Sometimes a continent needs a jolt to grasp something it has known for years. Donald Trump, it seems, has achieved what years of warnings from Paris and Brussels could not: he convinced Europe's free-market advocates that leaning on American technology is a serious vulnerability, not just a theoretical concern.

How? With threats toward Greenland, sanctions against international officials, and a readiness to use Europe's dependence on American companies as leverage. According to Politico, the European Commission is preparing a "tech sovereignty" package aimed at cutting dependence on foreign firms - everything from email and data storage to the tools that run public services.

"People finally realised there's no greater power than technology," said Sebastiano Toffaletti of the European association of digital SMEs. "It's not just a commodity. It's a means of power and influence, which is why Europe must have its own." Sentences that just a few years ago in Brussels would have been dismissed as disguised protectionism.

The turnaround is dramatic. Countries like the Netherlands and Denmark used to slow down French efforts to keep the EU's most sensitive data away from American servers. Dutch MP Bart Groothuis admits he made a "major U-turn": "It was a clear sign that our big ally would colonise us, that it wants us to depend entirely on American artificial intelligence."

And the real alarm bell, ironically, wasn't first sounded by Trump - but by Joe Biden, who before leaving pushed through rules restricting exports of AI chips to some European countries. Trump merely recognised the vulnerability and pressed it to the hilt, especially through sanctions against International Criminal Court officials.

For the Balkans, this is a lesson worth heeding. We're used to being small and dependent - on foreign capital, foreign platforms, foreign rules. But when even a powerful Europe discovers that dependence is a vulnerability the moment an ally decides to exploit it, the question becomes unavoidable: on whose servers, whose tools and whose rules do we ourselves actually live - and what do we have of our own in that whole story?