‘Rescuing Europe’ and ‘balancing powers’: A postcolonial critique of European digital sovereignty

Abstract

In the last decades, the term digital sovereignty, together with technological sovereignty and strategic autonomy, has become common vocabulary within the EU. While originating in discussions about global computation and the erosion of national sovereignty, the discourses underpinning the use of digital sovereignty resonate with earlier colonial notions of ‘rescuing Europe’ and the ‘balance of powers’ recurring throughout the history of European integration. The discussions about EU digital sovereignty and its infrastructuring remind us of the EU's colonial past by re-inserting so-called European values into the expansion of digital infrastructures in Europe and beyond. While the literature studying the emergence of European digital sovereignty showcases how the use of the term underlines and confirms a geopolitical turn within the EU, it has not yet discussed its historical colonial connections. This article demonstrates, first, that the sociotechnical imaginaries attached to the infrastructuring of the EU's digital sovereignty re-actualise an earlier nexus between the European integration project and colonial extractive infrastructures predating the creation of the EU. Second, with the case of the Global Gateway, this article shows how this nexus gains new life through the infrastructuring of digital sovereignty, again unfolding in the Global South.

Keywords

Digital sovereignty infrastructure EU post-colonialism imperial infrastructures

Introduction

In 2011, the CEO of the French radio station Skyrock, Pierre Bellanger, popularised the concept of digital sovereignty, claiming that France had become the vassal of the cyber empire of the USA. In various articles and interviews, he argued that by letting foreign states, namely, the USA and large American companies, unreservedly appropriate data from French and European citizens, France and Europe, more generally, had chosen a path towards digital subordination, provincialisation and colonisation (Christakis, 2020: 7). What was at stake was nothing less than France's national sovereignty and control over its territory, Bellanger explained later in his book La Souveraineté numérique in 2014. By then, the alarmist vocabulary of a colonised Europe had spread to European politics. One example is Catherine Morin-Desailly's report released in 2013 by the European Affairs Committee of the French Senate with the title L’Union européenne, colonie du monde numérique?

Given Europe's colonial past, describing France and Europe as a victim of colonisation might seem a bit ironic. However, as this article will show, the imaginary of a Europe under siege, threatened by superpowers in the West and the East, is not new; it has previously been invoked and spurred European colonialism. The pre-history of the European Union depicts a war-torn Europe and a debt economy in times of looming decolonisation. A recent intervention in the history of the EU (see, e.g. Hansen and Jonsson, 2014; Pasture, 2018) shows how the discussions leading up to the establishment of the European Union involved plans to extract untapped natural resources in Africa to restore Europe in ruins and as a way of alleviating geopolitical tensions and its economic dependency. It is this colonial imaginary that this article argues the discussions about digital sovereignty have given new life to.

The usage of the concept of European digital sovereignty has only grown stronger during the last two decades after its popularisation by Bellanger. Representatives of the European Union have adopted the concept of ‘digital sovereignty’ in policy documents and more recently aligned it rhetorically with a broader geopolitical expansive strategy. In 2020, the European Commission presented the recovery and resilient stimulus package called ‘NextGenerationEU’ (NGEU), which aimed to rebuild and strengthen Europe after the COVID-19 pandemic. Not least, according to the President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen, the NGEU was ‘about Europe's digital sovereignty, on a small and a large scale’ (Von der Leyen, 2020). The concept has become a strategic theme in the EU in the last few years (e.g. Glasze et al., 2023). Between 2019 and 2022, the President of the European Commission, the President of the European Council, and the High Representative of the Union of Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, all maintained the significance of strengthening the EU's strategic autonomy, often used interchangeably with Europe's digital sovereignty in public speeches (Bellanova et al., 2022: 337). In parallel with the introduction of NGEU, the EU launched a global connectivity package called the Global Gateway. This is, in a way, an extension of the NGEU. It is a strategy aiming to boost the EU's global political influence in the domains of digitalisation and green technology to strengthen both its digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy.

Together with related terms such as ‘technological sovereignty’ and ‘strategic autonomy’, digital sovereignty has gained a lot of scholarly attention during the last few years (Bellanova et al., 2022; Couldry and Mejias, 2019; e.g. Couture and Toupin, 2019; Pohle and Thiel, 2021). Much of this literature is largely in agreement that the use of digital sovereignty underpins and confirms a geopolitical turn within EU (see, e.g. Glasze et al., 2023; Monsees and Lambach, 2022). However, little attention, if any, has been directed towards the historical parallels with the early discussions about the European integration project from the early 20th century, a historical context that is crucial to understanding the geopolitical turn in the EU. Arguments of gaining control over critical digital infrastructures to rescue Europe from being squeezed between two superpowers (today, USA and China) and to rise again as a third option and a third force resonates with previous imaginaries throughout the history of European integration (Hansen and Jonsson, 2018; Pace and Roccu, 2020; Pasture, 2018).

By returning to the critical historical accounts about the European integration project and its colonial origins, this article seeks to redirect attention to two parallels that mark a continuity, or a return, to geopolitics, rather than a turn to it. First, the EU imagines a form of digital sovereignty with digital infrastructures that are built on European values, which needs to be safeguarded not only for the benefit of Europe but the entire world. This marks a parallel to an old image predating the EU. The trope to rescue Europe from the ruins of war for the sake of creating a world balance emerged during the interwar period in the early 20th century providing ideational substance in the creation of the European Community, later the EU. Second, the old imaginary, brought to life again through the integration of so-called European values into digital infrastructures, has a geographical and material inscription on postcolonial territory. Creating sovereign digital infrastructures in Europe requires resources from the Global South, rehearsing earlier attempts to gain control over infrastructures in colonial and postcolonial territory. To exemplify this parallel, the EU's strategic infrastructure project, the Global Gateway, will serve as an illustrative case in point. Hence, whether a turn or a return to geopolitics, this article argues that the EU's use of digital sovereignty renders visible an underpinning inherent coloniality that lingers on.

