"Tech sovereignty – What does it mean?"

Le 12 mars 2025, au Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, Luuk van Middelaar posait cette question aux différents intervenants. Voici ma réponse, en format court.

On March 12, 2025, at the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, Luuk van Middelaar posed this question to speakers. Here is my short answer.

Technological sovereignty, particularly in the digital realm, appear as an elusive notion that does not align with tangible realities. In a strict sense, digital sovereignty would imply absolute autonomy in every layer of digital dependencies. Yet from its very inception, the digital sphere has relied on a diversity of interdependencies, notably on technical and industrial fronts.

These interdependencies took shape in a historical period marked by globalization, which provided a fertile ideological foundation for the rise of a global Internet, also because these technologies emerged in a historical context where globalization created an ideal ideological foundation for the emergence of a global Internet. The dominant economic paradigm of the time favored the expansion and dominance of technology giants. Those private empires worked specifically on building dependencies.

Even the United States never was completely sovereign on their own digital technologies. Their supremacy has never translated into absolute independence. The American technology sector relies on globalized supply chains, particularly for producing semiconductors. As early as the 1980s, Japan was a key player in the manufacturing of electronic components, and more recently, Taiwan (with TSMC) and South Korea (with Samsung) have become key players.

This is why I prefer to speak of a dependency approach to power. Finally, digital technology, and technologies in general, must be considered as levers of power that can affect political sovereignty. This means that we must focus on managing dependency and study the levers of power that can, when addressing the subject of international relations, have an impact on political sovereignty.

Throughout Europe, this phenomenon is strikingly apparent, highlighting our considerable reliance on technologies originating in the United States. This dependence fosters various forms of imperialism, both at the state level and among private entities.

Addressing this reality calls for a meticulous approach. We have to thread the needle. One priority lies in identifying the sectors where a technological shift seems most pressing: health, education, media, administration, security, and energy. In each of these areas, the first step is to investigate in detail which software components are currently in use, then replace them progressively with solutions under European control.

A further consideration involves moving away from a strictly profit-based philosophy that assumes the creation of “European champions” as the only route forward. Do we genuinely aspire to have our own Big Tech conglomerates? The likely answer is no, given that such corporations often grow into multinational behemoths driven primarily by financial motives. Moreover, software and information technologies lend themselves to decentralized development, making it feasible to envision a continental framework supported by small and medium-sized enterprises. By contributing to and refining this shared infrastructure, those enterprises would remain accessible to oversight from both governments and citizens, ensuring broader accountability for the technologies that shape daily life.

Then, it is essential to say, in the actual situation where far right and fascism are growing in Europe, that the term of “sovereignty” shouldn’t serve nationalism and far right political agenda. For me, it is an other argument to avoid the use of the term “digital sovereignty”.