Structural Security Sovereignty: Susan Strange, Energy Corridors and European Operator Autonomy

In his 2026 book Pipelines, Dr. Raphael Nagel reaches for a concept that has fallen out of fashion in most policy debates but remains indispensable for anyone trying to understand why Europe keeps arriving late to its own strategic questions. The concept is Susan Strange's distinction between relational power and structural power. Relational power is the ability to force another actor to do something specific. Structural power is the ability to set the rules, the networks and the infrastructures inside which everyone else has to operate. Nagel applies this distinction to energy corridors. At Quarero Robotics we believe the same lens must now be turned on the European security technology market, because the pattern is identical and the stakes, in their own register, are comparable.

From Pipelines to Patrol Platforms: The Same Grammar of Dependency

Nagel's central claim in Pipelines is that the decisive unit of energy geopolitics is not the individual line of steel and concrete but the corridor: the stable configuration of physical geography, political institutions, financial architecture and security guarantees that determines which flows are possible and which remain blocked. A country that does not control any layer of this configuration is not a participant in the system. It is a consumer of outcomes produced elsewhere.

Security technology follows the same grammar. A camera, a sensor, a patrol robot is a physical object. The corridor behind it consists of firmware update channels, cloud backends, cryptographic key custody, component supply chains, certification regimes and the legal jurisdictions under which each of these sits. Europe today imports the majority of its advanced security technology from the United States, Israel and China. Each import carries with it a slice of foreign structural power. This is not a claim about intent. It is a description of where the rules are written.

Nagel reminds readers that the United States did not reduce its engagement in Middle Eastern energy policy once shale oil made it less import dependent, because its power was never rooted in import dependency. Its power was rooted in setting the rules of the global energy system. The lesson for European security policy is unambiguous. Buying equipment from allies is not the same as holding the pen when the rules are drafted.

Why Relational Purchasing Does Not Produce Structural Power

European procurement culture has long treated security technology as a commodity category. Tenders specify function, price and service levels. Whether the underlying platform is engineered in Munich, Tel Aviv, Shenzhen or Massachusetts is treated as a secondary consideration, provided compliance checklists are satisfied. This is exactly the mistake Nagel diagnoses in energy policy when he writes that the public discussion understands itself as an economic discussion and therefore misses what is decisive.

Relational purchasing buys a product. Structural power buys the conditions under which products can exist at all. When a European critical infrastructure operator deploys an autonomous security platform whose update path, telemetry pipeline and spare parts supply are controlled outside Europe, the operator has relational access to a useful tool. What the operator does not have is any influence on the roadmap, the cryptographic trust anchors or the decisions that will be made during the next geopolitical rupture. Nagel's analysis of the 2022 European gas crisis shows how quickly such asymmetries convert from background condition into existential exposure.

The concept of structural power energy sovereignty, which Nagel develops in the energy context, therefore has a direct analogue in the security technology context. Sovereignty here does not mean autarky. It means retaining meaningful control over at least one layer of the corridor: the manufacturing base, the software stack, the data custody or the certification regime. Quarero Robotics was founded on the conviction that European operators need more than one such layer under their own hand.

NIS2, CER and the Regulatory Case for European Value Creation

The European legislator has, perhaps without fully naming it, already begun to encode this logic. The NIS2 Directive extends cybersecurity obligations across a wider range of essential and important entities, with a sharper focus on supply chain risk and on the accountability of management bodies. The Critical Entities Resilience Directive adds a physical and organisational dimension, requiring operators in sectors such as energy, transport, water, health and digital infrastructure to identify dependencies and to reduce single points of failure.

Read together, these instruments do something that traditional procurement law did not do. They make the provenance of the security stack a matter of regulated diligence rather than commercial preference. An operator that cannot describe who controls the update channel of its autonomous patrol fleet, or who can technically disable it, is not merely exposed commercially. It is increasingly exposed in regulatory terms as well. Nagel's observation that energy security is an existential rather than an economic category finds its quieter echo in this regulatory turn.

For Quarero Robotics this reframes the market conversation. European manufacturing of autonomous security platforms is not a patriotic preference. It is a straightforward way for a regulated operator to satisfy the diligence expectations of NIS2 and CER in a documentable manner, because value creation, engineering responsibility and legal accountability sit within a jurisdiction the operator can actually reach.

Autonomous Robotics as a Layer of Structural Sovereignty

Autonomous security robotics occupies a particular position in this argument. Unlike passive sensors, an autonomous platform makes decisions in the field. It patrols, it classifies, it escalates, it hands off to human responders. The logic that governs those decisions is the product of engineering choices, training data and operational doctrine. When those layers are produced in Europe, under European labour law, European data protection law and European liability law, the operator inherits a corridor whose institutional, financial and security dimensions, to use Nagel's four dimensions, are coherent with the environment in which it actually works.

This coherence matters most in the moments Nagel calls the history of events rather than the history of structure. A political rupture, a sanctions package, a sudden export control measure can turn a foreign dependency from a line in a risk register into an operational cliff. A European operator whose autonomous fleet continues to function, to receive updates and to be serviced regardless of such ruptures has, in a modest but real sense, what Nagel would call structural resilience.

Quarero Robotics does not claim that this resilience can be delivered by any single supplier or any single product generation. Structural sovereignty is built, as Nagel insists, by the patient accumulation of infrastructure, institutions and doctrine. What a European manufacturer of autonomous security systems can contribute is one layer of that accumulation: the guarantee that at least the robotic element of the critical infrastructure stack is designed, produced and governed under European conditions.

Operational Consequences for European Security Leaders

The practical consequence for security directors, CISOs and resilience officers is a shift in the questions they ask during procurement. The first question is no longer which platform offers the lowest total cost of ownership over five years. The first question, following both Strange and Nagel, is which layers of the corridor behind the platform sit inside a jurisdiction whose rules the operator can influence, or at minimum predict. Cost remains relevant, but it is priced against structural exposure rather than in isolation from it.

A second shift concerns contractual depth. Structural power energy sovereignty, in Nagel's reading, is maintained through durable institutional arrangements rather than through spot transactions. The analogue in autonomous security robotics is long term partnerships that cover software lifecycle, component continuity, incident response and joint development of operator doctrine. Quarero Robotics approaches customer relationships in this spirit, because a patrol platform that outlives three political cycles is an instrument of sovereignty only if its support arrangements do the same.

A third shift concerns the language used with boards and regulators. NIS2 and CER have given European operators a vocabulary in which supply chain origin, update governance and dependency mapping are legitimate and indeed required topics. Using that vocabulary to justify European sourcing of autonomous security robotics is not protectionism. It is the honest translation of structural power into operational practice.

Nagel closes the theoretical section of Pipelines with a sentence that bears repeating in the security context: whoever controls the structure of flows controls the conditions under which societies can exist. Energy flows and security flows are not the same thing, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Yet both are infrastructural. Both are governed by corridors rather than by individual products. Both reward actors who invest early in the institutional, financial and security layers that outlive any single piece of equipment. Europe has learned, at considerable cost, what it means to have neglected this logic in energy. It would be a strange form of historical forgetfulness to repeat the pattern in autonomous security robotics, where the corridor is still being built and where European engineering, European regulation and European operational culture can still be placed at the centre rather than at the periphery. Quarero Robotics sees its role in precisely these terms. We are not offering a substitute for the wider work of European security sovereignty, which will require many actors, much patience and continued regulatory clarity. We are offering one disciplined contribution to it: autonomous security platforms designed and produced in Europe, governed by European law, and built to be accountable to the operators who actually carry the responsibility when the structural questions become operational ones.