Short abstract:

The paper exposes the conceptual link between ‘sovereignty’ and ‘competitiveness’ in EU digital strategy. It shows that it is rooted in modern frameworks of necessity and instrumentality rather than freedom and plurality, which prevents the meaningful twinning of the green and digital transitions.

Long abstract:

This paper aims to foreground the economic dimension of EU digital policymaking and its role in the ‘sovereigntist turn’. Indeed, digital sovereignty has become a central notion in EU digital strategy, often invoking imaginaries of being constrained and dominated by other actors. While this has been addressed in some of the scholarly literature on digital sovereignty, (e.g. Bellanova et al., 2022; Pohle and Thiel, 2020; Thumfart, 2022), it has not been sufficiently linked to neoliberal policymaking on a conceptual level. As such, the paper builds on the tracing and analysis of the ‘competitiveness’ discourse in the development of the digital strategy and policies of the EU. The analysis reveals the logic of competitiveness as central to digital policymaking and politics. Using the political theory of Hannah Arendt, it suggests treating competitiveness as a discourse of power that perpetuates a fundamentally modern conceptualization of agents and relations, and which is in tension with the EU’s newly proposed, more human-centered policymaking. Tracing this conceptualization also reveals a fundamental contradiction in the EU’s recent twinning of the digital and green transitions. Namely, if the gist of the EU’s digital politics lies in a desire to control and dominate others in the pursuit of the economic growth and competitiveness of EU businesses, then this contradicts the essence of the green transition, which would require that policymaking takes seriously the limits to economic growth. This would result in a shift in mindset towards less competitive and more co-operative modes of conceiving of politics.