What does sovereignty actually mean? It can’t mean that you are able to do everything by yourself without any dependency on others. No one is able to do that. Human life and civilisation has always been predicated on cooperation and dependencies. Even hunter gatherers were not 100% sovereign, since they traded with each other.
Europe is not sovereign, we know that but America is not sovereign either, which China’s rare earth export controls showed. China is also not sovereign being dependent on oil among other things as the Iran war shows. Sovereignty is therefore always a continuum, not a status that is on or off. At one end of the scale we can be entirely sovereign if we want but do we need full sovereignty? For example, a country like Denmark do we really need to mine all conceivable metals so we can build anything if we want to? Do we really need to produce volley balls, orange peelers and garden hoses?
The central question is therefore not whether you have sovereignty or not but how much.sovereignty you have in different areas and what level is needed for specific domains. Small nations like Denmark are used to never being truly sovereign in modern times, we always depended on larger powers to some extent.
Digital sovereignty therefore cannot be about doing everything yourself, it must be about doing the most important things yourself and having alternative options to switch to something else if need be. Digital sovereignty must be about where we want to be sovereign and the degree of sovereignty we need. Rather than moving all digital services to Europe at an instant it is more important to start building parallel capabilities that can quickly be scaled. That is going to cost but it will be cheaper and more feasible than complete digital sovereignty.
What we need to do on the digital sovereignty agenda then is to start mapping what flows are important to us, which are critical and which are trivial. Then we need to map the current sovereignty and a target. And then we need to start closing the gap. It is of particular importance that scalable alternatives are identified and utilized because that gives autonomy to switch. It is not necessary to have made the full switch.
For digital sovereignty it means to start systematically to map out key capabilities and start building sovereign alternatives that can then gradually be scaled. That would include cloud data centres, computer chips, enterprise software, AI models etc.
We don’t necessarily need to get to the end point, we just need a viable path.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash