The (False) promise of solutionism: ideational business power and the construction of epistemic authority in digital security governance

ABSTRACT

Digital technologies are transforming security governance, bringing new risks and opportunities. The resulting uncertainty creates interpretative contests about what these new challenges are and who can – and should – address them. We argue that private actors use their ideational business power – and specifically solutionist arguments – to influence how public actors perceive digital security problems; whether they view private actors as necessary and/or effective in solving them; and whether they view public and private goals as compatible. In doing so, they influence how public actors navigate competence-control trade-offs. We substantiate this argument in two qualitative case studies on the involvement of Palantir in EU law enforcement and on the prominent role of (foreign) tech companies in the European cloud project Gaia-X. Drawing on and contributing to the literatures on (critical) security governance, competence-control theory, and ideational business power, we shed light on the ideational underpinnings of Europe’s regulatory security state.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideational business power
• solutionism
• epistemic authority
• privatisation
• security governance
• digitalisation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants of the Special Issue Workshop in Munich in November 2021 and the participants of the 2022 ECPR-SGEU panel on the regulatory security state for their helpful comments. We are particularly indebted to the editors of the special issue – Andreas Kruck and Moritz Weiss – for their exceptional support throughout. We also want to thank Ludek Stavinoha for important early pointers, Philipp Genschel for his very astute comments on our paper, and three anonymous reviewers for challenging but constructive comments. We are also very grateful to our interviewees who kindly shared their insights. Lastly, we want to thank the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for generous funding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For example, through the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD) Act, US law enforcement authorities can force US companies to provide access to data stored in the European Union (EU), even though this potentially violates European data protection rules.

2 Tech companies have strong incentives to invest in and exert ideational business power. Not only is the public security sector is a lucrative market in the short run; companies might also increasingly become (seen as) indispensable co-providers of public security, boosting their economic prospects in the long run (Busemeyer & Thelen, 2020; Kruck, 2016).

3 Palantir also effectively reinforces its ideational influence through the strategic use of testimonials. As one interviewee from a competitor noted, Palantir systematically uses existing customers, such as public bodies that have already used Palantir products, as ‘influencers’ (Interview 1). For example, internal emails show that the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention proactively contacted its European counterpart to advertise Palantir’s services, highlighting their important role in ‘critical data integration, analytics, & decision support’ (23 March 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anke Sophia Obendiek

Anke S. Obendiek is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for European Integration Research, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna.

Timo Seidl

Timo Seidl is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for European Integration Research, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna.