Julian Ringhof and José Ignacio Torreblanca
Today’s major powers engage in comprehensive global technology politics. The weaponisation, mastering, and control of digital technologies is the new ‘Great Game’. These power dynamics are helping shape technological spheres of influence. Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific – but also in central Eastern Europe and the Balkans – have fallen or may soon fall under Chinese or Russian technological influence or dominance. China is luring countries into technological dependencies to undermine their political sovereignty through its Digital Silk Road (DSR) initiative. Beijing also shields its own citizens from foreign influence with its ‘great firewall’ and develops industrial strategies to secure its technological autonomy from the West. It uses digital disinformation to influence public opinion in other countries, mounts cyberattacks and cyberespionage to strengthen its industrial base, strategically deploys attractively-priced 5G technologies abroad to gain control of telecom networks, and tries to impose its technical standards through international organisations.
Together with Russia, China is attempting to ingrain authoritarian values into the global cyberspace. Russia is also leveraging and restricting mass media and social networks to protect its interests, shielding its population from democratic temptations, and waging an information war against the West and its allies with the aim of undermining citizens’ faith in democracy.
Meanwhile, the United States tries to offset Chinese and Russian influence, seeks to maintain its cutting-edge advantage on military artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies, and backs and protects the interests of its major technology companies globally. It also denies other nations access to key technologies, monitors critical investments in the technology sector to avoid security risks, seeks to secure and control critical supply chains (especially of semiconductors), and imposes export controls and even embargoes on sensitive technologies.
As for the European Union, the Brussels institutions are trying to shape global standards of privacy and data protection, digital platforms, and AI according to European values using the attractiveness and power of its internal market. The EU also promotes digital partnerships with like-minded countries and allies – and announced, in December 2021, the “Global Gateway” initiative as the EU version of China’s DSR.
All this implies that the EU has begun to play the global technology game. But it is nowhere near its rivals in terms of sophistication, strategy, resources, and vision. If the EU is to learn to speak the language of power, it needs to understand its efforts as part of an integrated digital strategy that can both cooperate and compete with those of China, Russia, and even the US.
The war in Ukraine is helping this EU strategy process. The war has become an accelerator of existing trends and challenges, turning technology into yet another key battleground. Before the war, the EU had already decided it needed to become a geopolitical actor. Indeed, Ursula von der Leyen declared in 2019 that she intended to form a “Geopolitical Commission”. One can already see the effects of this new orientation in areas such as trade, defence, health, and digital technologies. The European Commission has already launched a variety of ambitious initiatives at the nexus of geopolitics and technology: digital partnerships with Japan and Singapore; the EU-US and the EU-India Trade and Technology Councils (TTCs); the Strategic Compass; and the Global Gateway.
But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the EU has found a renewed impetus to engage in global technology politics. The EU has expanded its assistance to Ukraine both in the cybersecurity and disinformation domains. It has also approved a comprehensive set of technology sanctions and renewed its commitment to strengthening EU technological sovereignty. Meanwhile, Russia and China have cemented their ‘no-limits’ alliance and committed themselves to accelerate their technological decoupling from the West.
At this difficult moment, the EU should speed up its plan to become a global technology player. It is now time to put all the union’s technological and digital capabilities behind one vision and devise a joint strategy to deploy them. This paper sets out how the EU might accomplish that critical task. In the first section, its lays out the vision and the goals of such a strategy. Section two takes stock of EU technology and external digital policy initiatives so far. The next three sections look at what the EU should do along three digital diplomacy dimensions (values, security, and markets). Finally, the paper proposes a series of policy recommendations to help the EU bridge its current gap and move from its current stance to the status of a fully committed and capable global technology actor.
A digital vision
If the EU is to invest in setting up its own digital and technology foreign policy, it needs to be clear about what its goals are. The ultimate aim of this policy should be to give the EU both the strategy and the tools to transform it into a global technological actor able to sustain its interests and values at home and abroad, and in competition and cooperation with other powers. All the elements laid out in this brief are therefore focused on turning the EU into a capable and effective geopolitical actor in the field of digital technology.
The need for such a strategy is clear. The EU has set itself the goal of becoming a technologically advanced and decarbonised economy. The success of this major economic transition crucially depends on the EU’s capacity to master, command, and have full and unrestricted access to critical digital technologies. These technologies are increasingly contested, disputed, and even weaponised by third actors. Access to them may thus be denied or made conditional on political goals, jeopardising this transition. In a worst-case scenario, rather than allowing the EU to become a more autonomous and powerful actor, the transition to a digital and decarbonised economy may create new vulnerabilities and simply change the nature of the EU’s geopolitical and economic dependence.
