Abstract
This paper examines the concept of data sovereignty as a discursive practice in light of the populist idea of popular sovereignty and analyzes the digital policies of Western European right-wing populist parties (WEPs). It argues that WEPs use popular sovereignty and data sovereignty in a similar way: as discursive tools to legitimize drawing power back to the national level (with divergent and often contradictory interpretations), rather than workable foundations for policy plans. The paper also discusses how international cooperation, which populists often reject, is a useful tool to achieve data sovereignty. With this contradiction in mind, the paper develops an agent-based typology of data sovereignty as a discursive practice. It then analyzes the most recent official electoral programs of several WEPs: AfD in Germany, PVV and FvD in the Netherlands, UKIP in the UK, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and Rassemblement National in France. It uses a comparative policy analysis to compare the cases along several data points such as the proposed roles of governments, private companies, and cyber diplomacy. Most of the WEPs under discussion see data sovereignty as synonymous with individual privacy, do not acknowledge the role of international cooperation, and use digital policy as a means of reinforcing their image as challenger parties.
Introduction
Sovereignty is a central concept in populist discourse. Populism divides societies into “the people” versus “the elite”, and populist actors claim to be the representative of that people (Mudde, 2007; Brubaker, 2017). Such actors present popular sovereignty, or the idea that the people should be able to “govern itself” without outside interference, as the ultimate source of political legitimacy. This logic gives rise to several prototypical features of populist regimes or parties: strongman politics centered on a single individual, a turn away from diplomacy and international cooperation, and the identification of international or supranational organizations, such as the EU, as enemies (Brubaker, 2017; Cooper, 2019; Weyland, 2017). This formula has been relatively successful in the European Union, marking a “populist wave” in the early 2010s with great electoral success for populist parties that, with the electoral defeat of France’s Marine Le Pen in 2022, has shown signs of ebbing, although Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has solidified his position further in a contentious victory (Csak, 2022; Dettmer, 2021; Dodman, 2022).
At the same time, digital technologies have become essential to entire countries’ economies and political systems, while many national-level governance frameworks, rooted in the geographical boundaries of the state, neglect the partly de-territorialized nature of the Internet and tend to lag behind the development pace of new technologies (World Economic Forum, 2021; Zakhour & Gomes, 2022). The data harvested from consumers and citizens is now a valuable resource as well as a security issue, and the way data is transported and stored across geographical boundaries via the Internet has seen increased attention (Rafik, 2021). Many states and organizations, including the EU, are currently working on reducing their dependence on other states for digital technologies, digital infrastructure and data processing, due to privacy and security concerns for citizens and states (Glasze et al., 2022; Rafik, 2021, pp. 33–34; Zakhour & Gomes, 2022). Many of these actors see international cooperation as the main channel through which they can gain control over the data flows, infrastructures, and technologies that underlie “their” cyberspace, often using terms like “data sovereignty” or “digital sovereignty” to support their arguments (Celeste, 2021; Pohle & Thiel, 2020; Rafik, 2021). This has significant political implications: it can be expected that right-wing populists, in their efforts to draw power back to (their definition of) “the people” want to establish some form of digital or data sovereignty, but their turn away from the international or supranational level may hinder their chances of doing so.
This paper explores that paradox by focusing on how right-wing populist actors conceptualize digital policies and data sovereignty, as well as how they use data sovereignty as a discursive tool to build up a specific image. Since populists often tend to focus on discourse, performance, and image-building while proposing simplistic solutions to complex issues (Brubaker, 2017; Moffitt, 2015; Weyland, 2017), it can be expected that they tend to use data sovereignty as an image-building tool instead of making realistic policy proposals. Answering this question may add to the discussion on whether populism is a political strategy that inevitably implies short-term opportunism (cf. Weyland, 2017) or whether it provides ideas for an effectively viable political practice in the long term. Studies on populist parties have generally not focused on how data sovereignty relates to populist interpretations of sovereignty at the theoretical level, nor on how (if at all) populist regimes and parties implement or conceptualize data sovereignty-oriented digital policies. This paper aims to contribute to the literature by first providing a theoretical analysis of popular sovereignty and data sovereignty and then comparing electoral programs of right-wing populist parties in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and France with specific attention for their approaches to data sovereignty and cyber diplomacy. Finally, the paper draws conclusions and maps avenues for future research.
Popular sovereignty, data sovereignty, and cyber diplomacy
Populism is a form of politics that divides society into “us” and “them”: the people, with the populist actor as the ultimate representative of the people, fighting against a corrupt political elite (Mudde, 2004; 2007; Brubaker, 2017; Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). This ‘ideologically thin’ approach implies that populism can be combined with a wide range of different ideologies, whether left- or right-wing (Mudde, 2004; Stanley, 2008; Brubaker 2017). Considering populism’s “Manichean logic” of dividing society in two unequal parts (Mudde, 2007), ideological frameworks with a tendency towards exclusion mesh particularly well with populism, while nationalism is a particularly useful tool to clearly delineate who is part of the people (and should therefore, according to populists, be represented in government), and who is not (Heiskanen, 2021). Populism also exploits political cynicism among its electorate – or disillusionment with politics in general – by presenting itself as exceptional or unique in the political landscape, as a challenger to the status quo upheld by the so-called “establishment”, and as an underdog fighting for the people against a more powerful group of evil elites (Brubaker, 2017). In doing so, populist parties can attract sizeable numbers of protest votes, or votes that are not necessarily expressing support for the populist party, but rather opposition to the existing political system (cf. Goovaerts et al., 2020). This can be attributed to policy convergence among mainstream parties, or the idea that, at least in the perception of populist voters, mainstream parties are all identical and form a “cartel” that maintains the socio-economic and cultural status quo while conspiring to keep populist actors away from political power (Grant & Tilley, 2022; Katz & Mair, 1995; Van Dyck, 2021).
