Europe’s sudden enthusiasm for digital sovereignty and open source prompts an over-the-shoulder glance: how did a region with world-class industry, research institutions, and a market of 450 million people end up so dependent on digital technologies from abroad? Anecdotal explanations, such as cultural factors, entrepreneurial spirit, market fragmentation, or lack of venture capital, are unsatisfactory. They overlook a structural cause embedded in the European project.
At the centre lies a paradox. The European Union has long embraced competitiveness as a guiding principle, and yet this very pursuit contributed to the erosion of its position in the digital field. What appears today as a geopolitical necessity, regaining control over data, infrastructure, and platforms, is the outcome of earlier policy choices and embedded economic trade-offs.
In a liberal constitutional tradition, economic policy emerges from democratic processes rather than predetermined state goals. European integration took a different path. The European treaties enshrine economic objectives the member states chose to pursue jointly, most prominently competitiveness. While rarely discussed in civic debates in member states, the Treaties’ competitiveness objective permeates European Commission strategies and policy instruments. Yet competitiveness is a concept that originates at the level of firms, not entire economies. For companies, competitiveness entails identifying unique strengths and leveraging them to gain market dominance. Markets, in this sense, are arenas of strategic positioning rather than neutral spaces of exchange.
Applied to a multi-state economic zone, this logic loses coherence. The EU, as a bloc, is encouraged to “focus on its strengths” in competition with other regions. This approach echoes the work of Michael Porter for corporate strategy but is extrapolated to regional policy. Yet the analogy is imperfect. Who, exactly, is the EU competing against? And what does it mean for a large, internally diverse economic area to specialise in the same way as a firm? Can Europe afford to surrender democratic control over critical domains such as digital services?
Another pillar shaping Europe’s trajectory is external trade policy, which the European Commission centrally manages for its member states. Contrary to common perception, trade agreements do not simply pursue ‘business interests’. They systematically favour exporting sectors while exposing import-competing sectors to increased competition. This is the implicit bargain of liberalised trade: mutual market access in exchange for domestic adjustment.
In the digital domain, these dynamics became particularly consequential. To secure favourable conditions for its exporting industries, the European Union often conceded in areas related to data flows, digital services, or digital regulatory alignment. These concessions shaped the environment in which digital firms operate.
The competitiveness objective and the export bias of trade policies directed attention toward Europe’s established strengths, industrial manufacturing, engineering excellence, and high-quality exports, rather than toward emerging platform-based business models. As a consequence, digital challengers were frequently treated as peripheral.
In Europe, these concessions show up not only in markets, but in access. Third-country tech firms enjoy a level of proximity to European institutions that would be politically unthinkable in most member states. In Brussels, the default interlocutors are often not European SMEs or challengers, but large non-European platforms.
This is not a marginal imbalance. It shapes outcomes. Firms that already dominate global markets are also those most consistently in the room when rules are discussed. European challengers, by contrast, are too often an afterthought.
Commissioners routinely engage dominant players on their own turf, traveling to corporate headquarters abroad, while those trying to build alternatives within Europe struggle to be heard. The result is a policy environment that risks internalising the perspective of the very gatekeepers it seeks to regulate.
This dynamic was visible more than a decade ago. In a Commission panel on a European Cloud, most of the invited voices were neither European citizens nor residents, and their discussion mocked the very idea of a European Cloud. At the time, this was treated as realism. Fifteen years later, it looks more like complacency. Europe now depends heavily on hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This dependence now coincides with growing tensions over data residency, including issues linked to FISA 702 and the CLOUD Act.
Across cloud infrastructure, social media, and key digital services, companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) have become deeply embedded in the European digital landscape. This dependence is not merely economic; it fundamentally concerns democratic autonomy and data governance. Against this backdrop, the call for digital sovereignty has gained traction, often accompanied by anti-corporate sentiment.
Yet if digital sovereignty is to be more than a reactive slogan, it requires a deeper reassessment of the assumptions that guided earlier policy choices. This includes questioning the elevation of competitiveness as an overarching objective and reconsidering the trade-offs embedded in trade policy.
The challenge is not to abandon openness or competition, but to redefine how and where they are practiced. Economic ‘recipes’ built around strengthening predefined strengths are ill-suited to disruptive innovation. A trade regime optimised for export gains, in turn, systematically overlooks vulnerabilities in supply chains and emerging sectors. Economic choices intersect with the democratic cohesion of the European project.
The question, then, is not whether Europe should retain competitiveness as a guiding objective, but how it interprets it. Competitiveness cannot remain a doctrine that reinforces incumbency. It must be recalibrated to enable challenge.
This requires a deliberate shift in policy orientation. European policy has long been predisposed to stabilise and amplify existing strengths. In the digital domain, where it has meant accommodating dominant global platforms rather than fostering credible alternatives, that bias must be reversed. Where Europe is structurally behind, policy should explicitly favour challengers, firms, technologies, and models that contest existing gatekeepers.
In sectors marked by dependency, neutrality is not neutrality; it is acquiescence. Supporting challengers is a precondition for restoring competition. This implies moving away from implicit alignment with dominant actors and toward active support for those who disrupt them. Recent calls for “Buy European” policies reflect a growing discomfort with market realities, but they risk replicating a blunt logic of protectionism. In the digital sphere, Europe has a more powerful and coherent alternative: to lead through openness. Open source software, open standards, and interoperable platforms offer a pathway to reduce dependency while keeping markets accessible. They lower entry barriers, diffuse innovation, and structurally advantage challengers over entrenched incumbents.
Digital sovereignty, in this sense, is not achieved through market insulation but through a different form of openness. It depends on whether Europe is willing to shift from conceding or protecting positions to enabling contestability. Europe’s digital future will be secured not by invoking sovereignty alone, but by policies that systematically create space for challengers to sustain, scale, and succeed.
About the author
André Rebentisch works as a project manager at the intersection of software delivery and digital policy, with a particular focus on standardisation and interoperability architecture. He has represented SMEs and open source initiatives in Brussels.