The future of the EU also depends on its capacity to sustain democracy and democratic institutions, both at home and abroad. However, for 15 consecutive years, democracy has been in decline around the world, both in the number and in the quality of democracies. Coincident with this decline, both born-again and long-standing authoritarian regimes are growing stronger and more challenging. Misuse of digital technologies has contributed to these trends. This not only serves to undermine democracies by fuelling political polarisation and providing the tools for foreign influence operations, but it also helps authoritarian governments cement their grip on their citizens. Countering these trends is not only a moral necessity for the EU but also essential to securing its global interests.
The vision behind EU digital policy should thus be to secure and promote both its economic power base and its political model, at home and globally. To achieve this vision, the EU needs to act strategically. Acting strategically means that in designing its means and ends, the union needs to understand what other countries and powers are doing and how it plans to compete and cooperate with them. China and Russia have started a process of decoupling from the West, to which they seek to attract other countries. The rules-based order is being replaced by a power-based order. Geoeconomics (or sheer mercantilism) is back. States are using economic and technological interdependencies to impose their views and secure their geopolitical interests. It is a new world order – and in that world, technology becomes a key element of power, sovereignty, and survival.
To secure its interests, values, and global standing, the EU should embed its open-market and human-centric approach to technology in its alliances, partnerships, and the multilateral organisations to which it belongs. In a world where technology is disputed and weaponised, the more technologically sovereign like-minded countries are, the more the EU’s own sovereignty and its global geo-technology standing are assured; the more allies are protected against foreign influence operations, cyberattacks, and coercion derived from technological vulnerabilities, the more alignment and cooperation with the EU at the global level will be facilitated. The EU should therefore aim not at technological independence but at mutually reinforced and shared technological sovereignty with its allies.
To achieve this aim, the EU first needs to become an attractive partner for other countries. This attraction should extend to those who have signed up to Chinese digital infrastructures and investments or are targeted by China’s, Russia’s, and other countries’ propaganda and influence operations. The Global Gateway initiative can help this process if it focuses on strategic opportunities to strengthen alliances and undermine Chinese and Russian spheres of influence.
The EU also needs to strengthen its existing alliances. This need affects first and most fundamentally the US, but also applies to other partners. With the US, which in many fields is a technology competitor, the EU must settle its differences. The EU and the US have distinct approaches to technology governance. In Europe, values and regulation play a greater role than they do in the US. This distinction has so far prevented regulatory harmonisation and led to tensions. Still, while these differences may prevent policy harmonisation, they should still allow policy convergence, or at least coexistence – particularly given the common global challenges the EU and the US face. Clearly, the EU and the US cannot counter Russia’s and China’s aggressive technological strategies while refusing to compromise among themselves. Much as they did after the second world war, the US and Europe need to reach a wide agreement to sustain a global and free democratic technology order. The post-war order required rules-based institutions and military alliances to secure free trade across key straits and blue waters. The new order will require the transatlantic alliance to work together to facilitate a flow of data that preserves privacy, and to embed democratic values in technology regulations and governance at the global level. In sum, to stand up for its interests and values, the EU must become a global technology player. The EU and its member states can deliver on this vision by acting along three policy dimensions (values, security, and markets) with a common strategy and new and enhanced policy tools. As the next section shows, the EU is already on the road to global influence in technology. But it has a long way to go, and the most difficult part still lies ahead.
The EU: a geo-technology player in the making
In the last decade, the EU has gradually woken up to the geopolitical implications of digital technologies. This awakening can be linked to a series of events beginning in 2013 with the disclosures by former NSA employee Edward Snowden followed by Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, the Brexit referendum, the 2019 European Parliament election, and various EU member states’ national elections. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 helped put the spotlight on big US technology companies and the need to better regulate them. Similarly, the onset of international discussions over the Chinese 5G provider Huawei that same year raised greater awareness of EU technology vulnerabilities.
In parallel to this, the global impact of the EU’s 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), even if unexpected, turned the EU into a global technology actor and showed it the way to leverage the attractiveness and power of its internal market. Equipped with these influential regulatory tools, the EU is now seeking to become the global leader in the regulation of digital technologies. EU digital legislation is no longer just inward-looking. The union now proactively seeks to leverage its regulatory capacity and nurture digital partnerships and alliances to globally project its values. Building on previous successes, the EU is now in the process of implementing innovative regulatory regimes for AI, data governance, and digital platforms that, like the GDPR, have the potential to go global.