Since populism frames all other politicians or political entities as corrupt and claims to be the only true political representative of the people, it uses popular sovereignty (the idea that state authority emanates from the people) not just as the only source of legitimacy for political practices, but also as its own source of legitimacy (Brubaker, 2017). Populists claim that the power of the people has been hollowed out by representative democracy. In their view, ‘the voice of the people disappears – or at least, is muted – through procedures, representation and institutions such as Parliament and the judiciary’ (Girard, 2021, p. 77). They hence promise to ‘[return] power to the people’ (Brubaker, 2017, p. 380) and present the people as ‘an entity above the law’ (Girard, 2021, p. 88). Populist sovereignty claims tend to exploit ‘sovereignty conflicts’, or situations where ‘multiple and rival understandings of sovereignty’ clash, to mobilize voters (Basile & Borri 2022, p. 366). Due to the ever-increasing complexity of global political systems, such sovereignty conflicts crop up more often and in more complicated forms (Jabko & Luhman, 2019). This has several practical consequences. One recent example is Brexit, which promoters have advertised as “taking back control” and as an ‘assertion of sovereignty’ (Amir, 2022, p. 74), yet which, even before the actual referendum took place, was criticized for eroding parliamentary sovereignty and thereby undermining the workings of representative democracy (Wellings & Vines, 2015). In Italy, the populist radical right parties Lega and Fratelli d’Italia regularly exploit sovereignty conflicts for electoral advantages, with Lega, for instance, supporting greater subnational autonomy for Veneto and Lombardy (Basile & Borri, 2022). The Flemish nationalist-populist party Vlaams Belang uses popular sovereignty to legitimize its calls for secession from Belgium and the creation of an independent Flemish state, but also for its anti-EU and anti-elite arguments, both of which have, the party claims, hollowed out national sovereignty (Vlaams Belang, 2019). Even from these limited examples, it becomes clear that (popular) sovereignty is a contested concept and is, in practice, primarily used as a discursive tool to advance (or even mask) political goals such as Euroscepticism and secession with control over the nation’s own borders and judiciary as an important consequence of “retaking” sovereignty (Basile & Borri, 2022; Vlaams Belang, 2019). Sovereignty is also often deployed as a means of self-fashioning a specific image as a challenger of the political system (Brubaker, 2017), yet it often remains ‘an aspirational ideal’ rather than being a foundational principle that is operationalized in actual policies (Girard, 2021, p. 94). The consequence of the populist use of “sovereignty” for other parties’ legitimacy is that it can frame (whether implicitly or explicitly) any political opponent as illegitimate, simply because that opponent allegedly does not directly represent the people – although by no means all populist actors claim that their opponents are by definition illegitimate. At the same time, populists can present all of their own decisions as legitimate because they allegedly reflect the monolithic “will of the people”. This is where populism overlaps significantly with fascism: a fascist dictator, likewise, claims to have an almost oracular, mystical insight into the minds of the people and pretends to be the incarnation of the people in power, expressing their sovereign will (Finchelstein, 2017). A key difference between populism and fascism, however, is the use of violence and (hence) the validity of elections: while fascists tend to acquire power through violence, populists see elections as valid and use electoral results as validation and legitimization of their power (Finchelstein, 2017, p. 99). In this sense, while ‘social democracy represents socialism’s electoral road to power, (…) populism represents fascism’s electoral path’ (Popp-Madsen, 2020, p. 163). Populism, and especially its far-right version, can be seen as a form of authoritarian democracy or ‘postfascism for democratic times’ (Finchelstein, 2017, p. 251), but, of course, not all right-wing populist actors can realistically be called fascist.
Recent claims that Europe or even the world is in a ‘populist moment’ (Mouffe, 2016) or that it has entered an ‘era of populism’ (Diamanti & Lazar, 2019; Mouffe, 2018; Rosanvallon, 2020; Zacharie, 2019, as cited in Cervera-Marzal, 2020, p. 1) seem to be slightly overblown, considering the growing popular opposition to (or relatively recent electoral defeats of) populist leaders in Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Poland, and Slovakia, which invited political commentators to suggest that ‘the populist wave in Eastern and Central Europe is receding’ (Higgins, 2021). In early 2022, the number of populist leaders in power was the lowest it had been since 2004 (Meyer, 2022) – though the future of populism is as unpredictable as ever. The diminishing returns of populist political strategies – based on exclusion, cynicism, and short-term gains – seem to have met the ‘limits of enchantment’, or the boundaries of what people can believe without seeing real results (Brubaker, 2017 p. 380). Nonetheless, populism is unlikely to disappear entirely anytime soon. For instance, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán won another term in 2022, albeit in an electoral landscape that has been tilted in his government’s favor (Csak, 2022). Populism has proven to be an appealing formula (at least in the short term), as it seems to be ‘an almost automatic counter-response to the growing global interdependence, ethnic plurality, and border-transgressing nature of contemporary political phenomena, such as climate change, the flow of refugees, and global trade’ (Popp-Madsen, 2020, p. 167). This loss of control is compounded by a perceived disintermediation at the international level, or the idea that the interests of international elites have drifted away from the interests of the people (Cooper, 2017; 2019) which leads populists to, for instance, the nativist claim that mainstream political actors have “betrayed” the people by promoting migration (Brubaker, 2017; Kelly, 2017; Van Dyck, 2021). The exaltation of popular sovereignty as the ultimate source of legitimacy and its illiberal, nativist extremes can therefore not be separated from a perceived loss of political control in globalized illiberal democracies.
