Digital sovereignty, geopolitical imaginaries, and the reproduction of European identity

ABSTRACT

“Digital sovereignty” has emerged as a hot topic in European politics. But although true European digital sovereignty seems unattainable, analysing the digital sovereignty discourse is still useful since it tells us much about European politics. We examine three “projects” which are part of the broader digital sovereignty initiative: 5G, Gaia-X, and the semiconductor industry. This empirical perspective allows for a better understanding of how imaginaries about digital sovereignty play out in these specific tech projects and how these then help to affirm a particular European identity. Methodologically, we focus on how particular geopolitical imaginaries appear in these digital sovereignty projects. Our empirical analysis reveals that Europe’s comparatively weak digital industries are considered a security issue. China and, to a lesser degree, the United States are not only seen as economic rivals but also security threats when it comes to issues such as espionage and data protection. Based on this, we argue that digital sovereignty projects, despite being full of contradictions and tensions, contribute to a distinct EU identity of an agile, future-oriented global player in the digitised economy. This, while not entirely new, is a powerful imaginary even if the proposed idea of “sovereignty” might never be enacted.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital sovereignty
• geopolitics
• imaginaries
• cloud computing
• semiconductors
• mobile telecommunications

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We do not have space to dive deeper into the debate on discourse vs practice. Suffice to say that we do not make a hard and fast distinction between the two. This is in line with our analytical perspective presented in the second section. Although we mainly examine “texts” we understand the different projects as distinct practices that we distinguish from a general DS discourse which materializes mainly in speeches and policy documents.

2 The introduction to this special issue offers a more detailed introduction to the debates and literature on digital sovereignty, here we highlight only the main points crucial for our argument.

3 The question of values and security is of course a more complex one (Nyman and Burke 2016). Here we use this as a shorthand to differentiate between arguments directed at security issues in the narrow sense and arguments made about ethical and legal values such as the need for the protection of citizen data.

4 This is, of course, a contested proposition, so we are not seeing a centralized propaganda effort but intersubjective negotiation among actors in the European policy space, from Commission officials via member state representatives to think tanks. The DS projects are attempts by the EU to provide evidence in support of its relevance vis-à-vis its member states as well as towards external actors, especially the US and China.

5 Gaia-X takes a “privacy by design” approach to conform to EU data protection standards. For technical details see https://www.gaia-x.eu/sites/default/files/2021-05/Gaia-X_Architecture_Document_2103.pdf.

6 This emphasis on values is not specific to cloud computing. In the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the EU has organized its efforts around the brand of “trustworthy AI”.

7 Due to space constraints we cannot dive deeper into the question of different opinions among EU nation states. In brief, some countries are formally locking out Chinese vendors from competition while others take a case-by-case approach (Sahin and Barker 2021, p. 33).