Balancing acts - International pressures and the digital policies of the European Commission

Intensifying conflicts in the international system put multifaceted pressures on the EU as a global actor: In economic terms the EU faces increasing competition and growing fears of trade wars, in normative terms it faces clashes between democratic and autocratic values, and in security terms it faces the risk of weaponized interdependence. How and which of these pressures affect EU decision-making? This paper focuses on the digital policies of the European Commission. In this emerging policy field, Europe’s pivotal agenda setter for the internal market and the external trade relations has to balance the partially contradicting goals of stimulating economic growth, ensuring the protection of EU citizens’ rights, and managing the security vulnerabilities of networked societies. These goals are all affected by the multifaceted international pressures which renders it particularly relevant to study the Commission’s responsiveness to its external environment. Specifically, we study the public justifications provided for digital policy choices. We expand large and complete corpora of Commission press releases and speeches 1995-2023 to extract all public statements on digital matters, to then apply transformer-based machine-learning tools to classify them with reference to economic, normative, and security concerns on the one hand, and references to international pressures on the other. We then qualitatively link the resulting time-series to events in the EU’s international environment and in global digital governance, such as tensions around Internet governance arrangements or the ongoing ‘tech wars’ between the US and China. This approach allows us to exhaustively describe what the ‘European third way’ in digital policy making consists of and sheds led on the potential intentionality behind the often-quoted ‘Brussels effect’ in global digital policy. More broadly, our work contributes to ongoing debates about the interdependencies of internal market governance and its wider global context.