Salvaging European Technological Sovereignty in a Trump 2.0 World

William Burns is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

Europe urgently needs to rethink technological sovereignty in this new Trumpocene. The stakes are high because, without action, the hope of achieving a socially responsible kind of tech will fade yet again on the continent.

Is tech sovereignty possible for Europe, and even if it could be achieved, what is its endgame? In a putative mix of policy measures to contain Big Tech oligarchs, where does sovereignty fit?

Over the past few years, tech sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and related concepts have been raised repeatedly as prizes Europe must win. Although these terms are undefined in European law, they proved a consistent shorthand for fears about Europe’s declining economic and political power, symbolized by the continent’s lack of tech giants, unlike China and the USA. The sovereignty agenda gave rise to a mini-industry of strategizing on such topics as AI, quantum computing, biotechnology and “deep tech” with implications for how European politicians should respond.

But the latest phase of MAGA belligerency has thrown this reasoning up in the air. On the one hand, some want to double down on the sovereigntist rhetoric due to the assumption that multilateral approaches, weak though they were, fell apart.

However, escalating since the resignation of computer industry veteran and arch-sovereignist Thierry Breton from the European Commission last year, we also see circumspection.

It is legitimate to believe that sovereignty would be financially and, therefore, politically costly given Europe’s apparent fiscal position, while also likely to provoke Trumpian rage. Trump has yet to take concrete steps against the EU, and we simply cannot tell if he will turn out to be a paper tiger on trade. But the dangers of American retaliation are nevertheless real, especially if Europe were to create a rival to Big Tech.

A conference last month in Brussels, The Perfect Storm: A Time of Truth for Europe?, painted a bleak picture of Europe’s economic future, attributed to a posited collapse of the trans-Atlantic alliance and other global shifts such as China’s growing scientific and industrial prowess.

Far-right leaders – now sadly common in the EU – will support their American sponsor, while the rest would be prepared to throw sovereignty under the bus not just because they are cowed by Trump but because they might see it as an expendable bargaining chip in broader political transactions.

The important point to remember is that science and technology policy plays out over a longer term than the reactions of European politicians and a single American presidency. Progressives must keep their eyes on the ball.

The analysis published last year by the European Commission, before Trump appeared on the scene, and written by the Fraunhofer Society's Jakob Edler, highlighted the “basic values and norms of the continent” as a core criterion of tech sovereignty. “Even if a technology could be sourced from abroad on a reliable basis, Europe would not be sovereign if the features of those technologies were not in line with its value system,” Edler wrote.

Edler and colleagues have been among the most thoughtful official-adjacent commentators. But their barb stopped short of naming the values and norms in mind nor explaining exactly how these would be reproduced through technology.

One reason for such gaps is that the policy community knows little about the connections between technology and broader social change – if they exist, in what direction they might run, and how to encourage progressive effects. For decades, influential bodies such as the OECD emphasized the supposed relations between technology, economic growth, and competitiveness. When queried outside those narrow fields, they had little advice to give. They appear to be unprepared for what is playing out now in the days following the start of the second Trump administration.

There are now opportunities to reposition the debate in Europe into one where technology could become part of progressive economic and social change and to ask what role, if any, tech sovereignty could play.

Multiplying ambiguities

It has always been far more common for companies in Europe to license technology from the best on the market or reverse engineer it than to invent it. While European firms may introduce incremental improvements over time, they tend to follow the old European policy dictum, “One can borrow scientific and technical knowledge, but industrial power one must create oneself.”

In olden times, Europe’s primary offshore sources of intellectual property were China (the printing press and other inventions) and looted know-how from colonies. More recently, while acknowledging that it’s a complicated picture, the US has probably been the leading supplier of technical marvels.

Yet, against this unheralded reality, tech sovereignty regularly caught political attention because it played to vanity concerning Europe’s supposed inventive genius. It also proved politically potent, heralding transformation, because the proponents of sovereignty talked about technology and the world of the future while also remaining conservative, distracting from discussion of progressive change within societies while setting international relations in stone.

However, on rare occasions when theory became action, European governments found the main features of tech sovereignty were great expense and opportunity costs that proved difficult to justify. Rather than glorifying sovereign power, it instead demonstrated its limits.

Airbus airliners, a successful case of Europe overpowering American technology, triggered a decades-long trade dispute with financial effects in other parts of the economy due to over 3.3 billion dollars of duties imposed by both sides. The dispute has still not been concluded and could yet flare up again.

Airbus was also very costly to create. In 2004, the US alleged that Airbus received 40 billion dollars in European subsidies since its inception. However, the opportunity costs are probably the most significant aspect of the story; in other words, what might the tens of billions of dollars have been used to buy instead?

