Digital Sovereignty: Europe’s Favourite (Empty) Buzzword
Austria has kicked off the latest effort to define what “digital sovereignty” actually means for Europe. Vienna has shared the first draft of a non-binding EU declaration laying out guiding principles to shape future priorities, stressing that digital sovereignty is about “autonomy, not isolation.” The text highlights data sovereignty, long-term investment in key technologies like AI, chips, and quantum, and giving preference to European and open-source solutions in public procurement.
This new initiative perfectly captures the paradox at the heart of the debate. Even as policymakers try to pour concrete meaning into the phrase—listing specific technologies and procurement rules—the concept itself remains Europe’s favourite, and most politically convenient, buzzword.
The Magic of Meaningless Words
Few political ideas in Brussels have enjoyed such broad appeal—or such conceptual emptiness — as digital sovereignty. Like “innovation,” “resilience,” or “strategic autonomy,” it is a term engineered for universal applause. Who, after all, could oppose sovereignty?
As Simon Wardley dryly noted back in 2020, the whole debate feels like “generals trying to win a war by giving it the right name.”
From European Commissioners to tech CEOs, everyone insists that Europe must take control of its digital destiny. Yet when you ask what this actually means — whose control, over what, and for what purpose — the answers mostly dissolve into fog. The term has become what legal scholar Louis Henkin once called sovereignty itself: a catchword, a substitute for thinking and precision.
Digital sovereignty illustrates how political language creates the illusion of strategic clarity precisely when ideas are least coherent. Finnish researcher Juha Ruohonen offered perhaps the best metaphor: the EU and the US are engaged in a game of ping pong, swinging their rackets furiously even though the ball — technological power — has already rolled off the table. Both sides maintain the performance because it feels like action.
The concept’s success lies in its elasticity. It unites techno-nationalists and digital rights activists, industrial strategists and privacy lawyers, all under one comfortable banner of control. As academics Stéphane Couture and Sophie Toupin observe in their 2019 study, it serves as a projection surface for a wide variety of political demands.
But scratch the surface, and “digital sovereignty” begins to look less like a coherent policy goal and more like a collective therapy session for a continent anxious about its place in the digital world.
Sovereignty’s Many Lives
To understand why “digital sovereignty” is such a convenient illusion, it helps to remember that “sovereignty” has always been one. Few ideas in political theory have been stretched, abused, and reinvented as often.
From Bodin and Hobbes to the United Nations Charter, sovereignty has meant everything from the divine right of kings to the juridical equality of states. Its “zombie” quality — always pronounced dead, yet forever revived — makes it the perfect rhetorical tool. As legal scholar Theodore Christakis puts it, professor Michel Virally aptly defined sovereignty as “the most cursed” and “the most revered” of legal concepts, despised for its vagueness yet indispensable for political legitimacy.
Couture and Toupin trace this mutability into the digital age. They note how the term now appears not only in policy papers but also in activist circles, hacker communities, and indigenous data governance movements. “Technological sovereignty,” they write, is used by anarchist collectives to describe self-managed infrastructure and by governments to justify firewalls. Sovereignty has escaped the state.
The irony? Sovereignty discourse tends to be loudest where actual power is weakest. When authority is solid, sovereignty is taken for granted; when it is fragile, politicians invoke it endlessly. That observation fits Europe perfectly. The more digital dependency grows, the more European institutions insist on their digital independence.
The Brussels Effect and the Illusion of Power
Christakis’ 2020 study on European digital sovereignty offers one of the most lucid dissections of the term. From a legal perspective, he argues, it makes little sense, but from a political one, he acknowledges it is an extremely powerful concept. Its ambiguity allows everyone to project their fears and ambitions onto it.
He identifies two distinct meanings:
- Sovereignty as regulatory power — the ability to make and enforce rules that others must follow.
- Sovereignty as strategic autonomy — the capacity to act without being constrained by technological dependencies.
On the first count, Christakis shows that Europe is already a superpower. Far from being powerless, the EU has achieved global influence through what Columbia Law Professor Anu Bradford famously termed the “Brussels Effect”, a concept we analysed in our informations lab “global lab”. When the EU regulates—whether privacy (GDPR), competition law, AI or content moderation—its standards often become de facto global norms. It shapes how data is processed in California, how chemicals are used in Japan, and how platforms moderate hate speech in Latin America, as companies would often rather harmonize upwards than produce EU-compliant versions of their products.
