Emerging technologies as a political process in the EU: democracy and digitalisation

The EU is set for constructing a distinctive position to digitalisation with many legislative and strategic initiatives already realised and well on their way. With the Europe fit for a digital age strategy and its derivative policies, the balance between regulation and innovation, and with an embedded and recognisable code of ethics towards the development and deployment of AI, are sought. As a political process, or a set of processes, this not only means a massive effort by the Union towards creating new legislative measures and activities, but also reaches beyond the EU borders and establishes the EU as an ethically ambitious actor in multilevel governance of digitalisation. Furthermore, through activities related to the digital strategy, actors across sectors are brought together to have an impact on the way the EU is proceeding with the strategy. This paper focuses on the EU digital strategy as a lens to discuss the role of democracy as part of the EU ethos and politics. More specifically, it asks how democracy is articulated as part of the EU stand on digitalisation, and who are the key agents recognised as part of the strategy and policy. Using the approach familiar from studying political concepts, the paper investigates a wide selection of EU documents and reports, and discusses these from the perspective of emerging technologies as tools and objects of politics in global governance. This way, it addresses the potential of the recent and ongoing politics of digitalisation in the EU to strengthen the democratic dimension of the EU ethos.