On 13 September 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the birth of the Geopolitical Union – a European Union (EU) that would no longer be naïve in its relations with the rest of the world but would instead look to protect its own interests in the face of global upheaval. Elected in 2019, President von der Leyen announced her view of world events in her political guidelines,Footnote ² a world she described as ever more unsettled: ‘Existing powers are going down new paths alone. New powers are emerging and consolidating. Changes in climate, technology, and demography are transforming our societies and way of life’.Footnote ³ The mid-2000s onwards had seen shifts that shook the European Commission’s faith in the liberal international order, ranging from financial crises and contagion for the Eurozone, Russian aggression in Crimea, attacks to its legitimacy from disinformation of external origin to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU. With the election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016 and the beginning of an increasingly fractious trade relationship with China, it seemed that ‘Great Power’ politics was back,Footnote ⁴ and with it, a growing sense that international cooperation was being replaced with geopolitics and geopolitical strategising.Footnote ⁵ Furthermore, the seeming consensus that the private sector had a valuable role to play as equal partners in networks of governance was increasingly shaken by concerns over private power and the extent to which information infrastructure owners may have interests, values, and ideologies not necessarily aligned with those of actors such as the European Commission.Footnote ⁶ In particular, ‘Big Tech’, the large technology companies responsible for some of the most significant innovations in recent history, were seen to have amassed significant economic and political power with control over infrastructure and the data that powered it. And yet, could they necessarily be trusted?Footnote ⁷

Technology, where it is made, who owns it, and who uses it, have all become important geostrategic questions. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global manufacturing shutdown, resulting in a decrease in the microchips available for use in a whole range of sectors, it impacted automobile manufacture first and then spread into markets for smartphones, graphics cards, and refrigerators.Footnote ⁸ By May 2022, exacerbated by trade conflict between the US and China, the shortage had spread to medicalFootnote ⁹ and securityFootnote ¹⁰ technologies. Access to modern technologies, previously taken as a given in the EU, was suddenly something that could not be taken for granted; Europe’s dependency on technology and technology supply chains outside of its territory was no longer just part of a system of globalised trade but a vulnerability for both its economy and its security. If a natural disaster could limit Europe’s access to technology, could an unfriendly state? If the liberal international economic order and its organs, such as the World Trade Organization, were losing their ability to influence and shape trade links in line with previously accepted norms and values, and if states, particularly big technology-exporting states, were in active trade conflict and increasingly protectionist regarding their critical sectors, what would this mean for the EU? How could the Commission respond in a way that could ensure its economic prosperity and guarantee its security?

The central argument made in this book is that in the face of heightened geopolitical instability and a heightened sense of its own vulnerabilities, the EU has adopted an approach to technology regulation that can be characterised as ‘regulatory mercantilist’ in nature. This entails a framing of regulatory intervention as a response to geopolitical instability or perceived threat, which necessitates a response based in promoting sovereignty and/or reducing external dependencies. This requires increased regulatory control, with an emphasis on coordinating technology industrial policy within Europe, while promoting European rules and values as global standards outside of Europe. It represents a reorientation of public–private relations from a model in which both are equal partners in regulatory networks, typified by light touch or self-regulatory regimes, to one in which an element of hierarchy is restored, with co-regulation and the creation of new regulatory bodies or expansion of the powers of existing ones. Most importantly, it positions economy and security ambitions as mutually constitutive and interdependent, rather than trade-offs. Both Europe’s economy and its security are equally challenged by external vulnerabilities, and reducing the dependencies that create those vulnerabilities can help to ensure that the EU’s technological sovereignty is preserved and its ability to act free of the restraints placed upon it by strategic dependencies is increased. In this sense, the Commission has become the Geopolitical Commission, in which old ways of working and old rationales for regulation in the field of technology are replaced with a new geostrategic orientation, which is readily apparent in both the policy documents informing regulatory interventions and the structures for regulation provided in the resulting legal frameworks. As the penultimate chapter of this work demonstrates, the re-election of Donald Trump as President of the US and the beginning of his second administration in January 2025 have become key sources of geopolitical concern for the Commission, reinforcing the approach in von der Leyen II that was taken in von der Leyen I.