While many scholars have discussed the coloniality of digital/data infrastructures, digitalisation, and sovereignty (e.g. Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Kwet, 2019; Thatcher et al., 2016), not much has been written about the EU's/European digital sovereignty and its connections to European coloniality leading up to the formation of the European Union. The contribution, thus, consists of a postcolonial critique of European digital sovereignty and the geopolitical turn in the EU.

In what follows, I will attend to this article's theoretical and methodological approach. Then, I continue with the origins of the concept of digital sovereignty. This section opens the article for further analytical accounts about the sociotechnical imaginaries ingrained in the European integration project, lingering on in modified versions in the current discussions about European digital sovereignty and its infrastructuring.

Understanding the infrastructuring of European digital sovereignty through the lens of sociotechnical imaginaries

This article takes its epistemological cue from Musiani's (2022) recent call for an infrastructure-based research agenda to study the unfolding and materialisation of digital sovereignty. Musiani has recently suggested a research agenda with an analytical focus on the production and materialisation of infrastructures within states’ efforts to regain control over the Internet. In Musiani's understanding as in many other studies of digital sovereignty, infrastructures refer to the physical layer, such as submarine cables, data centres, and antennas, as well as the logical layer of protocols, policy, and legislations. Becoming sovereign in the digital domain implies, hence, policies that target the multi-industrial aspects of digital infrastructures. Following Bowker and Star (1999), Musiani emphasises the importance of attending to the connections and relationality that maintain and produce the infrastructures and how states re-negotiate and materialise practices to reassert and regain state sovereignty within the digital sphere. However, as the literature on European digital sovereignty has highlighted (e.g. Bellanova et al., 2022; Glasze et al., 2023), the concept of sovereignty within an EU framework rhymes poorly with the EU member state's procedural autonomy. This identified anomaly prompts questions that are not new to European history but resonate with issues of European integration beyond the digital. Hence, researching the infrastructuring of the EU's digital sovereignty requires, this article proposes, an analytical focus on the re-articulations of European values. When we ask how European values within EU policy discourse are re-articulated against new technologies, we are immediately urged to ask new questions concerning these values’ origins and their relationship to coloniality. These are pasts, I argue, that are present in the discourses about digital sovereignty. The theoretical concept of sociotechnical imaginaries helps us to unpack the embeddedness of values and identity in technological visions and their materialisation while linking past and future times.

Even if large-scale infrastructural projects historically often have been instigated or proposed by just one visionary person or a small group of people, they take material shape only through the mobilisation and a broader acceptance of the underpinning visions. For this article, it is important to highlight that while sociotechnical imaginary was a concept reserved for the nation-state (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009), it was later modified to include various types of actors in the negotiation and contestation of inherent visions (Jasanoff, 2015). In alignment with this modification, Mager and Katzenbach (2021) argue that it is mostly the private sector and technological companies that mobilise future digital imaginaries. Comparably, in the infrastructuring of digital sovereignty, visions and future trajectories are generated by a meshwork of European private actors and state or intra-state actors.

Similar to how Benedict Anderson (2016) analysed the significance of print technology for a nation-based identity, sociotechnical imaginaries draw connections between technology, visions, identity, and shared values. As Jasanoff (2015) and many scholars working with the concept state (e.g. Csernatoni, 2022; Haupt, 2021; Hegarty et al., 2025; Mager and Katzenbach, 2021), sociotechnical imaginaries are collectively held visions of desirable futures that render discourses about identity and values visible.

Important for utopian visions are their dialectical negative imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015: 5). It is perhaps only logical that visions and future imaginaries build on preventing past detrimental events and crises. Hence, the concept induces a temporal dimension of visions as they lay a pathway and a plan for future activities, alluding to past histories and experiences. As this article demonstrates in the coming sections, the discussions about the EU's digital sovereignty generate sociotechnical imaginaries connecting so-called European values with imaginaries of security, economic competition, and geopolitical positioning that enact better futures through digital solutions. These imaginaries, however, reiterate also historical tropes of rescuing Europe to create a third balancing power and in continuation save the world from the infringement of competing empires. This is the historical link that is missing in most of the literature about digital sovereignty in the EU. To strengthen this historical continuity, the article parallels the material infrastructuring of European digital sovereignty with colonial infrastructural projects at the centre of the European integration project prior to the creation of the EU.

This article combines various forms of text analysis with a focus on discourse analysis to demonstrate the historical links between contemporary and past sociotechnical imaginaries. Discourse analysis, in most of its interpretations and operationalisations, focuses on power relations and the underlying organising structures that make certain statement possible (see, e.g. Fairclough, 1989; Foucault, 1971; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). In alignment with this understanding, coloniality is an epistemic construction that organises speech and statements explicitly or implicitly through various forms of practices (Foucault, 1971). As developed and discussed by Foucault, the concept of discourse is always understood through a historical lens. Discourses enable contemporary structures that organise ideas, statements, and, as shown in Foucault's work on the panopticon (1995), architectural manifestations. But whether it is through an archaeological (1989) or a genealogical (1990) approach, Foucault's work always discloses contemporary structures by studying their historical connections.

