Europe’s digital Independence Day? Not quite

For years, Europe approached digital policy as a regulator rather than a technological power. It wrote the rules, enforced the standards and defended openness, while much of the infrastructure underpinning the digital economy remained in foreign hands. That model is now under growing strain.

On Wednesday 3 June, the European Commission unveiled its long-awaited technological sovereignty package under the leadership of Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen. The package brings together new policies on cloud and AI, semiconductors, open source software and digital energy systems, with the aim of reducing Europe’s reliance on foreign technology in critical sectors.

The ambition is clear. Europe no longer wants to regulate technological dependence. It wants to reduce it.

The end of innocence

The European Commission’s new technological sovereignty package arrives at a particular moment. For years, digital sovereignty was a phrase Brussels used frequently, but rarely with the political weight it carries today. It sounded strategic, modern and slightly abstract, flexible enough for everyone to support while meaning different things to different audiences.

That comfort has largely disappeared. The debate has hardened because the world around it has hardened too. The pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains. Russia’s war in Ukraine brought security and industrial resilience back to the centre of European politics. 

The Draghi report gave intellectual structure to a concern many had already begun to share: Europe is falling behind and becoming increasingly dependent on others.

Add to that the return of a more transactional United States, China’s unapologetic use of industrial policy, and the growing recognition that cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, AI and data systems are not neutral markets but instruments of power. Suddenly, the old European instinct of openness first and strategy later looks dangerously outdated.

That is the real shift behind this package. Europe has started to realise that it has too often played the role of the dindon de la farce in the global technology order: sophisticated in regulation, committed to openness and attached to rules, yet dependent on others for the infrastructure that gives those rules practical force.

The EU could shape the digital debate through the GDPR, the DMA, the DSA and the AI Act, while remaining structurally reliant on foreign cloud providers, foreign chips, foreign platforms and foreign investment capacity. In other words, Europe discovered that setting the rules of the game is not the same as owning the field.

The package matters because it recognises this reality. By bringing together cloud and AI infrastructure, semiconductors, open source and the digitalisation of energy systems, the Commission is trying to move from diagnosis to capacity-building. It wants procurement, data centres, sovereignty criteria and public demand to become instruments of strategic power.

That is a meaningful correction. It shows that digital sovereignty has moved beyond conference rhetoric and become a political instinct embedded in the Commission’s thinking.

The reality check

And yet the package also shows how difficult it is to turn that instinct into something operational. The uncomfortable reality is that Europe cannot declare independence from systems it still relies on every day. Sovereignty is not created simply by identifying dependencies or designing criteria to measure them. It depends on industrial capacity, cheap and reliable energy, patient capital, large domestic markets, coordinated public demand and companies able to compete at scale. On many of these fronts, Europe is not starting from a position of strength.

That is why the package disappointed many observers. The Cloud and AI Development Act may encourage the use of more trusted providers in sensitive sectors, but it will not produce a European hyperscaler overnight. Chips Act 2.0 may better connect semiconductor policy with downstream demand, but Europe remains weak in several critical parts of the AI and advanced semiconductor value chain. The Open Source Strategy is welcome, especially for public administrations, but open source alone cannot make up for years of underinvestment in European digital champions.

The Commission is trying to build strategic autonomy in sectors where the industrial base is often too thin, too fragmented or simply too late. That is the central tension.

If the EU moves too aggressively, it risks creating protectionism without viable alternatives. If it moves too cautiously, it risks producing another carefully written strategy that diagnoses the problem while leaving the market largely unchanged.

Foreign providers cannot simply be replaced when European businesses and public administrations still depend on them. But European alternatives are unlikely to grow if public demand continues to flow automatically towards the same dominant players.

The Commission is therefore caught between the ambition of sovereignty and the practical need to keep the economy functioning. In that sense, this is less a grand declaration than an exercise in realism.

Europe is not about to detach itself from American cloud infrastructure, Asian semiconductor manufacturing or global AI supply chains. Not quickly, and probably not completely. The more realistic objective is narrower. Reduce critical dependencies where the risks are greatest, create protected demand where European providers still have room to scale, and stop treating strategic infrastructure as though it were just another procurement exercise.

That may sound less dramatic than digital independence, but it is much closer to what the EU can actually achieve.

The political battle ahead

The political battle comes next. The European Parliament is likely to push for a more ambitious, more ideological and more sovereignty-focused position. That is often where Parliament feels most comfortable, sharpening the Commission’s language, calling for stronger European preference and adding political weight to proposals the executive has framed more cautiously.

Many MEPs will want the package to go further, particularly on public procurement, cloud sovereignty, open source and the protection of sensitive sectors.

Member States, however, are likely to pull the discussion back towards capacity, cost and implementation. Some will support stronger sovereignty language, especially France and countries already aligned with a more interventionist industrial policy. Others will worry about market access, trade retaliation, higher prices, administrative burden and the simple reality that public services and companies cannot shift to European alternatives that do not yet exist at scale.

The final outcome will probably be less far-reaching than sovereignty advocates want, but more strategic than what Europe would have accepted even a few years ago. That alone shows how far the debate has shifted. The question is no longer whether Europe should act, but how far it is willing to go.

So no, this is not Europe’s digital Independence Day. It is not a rupture, and certainly not liberation. It is something more restrained, and perhaps more consequential.

It marks the point at which Europe stops confusing dependence with openness and begins the slower, more difficult task of deciding which parts of the digital economy it can no longer afford to leave beyond its control.