Geopolitics and European Integration: The EU's Evolving Approach to the Governance of Strategic Technologies

In an era of increasing geopolitical competition, leadership in global technology governance has become highly salient. Although the European Union (EU) has traditionally approached the technology governance from an economic perspective, in the 2020s there has been a growing recognition that new technologies also have strategic and security dimensions, impacting on the EU’s geopolitical position. This paper analyses the manner in which the EU's approach to the governance of key technologies has evolved, focusing on the period 2019-2024 – the term of the self-declared “geopolitical European Commission” headed by Ursula von der Leyen – and examining emerging EU policies, regulatory efforts and global aspirations in the governance of key technologies such as AI, cyber security, and digital services (including efforts towards data protection, countering disinformation and combatting political interference) as well as biotechnologies (e.g. mRNA vaccines). The paper adopts a constructivist perspective, looking at the discursive, ideational, and normative aspects in the construction of the EU’s approach. A final section then compares the EU’s approach with developments elsewhere, in particular in the United States and China, in order to assess the extent to which the governance of these strategic technologies is subject to geopolitical rivalry or multilateral cooperation.