seidl-slides-uaces-2024

Technology Politics in a Geo-Tech World

In today’s ‘geo-tech world’ (King 2019), thinking about the politics of digital capitalism requires us to think in terms of a two-dimensional geometry of political conflict (Bradford 2023):

On the one hand, there are vertical conflicts between governments/societies and tech companies over who has the power to set the rules, appropriate the profits, and tell the story of the digital world (Acemoglu and Johnson 2023; Lehdonvirta 2022).
On the other hand, there are horizontal conflicts among governments as control over technology supply chains and infrastructures are increasingly essential for geostrategic competition (Farrell and Newman 2023; DeNardis 2014).

Example: The EU’s Quest for Digital Sovereignty

Since the late 1980s, European digital policymaking has, with some exceptions, been shaped by a ‘neoliberal rationality (…) discursively framed and legitimized by the ideas, promises and conception of [the] global information society’ (Dammann and Glasze 2023, 1101; cf. König 2022; Newman 2020).

Since the late 2010s, however, European policymakers have both embraced the language of digital sovereignty and moved away from an approach to digital policymaking predominantly centered on de-, non-, or self-regulation (Cini and Czulno 2022; Cioffi, Kenney, and Zysman 2022; Falkner et al. 2024).

Taking back Control? The Rise of Digital Sovereignty

‘To be digitally sovereign, the EU must build a truly digital single market, reinforce its ability to define its own rules, to make autonomous technological choices, and to develop and deploy strategic digital capacities and infrastructure. At the international level, the EU will leverage its tools and regulatory powers to help shape global rules and standards’ (European Council 2020).

Polanyi and List Meet in Brussels

I suggest understanding digital sovereignty as an expression of—and as a discursive tool to organize—two countermovements against the neoliberal model of digitalization (governance):

A Polanyian countermovement wants to limit the digitally-enabled expansion of markets and wrest back rule-making authority over the digital world from private platforms. The goal is to (re-)politicize digital policymaking.
A Listian countermovement wants to reduce techno-economic dependencies from rival or enemy countries through various forms of ‘government economic activism’ (Helleiner 2021, 4). The goal is to geopoliticize digital policymaking.

Varieties of Market Governance

Polanyian Version of Digital Sovereignty	Listian Version of Digital Sovereignty
Reasserting Marketcraft	Rediscovering Statecraft
Platforms vs States	Competing State-Platform-Nexuses
Market-Constraining (Market-Correcting)	Market-Directing
Socially-oriented actors (e.g. Trade Unions, NGO)	Neo-mercantilist actors (e.g. European companies, defense policymakers)

Markets are always governed (Vogel 2018), but they can be governed in a variety of ways (van Apeldoorn and de Graaff 2022):

Market-creating governance is about creating and expanding (digital) markets.
Market-correcting governance is about correcting (digital) markets with the goal to ensure their better functioning.
Market-constraining governance is about restricting (digital) markets to avoid harm to individuals, groups, or society at large.
Market-directing governance is about directing (digital) markets towards critical or strategic sectors or technologies.

Measuring Varieties of Market Governance

From the Workbench I

From the Workbench II

Thank you very much for your attention!

Acemoglu, Daron, and Simon Johnson. 2023. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity. First edition. New York: PublicAffairs.

Bradford, Anu. 2023. Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cini, Michelle, and Patryk Czulno. 2022. “Digital Single Market and the EU Competition Regime: An Explanation of Policy Change.” Journal of European Integration 44 (1): 41–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2021.2011260.

Cioffi, John W., Martin F. Kenney, and John Zysman. 2022. “Platform Power and Regulatory Politics: Polanyi for the Twenty-First Century.” New Political Economy 27 (5): 820–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2022.2027355.

Dammann, Finn, and Georg Glasze. 2023. “Governing Digital Circulation: The Quest for Data Control and Sovereignty in Germany.” Territory, Politics, Governance 11 (6): 1100–1120. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2022.2141850.

DeNardis, Laura. 2014. The Global War for Internet Governance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

European Council. 2020. “Special Meeting of the European Council (1 and 2 October 2020) – Conclusions.” https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/45910/021020-euco-final-conclusions.pdf.

Falkner, Gerda, Sebastian Heidebrecht, Anke Obendiek, and Timo Seidl. 2024. “Digital Sovereignty - Rhetoric and Reality.” Journal of European Public Policy. Forthcoming.

Farrell, Henry, and Abraham Newman. 2023. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Helleiner, Eric. 2021. The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History. Ithaca [New York]: Cornell University Press.

King, Julian. 2019. “Commissioner King’s Remarks at the 2019 Digital Resilience Summit of the Lisbon Council.” https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/speech_19_7261.

König, Pascal D. 2022. “Fortress Europe 4.0? An Analysis of EU Data Governance Through the Lens of the Resource Regime Concept.” European Policy Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1002/epa2.1160.

Lehdonvirta, Vili. 2022. Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Newman, Abraham L. 2020. “Digital Policy-Making in the European Union: Building the New Economy of an Information Society.” In Policy-Making in the European Union, edited by Helen Wallace, Mark A. Pollack, Christilla Roederer-Rynning, and Alasdair R. Young, Eighth edition, 275–96.

van Apeldoorn, Bastiaan, and Naná de Graaff. 2022. “The State in Global Capitalism Before and After the Covid-19 Crisis.” Contemporary Politics 28 (3): 306–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2021.2022337.

Vogel, Steven Kent. 2018. Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work. Oxford University Press.