In this article, I focus on statements about technological visions, European values, and their relation to the infrastructuring of digital sovereignty in documents such as policy briefings, visions and strategy documents supporting EU-funded digital projects, standardisation strategies, and EU-communication documents and fact sheets. The selection of empirical sources and the direction of analysis are guided by a review of research literature about EU digital sovereignty. The section that follows is based on this literature review drawing links between EU digital sovereignty with previous conceptualisations of political events concerning the extraction of data and espionage, such as cybersecurity and privacy. This conceptual backtracking makes visible discourses about victimisation and of being ‘colonised’ by other superpowers, which I then analyse through a historical critique of the EU as a colonial project.

While discourse analysis traces collective and systemic ideas back in time through its emphasis on language, it falls short of associating statements with action and performativity, according to Jasanoff (2015: 20). I do agree that discourse analysis is not enough when we follow the materialisations of infrastructures. However, since my interpretation of discourse draws from Foucault's work, I argue, following, for instance, Butler (1993) and Deleuze (1999) and the school of governmentality (e.g. Rose, 1999), that studying discourse also reveals structures that form and organise action, performativity, and material manifestations.

European digital sovereignty – An ambiguous concept

The EU's recent use of ‘digital sovereignty’ has been adopted from earlier discussions that stem from various intertwined developments and discourses around global computation eroding state sovereignty (Bratton, 2015). Although the EU's digital sovereignty is a relatively novel conceptualisation of threats towards European stability, the sentiments and the imaginaries of a Europe under siege can be traced back to earlier discussions proceeding the establishment of the European Union and European countries imperial ambitions. This continuity becomes even clearer considering the ambiguity of the concept itself, pointing to all sorts of infrastructural projects, including the allusion to colonial infrastructures in the Global South, which this article returns to in the coming sections. Digital sovereignty appears in EU discourse almost interchangeably with concepts such as technological sovereignty and strategic autonomy. As has been pointed out by scholars (Barrinha and Christou, 2022; Csernatoni, 2022; Kaloudis, 2022; Thumfart, 2021), even though these two latter terms gesture towards a broader definition encompassing material and technological aspects of the digital, there is no fixed meaning of the concepts yet and their meaning change depending on who is using them, which tradition they derive them from and which context they appear in.

This section seeks to comprehend the adaptation of the concept of digital sovereignty in the EU to then unpack its links to coloniality. It does so by discerning some of the earlier discussions about privacy, espionage, and dependency. These discussions have paved the way for a sovereign and geopolitical turn in the digital sphere and the insertion of so-called European values. At the core is how digitalisation in EU discourse has increasingly attained geopolitical imaginaries of economic competition and security with an increased focus on the control over the wide span of digital infrastructures from digital policy to material and technological components.

Some of the discussions relate directly to Big Tech and Big Data and the American dominance in the digital economy. Digital sovereignty has gained traction in European countries as it opposes corporate powerhouses, such as Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, and the commercialisation of the Internet that has created platforms harvesting personal data for profit and who have claimed ownership of vital material and immaterial structures, threatening democratic sovereignty (see, e.g. Pohle and Thiel, 2021; Zuboff, 2019). Often, the discussions have revolved around data ownership, data protection, privacy, and the rights to one's data. Public discourse has referred to data as the new oil ad nauseam. It is partly extracting this ‘new oil’ that has granted Big Tech its global position. In Couldry and Mejias’ (2019: 5) work, data resembles similarly a raw material, which expands the territory for extraction into a more abstract field, namely, ‘human life’. Through the digitalisation of many domains, such as work and school, health treatment, and mundane social and economic practices, data practices ‘colonise human life’ and render profit through the extraction of this raw resource.

As seen in the introduction, through a somewhat reversed logic, Pierre Bellanger managed to depict France and the EU as a subordinated and colonised polity. It is in alignment with this logic that the fostering of new European champions within the digital economy is mobilised to decrease what some commentators similarly have called a ‘neocolonial dependence’ on American Big Tech (see Hobbs, 2020). Within this political discourse, the issue of ‘neocolonial’ dependency is not merely an issue of privacy. It also refers to concerns about broader economic and democratic threats. First, according to this logic, Big Tech is producing oil out of data that belongs to European citizens, encroaching on individual and national sovereignty. Second, the social media platforms that Big Tech, to a large extent, harvest data from have enabled foreign actors to spread disinformation and undermine democratic institutions (Monsees and Lambach, 2022: 379; Shapiro, 2020).

An event that, furthermore, has incited a sovereignty turn within the digital is the Snowden revelations. In 2013, the whistle-blower and former agent of the US National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, disclosed a widespread American global surveillance programme (Barrinha and Christou, 2022: 359). The documents that Snowden leaked revealed schemes of mass surveillance of European citizens including politicians such as Angela Merkel (Hobbs, 2020). Against this background of the unveiled US claims to global hegemony in the cybersphere through borderless global surveillance schemes, states perceived a need to protect themselves against external threats. In Germany and France and at the EU level, consistent calls bringing the question of self-determinism in the digital space to the fore in the wake of the leak were accentuated (Barrinha and Christou, 2022; Bellanova et al., 2022; Pohle, 2020). At the EU level, the events had a major impact on the legislation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This was not, thus, a question of Big Tech only; it revolved around state intelligence and involved policy and infrastructural solutions.

Like France, Germany was early on active in the discussions about digital sovereignty, the national discourse influencing that on an EU level. In the German debate, according to Julia Pohle (2020), sovereignty within the digital sphere does not mean economic protectionism and enforced territoriality. Rather, an incongruent use of sovereignty within the digital sphere seems to point towards an open and borderless digital world where the German state, through complexity reduction, transparency, and digital literacy, promotes citizen and customer sovereignty (Pohle, 2020: 10–11) or the fostering of what Jan Winkler and Finn Dammann have called the ‘digitally sovereign subject’ (Glasze et al., 2023). The German emphasis on individual sovereignty refers to a return to purportedly European values, such as the right to privacy, human dignity, freedom, the rule of law, equal treatment, diversity, openness, and tolerance. On the EU level, where the ‘European values’ also are considerably vivid, by contrast, the focus on individual sovereignty is often overshadowed by the imaginaries of security, economic competition, and technological innovation, mobilised by increasing attention to digital infrastructures (Pohle, 2020).

