Europe offers a third way in the technological transformation (original) (raw)
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A Crucial Decade for European Digital Sovereignty
Perspectives on Digital Humanism
The current decade will be critical for Europe’s aspiration to attain and maintain digital sovereignty so as to effectively protect and promote its humanistic values in the evolving digital ecosystem. Digital sovereignty in the current geopolitical context remains a fluid concept as it must rely on a balanced strategic interdependence with the USA, China, and other global actors. The developing strategy for achieving this relies on the coordinated use of three basic instruments, investment, regulation, and completion of the digital internal market. Investment, in addition to the multiannual financial framework (2021–2027) instruments, will draw upon the 20% of the 750 billion recovery fund. Regulation, in addition to the Digital Governance Act and the Digital Market Act, will include the Data Act, the new AI regulation, and more that is in the pipeline, leveraging the so-called Brussels effect. Of key importance for the success of this effort remains the timing and “dovetailing” of ...
NEW CHALLENGES, OLD CONCEPTS. THE EU'S PURSUIT OF DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY IN THE PANDEMIC AGE
2021
This article details the changing narratives surrounding sovereignty that surface in the post-sovereign world. Faced with unprecedented challenges, the European Union has focused its digital policy on achieving digital sovereignty. The research uses insights from neofunctionalism to assert that the EU is building path dependency in digital affairs by using the digital sovereignty discourse. Far from being a mere catchphrase, digital sovereignty has become a priority for EU leaders as a means of further integration, fueled by the previous regulatory efforts that helped build the Digital Single Market. Once this new space has been built, the EU is asserting its authority and control over its resources and tools. As such, the aim of the article is to detail the main drivers for EU digital sovereignty. The research identifies internal drivers (the need for further integration post-Brexit, convergence) and external drivers (competition with the US and China, Big Tech companies).
Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Cyberwarfare and Security , 2021
Digital technologies have gradually affected the way societies interact, how companies deliver services and how people are governed. Policymakers around the world have realized the importance of digital technologies on their countries’ security and autonomy and have issued sovereignty claims regarding cyberspace. The European Union - an actor that aims to ensure that governments, the private sector, civil society organisations and end users around the world promote an open, free, and secure cyberspace - has recently added the concept of digital sovereignty in its political vocabulary. Taking for granted that there is no widely accepted and comprehensive approach regarding digital sovereignty, this paper will analyse the European discourse on digital sovereignty. It will first review the ambiguous concept of sovereignty and then explore the way it can be applied in the European digital domain. The aim is to highlight the dilemmas and constrains that the EU is facing in relation to regulating the digital domain, avoiding technological protectionism, promoting cyber-resilience, and understanding the game of digital geopolitics.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
This contribution examines the impact of the COVID-crisis on the norm development process of digital sovereignty in China, the EU, the US and Russia, investigating concepts such as digital sovereignty, technological sovereignty, internet sovereignty, data sovereignty, souverainete numerique, digitale Souveranitat, 网络主权 (“network sovereignty“), 信息主权 (“information sovereignty”) and Суверенный интернет (“sovereign internet“). It develops an intellectual history of the norm development of digital sovereignty, roughly following Finnemore and Sikkink’s three stages model. The first phase, norm emergence, lasts from the 1990s and the Patriot Act in 2001 to Russia’s laws on internet control in 2012. During this phase of the US’s largely uncontested digital hegemony, China is the prime norm entrepreneur of digital sovereignty, promoting 网络主权 (lit. “network sovereignty”). The second phase, norm cascade, begins with the Snowden revelations in 2013. This phase is characterized by an increasingly multipolar order. During this phase, the EU adopts a notion of digital sovereignty with a focus on economic aspects. And Russia’s notion of Суверенный интернет (lit. “sovereign internet”) is becoming increasingly radicalized. In Russia and France, illiberal accounts of digital sovereignty are supported by Carl Schmitt’s geopolitical theories. From 2016 to 2020, the US and the EU undergo a phase of norm universalization. Triggered by Russia’s interference with the US general election and Brexit in 2016, these countries and regions become aware that their political systems are vulnerable to manipulation. The COVID-crisis initiates the fourth and last stage of the norm development cycle, the stage of internalization. Processes of digital sovereignty are increasingly implemented, respectively they emerge in a bottom-up manner, with civil society playing an increasingly important role. However, this turn also makes clear that digital sovereignty in liberal societies is strongly characterized, respectively limited by the power of the private sector and restrictions on governmental power, such as federalism.
