Polanyi and List Meet in Brussels Digital Sovereignty and the Transformation of EU Digital Policymaking

In recent years, EU digital policymaking has undergone a profound shift. Its embrace of digital sovereignty starkly contrasts with the previous rhetoric of the global information society, and its new willingness to correct, constrain, and direct digital markets marks a significant departure from the longstanding focus on digital market creation. In this paper, we argue that this shift in rhetoric and reality is the result of the coming-together of two countermovements against the neoliberal model of digitalization (governance). A Polanyian countermovement wants to rein in the digitally-enabled expansion of markets and wrest back rule-making authority over the digital world from private platforms with the goal of (re-)politicizing digital policymaking. A Listian countermovement wants to reduce (or exploit) techno-economic dependencies through various form of ‘government economic activism’ with the goal of geopoliticizing digital policymaking. Digital sovereignty, we argue, is both an expression of and a discursive tool to organize these countermovements. This is not despite but because of its polysemic nature, which allows different actors to express their concerns and arguments in a shared language and connect them to an overarching narrative. We substantiate this argument in two ways. First, we systematically reconstruct the historical evolution and transformation of EU digital policymaking from 1994 to today. We do so by complementing qualitative insights from primary and secondary sources and original interviews with the computational analysis of a newly compiled dataset of EU digital policies, thus documenting broader shifts in market governance and regulatory tone. Second, we empirically document recent changes in the coalitional landscape of EU digital policymaking by computationally reconstructing discourse networks in digital-policy-related consultations.