Regulatory Mercantilism: Law, Sovereignty, and the Geopolitics of Technology Control

Abstract

Speaker: Benjamin Farrand Digital/Technology Sovereignty served as a central pillar of the first von der Leyen Commission, acting as a rationale for increased regulatory activity in digital policy as part of the EU’s geopolitical turn. The Geopolitical Union, as it was characterised by Commission President von der Leyen, was one in which the EU sought to be a leader in the world, on the basis of European values, and in order to guarantee European security. Regulatory mercantilism represents a merging of economic and security policy agendas, deemed interdependent. This seminar considers how the regulatory interventions in the digital policy sphere can be conceptualised as a move to ‘regulatory mercantilism’, in which as a response to perceived vulnerability to external forces, the EU seeks to actively regulate different technologies, bringing them either under direct territorial control, or alternatively, exporting its standards as international norms in order to produce a positive ‘regulatory balance of trade’. This seminar will expand upon this conceptual framework, providing examples from the EU’s regulation of online content under the Digital Services Act, activities around the production and security of supply of semiconductors, and the governance of AI. In doing so, it seeks to demonstrate how regulatory mercantilism can be useful as a means of analysing regulatory interventions in markets ordinarily framed in economic terms, and how control over technology has become critical in contemporary geopolitics.