Populism and its invocation of popular sovereignty to discredit “the elite” poses a substantial challenge to international cooperation, especially since it usually advocates for withdrawal from the international political arena (opting out of climate agreements, for instance) and delegitimizes existing international institutions and practices. Right-wing populism, being a form of ‘postfascism’ (Finchelstein, 2017), aims to centralize power as much as possible, which leads to democratic backsliding in populist regimes, typically characterized by reducing the powers of Parliaments and courts, installing regime loyalists in key positions, and capturing the media (Bauer & Becker, 2020). The centralization of power also has consequences for international cooperation, as populists also aim to shift power away from the international level and back to the national level. One notable example is Donald Trump in the US, who, between 2016 and 2020, ‘has openly challenged norms and conventions considered unshakable pillars of the Western liberal consensus and transatlantic relations’ and whose ‘administration has shown little sympathy for the institutions of global governance and the international rule of law’ (Larik, 2018, pp. 360–361). In addition to this withdrawal, populism’s success has also marked the rise of diplomats as “suspects” (Cooper, 2019). Populists present diplomats as elites, and all elites as corrupt, implying that diplomats, by their very nature, do not represent the interests of the people, which then serves as a legitimization for cutting funding for diplomatic services, diminishing the power of professional diplomats, and appointing loyalists as international representatives (Huju, 2022; Lequesne, 2021). At the same time, many countries who have staved off populism, such as France (where Le Pen was defeated in 2022), rely on elected leaders rather than professional diplomats to build an international image and represent their country on the global stage (Cooper, 2019).
One particularly important aspect of diplomacy is cyber diplomacy, or the practice of negotiating and establishing international agreements on digital technologies such as the Internet. Digital technologies have, due to their extremely fast-paced development, created a gap between governance frameworks and the affordances of the actual technology (Rafik, 2021; Verhelst & Wouters, 2020). The international arena is essential to reduce that gap through rule-setting and negotiating on digital topics. However, if populists are concerned with drawing power back to the national level, they may try to push popular or national sovereignty higher onto the international agenda, which may hinder progress on digital policies. Many actors, such as politicians, governments, and activists, regularly use the concept of sovereignty in the context of digital policies, to the extent that some researchers argue that “digital sovereignty” has become a buzzword (Glasze et al., 2022). However, the definitions and assumptions under which they operate, as well as actors’ conceptualization and views on implementation, differ starkly – this is not too surprising, since sovereignty is a hotly debated and often contradictorily understood concept in its own right Most commonly, digital sovereignty is used as a term for ‘collective control on digital content and/or infrastructures’ (Couture & Toupin, 2019, p. 2305), which can be broken down further into data sovereignty (degree of control over data storage, access and use, as well as laws and regulations applying to the data) and technological sovereignty (degree of control over technology deployment, design, operation, and regulation) as its central pillars (Zakhour & Gomes, 2022).
In academic research, digital sovereignty has developed into a fruitful topic of study in the past few years (cf. Couture & Toupin, 2019; Glasze et al., 2022; Hummel et al., 2021; Litvinenko, 2021; Pohle & Tiehl, 2020; Pohle & Voelsen, 2022). Many authors have approached digital sovereignty as a discursive concept, such as a strategic narrative (e.g. Litvinenko, 2021) or as a locus of tension within network theory (e.g. Pohle & Voelsen, 2022). Likewise, this paper builds upon the notion that ‘the concept [of digital sovereignty] is understood more as a discursive practice in politics and policy than as a legal or organisational concept’ (Pohle & Thiel, 2020, p. 1). It approaches data sovereignty, a component of digital sovereignty, as a discursive practice, hence following the claim that ‘traditional coupling of concepts of sovereignty, territoriality and the state, of jurisdiction and borders, must be rethought’ and that ‘digital transformation … should be understood and analysed as (geo)political discourses and practices.’ (Glasze et al., 2022, p. 1). In other words, the paper studies how ‘collective control’ (Couture & Toupin, 2019, p. 2305) over data flows, storage, transmission, and processing infrastructures is conceptualized by (specifically right-wing populist) political actors, whether they see international cooperation (or cyber diplomacy) as a method to work towards that control, and what this says about sovereignty and digital technology. The notions of digital, data, and technological sovereignty have gained political traction in part by reintroducing the nation-state into cyberspace (Pohle & Thiel 2020). The Internet was long thought to elude the fixed territoriality of states and borders, yet the vast amounts of data produced today are ‘processed and stored across geographical borders, often using foreign technologies’ (Zakhour & Gomes, 2022) while political actors such as the EU hold high hopes for ‘taking back control’ over “their” cyberspace through projects such as Gaia-X, a European data cloud (Farrand & Carrapico, 2022, p. 435; Celeste, 2021). Digital sovereignty, by at least discursively linking geographically bound national interests to the Internet, thus offers opportunities to challenge the ‘traditional coupling’ of sovereignty and territory (Glasze et al., 2022, p. 1). This paper hence embeds itself into the growing body of literature on digital and data sovereignty as discursive concepts by studying how political actors can use data sovereignty as a discursive image-building strategy. In taking right-wing populist actors as a case study, it also indirectly engages with research on cyber governance models, which has shown that exclusionary, sovereigntist approaches to Internet policy glean their legitimacy from claims of national sovereignty (Santaniello, 2021). This implies that authoritarian actors such as Russia and China approach cyberspace as a matter of national security, aiming to control information flows and critical Internet infrastructure and generally seeking to ‘align the internet with [their] national borders’ (Stadnik, 2021, p. 162; Creemers, 2020). However, interpretations of sovereignty in cyberspace tend to diverge significantly, limiting the efficacy of cyber governance models based on national sovereignty (Zeng et al., 2017). In this sense, populist actors’ sovereignty claims in cyberspace may at first glance seem to lead to exclusionary, sovereigntist cyber governance, but, in practice, they are unlikely to develop effective strategies for nationalizing and re-territorializing the Internet.
