Webinaire | Drails | EU digital sovereignty: a dilemma between seeking greater strategic autonomy and maintaining strategic interdependencies (14.11.25)

EU digital sovereignty: a dilemma between seeking greater strategic autonomy and maintaining strategic interdependencies

Online Workshop

14 November 2025  |  12am - 1pm CET

Since Ursula von der Leyen was appointed President of the European Commission in 2019, advancing digital sovereignty has become a core part of the Commission's mandate. Subsequently, a considerable number of observers and researchers have emphasised the uncertainties and ambiguities surrounding the meaning of digital sovereignty at EU level, as well as the objectives to be achieved and the policies to be implemented under its banner.

This DRAILS workshop will propose two central arguments for discussion:

Firstly, when analysing EU-driven policies, three predominant levels of sovereignty can be identified: proprietary, territorial and regulatory. These designate, respectively, the development of indigenous digital capabilities; the relocation of strategic stages in digital supply chains to EU territory; and the establishment of a normative framework governing the interactions of digital operators, consumers and users within the European market. Although programmes driven by the first two levels have not yet produced significant results, the European Commission has demonstrated its ability to carry out an ambitious overhaul of the EU regulatory framework.

Secondly, the Commission's superior capacity to advance the digital regulation agenda, compared to the other two dimensions, is the result of divergences in the level of sovereignty to be achieved. This reflects the EU's long-term dilemma regarding technological dependencies that have developed over the years with regard to foreign big tech, particularly US digital giants. While some industrial and political stakeholders advocate greater strategic autonomy, others favour maintaining these dependencies while exercising greater control. In this particular context, regulation emerges as the point of convergence, thereby empowering the Commission as a digital rule-maker.

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Guest | Patricia Nouveau, is a visiting lecturer at UCLouvain-Saint Louis and the University of Strasbourg (Unistra). She teaches global and European economic governance, European Union industrial and digital policies, and multinational lobbying of European institutions. She is also a researcher at the Center for International Relations Studies at the University of Liège (CEFIR). Her work focuses on the quest for European digital sovereignty. To this end, she studies the interdependencies of global digital value chains, technological rivalries between the United States and China, and their consequences for the European Union. She also compares the industrial policies pursued by these three major powers in the context of geopolitical rivalries.

Data, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Law & Society (DRAILS) is a CPDR - CRIDES research project