This new geopolitical logic underpins several new EU geo-technology initiatives. In the EU-US TTC, launched in 2021, the union and the US are currently negotiating enhanced cooperation in technology and standards development, digital regulation, connectivity investments, and the security aspects of advanced technologies. The swift and harmonised EU and US export controls on advanced technologies imposed on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in February this year are the first success story of this new transatlantic technology cooperation.
Beyond the EU-US TTC, the EU has announced a new TTC with India, launched its first digital partnership with Japan, while negotiating additional partnerships with Singapore and South Korea. With the Global Gateway initiative, the EU seeks to link digital development investments in lower income countries with values-based digital regulation and geopolitical thinking.
The EU has also taken steps to reduce its technological vulnerabilities and asymmetric dependencies through investment in technological capabilities. These efforts have been heavily influenced by China’s technological assertiveness, the US-EU technology clashes during the Trump administration, and most recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Along these lines, the EU has developed new instruments and cooperation mechanisms, such as the Toolbox for 5G security and the Joint Cyber Unit, to secure EU cyberspace.
To further strengthen its technological capabilities and reduce its asymmetric dependencies, the union is decisively investing in the development of critical technologies including semiconductors, through the European Chips Act; supercomputing, through the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking; and 6G development, for example, through the Hexa-X project. Moreover, the EU has rolled out a host of strategies addressing issues at the nexus of digital technology and geopolitics, including the 2030 Digital Compass, the Strategic Compass, the Cybersecurity Strategy, and the Standardisation Strategy. The breadth of the issues addressed in these various efforts underscore the ubiquity of geo-technological dynamics across diverse policy fields.
While the EU was building its digital standing, Russia invaded Ukraine for the second time. As so often, war became an accelerator of existing trends. Long before Russia’s invasion on 24 February, Ukraine had become ground zero for Russian digital and hybrid warfare, with hundreds of thousands of cyber-attacks and mass disinformation campaigns intended to destabilise the country, undermine Ukraine’s democratically elected government, confuse Western public opinion, and ensure the global south will rally around Russia.
In its response to the war, the West has deployed massive sanctions on advanced technologies with the intention of paralysing Russia’s industrial base and weakening its military capabilities. And while the Kremlin has prohibited and blocked several foreign digital platforms in Russia to impede the flow of outside information into the country, many other Western technology companies independently decided to cease operating in Russia. Both developments foreshadow a new digital iron curtain. The war in Ukraine has already demonstrated that digital technologies now shape the response to international conflict.
The legislative and policy measures taken so far by the EU are commendable. However, there is still much to do. The EU continues to be a technology research powerhouse, but its success in the commercialisation and the securing of significant market shares in digital technologies has been limited. Today, Europe is lagging in the development of advanced technologies including semiconductors, AI, and cloud and high-performance computing.
As the EU rolls out initiative after initiative, a cohesive strategy is missing to tie these measures together to improve coordination, set priorities, and identify gaps. Due to a lack of information, resources, and engagement the union is currently not realising its full potential – and not reaping the full geopolitical benefits of its digital policy efforts. Because such an overarching framework is lacking, important information is not flowing between the relevant Brussels and member state institutions and towards the EU delegations around the world that play a crucial role in forwarding European digital foreign policy interests.
Both the European Commission and the member states have identified these challenges. The commission’s 2030 Digital Compass, approved in March 2020, said that the EU needs a “comprehensive and coordinated approach to digital coalition-building and diplomatic outreach”. This is a position shared by the member states, which at the 12 July 2021 Foreign Affairs Council (FAC) called for the EU high representative and vice president (HRVP) and the commission “to formulate a comprehensive, ambitious European external digital policy in coherence with existing internal policies”.
The diagnosis is clear. If the EU wants to become a global technology actor, it must develop and deploy digital diplomacy tools. The next three sections spell out in detail how to deliver on this mandate and propose a policy approach along three dimensions: values, security, and markets. More precisely, they lay out a path
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to promote a human rights-focused and rules-based global technological order;
to secure the EU, its partners, and other like-minded countries in the analogical and digital worlds;
to promote fair, open, sustainable, and inclusive digital markets.
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