Methodology

To demonstrate this and the relevance of regulatory mercantilism in this context, I have employed grounded theory-informed thematic analysis.Footnote ¹¹ Grounded theoryFootnote ¹² is a method employed in conducting inquiry for the purpose of constructing theory.Footnote ¹³ Grounded theory seeks to uncover the relevant conditions in which actors make decisions, how actors respond to those conditions, and the consequences of doing so.Footnote ¹⁴ It is an abductive process, combining elements of iterative and deductive analysis, in which data is used to draw initial theoretical inferences, which are then refined by returning to the data in a form of theoretical sampling in which the data helps to expand upon the theoretical categories.Footnote ¹⁵ As argued by Corbin and Strauss, with theoretical sampling in grounded theory, each concept that comprises the theory is provisional but earns its way into the theory by repeatedly being visible in the collected data.Footnote ¹⁶ Initial development of the concepts has been conducted in previous research,Footnote ¹⁷ and the concepts have been further refined throughout the analysis conducted in writing this book. The analysis is thematic insofar as it identifies key themes that serve as a basis for action, rationales for acting, and then the actions pursued. This approach was used to identify patterns that could be used to determine the characteristicsFootnote ¹⁸ of these contexts, rationales, and outcomes, and whether they met the conditions to be considered indicative of a regulatory mercantilism approach. These themes are more fully explored in Chapter 1, which concerns the development and application of the regulatory mercantilism framework.

In terms of performing this analysis, I use the ‘Context, Process, Outcome’ (CPO) framework.Footnote ¹⁹ Context concerns the dynamic conditions that inform ideas and understandings of a given scenario or problem, which serve to shape responses to those conditions.Footnote ²⁰ Process and outcome refer to the ‘implementation processes […] and the intended and unintended process of change triggered […] leading to alterations in intermediary outcomes (e.g. knowledge, attitude, behavior, structures, collaborative climate), finally leading to the outcomes of interest’.Footnote ²¹ In studying the changed approach to the regulation of technology by the von der Leyen Commission, this entails looking at the geopolitical context in which discussions regarding technology are taken; identifying the processes by which shared meaning is made and communicated regarding perceived vulnerabilities arising from this context, and thus the rationale for regulating technologies; and the outcomes being changes in the way that these technologies are governed, namely through moving away from systems of regulation that could be understood as regulatory capitalist in nature to systems that could be considered regulatory mercantilist (as will be discussed in the next section). This approach is suitable and appropriate for assessing changes in public policy,Footnote ²² as it allows for an understanding of how external conditions impact upon the decisions made by policy actors such as regulators or legislators (and in this case, the European Commission) and the choice of public policy intervention they adopt, such as binding regulations or voluntary compliance mechanisms.Footnote ²³

In this book, I analyse the policies and actions relevant to technology control that were pursued by the first von der Leyen Commission in the period 2019–2024, drawing first from the above-mentioned political guidelines and then using purposive sampling to collate the policy documents relevant to the key policy areas identified in these political guidelines, including ‘A Europe Fit for the Digital Age’, ‘Promoting Our European Way of Life’, and ‘A New Push for European Democracy’, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. Of relevance for technology control is the Shaping Europe’s Digital Future Communication,Footnote ²⁴ which served as the basis both for identifying the key technologies relevant for this analysis, as well as for the Commission’s rationale for action and subsequent approach. In total, more than 120 documents were used in the analysis, including Commission Communications, EU State of the Union addresses and speeches by European Commissioners, publications by Commission President von der Leyen, and Proposals for Regulations and Directives. In each instance, documents were analysed for containing references to the conditions in which action was being considered (context), the rationale for action (process), and proposed actions (outcomes). In order to provide a structure for the analysis to follow, it is first necessary to provide an overview of the key theoretical contribution this work makes in the next section, namely the development of the regulatory mercantilist framework (which is expanded upon in Chapter 1), and then to consider the rationales for action adopted by the Commission in the field of technology control, namely ‘digital/technological sovereignty’ and ‘strategic autonomy’, covered in the subsequent section (expanded upon in Chapters 2 and 3, and then applied in Chapters 4–7).

