From Brussels to the World: How Internal EU Digital Policy Dynamics Travel in Times of Geopolitical Tension

As geopolitical competition intensifies around digital technologies, standards, and infrastructures, the European Union has positioned digital policy as a strategic domain of its external action. Yet prevailing analyses of EU digital foreign policy continue to focus on regulatory capacity or strategic autonomy, often overlooking how the EU’s distinctive internal foreign policy making structures shape its external engagements. This paper argues that understanding EU digital diplomacy requires closer attention to how the internal peculiarities of EU foreign policy making travel across borders and are enacted in relations with third countries. Drawing on relational international relations and practice theory, the paper conceptualises EU digital foreign policy as a process of ongoing coordination among member states, the European Commission, and the European External Action Service, in which authority, hierarchy, and roles are continuously negotiated. These internal relational configurations do not remain confined to Brussels. Instead, they are carried into external diplomatic arenas, shaping how the EU performs unity, manages contestation, and projects digital norms in interactions with partners and rivals alike. The paper develops a relational framework that links intra EU coordination to external diplomatic practice under conditions of heightened geopolitical tension. It shows how internal alignments, compromises, and power asymmetries influence the EU’s engagement with third countries, affecting the credibility, reception, and adaptability of EU digital norms. At the same time, the prioritisation of specific external relationships feeds back into internal EU dynamics, reconfiguring member state coalitions and redistributing influence within EU foreign policy making. This paper constitutes the conceptual component of a broader research project that empirically compares how EU digital policy is received and negotiated in three selected third countries. Situated in a context of intensifying geopolitical competition, the project examines how the EU’s regulatory and normative approach interacts with two competing visions of global digital governance, represented by the United States and China. By integrating internal EU dynamics with external reception and contestation, the paper provides a foundation for analysing EU digital foreign policy as a relational and geopolitically embedded practice.