{"id":85590,"date":"2025-10-02T15:01:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T15:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com"},"modified":"2025-10-03T16:16:41","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T16:16:41","slug":"reclaiming-europes-digital-sovereignty","status":"publish","type":"wpm-article","link":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/reclaiming-europes-digital-sovereignty","title":{"rendered":"Reclaiming Europe\u2019s Digital Sovereignty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: Noema is committed to hosting meaningful intellectual debate. This piece is in conversation with another, written by Benjamin Bratton, the Berggruen Institute’s Antikythera program director. Read it here: “Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily.<\/a>“<\/em><\/p>

The Cartography Of Digital Power<\/strong><\/h2>

Geopolitical power once flowed through armies and treaties, but today it courses through silicon wafers, server farms and algorithmic systems. These invisible digital infrastructures and architectures shape every aspect of modern life. “The Stack” \u2014 interlocking layers of hardware, software, networks and data \u2014 has become the operating system of modern political and economic power.<\/p>

The global race to control the Stack defines the emerging world order. The United States consolidates its dominance through initiatives like Stargate, which fuses AI development directly to proprietary chips and hyperscale data centers, creating insurmountable barriers to competition. China advances through systematic industrial policy and its Digital Silk Road, achieving unprecedented integration from chip design to AI deployment across Asia and beyond. These are deliberate strategies of technological imperialism.<\/p>

Europe occupies a paradoxical position: a regulatory leader but infrastructurally dependent. We Europeans have set global standards through GDPR and the AI Act. Our research institutions remain world-class. Yet just 4% of global cloud infrastructure is European-owned. European governments, businesses and citizens depend entirely on systems controlled by Amazon, Microsoft and Google \u2014 companies subject to the U.S. CLOUD Act’s extraterritorial surveillance requirements. When we use \u201cour\u201d digital services, we’re actually using American infrastructure governed by American law for American interests.<\/p>

This dependency isn’t abstract \u2014 it’s existential. In the 21st century, those who control digital infrastructure control the conditions of possibility for democracy itself. Europe faces a choice: build sovereign technological capacity or accept digital colonization.<\/p>

The Charges Against European Tech Discourse<\/strong><\/h2>

The attempt to blame Europe\u2019s digital paralysis on its critical intellectuals \u2014 those who resist Silicon Valley accelerationism, crypto hyper-libertarianism and techno-authoritarianism \u2014 is profoundly misdirected. At a Venice Architecture Biennale event I organized, \u201cArchipelagos of Possible Futures,\u201d Benjamin Bratton leveled four charges against Europe\u2019s approach to AI and digital sovereignty. He argued, first, that Europe follows a \u201cregulate first, build later (maybe)\u201d strategy that breeds dependency rather than sovereignty; second, that its tech critics are \u201ctechnophobic public intellectuals\u201d who only say why not to build; third, that this critical culture produces \u201canalysis paralysis\u201d that blocks the very innovation it seeks; and fourth, that environmental and social concerns are manipulated to defend intellectual status rather than confront real technological challenges.<\/p>

Each charge misses the mark. Europe\u2019s technological predicament is not the result of excessive critique but of three decades spent dismantling the very capacities needed for technological sovereignty. The real choice we face is not between criticism and construction, but between authoritarian technological models and democratic alternatives. And building such alternatives demands that we understand how power has historically operated through technology. To dismiss, as Bratton does, thinkers like Evgeny Morozov, Kate Crawford and Marina Otero, is to embrace precisely the techno-accelerationist logic I believe must be confronted today.<\/p>

Understanding the material realities of AI infrastructure \u2014 its environmental costs, labor dependencies and power concentrations \u2014 isn’t \u201cfearmongering\u201d but a prerequisite for sustainable, democratic development. And Europe’s emerging independent technological ecosystem demonstrates that democratic construction is already happening when we create the right conditions.<\/p>

Most fundamentally, dismissing regulation as a European pathology \u2014 in Bratton\u2019s phrasing, \u201cthe EU has AI regulation but not much AI to regulate\u201d \u2014 reveals profound superficiality. Regulation is not the problem. The problem is a lack of enforcement and the absence of an industrial policy at scale. Indeed, if European regulation were so ineffective, why did the Trump administration go so far as to threaten bans and sanctions against European regulators who dared to implement digital laws? Precisely because effective regulation is seen in Washington as a direct obstacle to U.S. technological supremacy.<\/p>\n

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(EuroStack)<\/div>\n <\/figcaption>\n\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n\n<\/div>

The Roots Of Europe’s Technological Predicament<\/strong><\/h2>

The roots of Europe’s predicament are to be found, first, in the stranglehold of neoliberal orthodoxy on European economic thinking. This caused decades of austerity and made Europe the poster child of hyper-globalization: free trade without economic statecraft, bans on state aid, trickle-down economics dogmas, no long-term public investment and the systematic rejection of industrial policy. All of this was gospel preached by the U.S., even as Washington protected its own national security interests and subsidized Silicon Valley. Europe, in other words, internalized the ideology of market neutrality while others practiced strategic capitalism.<\/p>

American technological dominance wasn’t born from free markets but from massive state intervention \u2014 DARPA, NASA and the National Science Foundation provided the patient capital and guaranteed markets that made Silicon Valley possible. As Linda Weiss’s work<\/a> on the national security state and Mariana Mazzucato\u2019s research<\/a> on the entrepreneurial state have documented, innovation ecosystems do not emerge spontaneously \u2014 they are structured through public direction. Every core technology in the iPhone \u2014 the internet, GPS, touchscreens, voice recognition \u2014 emerged from decades of public research funding. The Pentagon’s procurement budgets functioned as venture capital at a continental scale.<\/p>

Meanwhile, Europe internalized market fundamentalism more thoroughly than its own inventors intended. The Stability and Growth Pact<\/a> threatened strategic industrial investment as a violation of fiscal discipline. Competition policy, instead of preventing Big Tech dominance via bold antitrust action, prevented the formation of European champions while American firms achieved monopolistic scale. Europeans were lectured that industrial policy violated market principles by the very Americans who systematically practiced it.<\/p>\n\n

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\n “In the 21st century, those who control digital infrastructure control the conditions of possibility for democracy itself.” <\/div>\n\n \n