Regulatory Mercantilism: Europe’s Approach to Regulating Technology Control

The key theoretical contribution that I present with this book is the use of regulatory mercantilism as a way of understanding how the EU is seeking to regulate technologies considered critical for Europe’s economy and security. I came up with the concept for a co-authored article in which my co-author and I were seeking to understand how the Commission was operationalising digital sovereignty in the context of its cybersecurity policies.Footnote ²⁵ Regulatory mercantilism is an approach to policy formulation that is increasingly being referred to in work aiming to understand digital policymaking in the EU context.Footnote ²⁶ As the name suggests, regulatory mercantilism is an approach that shares characteristics with mercantilism as a system of control, requiring a brief outline of that ideational framework.Footnote ²⁷ Discussions of mercantilism often begin with a reference to Adam Smith, and in this respect, this work is no different. In Book IV of Wealth of Nations, Smith refers to the ‘mercantile System’,Footnote ²⁸ which he concludes constituted a system concerned with the encouragement of exports and discouragement of imports, with its object being ‘to enrich the country by an advantageous balance of trade’.Footnote ²⁹ Whether to consider it a unified and coherent system of thought or policy, however, is a subject of considerable debate. As Helleiner noted ‘no one in the pre-Smithian era described themselves as “mercantilists”’.Footnote ³⁰ Magnusson has similarly remarked that ‘it was after Smith that Mercantilism was constructed into a more or less coherent “system” […] constructed as an opposite to the “Smithian” or “free trade” system’.Footnote ³¹ Mercantilism as a set of diverse ideas about the economy is more complex than Adam Smith’s account suggests: It was neither a unified system ‘obsessed’ with securing wealth in the form of coinage,Footnote ³² nor a set of concrete policies in which national power or wealth can be measured solely by the volume of gold acquired.Footnote ³³ Heckscher, while a critic of mercantilism, argued that the view that mercantilists saw wealth and money as either identical or interchangeable was mistaken.Footnote ³⁴

Mercantilism, such as it was, constituted a form of political economy focused both on the relations between states in matters of external trade and the role of the state in matters of internal trade harmonisation, reducing barriers that prevented the unity of the economy within a state, and the form that relations between what would now be considered the public and private sectors should take. It was an approach that saw power as guaranteed by wealth, and that wealth could in turn guarantee power, and through that power, the security of territory. Viner describes this rationale in mercantilism as being about ‘power and plenty’,Footnote ³⁵ and that both were mutually reinforcing goals in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century foreign policy. As will be discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, mercantilism was an approach to state-market relations that were largely defined by the geopolitical structures and conflicts of its time, in which the best way to secure the state from external (and in this context, military) threats was to amass wealth, minimising the import of goods and resources that would create dependencies on other states, while seeking to maximise the export of ‘value-added’ goods, with a positive balance of trade essential to furthering state interests. This required a form of economic state-making, reducing any barriers to a unified economy internally, and the pursuit of an active industrial policy to produce the goods that could be exported in order to generate wealth, which in turn could be used to promote the security of the state, whether in the form of armaments, the payment of armies, or the building of ships. This however required the exertion of power beyond territorial borders to gain access to more of the natural resources deemed essential for industrial policy.

Regulatory mercantilism shares certain of these characteristics, although tempered for the nature of international relations in the twenty-first century. Regulatory mercantilism is an approach to regulating sectors that is motivated by a sense of insecurity or vulnerability on the part of the studied policymakers, as will be explored further in Chapter 1. Geopolitical instability and the belief that traditional allies or partners cannot necessarily be trusted create a sense that the dependence on the resources, goods, or service provision originating in other states creates critical vulnerabilities, with resulting economic and security implications. This lack of control limits the ability of a state-like actor like the European Commission to act freely in its engagements with both the private and public sector actors in those other states, or, in the parlance of the Commission, hinders its strategic autonomy (a concept that will be expanded upon in the next section). Regulatory mercantilism is therefore contingent and a response to perceived vulnerability, with the response being framed in terms of sovereignty and strategic autonomy, with economic and security issues being interlinked and used as a basis for action. In approach, it is interventionist, introducing legal frameworks as a means of exerting increased control over a domain such as, in the case of this book, technology. Regulatory mercantilism as a result seeks to reorient state-market relations, subjecting critical areas to increased oversight by means of legally mandated co-regulation, replacing self-regulatory regimes. The Commission approach emphasises industrial policy as a means of reducing external dependencies,Footnote ³⁶ bringing production of essential technologies into its territory as far as possible and expresses preference for ‘European’ solutions promoted by European private sector actors over those solutions provided by private sector actors based in other states.

