Skip to main content
SearchLoginLogin or Signup
Published on Jun 12, 2022

The Race for Digital Sovereignty: Is Europe Already Too Late?

In this article, the European entry to the race for digital sovereignty will be analysed. There will be a critique of whether the current plan is likely to achieve the desired results, and alternative approaches will also be examined.

by European Studies Review
Published onJun 12, 2022
The Race for Digital Sovereignty: Is Europe Already Too Late?

Abstract

The European Commission has emphasised the importance of improving its digital strategy in recent years. In March of this year, guidelines were published setting targets for a digital transformation by 2030. In this article, the European entry to the race for digital sovereignty will be analysed. There will be a critique of whether the current plan is likely to achieve the desired results, and alternative approaches will also be examined. In this way, we may explore whether or not the 2020s will be Europe's "Digital Decade" after all.

Keywords: data, digital sovereignty, surveillance capitalism, standard-setting, GDPR

On March 1st 2021, the leaders of four European countries sent a letter to Commission President von der Leyen on the importance of developing a digital sphere independent of other powers such as the USA and China. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas all signed this letter which declared that “Now is the time for Europe to be digitally sovereign [...] We need to effectively safeguard competition and market access in a data-driven world. Critical infrastructures and technologies need to become resilient and secure. It is time for the digitization of governments in order to build trust and foster digital innovation” (ERR News 2021).

Digital sovereignty, in a European context, refers to the EU’s ability to act independently in the digital world. Chancellor Merkel has stated that it “describes the ability both of individuals and of society to shape the digital transformation in a self-determined way” (Siebert 2021). The concept of sovereignty in this instance should not be understood as for states alone but also for the individual. This philosophy remains a key part of the European Digital Strategy “Shaping Europe's Digital Future”. The concept of digital sovereignty was a common feature of Eurobubble rhetoric even before the von der Leyen Commission had been formed. In her Political Guidelines issued in July 2019, von der Leyen placed an emphasis on the need for Europe to be a leader in the next wave of technologies such as blockchain, high-performance computing and especially artificial intelligence. It is here where von der Leyen made the commitment to put forward legislation that would enact a common EU-wide approach to AI in her first 100 days as Commission President. This was reinforced in the President’s inauguration speech in November 2019, where technological innovation was set, alongside addressing the climate crisis, as one of the EU’s top priorities for the 2019-2024 Commission term.

The reasons for the current emphasis on increasing autonomy in the digital world are clear. According to the World Economic Forum, 92% of the data created in the West ends up being hosted in the United States (Fleming 2021). Of similar concern is that no European company can be found on the list of the Top 20 global tech brands. Europe can be said to be caught in the middle between two different ideologies on how the digital world should be run. On the one hand, the US is pursuing a model of surveillance capitalism which is driven by some of the largest US tech companies. This term, devised by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, refers to an economic system centred around the commodification of personal data for the purposes of profiting from such data. On the other hand, China remains a growing power in the tech industry, pursuing a model of techno-authoritarianism and online censorship in the domestic market. With this in mind, a European ‘Third Way’ that is focused on regulation of big tech companies and empowerment of the individual consumer would seem to be the best solution.

However, some experts have predicted that the EU has started the race to be a leading power in technological innovation far too late. Previous attempts to wrestle control of the digital sphere away from US tech giants have not yielded the desired results. For example, in the 2000s, the Franco-German search engine Quaero was released to compete with Google; its obscurity today is testament to the project’s failure. In fact, contemporary expert Angelique Chrisafis correctly referred to the project as "a blatant case of misguided and unnecessary nationalism" that would not be able to compete in this market. Quaero was eventually shut down in 2014. Furthermore, it could be argued that the Commission’s current strategy is misguided. Much of the strategy is based on pure economic investment in these industries. While the US and Chinese governments are certainly investing heavily in cutting-edge technologies, it is mostly research and development from the private sector that is funding innovation, particularly in the US (Barker 2020). State funding alone is unlikely to be able to compete with the sophisticated American and Chinese private sectors and Europe has not developed its private sector to a sufficient level to compete in the global market.

While the coming race for new technologies will prove a challenge for Europe, one area where the bloc has excelled in the past is the setting of standards. The setting of norms and international standards in a rules-based order has always been a key component of EU foreign policy and it would appear that this is no different for the digital world than for the physical one. The most striking example of this is of course the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which came into effect in 2018. Despite resistance from Silicon Valley and subsequently the Trump Administration, the EU successfully passed legislation which offered Europeans a higher level of personal data protection than anywhere else in the world (Scott 2018). Powerful tech companies from San Francisco to Tokyo were forced to either respect the EU’s higher regulatory standards or risk being shut out of a lucrative market of 450 million consumers. As such, the global bar for data protection was raised, with many countries seeking to emulate the protection offered by the GDPR. Indeed, it could be said that rather than being a tech superpower, the EU should instead focus on its competencies and exert its influence as a regulatory superpower.

Overall, it is clear that the EU is likely to face setbacks in its ambition to become a leading power in tech innovation. Its position as a relative newcomer to the race for new technologies such as AI puts it at a significant disadvantage. At the same time, the EU should look to its past to see that its successes in regulating big tech could lead it to the best method of ensuring that European digital sovereignty is assured.

References:

License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
Comments
0
?
Login to discuss
comment
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?
PolisReflects
Published with