The increasing attention on digital infrastructures in the EU discourse about digital sovereignty, from the physical infrastructures to the logical and regulatory (Musiani, 2022), explains at least partly the conceptual confusion around the term. It has been used when referring to economic and regulatory questions (Csernatoni, 2022; Donnelly et al., 2023; Farrand and Carrapico, 2022), issues that are commonly associated with strategic autonomy (Pohle, 2020). When referring instead to cloud services or 5G development and the semiconductor industry, these terms resemble issues reflected by the term technological sovereignty (Autolitano and Pawlowska, 2021; Baur, 2023; Monsees and Lambach, 2022). Digital sovereignty emerges from discussions that are linked to a variation of problems and opportunities associated with the digital, which continuously infiltrates more and more domains of social life. Between argumentation about individual rights to privacy and cybersecurity, the term's ambiguity serves many purposes, not the least the promotion of purported ‘European values’ (Baur, 2023; Glasze et al., 2023; Monsees and Lambach, 2022). These values are often put forward as a middle way and a ‘third model’ between, what the current President of the European council Charles Michel has described as the American model of ‘business above all’ and the Chinese ‘state authoritarian model’ (in, Christakis, 2020).

Although these debates stem from the discussions mentioned here above, the motivations and legitimisation underpinning the control and regulatory turn draw heavily on geopolitical imaginaries of security and economic competition (e.g. Barrinha and Christou, 2022; Monsees and Lambach, 2022). These imaginaries were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which disclosed the fragility of global value chains and dependency on foreign actors (Da Ponte et al., 2023). It goes without saying that the recent trade war waged upon the world by the Trump administration has not alleviated the geopolitical tensions. However, as we will see in the coming sections, the issues of a fragile union, dependency, the lack of competitive strength, and the significance of exporting European values are notions as old as the EU itself. Here, it must be added that the use of the adjective ‘European’ in EU policy's invocation of European values transgresses the geographical polity of the EU's member states to encompass a colonial idea of European territory.

The historical nexus between European values and colonial infrastructures

While digital sovereignty emerged in EU policy with direct ties to the discussions mentioned here above, its infrastructuring should be seen as a continuation of a longer European geopolitical project with colonial roots. This relation becomes clearer once we draw the links between European values, technology, and infrastructures and their significance for the European integration project, later becoming the EU.

European values cannot be understood without invoking the dialectical relation between European identity, as it emerged through crises of governing during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and its non-European ‘Other’ (Chakrabarty, 2008; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Mbembe, 2019; Said, 1994; Spivak, 1999). As Europeans now were endowed with a consciousness of reason, free to transform nature to the best of its ability (Amin, 2009), race, identity, and culture became partly constructed through the lens of ‘civilisational’ progress and technological development. Fittingly, the construction of European identity and the spreading of its constituting values of free will, scientific objectivity, and technological development coincided with the European construction of universal law and reason and, more importantly, the appropriation of territory (Bhandar, 2018; Bonilla, 2017). As historical research on infrastructure and infrastructure studies have shown, infrastructural projects, such as railways, roads, harbours, telecommunication, and the like, have been instrumental in territorial appropriation and colonisation (see also, e.g. Aalders, 2020; Chua et al., 2018; Davies, 2017, 2021; Headrick, 1981; Pasternak et al., 2023; Van Laak, 2004). Moreover, technological development and the expansion of infrastructures affirmed also a modern European identity and a self-acclaimed cultural and racial superiority (Diogo and Van Laak, 2016).

Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps articulated most palpable during the interwar period, European expansionism was motivated by a slightly different rationale. While the ‘civilising mission’ and the figure of the saviour saturated European identity during the colonial era and remained central well into the 20th century, an addition to this creed was that Europe too, a continent in ruins after WWI, needed rescuing to avoid yet another war, as proponents to European integration astutely claimed (Pasture, 2018; Thorpe, 2018). European integration as an idea of peace between European countries through the consolidation of their colonial territories emerged in the aftermaths of WWI and lingered on in various forms through agreements and treaties also after the creation of EC/EU. With looming decolonisation in the early to mid-20th century, a proposal of a Pan-Europe project emerged with a proposed economic programme identifying three issues: shortage of raw materials, increasing unemployment, and a dependence on North American capital. One of the suggested paths forward was to incorporate untapped natural resources in the European colonies. Only then could the European continent become self-sufficient in most natural resources and challenge the growing global economic powers of the USA and Soviet Union, which had the capability to organise their respective economies on a geographical continental scale (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: 25–27). This idea was manifested in technological and infrastructural imaginaries, most radically proposed by the German architect Herman Sörgel in his vision of ‘Atlantropa’. This was a grand and absurd visionary geoengineering project greening the Sahara and constructing damns to lower the level of the Mediterranean Sea to create a more united geographical Euro-African super-continent (Diogo and Van Laak, 2016).

While Sörgel's vision remained a fantasy until his death in 1952, a more realistic path forward for Europe was proposed by the French minister of colonies Albert Sarraut. Sarraut proposed a plan to prepare France for what he so foresightedly saw as the coming decolonisation, based on remaining in control over colonial territory through long-term infrastructure investments (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: 51–2). This idea found fertile ground in the colonial logic of ‘responsible’ extraction of African natural resources and European settlements in Africa, which, it was suggested, would establish Europe as a third balancing power between the USA and the Soviet Union (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: 60).