In the context of technology, data takes on the character of a natural resource, a building block for the types of technological innovation that the EU wishes to see. This motivates a desire to bring these forms of ‘critical raw material’ into the EU’s geographical control where possible, but to export its norms and values to other states and regions where it is not. This forms a ‘regulatory balance of trade’, in which the EU seeks to minimise the import of rules or values as much as possible, while maximising the export of its regulations, ensuring that even if data, resources, or goods are not within the EU’s territory, they are nevertheless handled in a way aligned with the EU’s rules and values. The Commission seeks to achieve these through two means: the first is through using its economic power and the size of its market to essentially change the regulatory approach in other states by means of gravity, with private sector actors lobbying their own states to adopt similar rules as a means of reducing the compliance costs incurred by regulatory divergences. Known as the ‘Brussels Effect’,Footnote ³⁷ this approach to regulatory export has been central to the Commission’s approach to technology regulation in the von der Leyen Commission in the fields of data and artificial intelligence (AI). However, a softer approach to regulatory export is possible through processes of cyber-diplomacy. Cyber-diplomacy has been defined as diplomacy engaged in through multilateral forums such as the United Nations, or bilaterally between states, to secure national interests regarding cyberspace, whether in fields such as cybersecurity or internet governance.Footnote ³⁸

It is possible to expand this concept to incorporate securing national interests as they relate to the technologies facilitating access and use of cyberspace, be they information infrastructures or technical standards, or how it is used, including on social media platforms. These tools of cyber-diplomacy can include seeking to influence norms and policy development in international forums, uploading European rules and values to the global level, or leveraging agreements and relations with other states and regions, such as Mercosur or partners in the Africa-focused Global Gateway programmes as ways of tying investment and expertise provision around digital issues with adherence to European principles concerning technology control. Through the combination of these twin policies of industrial policy and capacity building at home, while exporting European standards as global standards through demonstrating technological leadership, the EU seeks to provide for both its economic prosperity and its continued security, not as separate and distinct domains of activity, but as mutually reinforcing parts of the whole. The entirety of the book will expand upon this framework, identifying the geopolitical causes behind the adoption of the approach, how it applies in the given technology case studies covered in each of its chapters, how the control of technologies is problematised as having impacts upon the EU’s strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty, and how the Geopolitical Commission then uses legislative interventions to reduce external dependencies and promote greater European control. Before moving on to provide an overview of the structure of the book, it is first important to expand upon two key terms that will be used throughout the monograph and are central to the analysis, namely ‘digital/technological sovereignty’ and ‘strategic autonomy’.

Digital/Technological Sovereignty and Europe’s Strategic Autonomy

Central to the analysis, insofar as they serve as rationales for action on the part of the Commission in its attempts to regulate technology, are the concepts of ‘digital/technological sovereignty’ and ‘strategic autonomy’. Digital/technological sovereignty are terms that first started to be used by the Commission in 2019 and then became the focus of considerable academic interest for scholars working in European studies, broadly defined. As of 2025, the concept has been the subject of at least two special issues of journals, one in European Security published in 2022 and one in the Journal of European Public Policy in 2024.Footnote ³⁹ As has been noted, the Commission has tended to use either the terms ‘digital sovereignty’ or ‘technological sovereignty’ interchangeably, with variance in different policy documents.Footnote ⁴⁰ For the purposes of this work, when quoting directly from policy documents, I use the wording used by the author (e.g. ‘digital sovereignty’). Digital sovereignty is a concept that has been drawn from the domestic level in countries such as France and Germany, where this sovereignty was defined in terms of autonomy from the US, particularly around ‘Big Tech’, and increased state control over data flows.Footnote ⁴¹ Similarly, China was a strong proponent of ‘cyber sovereignty’ as early as 2010, framing it in terms of respect for adherence to rules and laws for cyberspace within a state’s territory being akin to that between nations regarding physical borders.Footnote ⁴² For China, this entailed asserting control over national information infrastructures and data originating within the Chinese state, which China argued should be governed by Chinese law, rather than rules or values originating from the US, which it considered a digital hegemon.Footnote ⁴³ Russia similarly took a more authoritarian position on digital sovereignty, going further than China in declaring Russian cyberspace to be a separate and distinct entity from the rest of the World Wide Web.Footnote ⁴⁴ Russian efforts have gone so far in this field that experiments have been run to ensure that the ‘Russian’ internet can continue to function normally if disconnected from the rest of the global internet.Footnote ⁴⁵

