Digital Sovereignty: Europe's Favourite (Empty) Buzzword | LinkedIn

A great piece on "Europe's favourite, and most politically convenient, buzzword" - digital sovereignty. "Few political ideas in Brussels have enjoyed such broad appeal—or such conceptual emptiness". It's in effect a tour of what the concept means according to different camps, as each attempts to (re)define it according to their agenda, leading to a debate which "feels like "generals trying to win a war by giving it the right name"".

The term is nothing more than "a catchword, a substitute for thinking and precision... creates the illusion of strategic clarity precisely when ideas are least coherent... unites techno-nationalists and digital rights activists, industrial strategists and privacy lawyers, all under one comfortable banner of control... a collective therapy session for a continent anxious about its place in the digital world".

It doesn't help that sovereignty itself has always been illustory itself: "always pronounced dead, yet forever revived — makes it the perfect rhetorical tool". Now it is difficult to find many terms which so effortlessly span the entire political spectrum as technological sovereignty, "used by anarchist collectives to describe self-managed infrastructure and by governments to justify firewalls."

Good insight: "Sovereignty discourse tends to be loudest where actual power is weakest" - when you hear people invoke it, you know they're worried.

The piece surveys different analyses. Some highlights:

"Christakis' 2020 study on European digital sovereignty ... identifies two distinct meanings:

• Sovereignty as regulatory power — the ability to make and enforce rules that others must follow.
• Sovereignty as strategic autonomy — the capacity to act without being constrained by technological dependencies."

Back in 2020, Europe was a superpower on the regulatory front, but the power of the Brussels effect has more recently been called into question.

But ""Referees don't win” the game... [Europe] can discipline the digital economy but not drive it." Strategic autonomy is the goal, but can easily "slide into techno-nationalism... echoing the very protectionist instincts Europe criticizes in others."

A 2019 analysis identified 5 different meanings: "Cyberspace sovereignty;... State digital sovereignty;... Indigenous digital sovereignty ...(cultural and data self-determination); ... Social movement sovereignty (self-hosted, open-source alternatives to corporate platforms) & Personal digital sovereignty ... (encryption, privacy, and data ownership)... same word but for radically different ends — some to resist the state, others to empower it".

Yet the key point here is that while this obsession "reflects a deep discomfort with dependence—on American platforms, Asian hardware, and global data flows... in an interconnected digital economy, not every form of dependence is failure; it can sometimes be the condition of participation. Christakis argues that Europe should focus on managing interdependence rather than chasing the mirage of autonomy... Digital sovereignty... can be dangerously misleading... encourages policymakers to equate control with security, and autonomy with innovation... [instead] openness breeds resilience, and collaboration drives progress. Europe's digital future ... will depend less on who owns the servers than on who imagines the systems. As long as "digital sovereignty" remains a slogan instead of a strategy, Europe will continue mistaking the theatre of autonomy for the practice of power "