defending here has no ideological camp or boundary. Neither isolationism nor withdrawal. Just a demand from responsible adults: to know what we depend on, at what cost we can break free, and who holds the power.

vassal.host exists for this very purpose. To make clear what the word encompasses, file by file, without trial and without theatrics. We sell nothing. We examine what we think we hold, and what truly holds it.