The truth is that tech sovereignty carries with it direct costs, unwanted effects, and opportunity costs. While none of these are necessarily insurmountable, they have to be part of assessing the wisdom of a particular line of policy. Policymakers must hold a theory of change in their heads if they are to understand how investment in technology, machines, and devices could help deliver the geopolitical weather they want.

Yet, the role that a particular technology could play in intergovernmental bargaining has not been systematized, although various unspecified “theories” appear in European policy discourse. Leaders who espouse tech sovereignty might, for example, hope possession of machines will give them wealth and power unmatched by their peers. This could stem from a widely-held view that the relative geopolitical weight of a country derives from its ranking in “innovation” tables, which count the number of start-ups, unicorns, and so on. It has to be said this is an unproven premise and, if it could be achieved, would require continual negotiation with and consent of the two superpowers.

Ultimately, European tech sovereignty lies in the hands of China, the US, and others to facilitate rather than for Europe to unilaterally proclaim, implying the best investment would actually be in diplomacy. There is also reason to believe that European elites completely misread how the world is changing. We appear headed for a period where technologies will be shared by superpowers in a new kind of post-colonial dispensation, despite the better intentions of the Biden administration to create a friendlier environment.

But the overall situation, as shown by the Airbus case, is not easy to summarize let alone predict. Indeed, it would be naive to believe it could be. Our poor grasp of the relations between machines and geopolitics – as with other aspects of societal change – means we clutch at straws.

Quoting Maurice Pearton’s classic of the technology geopolitics genre, The Knowledgeable State, “Industrialization during the last century increased the options open to policy; it has now reached the point of multiplying the ambiguities.” Without a map, however, we are going to find ourselves lost.

Europe’s struggle to invent

If we look deep into European history, tech sovereignty can be summed up by the need of elites to control certain types of machines.

In physical terms, these machines have generally been uncommon, physically imposing, made predominantly of metal, and sometimes very dangerous, like nuclear weapons. Manufacturing them proved enormously difficult and had systemic effects through sourcing materials and components and mobilizing laws, regulations, and expertise.

These projects often involved a call for integrated action across European countries (typically in support of particular “national interests”) other times, they were presented as a strictly national policy without cross-border premises.

During the Cold War, European governments regularly harbored a fear of being left behind in the wake of the US and later Japan. This led to a politics of constant emergency defined by technology gaps that had to be plugged.

In the 1980s, investment programs such as the Europe-wide “ESPRIT” (as well as separate national programs in France and the UK) piled on the pressure, aimed at countering what was seen as the encroachment of Japanese microelectronics.

These schemes articulated quite different approaches (offering spooky parallels to the current “EuroStack” proposal from groups on the center-left that was previously advanced in a post on Tech Policy Press). The British and European schemes were inclined to fund pre-competitive research in consortia of large firms while the French policy never shied away from restructuring industry and trying to create marketable products.

The 1980s-era projects were, however, only intermittently successful in plugging the self-perceived technology gap (as far as we know), although they influenced thinking in the Brussels bureaucracy in favor of large science programs, as argued in a recent book by a “seasoned" EU official.

It is difficult to know what these projects did for social democracy as it appears no one analyzed it, but the effects were probably quite limited, although not zero.

The 1990s and beyond saw the partial rejection of dirigisme (elite control) at the EU level in favor of approaches that sought to involve citizens more deeply in policy design and gain their active consent. The inflection points lay with center-left political appointees to the European Commission’s science and technology brief, notably, the former French prime minister, Édith Cresson.

Cresson’s previous unsuccessful attempt to restructure France’s ICT sector, as well as her maverick socialist politics, must have informed her thinking. She instigated many prescient but unrealized agendas such as “Society, the endless frontier,” advocating for societal goals at the heart of technology policy.

A critical history of the last twenty years has yet to be written, so we can only guess what really happened. Since before the financial crisis in 2008, the European Commission’s thoughts on science and technology have been dominated by the center-right and, for the past decade, an American program – Apollo or the “moonshot” – which became the poster child for all kinds of technical and scientific visions.

It is a telling metaphor for a discussion that evokes powerful machines like space rockets but returns us to the status quo, much like the capsule that returned to Earth. Apollo was, without doubt, a good example of technology as performance art, which surely produced political effects on the US government and the Soviet leadership. But it was not a social democratic phenomenon, unlike the contemporaneous civil rights movement and Great Society programs. Nor did it have macroeconomic effects – the main spin-off being non-stick pans.

It appears we’ve come full circle: elite fixation on particular machines crept back, upsetting the layered sands of experience and delivering us to our latest crisis.

