Abstract
The European Union (EU) has, with increasing frequency, outlined an intention to strengthen its 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 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.
Highlights
Governments’ interest in the “datafied society” (Hintz et al, 2018) as an object of policy and regulation is nothing new, with a long-held recognition that governance protocols can be used to reshape the technological infrastructure underpinning society and its nature (Floridi, 2018; van Dijck & Poell, 2016)
The Electronic Components and Systems for European Leadership (ECSEL) initiative seeks to grow Europe’s semiconductor capabilities, amongst other things, and has been cited as “proof” of Europe’s potential to hold digital sovereignty in the field of microelectronics (European Commission, 2020b). Another emerging technology which the European Union (EU) is focusing on is the field of supercomputing, with President von der Leyen promising an investment of €8 billion to develop the generation of supercomputers (European Commission, 2020d), which are seen as a prerequisite to being competitive in the areas of cloud technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), and cybersecurity
Establishing a “sovereign internet” through controlling what content can be viewed online is an area of digital sovereignty that is critical to China and Russia (McKune & Ahmed, 2018), but was not mentioned by EU institutional actors in our data set
Summary
Governments’ interest in the “datafied society” (Hintz et al, 2018) as an object of policy and regulation is nothing new, with a long-held recognition that governance protocols (policies, ethics frameworks, and regulations) can be used to reshape the technological infrastructure underpinning society and its nature (Floridi, 2018; van Dijck & Poell, 2016). This term has gained traction in the context of the European Union (EU), which will be the focus of this paper In her 2020 State of the Union Address at the European Parliament, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, stated that this is [the European Union’s] opportunity to make change happen by design, not by disaster or by diktat from others in the world [...] it is about Europe’s digital sovereignty on a small and large scale (European Commission, 2020d).
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