In the context of this paper, it seems productive to make a clear distinction between data sovereignty as a policy objective, i.e. as put into practice by certain political actors and data sovereignty as a discursive tool, i.e. used as an argument to advance other goals, in particular image-building. This paper firmly focuses on data sovereignty as a discursive practice – since sovereignty itself is often used as a discursive tool instead of a practical concept, it stands to reason that data sovereignty may be used in that manner as well. To that end, it should be useful to make a further distinction between different interpretations of data sovereignty as it is deployed in discourse. Based on the extensive literature review of Hummel, Braun, Tretter, and Dabrock (2021), the use of the term data sovereignty ‘typically relates in some way to meaningful control, ownership, and other claims to data or data infrastructures’ (p. 12). Through their analysis, an agent-based typology of data sovereignty can be developed: data sovereignty is commonly used as relating to the data of (a) individual consumers, (b) (indigenous) groups and (c) countries (p. 12). Since populist discourse is often focused on building up a specific image for electoral gains among their main voter base, it stands to reason that populist actors are most concerned with data sovereignty as it relates to individual citizens, i.e. the control that individual consumers have over their data. The second type of data sovereignty concerns indigenous or minority groups and tends to be concerned with the rights of minority groups over their data when collected by public and private actors. The third type can be understood as the “geopolitical” form of data sovereignty, in which states (or international organizations such as the EU) negotiate to gain control over or otherwise regulate their own data flows vis-à-vis other states or companies in other states, including control over the frameworks within which the nation’s data storage and transmission processes take place. A workable typology of different interpretations of data sovereignty as a discursive concept is presented in Table 1.
A typology of data sovereignty as a discursive tool
A typology of data sovereignty as a discursive tool
Since the table presents an agent-based typology of data sovereignty as a discursive practice, it is by no means an illustration of the full complexity of data sovereignty as a concept, as its definition is still contested and it is often used in contradictory ways – the table offers a picture of how the concept is used, not what it is. For instance, one can argue that international data sovereignty is a prerequisite for personal data sovereignty, as the interests of individual citizens in a particular state can be expected to be legally protected at the national level more so than by profit-driven internet companies or by other states. In other words, to ascertain that citizens control their own personal data flows (not just with regards to personal privacy, but also to how that data is used and stored), that control should ideally first be achieved at a higher level. In a more practical sense, this means that data sovereignty is ‘about ensuring that the digital data of companies or individuals are hosted by their country of origin and are subject to the laws of that country’ (Rafik, 2021 p. 39). At any rate, the Internet is fundamentally global, and almost all of its governance aspects affect multiple states at once, leading to the question of how to regulate local effects such as the use and storage of data with respect for other states’ sovereignty (Woods, 2018). This implies that diplomacy is essential to govern the Internet and its data flows, and hence also to achieve and regulate data sovereignty. The EU, in particular, has struggled with data sovereignty, and especially with control over its data storage, due to there being no European-based firms providing the cloud services needed to transmit and store the enormous amounts of data produced in the EU. While a number of initiatives such as Gaia-X have been taken to amend that issue, these projects will take time to come to fruition, and international cooperation remains essential to keep up with the legislative gap (Madiega, 2020). However, with international cooperation being questioned by populists across the world, and the Trump administration having shaken transatlantic confidence (Larik, 2018) and hence also in the safety of EU data being hosted in the US, it is unsurprising that data sovereignty is moving up on the EU’s political agenda (Celeste, 2021; Farrand & Carrapico, 2022; Madiega, 2020). Since data sovereignty hence requires diplomacy (the use of a tool discredited by populists), any populist calls for international data sovereignty are paradoxical: populist actors push for national control and de-internationalization, but this clashes with the necessarily international nature of digital agreements required to achieve data sovereignty. Moreover, if international data sovereignty can be considered a prerequisite for personal data sovereignty, then any populist calls for individual privacy should also be considered opportunistic discursive invocations of data sovereignty without a substantial long-term vision for effectively achieving that type of personal data sovereignty. The next section of this paper uses comparative policy analysis to examine the negotiation of that paradox in the digital policies of European right-wing populism.
In what follows, the paper will use comparative policy analysis to examine how right-wing populist actors in Europe conceptualize digital policy and data sovereignty. It will devote specific attention to the exact type of data sovereignty they primarily advocate for: personal, group, or international data sovereignty. It also considers whether WEPs conflate different types of sovereignty, if they present governments and private companies as hostile entities, and whether they see diplomacy as a tool to achieve data sovereignty. Furthermore, it observes whether the notion of popular sovereignty translates into personal data sovereignty and whether WEPs propose national legislation overruling international agreements, further fragmenting digital legislation and complicating policy-making. The paper focuses particularly on Western-European populism, since digital policies and investments in Western Europe have seen a more accelerated and intensified implementation than in Eastern Europe, with Western European nations having stronger digital economies on average (Anderton et al., 2020), potentially creating a ‘digital gap’ (PwC, 2022). Western European populist parties, then, are more likely to have to grapple with the data sovereignty paradox, since their economies are more dependent on digital technologies and voters’ lives are more intertwined with such technologies. Moreover, considering that populist parties aim to take extreme anti-establishment positions, but also hope to appeal to a broad electorate, and that Western European voters’ attitudes towards digital policies and privacy are, on average, more positive and trusting (Eurobarometer, 2020), it can be assumed that the data sovereignty paradox is more central to Western European populist parties’ electoral program. Within Western Europe, the paper selects six right-wing populist parties: Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) in Germany, Forum voor Democratie (Forum for Democracy) and Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands, Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) in Belgium, UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) in the UK, and Rassemblement National (National Rally) in France. The paper analyzes the official electoral programs of each party, and compares the cases along the data points of (1) types of data sovereignty (personal, group, or international), (2) conflation of DS types, (3) the party’s view on the role of governments in digital policy, (4) the party’s view on the role of private companies in digital policy, and (5) the envisioned role of diplomacy and international cooperation in digital policy.
