From European Union's current digital dependency to desired digital sovereignty: the path towards European technological unification

The growing convergence of traditional industries and digital technologies has enhanced EU overreliance on foreign hardware and software inputs, better served or only served by US and Chinese firms. The expansion of digital technologies towards general-purpose and dual-use applications first questions European traditional industries’ ability to retain control and reap the full benefits of their now-required digital transformation. It also casts doubt on the EU capability to provide - if necessary - secured and autonomous digital supply chains thanks to home-grown industries. US-China rising confrontation over technological hegemony makes the ability for EU Member-States to make autonomous choices in terms of digital policies even more compelling.
Against that backdrop, the European institutions and some Member-States now stress the necessity to preserve their “strategic autonomy” and “digital sovereignty”. However, already in 2000, EU Lisbon strategy was acknowledging the imperative for the emergence of EU-based high-tech champions in ICT industries. The industrial policy goals set in the Lisbon strategy and replicated in the agenda 2020 have failed to convincingly materialise, raising the question of the necessary economic and political conditions for the European Union to successfully develop the missing digital capabilities, as a basis for strategic autonomy.
This paper will first show that EU digital missing capabilities not only entail strong technological dependencies, but they also bear the risk for Europe to lose its industrial competitive advantages and they cast some doubts about EU strategic autonomy. Such a situation has triggered at the EU level the implementation of digital sovereignty-driven industrial policies, which turn out to mainly focus on the preservation of EU industrial strongholds and not necessarily on bridging all missing capabilities’ gap. Furthermore, to achieve these restricted objectives, the EU relies on unchanged policy instruments although these instruments have in the past failed to convincingly develop territorially based ICT capacities. In a way, the extent of EU digital dependencies contrasts starkly with the above-mentioned policy limitations.
This paper argues that the limitations to EU industrial policy goals and instruments are strongly linked to the long-standing resilience of industrial and technological rivalries between EU national champions, mainly specialised in mature and traditional sectors. These rivalries have contributed to structurally shape European industrial policies and the related EU institutional framework. In doing so, they hampered some unifying social cohesion around the rising stakes of the digital transformation, unlike in the US and China. Therefore, this paper concludes that EU’s digital sovereignty goal is structurally linked to the emergence of such a “digital cohesion” and to the alignment of national corporate elites through intra-European industrial and capital alliances, further interlocking industrial vested interests (to be further investigated).