Diluting digital sovereignty: Czechia’s quiet selective adaptation to EU digital politics

This article analyses how the notion of ‘digital sovereignty’ (DS) was constructed in public, semi-public and hidden discourses in Czechia. We show that the Czech government initially viewed DS with suspicion, but that its approach gradually shifted to a more pragmatic one. This happened through a process of selective adaptation, which we understand as an outcome of the interaction of different narratives of DS, which occurred mostly out of the public sphere. We contribute to the scholarship on DS and the role of Central and Eastern European (CEE) states in EU politics in three ways. First, we provide the first case study of the politics of digital sovereignty in Czechia. Second, we contribute to the debate on national variation in EU digital politics by focusing on small states and dependent economies in CEE, thereby moving beyond the literature’s focus on the large states of the EU’s economic core. Third, by bringing in the otherwise invisible discourse of Czech officials, we push beyond the dominant focus on the ‘noisy’ public rhetoric in DS scholarship. In contrast, we show that the existing studies miss the level of ‘quiet’ bureaucratic politics, a dimension that is crucial for understanding Czechia’s politics of DS.