Germany: AfD
The German AfD is a radical right-wing nationalist-populist party that is Eurosceptical, Islamophobic, and anti-immigration. While the party was highly popular during the so-called “migration crisis” in the mid-2010s, its electoral success has recently diminished due to infighting, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a general loss of appeal of its radical populist positions, gaining just over 10% of the vote in 2021 (Chazan, 2020; Schütz, 2020; Vehrkamp & Bischoff, 2020; Schultheis, 2021). In its most recent electoral program (2021), called ‘Deutschland. Aber normal.’ (Germany. But normal.), digital policy is relatively prominent. In terms of infrastructure, the party advocates for more fiberglass internet cables while warning for the ‘health risks’ of 5G networks (AfD, 2021, p. 183). In a section called ‘data protection and data security’ (AfD, 2021, p. 182),1
‘Datenschutz und Datensicherheit’.
‘Ein zentrales, bereichsübergreifendes Personen kennzeichen bei der Modernisierung der Verwaltungsregister von Bund und Ländern lehnen wir ab, da es die Erstellung von Persönlichkeitsprofilen zulässt und damit verfassungswidrig ist.’
‘Die AfD fordert die Abschaffung der DSGVO und seine Ersetzung durch ein neues, schlankes Daten Schutzgesetz zur Wahrung informationeller Selbstbestimmung.’
‘Die AfD fordert die Einführung einer Digitalsteuer für Tech-Riesen (“Gafam”), die nicht auf den Gewinn, sondern auf den Umsatz dieser Unternehmen erhoben wird.’
To improve the security of digital administration systems, the AfD calls for the bundling of European IT competencies within the framework of research and development cooperation with the aim of developing European hardware and system software in order to become more independent of solutions from non-European providers. (p. 185)5
‘Zur Verbesserung der Sicherheit digitaler Verwaltungssysteme fordert die AfD die Bündelung europäischer IT-Kompetenzen im Rahmen von Forschungs-und Entwicklungskooperationen mit dem Ziel, europäische Hard-& Systemsoftware zu entwickeln, um von Lösungen außereuropäischer Anbieter unabhängiger zu werden.’
Although AfD argues against dependence on non-European providers, it still does not take a hostile position towards these companies and their practices. Moreover, while AfD’s call for the annulment of the GDPR, the EU’s data protection law (which fits into its Eurosceptic narrative) combined with its call for more Europe-wide international digital cooperation may seem paradoxical, it should be noted that its hopes to develop cooperation between private companies rather than governments. It rejects cooperation via the EU, but not via private consortia and alliances – even though one could argue that EU-wide cooperation is necessary, especially in terms of cybersecurity, to protect the EU data ecosystem as a whole. Similarly, concerning artificial intelligence, AfD hopes to ‘more effectively combine forces in the field of AI in [Germany] and promote national cooperation’ to take on multinational competition (p. 185).6
‘Künstliche Intelligenz ist eine Technik der Zukunft mit einem hohen wirtschaftlichem Potential; die Konkurrenz durch multinationale Konzerne in diesem Bereich ist jedoch groß. Daher wollen wir die Kompetenzen im Bereich KI in der Bundesrepublik besser bündeln und nationale Kooperationen stärker fördern.’
The Dutch radical-right nationalist-populist parties PVV and FvD are, much like AfD, anti-migration, anti-Islam, and anti-EU parties. PVV primarily attracts older voters, since 50% of its voters are 55 or older, and 80% 34 or older, while about 32% of FvD’s voters are between 18 and 34 years old (van Dalen, 2021). During the Covid-19 pandemic, FvD started out by calling for total lockdowns, but, after realizing this did not sit well with its electorate, quickly shifted towards calling Covid-19 a conspiracy, questioning the efficacy of vaccines, and promoting horse dewormer as medicine against Covid-19 (NOS, 2021). While during the years before Covid, FvD was on a distinctly upward trajectory, its support has plummeted, at least for the indirect elections of the First Chamber, tallying just over 5% of the vote. However, if compared to its First Chamber results in 2017, where it clocked in at just 1.78%, the result was much stronger (Verkiezingsuitslagen.nl, 2022). PVV’s party structure can be considered authoritarian in and of itself, with Geert Wilders structuring the entire party around his persona and centralizing power around himself (van Donselaar & Rodrigues, 2008). This might explain why PVV’s plans for digital policies are almost non-existent in its 2021 electoral program: it only mentions digitalization when promising to protect people’s personal security against hackers and cyberbullies as well as cyberattacks from ‘foreign powers’ and promises to ‘free up money’ to ‘arm ourselves against that threat’ (PVV, 2021, p. 20).7
‘De PVV wil ook veel meer aandacht voor onze digitale veiligheid. Internetcriminelen lijken vrij spel te hebben. Vele ouderen worden het slachtoffer van internetoplichters en vele jongeren worden digitaal bedreigd. (…) Buitenlandse mogendheden en internationaal georganiseerde internetcriminelen beschikken over digitale technieken om grote schade aan te richten. Tegen die dreiging zullen we ons beter moeten wapenen. Hiervoor zal extra geld worden vrijgemaakt.’
