Europe is facing key decisions on digital sovereignty, particularly with regard to AI, cloud infrastructures, chips, data and digital dependencies. In their analysis for the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Marie Blüml and Dr Matthieu Binder from iRights.Lab show why digital sovereignty should not be confused with digital autarky.
The focus is on an understanding of governance: above all, digital sovereignty means that organisations remain capable of acting - in other words, that they can actively shape digital services, enforce requirements against technology providers and change systems if necessary.
The analysis makes it clear that a differentiated view of the entire digital stack is crucial - from data and basic models to software and the cloud through to hardware, chips, energy and raw materials. In this way, problematic dependencies can be identified more precisely and political and organisational scope for action can be better utilised.
The article also shows where Europe is already making progress, where bottlenecks remain and why digital sovereignty must be understood as a task for society as a whole.
May 2026
Picture: Adobe Stock, edited by hbs. licence: All rights reserved.