Yet what does digital sovereignty mean at the EU level? For Bellanova et al., digital sovereignty in a European context is a reaction or response to several interrelated concerns, including: the EU’s growing awareness of its dependence on non-EU digital infrastructures and technologies; a lack of control over these infrastructures, as well as digital services, often originating outside of the EU with a diminished capacity to enforce EU legislation over them; a loss of competitiveness with more technologically advanced and agile states, such as the US and China; an inability to promote European competitors aligned with European values to counter these non-EU tech giants; and finally, the EU’s perceived vulnerability to externally originating threats.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thumfart argues that digital sovereignty is a rhetorical practice, defined by the construction of frontlines in a deeply entangled world, constituting an attempt at ‘rebordering’ in the digital realm.Footnote ⁴⁷ Floridi et al. identify four key models arising from the scholarship concerning digital sovereignty: a rights-based model, a market-oriented model, a centralisation model, and a state-based model.Footnote ⁴⁸ They argue, however, that ‘none of the existing models offers a desirable balance between comprehensive digital regulation and responsiveness to technological innovation and social changes’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this, I agree with the authors, and ultimately, this book considers that these models are not distinct and separate models of digital sovereignty but different dimensions of the same phenomenon. Instead, it is submitted that if we consider digital sovereignty not as a normative construct but in terms of how it is constructed and used as a rationale for action by the Commission, it comprises being rights-based, insofar as it seeks to reinforce and embed at the global level European values; market-oriented in its focus on issues such as industrial policy and competitiveness and the interdependence of economic and security goals; centralising through efforts aimed at exerting control with increased regulatory oversight; and state-based through efforts aimed at reconfiguring state-private sector relations, as will be explored in the three case study chapters. It is formulated as Europe’s ability to choose and to set its own rules and values, reducing its dependencies on external actors.Footnote ⁵⁰

The ultimate purpose of this rationale of digital sovereignty is to achieve its other rationale for regulatory action, namely, strategic autonomy. Strategic autonomy is a concept that has its origins in external security and defence.Footnote ⁵¹ First discussed at the EU level in European Council Conclusions from 2013 in the context of defence technologies, the European Council argued that sustaining defence capabilities can enhance its strategic autonomy.Footnote ⁵² In 2016 the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy at the time, Federica Mogherini, argued that strategic autonomy was essential for the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CDSP) as a means of defending the EU’s citizens, its principles, and its values.Footnote ⁵³ While Biscop argues that the development of the EU approach from 2013 onwards to strategic autonomy in security and defence was ultimately based in a desire to be able to act without relying extensively on the US,Footnote ⁵⁴ it is interesting to note that the EU in its use of the term at this time does not come with a useful definition of the concept, only that it is essential. Instead, authors have suggested looking to the earlier French concept of strategic autonomy developed in the 1990s, which has internal dimensions of security and defence and external dimensions of projection (whether of force or values).Footnote ⁵⁵ Interestingly, this is also framed in terms of Europe’s ability to choose, with the concept connotating ‘that Europe should be able to stand on its own feet rather than relying on others […] this revolves around “the ability to set one’s own priorities and make one’s own decisions”’.Footnote ⁵⁶