FvD’s electoral program, by contrast, has more attention for digital technologies. It sees privacy, and hence personal data sovereignty, as the primary purpose of digital policy: ‘Through far-reaching digitalization, it is possible to collect and store enormous amounts of privacy-sensitive information’ (FvD, 2021, p. 101).8
‘Door verregaande digitalisering is het echter mogelijk om enorme hoeveelheden privacygevoelige informatie te vergaren en op te slaan.’
‘Big Tech-bedrijven verkopen grote hoeveelheden persoonlijke data door. (…) Wij zijn voor een minimale dataverzamelingen door de overheid en Big Tech-bedrijven.’
‘Verplichting tot privacy en security by design.’
‘Burgers de baas laten zijn over hun eigen data, in plaats van Bigtech-bedrijven. (…) Stoppen anti-MKB EU-wetgeving, zoals de General Data Protection Regulation 2018. (…) Een Nederlandse variant maken van de GDPR 2018.’
‘Schendingen van privacy zijn een internationaal, grensoverschrijdend probleem geworden. De uitwerking van de Brusselse wetgeving (GDPR) naar de Nederlandse AVG heeft geleid tot een onmogelijke kluwen aan wetjes en regeltjes.’
The UK Independence Party is also a right-wing populist party with anti-immigration and (especially) Eurosceptic positions, turning towards the radical right from 2018 onward. Its main agenda point was getting the UK to withdraw from the EU, which may explain why the party’s support collapsed after Brexit. Since it is now a fringe party in British politics, one could argue that there is little point in examining its digital policies. However, the paper’s purpose is to examine the interrelation between populist interpretations of sovereignty and the concept of data sovereignty; whether the party has any bearing on the national political landscape is irrelevant for its purposes. Like AfD and FvD, UKIP supports the use of ‘end-to-end encryption,’ hoping to ‘make secure communications an inviolable right,’ claiming that social media companies try to control free speech (UKIP, 2021, p. 48). It also ‘aims to reduce the UK’s dependence on and increase our national influence over foreign IT manufacturers’ and ‘will give preference to (and give support to) UK owned and controlled software manufacturers’ (UKIP, 2021, p. 49). It warns against security threats and ‘backdoor access to government data’ by China while proposing to ‘strictly control all other foreign participation in the “core” 5G network’ and ‘using UK based technology skills’ to fight cybercrime (UKIP, 2021, p. 49). Regarding data sovereignty, UKIP also aims to repeal the GDPR, like many of its peers across Western Europe, calling it ‘an abomination of Eu inspired bureaucracy and red tape’ and proposing to ‘introduce new legislation, (an updated version of the UK’s Data Protection Act) … to uphold the right to privacy’ (UKIP, 2021, p. 49). While UKIP clearly sees the importance of both personal and international data sovereignty, it does not see diplomacy as a means of achieving that sovereignty – it does not even say how it would achieve international data sovereignty – since other nations, and especially China, are presented as hostile actors. Nonetheless, it does not take a hostile position vis-à-vis the British government. UKIP, like many other WEPs under discussion, only describes the end results of its proposals rather than the process by which those results should be achieved, leaving voters to fill in the blanks while avoiding having to spend resources on the development of a viable digital plan.
Belgium: Vlaams Belang
The radical-right Flemish-nationalist populist party Vlaams Belang (VB) is one of the country’s most popular parties, but cannot be in government due to the cordon sanitaire, or a consensus among other parties that they will not agree to a coalition with VB. The cordon was established due to VB’s extreme positions on Islam, minorities, human rights, and immigration, or, as observes have noted, because the party ‘did not subscribe to the elementary norms and values of civilization’ (De Standaard, 2004). The party’s more recent discourse is primarily focused on reinforcing its image as a challenger to the status quo (Meijen, 2021). The party advocates for secession from Wallonia and the creation of a Flemish state (Vlaams Belang, 2019), which not only makes it a special case of nationalist populism but also, paradoxically, may mean that it pushes for national sovereignty and a pullback into the national level, but also for the achievement of international data sovereignty. In terms of digital policies, however, VB does not explicitly push for international (i.e. Flemish) data sovereignty but rather for stricter laws for Big Tech companies – even though international cooperation would be required:
The past few years, we have noticed that a handful of predominantly American technology companies have, through takeovers and lobbying, established an enormously dominant position in the sector. The GAFA-companies (Google, Apple, Facebook & Amazon) control enormous amounts of internet traffic, possess large amounts of privacy data of our citizens, and (…) [use] lobbying to influence political decision-making. (Vlaams Belang, 2019, p. 16)13
‘De voorbije jaren hebben we gemerkt dat een handvol, voornamelijk Amerikaanse, technologiebedrijven door overnames en gelobby een enorm dominante positie hebben ingenomen in de sector. De GAFA-bedrijven (Google, Apple, Facebook & Amazon) beheersen enorme hoeveelheden van het internetverkeer, beschikken over grote hoeveelheden privacygegevens van onze burgers en wenden hun gigantische budgetten aan om innovatieve bedrijven over te nemen en via lobbying politieke besluitvorming te beïnvloeden.’
Moreover, VB ‘wants a ‘New Deal’ at the European level to break the current tech monopoly’ and demands ‘strict oversight on the private data that these companies collect on our citizens’ (Vlaams Belang, 2019, p. 17).14
Het Vlaams Belang wil op Europees niveau een ‘New Deal’ om het huidige tech-monopolie te doorbreken. Er moet tevens een streng toezicht komen op de privégegevens die deze bedrijven van onze burgers verzamelen.
