Europe in a Geo-Tech World

Technological Change
European Union
Geopolitics

Description

In a world where technology and geopolitics increasingly intersect, Europe is busy finding its place. On the one hand, it has adopted landmark technology regulations with global impact and importance. On the other hand, Europe lacks truly significant technology companies of its own and risks falling behind in key technological sectors, from batteries to artificial intelligence.

This poses both economic and security risks and may ultimately even undermine Europe’s regulatory influence. As the Commission itself put it, for ‘Europe to truly influence the way in which digital solutions are developed and used on a global scale, it needs to be a strong, independent and purposeful digital player in its own right.’

Against this background, I have written on the rise of a geo-tech world, EU technology policymaking, and its quest for technological sovereignty.

Resources

  • This book review essay reconstructs and provides a conceptual sketch of the rise of the geo-tech world and and its implications for how we think about the (geo-)politics of technology today.

  • This paper analyzes the EU’s embrace of the language of open strategic autonomy and concomitant shift in EU trade policy away from the long-dominant paradigm of open(ing) markets and towards a position that balances openness more explicitly with security and neo-mercantilist concerns.

  • This special issue addresses whether, and to what extent the EU’s discursive embrace of digital sovereignty is accompanied by actual policy change.

  • These slides outline the argument and present some preliminary findings from an unpublished working paper. The paper puts the EU’s approach to digital policymaking in historical context and theorizes the embrace of the language and logic of digital sovereignty as an expression of, and discursive tool to organize a Polanyian and a Listian countermovement against the neoliberal model of digitalization (governance).

  • This article theorizes current developments in European industrial policy as an expression of a ‘geo-dirigiste turn’ and situates this turn in the longue durée of European industrial policy debates and the different answers Europe has found to the ever-present fear of falling behind.