With a growing awareness of geostrategic positioning in the current global climate, strategic autonomy has spread beyond security and defence specifically to become a broader goal for the EU in terms of its economic prosperity and trade relations.Footnote ⁵⁷ As will be discussed throughout the case study Chapters 4–6, strategic autonomy is a term that is applied to the EU’s dependencies on external actors in such a way that ‘economy’ and ‘security’ become unified and mutually constitutive. Strategic autonomy, including ‘open’ strategic autonomy,Footnote ⁵⁸ is about being able to act unhindered or limited by its strategic dependencies on other states or the private sector actors operating within those states, with these strategic dependencies defined as ‘dependencies that are considered of critical importance to the EU and its Member States’ strategic interests such as security, health, and the green and digital transformation’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In this context, open strategic autonomy was defined by the Commission as ‘the ability to shape the new system of global economic governance and develop mutually beneficial bilateral relations, while protecting the EU from unfair and abusive practices, including to diversify and solidify global supply chains to enhance resilience to future crises’.Footnote ⁶⁰ As is indicated from the case studies, however, the terms ‘open strategic autonomy’ and ‘strategic autonomy’ often are used interchangeably, or more often, only ‘strategic autonomy’ is referred to. What is of relevance however is that the concepts of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy are intimately connected and used in conjunction in the Commission’s arguments for increased regulatory oversight or control of strategic industries in the context of technology. Both have the element of ensuring that the EU can act and respond to global situations without being limited by its external dependencies. For this reason, both digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy require actions on the part of the Commission that reduce these dependencies, particularly where they are considered strategic dependencies. As this book will demonstrate, the approach taken by the Commission in doing so is one of regulatory mercantilism.

Structure of the Book

The book is divided into three parts. Part I, ‘Regulatory Mercantilism and the Geopolitics of Technology Control’, covers the first three chapters. Chapter 1 is the theoretical basis for the rest of the book, fully outlining the regulatory mercantilist framework, its origins, distinctions from other modes of regulatory governance, and its characteristics. This chapter considers the approach of regulatory capitalism and how it has been the Commission’s approach to technology regulation until relatively recently, aligned with the idea of the regulatory state and the reliance on expert-led forms of self-regulation or regulatory networks as a means of achieving economic goals based on a logic of efficiency rather than one of security. It outlines in more detail the ideas of mercantilism and its core features, before expanding on how regulatory mercantilism draws from these principles, representing a changed paradigm in technology regulation in which the logic is one of security, with security and economy being mutually constitutive policy objectives, motivated by concerns over external dependency and guaranteeing sovereignty. It highlights the more interventionist approach to regulation that is adopted within a regulatory mercantilist approach, the renewed emphasis on industrial policy, and the regulatory export of standards as global standards. The chapter concludes by making clear how this can then be applied to the analysis of the von der Leyen Commission’s actions.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Commission as a technology regulator, beginning with the development of the EU’s technology policies and laws, from their beginnings in the late 1970s until the late 2000s. It starts with reflections on the limited interventions of the Commission during the period referred to as one of ‘Eurosclerosis’, where the emphasis of interventions was by way of negative integration through the Court of Justice of the European Union, before the beginnings of distinct technology policies and positive acts of integration around technology in the 1990s. It explores how during its development, EU technology policy was marked by a distinction between economically oriented developments, such as around intellectual property rights, and security-related ones, as in the case of cybercrime and cybersecurity. However, in the period of the late 2000s/early 2010s and the EU ‘polycrisis’ of financial crisis, legitimacy crisis and populism crisis, and concerns over the power of the private sector in technology governance, the groundwork was laid for seeing technology control in terms of interlinked economic and security goals, a growing distrust of ‘Big Tech’, and concerns about the need to externalise the EU’s rules and values, including through the Brussels Effect.

Chapter 3 moves to the global level, exploring the history of technology control and its historical links to geopolitics. It begins by considering control of technology in the context of the Cold War and technology as being explicitly considered a security issue in terms of the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. It covers the CoCom technology restrictions imposed by the US and Soviet Union attempts to gain access to critical technologies through Comecon before considering how the approach to technology changed substantially with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the belief in the triumph of the liberal international order and globalism as reflected by the World Trade Organization and ‘free trade’. It then explores the multifaceted crises impacting upon this conviction in the benefits and resilience of the global trade system, the increased economic conflict between the US and China as a rising technological power, and a move from multilateralism in a ‘unipolar’ system to increased nationalism and protectionism in a ‘multipolar’ system, and what this meant for the EU’s sense of insecurity and vulnerability in the context of geopolitical reordering.