‘Tot slot moeten bedrijven zoals Google en Facebook meer transparantie bieden over de gelijke behandeling van alle politieke strekkingen op hun netwerken.’
‘Door de indrukwekkende toename van ICT-toepassingen in het dagelijkse leven beschikken verschillende bedrijven, maar ook steeds vaker onze overheid, over enorm veel data van de burgers. (…) Tevens legt dit een grote verantwoordelijkheid bij onze overheid.’
In France, the right-wing nationalist-populist party Rassemblement National (RN, formerly Front National or FN), like the other parties analyzed in this paper, is Islamophobic and anti-immigration, although its leader Marine Le Pen toned down the party’s more extreme standpoints – and especially its usually ardent Euroscepticism – in recent years (Sénécat, 2021). In its 2017 program for the French presidency, (then-)FN proposes to ‘inscribe digital freedoms into the freedoms protected by the constitution’ (FN, 2017, p. 4)17
‘Garantir (…) les libertés numériques par leur inscription dans les libertés fondamentales protégées par la Constitution (…).’
“Créer une charte à valeur constitutionnelle qui inclura la protection des données personnelles des Français, notamment par une obligation de stockage de ces données sur des serveurs localisés en France.”
‘Les géants de la Big Tech ne s’imposent pas seulement en tant que force financière, économique, technologique, mais aussi en tant que force morale et politique entrant en concurrence directe avec nos États. (…) Nous n’hésiterons donc pas à les démanteler, s’il existe des acteurs européens capables de les remplacer, ou si ce démantèlement peut permettre leur déploiement.’
“Notre seul et unique objectif doit donc être la création de géants français et/ou européens”, “… être vigilants vis-à-vis des géants du numérique chinois.”
The analysis has shown a number of similarities and difference between the digital policies of Western European populist parties (WEPs), as visualized in Table 2.
Comparative analysis of populist digital policies
Comparative analysis of populist digital policies
As shown in the table, AfD and UKIP discuss personal and international data sovereignty, keeping both types correctly separated, although they do not discuss them in depth. Both parties present US-based technology companies, and particularly Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, as hostile towards individual citizens. AfD presents the national government as hostile towards individuals in the sense that it allegedly invades citizens’ privacy, while UKIP does not take a positive or negative position towards the government regarding privacy or digital policy. The table makes clear that AfD, RN between 2017 and 2021, and UKIP all aim to reduce national dependence on US-based technology companies, but differ in their approach to the role of diplomacy therein: AfD and FN/RN (between 2017 and 2021) propose (inter)national cooperation agreements between private companies without necessarily involving governments, which would lead to the creation of consortia such as the Franco-German technology company partnership Gaia-X, while UKIP sees other nations as hostile and proposes to resolve the issue of international data sovereignty by strengthening the technology sector in the UK.
The table also shows that FvD and VB use personal data sovereignty (abbreviated as P) as interchangeable with international data sovereignty (abbreviated as I); that is to say, they want to improve individual privacy (personal data sovereignty) by reducing the power that US-based technology companies have over their products (arguing that they censor certain political opinions), rather than by reducing the European or national dependence on US-based companies as a whole, which would arguably be more effective at improving personal data sovereignty. In doing so, FvD and VB link different types of data sovereignty together. Both parties also present the government as lax due to the lack of protection of citizens’ personal data but do not present the government as hostile towards citizens, while presenting US-based technology companies (described in the table as non-European companies) as evil and exploitative giants. Since they do not see the importance of reducing dependence on US-based companies to achieve data sovereignty, neither party envisions any role for cyber diplomacy in digital policy. The PVV, by contrast, does not have any significant digital policies in its election program, rendering its column, like 2022 RN’s, conspicuously empty.
The WEPs under discussion present themselves as protectors of the people – which is typical for populist parties in general (Brubaker 2017) – in the field of digital policy by promising stricter privacy laws that prevent the collection and exploitation of citizens’ personal data, while only rarely describing the specifics of their digital policy plans. This meshes well with the notion that populists tend to propose simplistic, seemingly commonsensical solutions to complex issues as a means of “performing” strong and decisive leadership (Moffitt, 2015). A straightforward explanation for the WEPs’ emphasis on personal privacy may be that privacy laws are most directly experienced by individual citizens and therefore most easily understood. It would seem that populist positions on digital policies are at least in part determined by the direct perceptibility of a specific topic and the degree to which people (at least those who fit the populist definition of “the people”) are directly affected by the topic in question. By contrast, international agreements on digital policies are generally more abstract and mainly interesting for specialized audiences, which may make them less likely to be proposed by populists and more likely to be rejected, since they can be presented as taking power away from “the people”. FvD and VB promise individual citizens that their data will belong to themselves, but do not mention that international cooperation may well be a prerequisite for personal data sovereignty to become a reality. In fact, most of the WEPs (save for PVV and RN in 2022, which do not discuss digital policy in their electoral programs, rendering their columns in Table 2 conspicuously empty) want to move away from international cooperation by scrapping the EU’s GDPR and developing new data protection laws at the national level, which would contribute to the existing fragmentation of digital policies across Europe and potentially reduce the efficacy and enforceability of these laws vis-à-vis Big Tech companies. This shows that WEPs indeed prefer to pull back into the national level in order to concentrate power – and specifically power over data flows – at the national level rather than combine forces to reorganize data flows and reduce the European dependence on US-based companies. This implies that they effectively argue against international data sovereignty while presenting themselves as champions of personal or individual data sovereignty, ignoring the importance of international cooperation for achieving effective individual data sovereignty. In that sense, the analysis provides further evidence for the notion that data sovereignty is a contested and complicated term which is used in contradictory ways (Hummel et al., 2021), which may also be the reason why it often functions as a discursive tool rather than an actual model for structuring cyber governance (Pohle & Thiel, 2020). Moreover, the agent-oriented comparative analysis shows that, due to the populist interpretation of data sovereignty as an individual rather than an international matter, populist sovereignty-based cyber governance models may be limited in their potential to achieve effective change (Zeng et al., 2017). For that reason, populist calls for re-nationalization or re-territorialization of the Internet, or their efforts to ‘align the internet with [their] national borders’ (Stadnik, 2021, p. 162; Creemers, 2020), are unlikely to succeed without international cooperation, which they even reject within the context of digital policy. Hence, the analysis may also indicate that populism should be approached as a political strategy aimed at gaining power in the short term (cf. Weyland, 2017), without proposing workable policies and governance models in the long term.
