Digital Sovereignty and Central Europe: Absence, resistance, or creative cooptation?

Since 2019, ‘digital sovereignty’ (DS) has become a leading policy discourse in the European Union. The term itself is broad, most generally capturing something like the ‘ability to control the new digital technologies and their societal effects’ (Shapiro 2020, 7). The potential implications of DS being put to practice are far-reaching and span across security, economy, research and development, and many other fields. While the discussion of these effects is only starting, it is already clear that Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has been relatively silent in them and is thus at risk of becoming invisible on the emerging map of a ‘digitally sovereign’ Europe. This paper will present the first outcomes of a broader project on the position of CEE actors within EU’s discourse on DS, both as active agents and objects of governance. We ask the principal research question of ‘What do the discourses and practices of digital sovereignty do to and in Central and Eastern Europe, in particular with respect to its position within the EU?’ Our aim is to understand the differentiated impact of the EU transformation conducted under the banner of DS on the power relations between CEE and other actors within the EU. In particular, we ask whether DS can be used as a tool of empowerment of CEE, or rather as yet another source of divide between new and old member states. To our knowledge, there is no academic study focusing on ‘digital sovereignty’ within Central and Eastern Europe, nor any analysis of its specific impact upon the region. Yet, there are rich accounts that can provide us with useful arguments regarding CEE’s position in the broader European political, economic, cultural and epistemic orders, which present starting points for our analysis. We will rely in particular on the literatures on small states in the EU, economic dependency, as well as cultural hierarchies, in order to sketch initial responses to the problem of CEE’s relation to the DS discourse.