Spanish Fake Sovereignty: From Privatising the Nation-State to Becoming a Digital Colony

Abstract

Giving policies pompous names, such as ‘Digital Spain 2025’, ‘National Artificial Intelligence Strategy’ (ENIA) or ‘Spain 2050’, the Spanish government wants to roll out a new sovereign power deployed outwards and integrated into the global digital, financial and military sphere. The article argues that this process, which requires handing over legal, social, financial, and economic powers to private corporations, has transformed the country into an incipient ‘digital colony,’ a territory for data mining and the surveillance of society situated on the periphery of the capitalist world economy. On the way to becoming a digital colony, the privatisation of nation-building and popular sovereignty has involved discriminating against minority nations and executing repressive law enforcement policies.