This paper has shown that Western European populist parties primarily see data sovereignty as an individual matter. Some WEPs acknowledge the importance of international data sovereignty, but do not want to use cyber diplomacy to achieve it, preferring cooperation between companies or supporting national technology companies. Moreover, the WEPs’ “paranoid approach” to digital policy is a self-fulfilling prophecy: they warn voters of the dangers of the loss of privacy, while proposing to scrap international agreements that effectively protect that privacy, which allows the WEPs to further exploit fears of privacy loss by promising to reinstate that privacy (while not having a plan to do so). It can therefore be argued that WEPs are using digital policy as short-term opportunism to attract voters who feel that their personal data is being abused and their privacy is being invaded by governments and technology companies, but also voters who feel that their opinions and ideas are “being censored” on certain digital platforms. While further research would be needed to support this claim, the psychology of populism, and particularly its penchant for conspiracy theories (see e.g. Bergmann, 2018), could be correlated with this policy position, as populists may hope to make electoral gains off of their voters’ fears (whether unfounded or not) of online surveillance. The comparative analysis has shown that WEPs’ policy programs are not prepared for further digitalization, and that they conceive of digital policy primarily as a means for self-profiling, i.e. reinforcing their image of being a protector of the people (against governments or technology companies), rather than an actually important policy area. The paradox of cyber diplomacy and data sovereignty in populism is not resolved but rather reduced to the issue of individual privacy, which obfuscates the paradox for the general public. This strategy also speaks to the complexity of data sovereignty as a concept: the ways it can be deployed as a discursive tool (as in Table 1) are far simpler than the concept itself.
The paper’s contribution to the literature is that it explores the notion of data sovereignty from the perspective of populism studies. Furthermore, it discusses the connection between data sovereignty and established notions of popular sovereignty used to legitimize political power, while positing cyber diplomacy as a link between those concepts. It also theorizes an agent-based typology of data sovereignty as a discursive tool. Its empirical implications lie primarily in the area of political science, analyzing whether WEPs’ digital policies can be seen as image-building tools focused on short-term electoral gains, instead of policy plans that are intended to work in the long term if the party comes to power. The paper’s findings provide initial empirical evidence for the former. Key weaknesses of the study are, firstly, that its narrow scope makes it difficult to extrapolate its empirical findings beyond Western European right-wing populist parties, and, secondly, that WEPs seemingly do not often talk about data sovereignty directly. A possible explanation for this lack of engagement is that digital policy, and especially policies on cutting-edge technologies and novel concepts in digital governance, is still a niche subject for the general public that populist parties aim to appeal to. Age differences may also play a role, as, for instance, the Dutch PVV’s lack of digital policies may be linked to its older voting demographic.
The lack of substantial digital policies among WEPs also has broader implications for democracy and invites further research. For instance, populists typically claim they embody the voice of the people and that they function as a direct conduit for channeling the needs of “the people” into politics (Brubaker, 2017; Mudde, 2007). To that end, populist actors use the Internet and social media to amplify their messages and talk to “the people” directly (Schroeder, 2019) – implying that a populist actor with power over the nation’s digital infrastructures and technologies could significantly reinforce its position. Alternatively, populists may promise to establish forms of direct, digital democracy in which voters can use digital technologies to be (or at least feel) more directly represented in the political sphere (De Blasio & Sorice, 2018; Kim, 2008). This is particularly relevant for Western Europe, as its technological infrastructure and citizens’ digital literacy is relatively well-developed. However, the paper shows that WEPs do not wish to do so, and that they are ill-equipped to develop workable plans for further digitalization – implying that they will likely not focus on using digital technologies to connect with the people and improve democratic participation. In fact, the analysis also shows that, at least in Western Europe, if populists would advocate for direct digital democracy, their claims are not supported by policy proposals that provide the underlying frameworks necessary to execute these plans for digital representation in a safe and trustworthy manner. WEPs using digital direct democracy as a means to present themselves as a more direct representative of citizens hence may not have a sustained vision for actually implementing these promises, yet more research is needed to support that claim. Further research could also take the analysis in a different direction by expanding the agent-based typology of data sovereignty as a discursive concept, focusing on other geographic areas, or fleshing out the notion of cyber diplomacy as a bridge between national and data sovereignty.
Footnotes
Author’s biography
Jens Meijen is a PhD Researcher at KU Leuven and a Europaeum Scholar in the Europaeum network founded by the University of Oxford. He is also a team leader at the Center for AI and Digital Policy in Washington, a Global Policy Fellow at the Institute for Technology and Society in Rio de Janeiro, and lead consultant at Ulysses.ai, an AI consulting and risk management firm.