Yet this power is one-dimensional. Europe may write the rulebook, but it doesn’t build the platforms. Regulation alone does not confer technological capability. To borrow Bruegel think tank Guntram Wolff’s wry phrasing: “Referees don’t win” the game.
The tension between regulatory sovereignty and technological dependency lies at the heart of the EU’s identity crisis. It can discipline the digital economy but not drive it. Hence the growing obsession with the second meaning—strategic autonomy—and the quest for homegrown tech champions.
The Politics of Strategic Autonomy
The rhetoric of digital sovereignty reached fever pitch in 2018, when then-Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker declared in his State of the Union that “the time for European sovereignty” had come. At the time, as Christakis recalls, “half of Europe criticized him.” Two years later, the concept was everywhere: in speeches by Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen, and Thierry Breton.
Macron, in a now-famous Economist interview, used the word sovereignty more than a dozen times, albeit with different flavours.
Breton, the EU’s Internal Market Commissioner, went further in a speech:
“Digital sovereignty relies on three inseparable pillars: computing power, control over our data, and secure connectivity.”
The European Council’s conclusions in October 2020 also adopted the term:
“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.”
Translated into policy, this has meant projects such as Gaia-X, the “European cloud,” and the Data Governance Act, designed to keep more data—and thus more control—within European borders.
But the rhetoric of strategic autonomy can easily slide into techno-nationalism. Calls for “data localization” or “European-only” cloud services risk echoing the very protectionist instincts Europe criticizes in others. “How could Europe avoid policy inconsistency and contradiction,” Christakis asks, “if it enters into a “The Chinese do it, we will do it” approach?”
Five Sovereignties for the Price of One
Couture and Toupin’s literature analysis reveals that “sovereignty” now operates in at least five distinct registers:
- Cyberspace sovereignty — inherited from John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which proclaimed, “You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
- State digital sovereignty — used by governments like China, Russia, and increasingly the EU to assert control over data and infrastructure.
- Indigenous digital sovereignty — focused on cultural and data self-determination.
- Social movement sovereignty — where activists advocate self-hosted, open-source alternatives to corporate platforms.
- Personal digital sovereignty — expressed through encryption, privacy, and data ownership practices.
Each of these uses claims the same word but for radically different ends—some to resist the state, others to empower it. They also observe that sovereignty talk often arises precisely where control is slipping away. When power is stable, there is no need to name it. That’s why you rarely hear American policymakers invoke “digital sovereignty”—the U.S. has it. Europe, by contrast, talks about it constantly.
Toward Intellectual Honesty
The obsession with digital sovereignty reveals less about technology than about Europe’s psyche. It reflects a deep discomfort with dependence—on American platforms, Asian hardware, and global data flows. Yet in an interconnected digital economy, not every form of dependence is failure; it can sometimes be the condition of participation.
Christakis argues that Europe should focus on managing interdependence rather than chasing the mirage of autonomy. Couture and Toupin make a similar point from the opposite direction: we must ask who defines technological sovereignty and for what purpose. Sovereignty, they remind us, is never neutral; it is always an act of legitimization. In other words, when policymakers invoke “digital sovereignty,” they are not describing a state of affairs; they are performing one. The discourse itself becomes an assertion of power.
Beyond the Buzzword
“Digital sovereignty” will continue to adorn strategy papers, summit communiqués, and press releases. It satisfies a bureaucratic appetite for decisive language, even as its content remains undefined. Like “strategic autonomy,” it provides rhetorical shelter against uncertainty.
But as a guiding concept, it can be dangerously misleading. It encourages policymakers to equate control with security, and autonomy with innovation. In practice, the opposite is often true: openness breeds resilience, and collaboration drives progress.
Europe’s digital future will not be secured by declaring independence from others but by investing in capacity, literacy, and trust. It will depend less on who owns the servers than on who imagines the systems.
As long as “digital sovereignty” remains a slogan instead of a strategy, Europe will continue mistaking the theatre of autonomy for the practice of power. The danger is not only hypocrisy but also self-harm. Overregulation could hinder innovation, reduce competitiveness, and even weaken Europe’s influence. The continent risks becoming both the world’s regulatory conscience and its technological museum.
Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research
