Disjointed (De-)politicisation and Multilevel Governance: the Case of Cloud Infrastructure in the EU

Multilevel governance in the EU is known for facilitating different mechanisms for depoliticising essentially political questions. It invites blame avoidance strategies by politicians and venue shopping by societal actors. It facilitates the technocratisation of policies by delegating them to technical agencies or subjecting them to quasi-objectified harmonised rules (famously the Stability and Growth Pact). These strategies can serve to shield essentially political choices from public contestation and prevent weaker and lesser organized societal interests from effective influence. Digital infrastructure policy is a policy that has rapidly gained in importance in the EU in recent years and that requires the active involvement of political actors across multiple levels. Major investments in digital infrastructure are seen to be essential for European societies to reap the full benefits of new digital technologies, for innovation and industry in Europe, and for ensuring Europe’s digital sovereignty. At the same time, these investments raise fundamental political concerns about, among other things, environmental impacts, landscape planning, and data ownership and protection. Importantly, different aspects of these political concerns come to the fore at different levels of the EU’s system of multilevel governance. While EU-level actors like the European Commission seek to define an EU-wide agenda and strategy, national governments define their own (economic and strategic) priorities and maintain their own relations with major technological players within and outside of the EU. Ultimately, key decisions about allowing the actual building of the envisaged infrastructure and the conditions under which this takes place are left to regional and local authorities. The agendas of these public actors are often influenced and conditioned by prominent (US-based) technological business firms and their interests to establish themselves on the EU market. On the other hand, civil society mobilisation on environmental, landscaping and data concerns tends to remain dispersed across member states and localities. In this paper we aim to map the structure of political contestation of cloud infrastructure in the EU and how it facilitates and hinders the politicisation of different concerns at different levels of government. Our empirical analysis builds upon the reconstruction of the policy narratives of a sample of key actors in the policy domain: (three) civil society groups, the Commission, the European Parliament, (four) member state governments, and (two) tech business firms. We organize their (stylized) policy narratives around the key objectives they hold, the way they frame the issues at stake, the main level at which they operate, the opponents that they identify, and the resources they bring to bear. In the integrated analysis of these policy narratives, we identify the connections between the actors as well as the disconnections that emerge. On this basis we can account for the ways in which the different issues are (de-)politicized at the different political levels. Ultimately, these findings are to contribute to the facilitation of an open and comprehensive political debate on cloud infrastructure in Europe.