A piece of the pie

The US has always had major technological strengths in IT and industrial agriculture. Despite being the world’s largest food and agricultural commodity import market, Europe kept out some American agricultural products through regulations, tariffs, and subsidization of its own agriculture, including through research, development, education, and so on.

But with the exception of genetically modified crops, it never kept out American industrial methods such as chemical sprays. On the contrary, it embraced them, citing the US-invented herbicide glyphosate, as well as, of course, also inventing its own versions.

The agricultural example illustrates one relatively settled endgame that few in the progressive space are satisfied with, and that proves very difficult to dislodge. But when we talk about the digital world, no one knows if we have yet reached the endgame.

There are parts of the European policy community that claim to believe that the implementation of AI will deliver economic gains for the continent. However, the European Central Bank understands very well that this is a false prospectus. The macroeconomic effect of IT on European productivity has always been limited, and officials suspect the same will apply to AI. Obviously, productivity gain will instead be captured by the Big Tech firms thereby augmenting their political and financial clout.

Airbus-type concepts – implying heavy investment to create a rival to US tech – would therefore have value as a way for European capitalists to get a piece of the pie, a goal that is about more than AI or other specific applications of IT.

The European Investment Bank (another EU body) was a crucial player in the formation of Airbus. The bank is now conducting billion Euro-scale investment operations in IT and chips as if gradually patching together a mechanism of integrated action.

The geopolitical effects are slightly unpredictable. But negotiation with the US would be a constant feature of the endgame should Europe produce a tech rival, whether that leads to agreement between firms on spheres of interest, a cartel, a trade war, or some other formulation.

From the progressive perspective, many of these features would obviously be highly undemocratic and Imperialist. Progressives would opt for an open, multilateral means of negotiating that also delivered benefits for the Global Majority. Trade disputes would be poison to what remains of social democracy, such as American retaliation, which delivered heavy economic blows to Europe.

Another Airbus would be pointless unless it was designed as a unique organization with deeply embedded democratic structures and a social purpose. If investments impose greater industrial democracy on recipient firms, such as labor union control on management boards, environmental and social priorities, and promotion of equality, there would be benefits. Unfortunately, these investments never imply such qualities, and that point needs to be made.

Technologies by and for whom

A second strand of progressive challenge must be on the place of particular technologies in the debate.

The European Commission, through its Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform, fixated on “digital technologies,” “deep tech innovation," “clean and resource-efficient technologies, including net-zero technologies,” and “biotechnologies, including medicinal products.”

Evidently, it is impossible to tell in advance which specific lines of action in each of these vast fields would pay off. Experts would struggle, let alone businesspeople and policymakers. The hype around large language models and enormous data centers, promoted by Big Tech, ignores other approaches to AI, which are discussed only by specialists and rarely feature in political speeches.

But more radically editing these kinds of lists raises more profound political questions. It is a self-evident point, but huge numbers of inventions are essential to our lives, and they generally have complicated supply chains. Melt-blown polypropylene for the manufacture of face masks, for example, is a crucial preventative against infectious disease.

In a mix of constantly shifting trends and myriad technologies, we obviously want to understand our dependencies. But the answers are not so obvious and would hinge on the tasks devices perform, our attachment to these tasks, and how we want the world to look tomorrow (a political question).

During its intermediate years of non-networked desktop computers in the last decades of the twentieth century, IT moved towards becoming a technology like washing machines – useful but not stupendously profitable and certainly outside the scope of tech sovereignty. The early household computers, designed for amateur tinkering, were widely manufactured by European firms in many unexpected corners of the continent. PC clones rendered computers cheap consumer goods.

With the advent of large data centers, driven by the cloud and then AI boosterism, we pinged back in time to a Cold War ethos in which “mainframe” computers were seen as geopolitical trophies. Yet, the scholar Xiao Gongqin– translated by David Ownby – worries about the US cutting off China’s access to Microsoft, a spectacular “vulnerability” as business depends on it. The PC clone and its operating system came back to haunt geopolitics, showing that tech sovereignty looks different depending on where in the world you sit.

The final, related point is that European countries repeatedly used technology policy as an Imperialist weapon. This means the deliberate undermining of science and technology in decolonized countries – and the struggle, therefore, for decolonized countries to develop their own capacities.

This is why tech sovereignty in the manufacture of antiretroviral drugs was so important in post-Apartheid South Africa. The drugs were denied to the country by multinational pharmaceutical firms. But South Africa eventually achieved sovereign manufacturing capacity with great benefits for the health of its people.

How European policies damage tech sovereignty in the Global South is a question that must remain open for contestation. Connecting with progressives globally will always form the backbone of any sensible strategy to develop a more just, equitable, sustainable, democratic, and meaningfully sovereign future.