Protecting, Transforming, and Projecting the Single Market. Open Strategic Autonomy and Digital Sovereignty in the EU’s Trade and Digital Policies

Abstract

In recent years, the EU has reformulated its trade and digital policies under the banners of open strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty, respectively. The existing literature has only begun to explain this departure from the market-centered and efficiency-oriented rhetoric that has dominated European policymaking for the last decades. In this paper, we argue that the discursive turn towards autonomy and sovereignty is part of a larger recasting of the European project, which we understand as the evolving compromise between a neoliberal, a neo-mercantilist, and a socially-oriented faction. Through a combination of document analysis, interviews, and discourse network analysis, we show that a changing global environment has provided an opening to challenge the existing, neoliberally dominated consensus. We further show how open strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty are used as coalition magnets in mobilizing support for a more assertive, capable, and interventionist Europe able to protect and promote its interests and values in an increasingly digitalized and geopoliticized world.

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