Turning legacy into alliance relevance: Czechia’s defense-industrial imaginary and the politics of selective sovereignty

After 2022, Czechia drew unusual attention in European defense-industrial politics. Exports rose sharply. The multilateral Czech Ammunition Initiative delivered a cumulative 4.4 million large-caliber rounds to Ukraine. CSG N.V. was listed on Euronext Amsterdam in what was, by capital raised and market capitalization, the largest defense IPO on record. Public discourse increasingly casts the country as a contributor to European defense-technological sovereignty. The structural record is narrower than the discourse suggests. Czech defense production remains concentrated in ammunition and energetics, land platforms, and legacy overhaul. Czech participation in the European Defense Fund and PESCO is broad in count but thin in leadership. The country’s defense-industrial niches (CBRN defense, passive radar, large-caliber ammunition, small arms, MRO) derive their value from sustained capacity, not from new technological frontiers. I take this gap as my analytical object. Reading the Czech case through socio-technical imaginaries and the imaginary turn, and against the smart-small-power literature, I argue that Czech defense policy operates as a strategy of selective sovereignty. The components are familiar: calibrated participation in EU and NATO instruments, security of supply, embedded industrial roles, and the maintenance of established niches. What the dominant imaginary does is not industrial transformation. It actually renders legacy capacity legible as an alliance contribution and makes the continuity strategy politically intelligible. The Czech Ammunition Initiative is the paradigmatic case.