‘Weaponized interdependence’

Last November, Germany and France hosted the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty in Berlin. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said it marked “an important milestone on the path towards a more sovereign, secure and competitive digital Europe.” France’s President Emmanuel Macron said it sent “a clear signal: Europe has what it takes to lead the digital age.”

So far, though, Europe’s digital age is mostly American. Europeans’ phones, search engines, social networks, cloud servers, chips, and chatbots come from Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic—the list goes on.

As Anu Bradford said here in The Signal in February, American tech companies used to fight European regulators on their own. Then they “realized they can’t push back on European regulations alone,” so they “enlisted the White House.” In July, the European Commission, the EU’s executive, fined Google €890 million for favoring its own services over its rivals’. U.S. President Donald Trump answered by threatening tariffs and ordering a trade investigation into the EU.

Now Europe wants to make itself “technologically sovereign.” In June, the Commission published what it calls the Tech Sovereignty Package, a set of proposals to build up the EU’s own chips, cloud, and AI, and to break foreign suppliers’ hold on all three. But how did Europe get so reliant on non-European tech in the first place?

Filippo Blancato is a postdoctoral fellow in technology and geopolitics at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Blancato says that until recently, Europe’s leaders in politics and business lived in the world of the 19th-century economist David Ricardo, where every country specializes in what it makes best and imports the rest. For Europe, the rest included software, mostly from America. But the rules have changed. Europeans can no longer count on Washington to back them up, or even to keep from using their dependence against them. Still, the same break with America has given the Continent its best chance in decades to make technology of its own …

Gustav Jönsson: Just how dependent is Europe on foreign technology?

Filippo Blancato: Very. From a European point of view, the picture is bleak. By most estimates, Europe imports 80 percent of its digital products, services, and intellectual property, mostly from the U.S. European companies spend about €264 billion a year on American software and cloud services alone.