The visions of restoring what was left of the European empires were largely dependent on technological and infrastructural imaginaries, all bolstered by the rationale of strengthening Europe and spreading European values for the sake of a better world. If ‘Atlantropa’ was an unrealistic sociotechnological vision, the geopolitical image of ‘Eurafrica’ remained an underlying idea up to the negotiations of the Paris Agreement in 1950. In the aftermath, the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer stated that no grand geopolitical blueprint of the world was without risk and that ‘free Europe must be prepared to confront this risk’ (in Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: 234). Put in a Cold War context, the association with the overseas colonial territories, the grand project of incorporating Africa in a European economic zone, would not only help develop Africa but would, as Adenauer meant, benefit the entire world (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: 237–238). It is this relation between European values and technological and infrastructural solutions that is brought into the digital sphere through the infrastructuring of digital sovereignty.

The incorporation of European values into digital infrastructure

Ursula von der Leyen's speech as she took office in 2019 as the President of the European Commission evoked a promise of global strength. Her Commission would be a geopolitical one, promoting ‘European values’ worldwide through partnerships and cooperation (Von der Leyen, 2019). As many scholars already have highlighted, European digital sovereignty must be read against the backdrop of this ‘geopoliticisation’ of the EU over the past two decades (Bialasiewicz, 2011; Kuus, 2007; Monsees and Lambach, 2022). This article argues that the EU's geopoliticisation must be, in addition, historicised and linked to colonial and imperial infrastructural projects. Similar to how science and technology helped to build the image of a superior European identity during ‘high colonialism’ (Diogo and Van Laak, 2016), the expansion of digital infrastructures is moored to the re-articulation of European values. Through three examples, this article shows how the sociotechnical imaginaries driving the infrastructuring of digital sovereignty produce discourses about European digital futures linking them to European exceptionalism.

First, the recent Franco-German initiative Gaia-X is a federated cloud ecosystem that is free and open to join by business actors in Europe and beyond and aims to encourage innovation through digital sovereignty. In this case, digital sovereignty refers, according to CEO Francesco Bonfiglio, only to self-determination as in the technological ability to protect data (Bonfiglio, 2021). However, discourses around geopolitics and European digital sovereignty are implied in the larger incentives driving the development of Gaia-X. Its purpose as a cloud ecosystem is to decentralise computation to enable technological innovation and growth in the global digital economy and, at the same time, deal with concern of espionage connected to data traffic. This concern derives from the passing of US legal frameworks like the 2018 Cloud Act and the Foreign Surveillance Act that give US intelligence authority to monitor data stored in American cloud services, which in Europe, to a dominant part, are provided by American companies (Monsees and Lambach, 2022). Interestingly, as Baur (2023) notes, while the idea of the cloud generally gestures towards open and dispersed computing, spurring innovation, Gaia-X seeks to create a governed ecosystem in which participation builds on a set of principles. These principles dictate an open, transparent, sovereign, fair, independent, inclusive, free, federated, innovative, and evolutionary ecosystem of companies sharing data. These are not, Bonfiglio asserts, in themselves, European principles (2021). However, while Gaia-X is an open federated organisation, ‘to ensure the correct representation of European core values and principles’, only the European member's representative can elect the Board of Directors (Bonfiglio, 2021: 5). Bonfiglio delivers clearly the message that these ‘universal values’ will be best safeguarded by European member representatives. Hence, the purpose is not to create a competing cloud service but to co-produce an infrastructure of existing cloud providers that follow ‘universal values’ best protected by European business leaders. The discourses around Gaia-X tap into old European exceptionalism. Moreover, the sociotechnical imaginary supporting Gaia-X appeals to boundaries and innovation at the same time, integrating the European continent through a territorialised and independent European cloud infrastructure that can potentially encourage European technological innovation and help the EU to catch up with Asia and the USA (Baur, 2023: 16). Even though, as Monsees and Lambach (2022: 384) argue, the frequently mentioned European values are fuzzy, in the case of Gaia-X, they are pinpointed in a set of principles. I argue that in this case, it is not necessarily the content of the principles that constitute European values and identity but the claim that only European actors can be the protector of uncorrupted universal values.

The second example concerns telecommunication technology, the roll-out of 5G, and the development of 6G. Besides the economic stakes, controversies around 5G technology disclose political tensions. When planning for an upgrade from 4G to 5G in the late 2010s, European countries raised concerns about incorporating Chinese technology into European mobile data networks. The decision by many European countries to ban Huawei from providing 5G technology mirrors a two-faced debate. According to Monsees and Lambach (2022: 386), 5G technology represented, on the one hand, a future-oriented prerequisite for better public services that also would enhance the economy and the EU's competitiveness. On the other hand, it actualised concerns around security issues such as privacy and cybersecurity, targeting China as the main security threat. As the future telecommunication, 6G, is in the process of taking form, the tension between the EU/USA and China remains. But while the case of 5G illustrates the security imaginary integrated in the roll-out of 5G infrastructure, creating a duality between the West and the East, the development of 6G embodies in addition the current move towards ‘green’ technologies, creating a close bond between the digital transformation and the green transition, what has been dubbed ‘the twin transition’. The EU flagship project Hexa-X, and its continuation Hexa-X-II, is an illustrative case of how projects operationalise strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty and simultaneously promote so-called human-centred values in the negotiations in standards for coming 6G infrastructure (Hexa-X-II, 2024; Niestadt and Reichert, 2024). While fostering purported ‘European values’, such as trust, privacy protection, and furthermore, more traditional ones, such as inclusiveness, and democracy, the visions of 6G as projected by Hexa-X(-II) promote additionally the development of energy optimal solutions for the 6G standards (Hoffmann et al., 2021: 29), offering telecom infrastructures ideal for the twin transition. The sociotechnical imaginaries around 6G development and standardisation generate discourses around universal values embodied in greener, safer, faster, and more equal digital technology. Hexa-X(-II) is an example of how the EU, using private–public partnerships and sponsorships, advances the EU's position in standardisation organs such as the 3gpp. Since 2022, the EU promotes a new standardisation strategy in which European values should be incorporated in the advancement of global digital and telecommunication standards (European Commission, 2022b). The policy around a new standardisation strategy also suggests that standard-setting needs to be accompanied by establishing ‘digital partnerships with like-minded countries in the Global South in order to offer an alternative to the Chinese DSR’, ideally through the Global Gateway, that already promotes a global digital transition in line with EU values (Szczepański, 2024: 8).