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2022
The increasingly pervasive importance of computer and digital industries in all stages of the economy has revealed Europe’s growing reliance on foreign technologies. Twenty years ago, the EU considered US first-mover advantage in Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) a sectoral competitiveness issue. In the intervening years, China has been the sole economy to significantly demonstrate an ability to challenge US high-tech dominance, notwithstanding the existence of niche players in the rest of Asia and Europe. In this period, digital industries have unleashed an extended range of general-purpose and dual-use applications, needing key hardware and software inputs that are better-served or only served by US and Chinese firms. EU overreliance on ICT imports has shifted from being a sectoral issue to a cross-sectoral one, spanning from the provision of digital services and goods to the consumer (Business-to-Consumer), progressively extending to businesses (Business-to-Business), and currently heading towards the digitalization of everything — objects and processes. It strongly calls into question the capacity of European traditional industries to retain control and reap the full benefits of their now necessary digital transformation. It also casts doubt on the EU’s ability to provide — if necessary — secured and autonomous digital supply chains reliant on homegrown industries. This debate over Europe’s digital dependency has gained momentum since the mid-2010s and the deterioration of US-China relations. Over the last few years, China and the US have set a series of policy goals aiming at localizing strategic layers of the digital supply chain on their respective territory and therefore at “decoupling” their tightly interwoven production networks. Beyond the search on both sides for increased industrial self-sufficiency and leadership, the Trump administration has also justified this decoupling in terms of the national security threat posed by collaborations with Chinese companies and experts. In doing so, the US administration clearly expressed its willingness to see Europe as a political ally and as an economic partner taking the same stance and cutting industrial ties with strategic Chinese suppliers such as Huawei. The EU’s inability to develop strong European digital capabilities compromises the ability of EU Member States to make autonomous choices in terms of digital policies and supplies, with potentially far-reaching consequences for foreign policy, security, and military affairs. Against this backdrop, some key European decision-makers and stakeholders, including the European Commission (Commission) itself, have increasingly invoked notions of “strategic autonomy” and “digital sovereignty.” From a cross-sectoral challenge, the digital transformation of Europe has become an issue of political power. The European Union’s perceived drift towards progressive technological and political disempowerment brings into question the industrial policy path followed by the EU over the twenty-year period since US-based ICT pioneering companies started to successfully develop and market Internet-related services and products. With the digital gap steadily widening over time, European institutions have progressively shifted their digital objectives from a full catch-up policy to a specialization strategy recentred on the current digital transformation of European industry, described today as the fourth industrial revolution.2 In doing so, the EU has in a way acknowledged that US tech prime movers and Chinese followers have become strong incumbents, making the building up of a European competitive advantage in digital services to the consumer unlikely. By contrast, EU industrial policy instruments have remained relatively constant over the years although results failed to convincingly materialize, recognition of which has entailed the adaptation of EU digital objectives. The EU has maintained a two-pronged approach throughout, on the one hand coordinating decentralized Member States’ Research & Development (R&D) policies to boost digital innovation and adoption, and on the other hand setting Europe-wide norms to help innovating companies scale up and reinforce their market position worldwide. Although the EU is increasingly considered a digital standard setter on the regulatory front, this two-fold approach has so far failed to spur the emergence of strong leading digital innovators apart from a few corporate icons such as Spotify, SAP, Nokia, and Ericsson. The perpetuation of failing policies, this chapter shall argue, is strongly linked to the long-standing resilience of technological rivalries between key Member States and between their national champions, mainly specialized in mature and traditional sectors. These rivalries have structurally shaped industrial policies and the related EU institutional framework, and in so doing, they have stymied the objectives of developing the overarching political instruments underpinning both US and China industrial policies: a centralized management of public financial resources and a centralized management of strategic research, development, and procurement policies. It could be argued that the EU, being a regional construction, can hardly claim state apparatus prerogatives. Indeed, as key industrial policy instruments have remained at the level of EU Member States, the industrial path carved out by the EU could not result in unifying political and social cohesion around the rising stakes of the digital transformation, unlike in the US and China. The EU’s digital transformation is less a matter of digital dependency to be solved than a matter of industrial path dependency to be overcome.
2021
The concept of "European digital sovereignty" does not seem to fit well with the global nature of digitalisation, but a closer look at the phenomenon reveals why this term makes sense. First of all, digitalisation is not a process antithetical to territorialisation, contrary to the logic of states or incompatible with the defence of the interests of the European Union, especially at a time when the digital space has become a geostrategic battlefield between countries and, above all, different models. The proposal advocated here consists of understanding this term not only as an ad intra protection but also as a capacity to assert the European model of digitisation on a global scale
Future of Europe in Ankara Avrupa Çalışmaları Dergisi , 2024
The Digital Europe Program (DIGITAL) is a European Union program aimed at accelerating the continent's digital transformation, increasing global digital competitiveness, and establishing technological sovereignty. It focuses on vital digital technologies such as HPC, broadband Internet access, Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud services, cyber security, the digital single market, and advanced digital competencies. DIGITAL is regarded as critical for Europe's strategic autonomy in the digital sphere, and it is more than a project; it represents a massive transition that initiates socioeconomic change. The program develops a European data economy and a digital single market, influencing the EU's socioeconomic dynamics. The achievement of technical sovereignty is dependent on exemplary implementation, finance, and management initiatives.
Safeguarding European values with digital sovereignty: an analysis of statements and policies
2021
The European Union (EU) has, with increasing frequency, outlined an intention to strengthen its "digital sovereignty" as a basis for safeguarding European values in the digital age. Yet, uncertainty remains as to how the term should be defined, undermining efforts to assess the success of the EU's digital sovereignty agenda. The task of this paper is to reduce this uncertainty by i) analysing how digital sovereignty has been discussed by EU institutional actors and placing this in a wider conceptual framework, ii) mapping specific policy areas and measures that EU institutional actors cite as important for strengthening digital sovereignty, iii) assessing the effectiveness of current policy measures at strengthening digital sovereignty, and iv) proposing policy solutions that go above and beyond current measures and address existing gaps. To do this, we introduce a conceptual understanding of digital sovereignty and then empirically ground this within the specific EU context via an analysis of a corpus of 180 EU webpages that have mentioned the term "digital sovereignty" within the past year. We find that existing policies, in particular those pertaining to data governance, help to achieve some of the EU's specific aims in regard to digital sovereignty, such as conditioning outward data flows, but they are more limited concerning other aims, like advancing the EU's competitiveness and regulating the private sector. This is problematic insofar as it constrains the EU's ability to safeguard and promote its values. The policy solutions we propose represent steps towards the further strengthening of the EU's digital sovereignty and firmer protection of EU values.