Battles in the digital space have taken center stage in today’s global power struggles. The EU cannot stay aside.
To become a geopolitical actor, the EU needs to learn to play global technology politics and should adopt an ambitious digital diplomacy strategy.
A digital diplomacy strategy will enable the EU to better defend its values, enhance its security, and foster digital markets at home and worldwide.
To counter Chinese and Russian influence in the technology realm, the EU should build digital alliances with like-minded countries. The EU needs to seek greater convergence with the US and other Western allies, and offer the global south an attractive alternative path to digital development.
For the European External Action Service and the European Commission to succeed in this task, the concurrence of the EU institutions, the member states, and a variety of private stakeholders is essential.
Introduction
Today’s major powers engage in comprehensive global technology politics. The weaponizations, 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 organizations.
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 in 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, defense, 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 (TTC); 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, it 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 decarbonized 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 weaponized by third actors. Access to them may thus be denied or made conditional on political goals, jeopardizing 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 decarbonized 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 polarization 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. Economics (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 organizations to which it belongs. In a world where technology is disputed and weaponized, the more technologically sovereign like-minded countries are, the more the EU’s own sovereignty and its global biotechnology 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 harmonization and led to tensions. Still, while these differences may prevent policy harmonization, 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.
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