Since the legislative period under Ursula von der Leyen, the development of a European path of digitalisation has become a central component of EU policy. This path towards digital or technological sovereignty is presented by the EU Commission as a humane vision of the global internet guided by European values. It also appears in many critical discourses as the best or at least least harmful alternative to the digital monopolies of the USA and the all-encompassing digital surveillance of China. The contribution argues that the framing of digital sovereignty as a mere defence of European values obscures the view of the political-economic constraints and dependencies against which the EU's digital policy takes place and thus prevents a broader understanding of geopolitical shifts and influences in the course of the distributional struggles of the digital transformation.
The article understands the attempt to assert digital sovereignty from a critical-geographical perspective as a process of the specific economisation of the last two decades and sheds light on its contradictory evolvement in the EU. To this end, first an overview of the history and spatially uneven implementation of the digital transformation is given (Moisio/Pfeiffer/Zuboff/Staab). Non-European companies have managed to monopolise access to digital competitive advantages and threaten to absorb core European industries (Schadt). Against this background, key contradictions in which the digital transformation in the EU is taking place are addressed: (1) between the EU and external competitors, (2) between European economies, (3) between European companies and (4) between capital and labour. Finally, these contradictions are exemplified on the European digital infrastructure project Gaia-X and a prospect of possible transformations of the contradictions is given.
Mots clés : Digital Sovereignty|European Union|Digital Transformation|Knowledge-Based Economies|European Values
A103094MM