Mainstreaming a maverick? European digital sovereignty discourse and the EU’s evolving external relations policy towards cyberspace

The European Union’s pursuit of ‘European digital sovereignty’ has aroused voracious debate as to whether its discourse is merely rhetorical performance or whether it has spurred significant policy change. Despite the rising importance of ‘cyber’ and digitalisation on the EU’s global agenda, how such discourse comes to bear on the EU’s external relations policy change remains largely underexplored. This paper probes the relationship between the emergence of ‘European digital sovereignty’ discourse and changes to EU external relations policies over the 2013-2020 period. By examining key policy changes in four areas of EU external action—namely the CFSP, development cooperation, industrial strategy, and global governance—this paper unveils how such changes relate to the EU’s embrace of sovereigntist discourse over time. The paper’s main argument holds that European sovereigntist discourse has exerted an inconspicuous influence on the bulk of cyber-external relations policy changes, with the exception being cyber-industrial strategy. Thus, the discourse of European digital sovereignty has been relatively toothless for EU external relations policy change. Nevertheless, this discourse retains strategic value to EU officials, who have invoked ‘European sovereignty’ to explain the EU’s external action as legitimate vis-à-vis other global actors. Overall, this empirical case substantiates theoretical arguments about the concept of sovereignty as providing both a guiding framework for policymaking and a means of strategically framing policy choices. Additionally, it identifies two contemporary drivers of EU cyber-external relations policy: EU officials’ evolving security perceptions about the global environment (shaped by security crises), and policy convergence with the EU’s 2016 Global Strategy. Please email me for a copy of the paper (julia.carver@politics.ox.ac.uk).