Lastly, EU's efforts to ensure the supply of semiconductors. The disturbance of value chains due to the COVID-19 pandemic showed the fragility of supply chains and the need of becoming more self-reliant. While the rhetoric concerning semiconductors constantly keeps referring to geopolitical tensions between the USA and China, Monsees and Lambach (2022) argue that the emphasis leans towards the economy. Semiconductors are, they claim, not in themselves associated with security issues such as 5G technology. Also, the idea of Chinese domination is a fiction that is equally difficult to uphold as the fiction about EU becoming self-sufficient, due to the semiconductor industry's outspread and entangled production. Hence, the debate around semiconductors serves to ideologically position the EU in a geopolitical sphere while primarily being an issue of economic competition (Monsees and Lambach, 2022: 387).

The discourses around building out and strengthening European digital infrastructures derive from sociotechnical imaginaries around the EU's digital sovereignty, in which Europe (interchangeably used with the EU) is portrayed as the stronghold of universal values. A key component in these sociotechnical imaginaries is the delineation of a geopolitical battlefield in which the EU tries to rise as a ‘third force’ alongside two competing superpowers, namely, the USA and China. Although Russia is barely present in the discussions about digital sovereignty in the literature, Russia's occupation of Crimea and the war on Ukraine have actualised realist's ideas of confrontational states and sovereignty anew. Against this backdrop, and as much of the literature showcase (e.g. Farrand and Carrapico, 2022), digital sovereignty functions as a term to join forces to strengthen the EU and enhance its economic competitiveness and geopolitical position. Also, by attaching ‘European’ values, such as openness, democracy, rule of law, and fundamental rights, to the development of digital norms and standards, the EU aims to expand its reach beyond the European continent. It does so, as I will show in the last section, through the strategic infrastructural programme the Global Gateway, referred to by Ursula von der Leyen as a ‘truly unique offer’ (Von der Leyen, 2023). With the Global Gateway, the EU aims to direct investments to the Global South, ‘offering’, in comparison to China, purportedly more equal, greener, more inclusive, and democratic infrastructures.

The sociotechnical imaginaries, thus, take form and are put into action in the shape of the digital infrastructure projects such as the discussed Gaia-X and Hexa-X while at the same time extending its realm of operations to the Global South. This echoes a perpetual logic of strengthening Europe, not only to save it from the grip of surrounding superpowers and, so to speak, ‘decolonise Europe’, but also to simultaneously spread the values that will improve life for all, reminding us of Adenauer's conviction about Europe's burden and role in global politics. In short, the EU-sponsored and endorsed projects, coupled with digital sovereignty, mobilise a new empirical nexus between digital sovereignty and the advancement of European values in an, today, almost unquestioned global digital transition.

Infrastructuring digital sovereignty in Europe and beyond: The case of the Global Gateway

The EU's strategic programme the Global Gateway showcases how the EU's digital sovereignty and its integral sociotechnical imaginaries take infrastructural form within and beyond the EU. The COVID-19 pandemic had disruptive effects on the globalised economy and supply chains and exposed the EU's weakness and dependency, accelerating and intensifying the geopolitical turn already explicitly announced by von der Leyen's Commission (Burni et al., 2021; Heldt, 2023). As a response, the European Commission devised a strategic recovery programme called the ‘NextGenerationEU’ (NGEU), which contained an economic package of loans and grants distributed to EU member countries in proportion to the pandemic's impact and national economy. Each member state had to present a national recovery plan to unlock the funds from the programme's Resilient and Recovery Facility (RRF). The plans had to consider the facility's six pillars consisting of policies regarding (1) the green transition; (2) digital transformation; (3) smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth; (4) social and territorial cohesion; (5) health and economic, social, and institutional resilience; and (6) policies for the next generation (European Commission, 2024).

In parallel with the NGEU/RRF, the EU launched an external global strategy. A combination of actors, including the EU, EU member states, and their implementing agencies, the Public Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, pooled together resources to rapidly alleviate the global COVID-19 crisis (European Commission, 2020). What has become framed as a ‘working better together’ agenda (Burni et al., 2021: 533) expanded to a more general level of global action called the Team Europe approach, soon becoming the backbone of Global Europe. In a press release, the Council of European Union stated that with the size of the new financial instrument Global Europe, the EU will cover cooperation with nearly all third countries, ‘allowing the EU to effectively uphold and promote its values and interests worldwide while supporting multilateral efforts’ (European Council, 2021). It is also the Team Europe approach that channels the investments in the Global Gateway infrastructures. In other words, EU is trying to position itself as a global leader through standard and norm setting projects and financial instruments, creating public–private partnerships, fostering multilateralism, and promoting its values to strengthen European companies and European economy. The visions of a stronger European and EU incorporate yet again an image of associations with the Global South. While promoting values worldwide alludes to ‘normative power’ (Manners, 2002), this section makes clear that the EU's latest connectivity strategy, the Global Gateway (Okano-Heijmans, 2024), represents not only soft power but also, echoing Karjalainen (2023: 298), hard power in shape of infrastructures.