Part II of the book, ‘Technology Regulation in the von der Leyen Commission’, comprises the next three chapters. Chapter 4 covers the policy agenda of the von der Leyen Commission as it relates to technology, identifying the concerns over ensuring digital sovereignty and maintaining strategic autonomy as central rationales for Commission action. Chapter 4 focuses on ‘technological systems’ in which the EU has sought to increase its control and regulatory oversight through regulatory mercantilist means. Analysing the Commission’s actions in technical standards for technologies such as digital communications, life-cycle cybersecurity for internet-enabled products, and the fostering of an EU industrial policy for semiconductors and microchips, this chapter highlights how concerns over foreign manipulation and excessive strategic dependencies has resulted in the Commission proposing legislative interventions in order to guarantee sovereignty and strategic autonomy through increased Commission and regulatory body oversight, the explicit linkage of economic and security concerns, and active promotion of technology industrial policy internally, and exporting of norms and values through ensuring a positive regulatory balance of trade externally.

Chapters 5 and 6 cover the other two case studies, with Chapter 5 focusing on the regulation of social media platforms and platform architecture, with changes in EU perceptions regarding the reliability of these platforms and the values of their owners. It examines the shift from economically motivated self-regulatory regimes in these sectors based in logics of efficiency to a digital sovereignty-motivated move to a logic of security in regulation. It identifies the explicit linkage between economic and security concerns, particularly as it relates to disinformation and political advertising, with the promotion of co-regulatory regimes with significant levels of oversight provided by the Commission. Chapter 6 considers the desire to reduce critical dependencies on third-country-based data servers and computing capabilities. Starting with an overview of the EU’s historic approach to data, and then personal data, it explores the Brussels Effect as a motivator for further action on exporting regulatory norms concerning the protection of personal data and non-personal data, coupled with concerns over lack of competitiveness in data-derived commercial activity, particularly in the field of AI. Concerns over competitiveness impacting Europe’s security and the risks posed by unauthorised access to industrial or sensitive data from the governments in third countries, the Commission desires increased regulatory control. This is facilitated by industrial policy aimed at both promoting European data server infrastructure and encouraging switching to those Common European Data Spaces as a means of building up a European data economy, while placing strict limitations on the export of non-personal data outside of Europe’s borders. The Commission combines this with an attempt to utilise the Brussels Effect to ensure that European standards concerning the safe use of AI technologies become global standards shaped by the EU and its values.

Part III of the book is ‘The Future of the Geopolitical Union’, which comprises Chapter 7 and the conclusion to the book. Chapter 7 considers the developments that have taken place since the beginning of the von der Leyen II Commission, identifying how there has not only been continuity in the EU’s approach to technology control and its links to digital sovereignty but also an expansion and reinforcement of the approach. This is both structural, in terms of a significantly reorganised Commission, with a new Commission Vice President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, and practical, in terms of the reinforced discourse of sovereignty and strategic autonomy. The Commission faces significantly more uncertain and chaotic geopolitics as a result of the re-election of Donald Trump as US President and his aggressive and unpredictable actions in his foreign policy; the increased blurring of state and private power as Big Tech players have moved closer to the Presidency and appear to have formed parts of his Administration; as well as heightened trade tensions with China over electric vehicles. As a result, the linkage of security and economy has become even more explicit for the von der Leyen II Commission, with the Competitiveness CompassFootnote ⁶¹ taking an approach that appears to be a more assertive form of regulatory mercantilism, in which the element of defence is specifically incorporated into the EU’s rationale for action, with an expansion of technology controls including the development of an explicit push for defence technology industrial policy, the increased control over external dependencies and supply chains through its Preparedness Strategy, and an AI policy for Europe that includes significant investments for AI gigafactories.

The book concludes by bringing the different themes of this work together, considering the potential futures for the EU as the Geopolitical Union, reflecting upon how regulatory mercantilism could be a useful framework for analysis of policies beyond technology and beyond the EU, and suggesting potential future avenues for research based on these reflections.