Europe Seeks Digital Sovereignty Through Partnerships that Are Almost Non-Existent

The European Union is trying to turn its digital policy from a set of fragmented initiatives into an instrument of geopolitical influence. In practice, its ambitions are still well ahead of its ability to implement them.

In an analytical paper of the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) entitled Autonomy through Partnerships: Charting the EU’s Global Digital Engagement, policy analysts Clotilde Bômont and Fee-Marie von der Brelie describe how the EU is reshaping its external digital posture. The authors record several shifts: from normative power to market power, from internal fragmentation to integration efforts, from dialogue to delivery and from defensive sovereignty to 'active' autonomy via partnerships.

Europe has really ramped up the number of initiatives. The authors mention almost two hundred projects, programs and agreements that cover various regions – from the eastern neighborhood to Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Arctic. There have appeared elements of ‘Team Europe’ – attempts to combine regulation with investment, infrastructure, and cyber security. However, the authors themselves admit that broadening geographical coverage and setting more complicated tasks quickly bump into a lack of resources, personnel, and political cohesion. Ambitions grow faster than the ability to realize them.

Especially conspicuous is an old European weakness: the gap between the number of initiatives and their real concentration. In Latin America and the Caribbean, EU digital projects have formed a dense but diffuse footprint. In the Arctic, national approaches to subsea cables and connectivity remain fragmented. Even in priority areas such as semiconductors, 6G, and artificial intelligence, partnerships with Japan and South Korea still look more like racing after established chains than forming Europe’s own centers of power. Europe often comes to where the rules and infrastructure have already been largely defined by others.

Europe still hopes that proper standards, dialogues, and pinpoint investments will help strengthen its standing in global digital competition. Yet its intrinsic limitations – slow deployment of infrastructure, lag in cloud technology and AI, and lack of a common capital market – are still there. External partnerships will not make up for these weaknesses; they rather camouflage them. While Brussels multiplies agreements and regional formats, the basic conditions for gaining real digital power within the Union remain not fully created.

Another systemic problem is that Europe tries to act as a normative leader and a catching-up technological player at once. These two roles are poorly compatible. While the Union wastes time and political capital to disseminate its standards, key technological positions in infrastructure, cloud technology and artificial intelligence are increasingly occupied by U.S. and Chinese firms. In this situation, partnerships perform a compensatory rather than power-building function.

As a result, EU digital influence increasingly resembles trying to buy influence where it has already been divided among other players. So long as Europe continues spreading thin across a lot of initiatives rather than concentrating resources on a few critical areas, all talk about digital autonomy will remain mostly declaratory. Partnerships as such create no power. They just show how acutely the power is lacking. And the longer Brussels substitutes broadening its geographical presence for real concentration of efforts, the more visible its lag will be. As a result, Europe risks remaining a player who talks a lot about sovereignty but still depends on others’ technology, standards, and infrastructure.

Original publication: https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/analysis/autonomy-through-partnerships-charting-eus-global-digital-engagement