Unveiled in 2021, the Global Gateway is an infrastructure plan that aims to boost smart, clean, and secure digital, energy, and transport links, which will purportedly strengthen education, health, and security of supply chains across the globe (European Commission, 2021). The plan targets infrastructures reflecting NGEU/RRF's six internal socio-economic domains formulated as pillars while harbouring more traditional development conditionality rules, such as democratic values, good governance, transparency, equal partnership, and sustainability (Heldt, 2023; Tagliapietra, 2023). The EU–Africa investment package inaugurated the strategy and covers half of the total budget of EUR 300 billion distributed as loans and grants during 2021 and 2027 (Eickhoff, 2023; European Commission, 2021). Interestingly, as Heldt argues, albeit without any mentioning of the EU's colonial history, the allocation of investments on infrastructures in Africa is a response to China's dominant presence in Africa, where, as Heldt puts it, ‘the EU has longstanding diplomatic and historical interests’ (2023: 225). Hence, as widely acknowledged (e.g. Eickhoff, 2023; Heldt, 2023; Tagliapietra, 2023), the Global Gateway is a geopolitical instrument and strategic programme. It aims to challenge the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Digital Silk Road (DSR), by promoting a middle-ground, a third way, between the American Build Back Better World (B3 W) and the Chinese BRI and DSR, buttressed by the claimed superiority of European values (Karjalainen, 2023: 302).

The new infrastructural investments target the acceleration of green and digital transition, developing partnerships with ‘resource-rich countries to identify key thematic areas to take advantage of the African Continental Free Trade Area and to promote investment along the raw materials value chains, supporting partner countries to develop regional values’ (European Union, 2022). Unsurprisingly, Babić (2023: 253) states that these projects will not only meet the needs of the local economies and local communities but also serve the EU's own strategic interests. The Global Gateway follows a tradition of institutional agreements with the Global South that originates in the Rome Treaty in 1957 (Raimundo, 2021).

Returning briefly to the image of ‘Eurafrica’ and the discussions proceeding the establishment of the EU certainly sheds light on the links between past imaginaries of a connected super-continent and the Global Gateway's future visions. The image of Eurafrica, which grew stronger and widespread in the late 1920s and 1930s (Thorpe, 2018), targeted a community or an association between European countries and Africa as a way of monitoring overseas territories through infrastructural investment. Around mid-1950s and the looming decolonisation, the geographical image of Eurafrica vanished and was replaced by EU–Africa relations built on development, aid, and diplomatic counselling (Hansen and Jonsson, 2018; Weldeab Sebhatu, 2021). The Yaoundé and the Lomé agreements passed on to the Global Gateway the ambition of finding a ‘third way’ and a ‘middle way’ (see Raimundo, 2021), distancing the association from other superpowers. It is worth noting in this context that the digital pillar of the Global Gateway funnels the digital investments in infrastructural projects partly through the EU's digital development programme, Digitalisation 4 Development hub.

The burgeoning literature on the Global Gateway has already highlighted the uneven power dynamics in the partnership between Europe and Africa (e.g. Heldt, 2023; Karjalainen, 2023; Tagliapietra, 2023). However, not many of them reminds us about the links to colonial infrastructures and previous imaginaries that served as strategic geopolitical projects between European countries and Africa in the first half of the 20th century. An example is the Medusa submarine cable system (Medusa), an underwater fibre-optic cable connecting South Europe with North Africa. Although much more feasible and less radical than the project of Atlantropa, the Medusa builds on the sociotechnical imaginary of connecting both continents. According to the European Commission, the cables will offer faster and secure connectivity for research and education communities, ‘providing the digital backbone for economic development of the connected countries’ (Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations, 2022). With 16 (in some documents, 12) landing points along the shores of the Mediterranean and the network centre based in Europe, the pan-African telecom operator AFR-IX, founded in 2013 by European capital, owns the infrastructure. AFR-IX has partnered up with many telcos, mostly European ones, among them, Orange and Nokia-owned Alcatel Submarines Network, which has overseen the manufacturing of the Medusa cable (Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations, 2022). As commentators point out, the implementation to reach its objectives of creating ‘unprecedented opportunities for collaboration, innovation, and economic development’ is not very clear (Gerasimcikova et al., 2024: 38). Nonetheless, the visions mobilised in reports and fact sheets promoting the project unhesitatingly point towards clear connections between the underwater cable, digital inclusions, and social and economic development. For instance, a Medusa report identifies positive social impacts by stating that the construction of terrestrial parts of the infrastructure, mainly in the landing points, will lead to employment in the ICT sector and the establishment of local businesses that will cater to the needs of residents. The report further maintains that the cables will provide schools and higher education institutions with access to Internet; it will enable digital administration and improve the health sector, thanks to widespread telemedicine (Medusa, 2023: 21).

