European Digital Sovereignty: A Layered Approach

The paper uses a stack model to come to an estimation of the EU's digital capacities on the global stage. Digital capacities are hard to measure and involve a wide variety of technologies ranging from semiconductors and network infrastructure to artificial intelligence and Internet of Things-devices. By adopting Benjamin Bratton's speculative work on the stack as the contemporary organizing principle of sovereignty, this paper presents a layered approach to digital technology and then assesses the EU's capacities across those layers. It aims to provide a framework to discern connections across different digital technologies and reason about required policies to achieve the EU's goal of digital sovereignty.