Paper short abstract:

Modern states and their Westphalian notion of sovereignty are in a knotty relationship with the digitally fueled ‘network society’. Analysing German parliament plenary speeches I aim to explore politicians’ interpretations of state sovereignty around topics explicitly connected to digitalisation.

Paper long abstract:

With the many changes an increasingly digitalised network society (Castells 1987) brings with it, various voices from inside and outside academia have portrayed digital technologies as both an existential threat to its authority and sovereignty as well as a new powerful resource to intensify control mechanisms. Investigating these frictions between digitality and state sovereignty in the Westphalian tradition, I believe parliamentary speeches to be one (of many) important sites for critical engagement. Seeking to identify the various implicit and explicit conceptions on the topic at hand, digital statecraft as a conceptual lens helps shedding light on politicians' attempts to make sense of at times unpredictable developments. In this I am guided somewhat by Fourcade and Gordon (2020), who proposed state politics to be guided by the view of a citizen rather than a state. This additional perspective allows me to particularly highlight the abovementioned conflict of digitality and state sovereignty and the rationales behind the political debate around it. Preliminary analysis does indeed show that politicians' trust of emergent digital ideas and technology is very much dependent on the particular case and their perceived impact on the state as an institution. Technologies that are expected to add positively to the country (through economic growth, international prestige, and other means) are much more positively conceived as those whose use is yet unclear or expected to be actually harmful to the country (e.g. e-government vs. social media). The study thus tangibly illustrates the process of digital statecrafting undertaken in the Bundestag.