This so-called hard digital infrastructure must be seen in a broader context of softer digital infrastructures. The Global Gateway's digital pillar combines hard digital infrastructural projects with soft infrastructures such as data governance policy advocacy work and capacity building to stimulate the digital economy, all with a focus on an entrepreneurial digital development and digital inclusion (see, e.g. Teevan and Domingo, 2022). But without really knowing yet how the digitalisation will cater to the local residents, what is more likely, is that private companies in telecommunication will benefit from new markets (Gerasimcikova et al., 2024: 38). The image of the Medusa cable as a sociotechnical fix that will lead to an evenly inclusive digital network remains to be seen. Previous research shows, however, that submarine cables and landing points do not automatically lead to an even distribution of connectivity in the mainland (see, e.g. Thorat, 2019). Also, even if digitalisation would spread evenly geographically in North Africa, Internet penetration is a double-edged sword. As highlighted by African stakeholders, although Africa is purportedly in need of better connectivity to improve the livelihoods of Africans, the question of who owns the hard infrastructure and the capacity to update the systems is key for African digital sovereignty (Teevan and Domingo, 2022). Moreover, the issue of who owns the data extracted from further digitalisation and the EU's involvement in shaping digital trade in Africa has already been subject for fierce critique. Accordingly, a report argues convincingly that while the EU arrived late into the global cyber-capitalism with benevolent incentives bashing its imperial rivals, the extraction of data in the Global South enabled by EU trade agreements should not be mistaken for anything else than good-old extractive colonialism, in which the data later is processed and packaged in the Global North to be sold back to the Global South (Scasserra and Martínez Elebi, 2021).

It is still early and not entirely clear how the EU's digital sovereignty will take infrastructural form in the Global South. Nevertheless, we can see already today how the EU's digital infrastructure projects, similar to older expansionist extractive infrastructures (Diogo and Van Laak, 2016), strive to open the territory from the shores to the inland for further value extraction. The extractive economy of digital infrastructuring becomes perhaps most vivid when exposing their relationality and topography. As Thorat (2019) has brilliantly demonstrated, digital infrastructures are often laid over old colonial infrastructures. In the case of Medusa and submarine and terrestrial envisioned strategic corridors, the topographical dimension is primarily imaginative with historical connotations. For instance, when the EU early after the launch of the Global Gateway described its ambitions of expanding corridors in Africa, it referred to the potential areas of submarine and terrestrial connectivity as the ‘EurAfrica Gateway’ (European Commission, 2022a). But also, as alluded to in this article, global digitalisation and the EU's infrastructuring of digital sovereignty are not without an implied relation to the Green Industrial Revolution, with green extractive technologies and a new surge for rare earth elements alluding to a scramble for Africa 2.0 (see, e.g. Mniga, 2024). It can be detected in the sociotechnical imaginaries driving the EU's aims to shape digital standards and create long-term lock-in effects; it is also seen in the propagation and exportation of green and equal digital infrastructures to the Global South.

As a final thought, I will return to the interrelations between infrastructures. This article has hinted at the multi-industrial aspects that the infrastructuring of digital sovereignty contains through its ambiguous conceptualisation. One example that reflects this interconnectedness would be the semiconductor supply chains that depend on its spread-out technological and extractive infrastructures of rare earths. Although the relationality between various related infrastructural projects requires more attention and research, the example of Lobito Corridor, a Global Gateway flagship project, is one example of how the digital and the green transition builds extractive infrastructures on top of the old ones. The new project of the Lobito Corridor restores the old Benguela Railway, a colonial project that was inaugurated in 1931 with, similar to today, the purpose of connecting Zambia and the DRC with the Atlantic Ocean to export minerals to Europe and the USA (Schubert et al., 2023; The Lobito Corridor Investment Promotion Authority, 2024). These are minerals that, as we can read in the Memorandum of Understanding between the EU, Zambia, the EU, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are crucial for the digital and green transition (EU-DRC, 2023; EU-Zambia, 2023). The infrastructuring of digital sovereignty is, thus, not separate from the investments in ‘green’ transportation infrastructures. Semiconductors and batteries, which are steadily more integrated into the gadgets that rule the digital economy and our daily lives, need the elements that the green transportation links, such as the Lobito Corridor, target.

Conclusions

Many of the projects launched by the Global Gateway are still in their infancy, and few have concretised. Still, the Global Gateway serves as an illustrative programme with many projects that exemplify how the EU's digital sovereignty merge with kin global infrastructure projects, many times coupled with the green transition. Starting from discussions about the EU's digital sovereignty, this article has argued that EU's effort to claim control over digital infrastructure by invoking ‘European values’ marks a continuity that can be traced back to the organisation of colonial infrastructures in the early European integration project preceding the EC/EU. Thus, the increasing use of digital sovereignty, technological sovereignty, and strategic autonomy not only marks a geopoliticisation of the EU but also the continuation of a longer history of legitimising colonial infrastructures. What needs further attention is how the infrastructuring of EU digital sovereignty meets resistance and friction, a perspective of the Global South that counters the Global North's perspective on geopolitical strategies and that challenges the notions of sovereignty and independence.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks for all the comments given by the participants in the research team The social life of XG: digital infrastructures and the reconfiguration of sovereignty and imagined communities: Stefan Jonsson, Karin Krifors, Manuela Bojadžijev, Alexander Harder, Camilo Alvarez-Garrido, Helen V. Pritchard, Femke Snelting, Anna Pillinger, Lukas Egger, and Roland Atzmüller. I am also grateful to my colleagues at REMESO, Linköping University, and Minoo Koefoed at Norwegian Institute of International Affairs for their valuable comments.

ORCID iD

Mauricio Rogat

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Forskningsrådet om Hälsa, Arbetsliv och Välfärd (grant number 2021-01636).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Mauricio Rogat is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University. He has a PhD in social anthropology from the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Mauricio works currently in the research project The social life of XG: digital infrastructures and the reconfiguration of sovereignty and imagined communities (solixg).

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