Tensions between the EU and the Trump administration have highlighted the risks of the EU’s technological dependence on the United States. Chloe Teevan and Gautam Kamath explore whether India could serve as an inspiration for and partner in Europe’s pursuit of tech sovereignty.
Growing transatlantic tensions mean the EU is now grappling with the question of how to secure technological independence from the United States. Yet it is neither plausible, nor desirable, for the EU to try to move forward without global partners.
Just as the EU desires increased technological sovereignty, other global powers like India and Brazil share these concerns. Indeed, by working together with other leading democracies and learning from their successes, the EU and its partners could potentially move more quickly toward achieving their goals.
Calls for sovereignty amidst growing transatlantic tensions
Even before the most recent round of EU-US tensions in the tech sphere, arising from the aggressive stance of the second Trump administration to European tech regulation, Ursula von der Leyen had appointed Finnish Commissioner Henna Virkkunen as Executive Vice President for Tech Sovereignty.
The Draghi report on EU competitiveness, released in September 2024, also focused heavily on developing advanced technologies. Shortly after the report was published, leading digital policy thinkers in Brussels launched the EuroStack Initiative, calling for a new European approach to tech infrastructures across the technology stack, from hard infrastructure through to the platform layer.
The EuroStack conversation is ultimately pushing for the EU to go much further in adopting a range of industrial policy measures to support the emergence of a more robust European digital sector across the technology stack. The flagship report in February called for €300 billion in investment across the stack over the next decade, in the process making Europe less dependent on the US in particular.
This investment would also create high-skilled jobs, advance technology adoption and thus the competitiveness of other sectors, and position Europe as “a leader in values-driven, citizen-focused innovation, shaping a digital future that prioritises privacy, trust, and accountability.” More recently, a letter signed by leading members of the European digital industry called for a range of measures, including the introduction of a “buy European” rule for public procurement.
Yet, as we have argued elsewhere, to develop robust digital infrastructures and achieve greater security in key digital value chains, the EU will need to diversify and grow its partnerships with a range of international partners. The EU needs partners to source critical minerals, to secure semiconductor value chains, to develop new markets and to find allies in protecting a free and open internet.
As the United States withdraws from international agencies and scales back support for global governance initiatives, the EU has an opportunity to build “coalitions of the willing” – narrower groupings of likeminded partner nations – and lead policy alignment.
This becomes especially important in the case of sovereign digital infrastructure, where global ICT supply chains are dominated by companies domiciled in the US and China. Achieving this will require an intensification of European digital dialogue efforts with key partners across the world, an openness to learn from their experiences and a willingness to negotiate based on shared interests.
Learning from India Stack
Indeed, other countries have already had great success in building parts of the stack and their successes could be important learning opportunities for the EU. Most notably, India’s digital public infrastructure – composed of digital ID, digital payments, data exchange and most recently a new e-commerce layer, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) – provides universally accessible public and private digital services to its population of nearly 1.4 billion people.
By building this interim layer of soft digital infrastructure from scratch in partnership with the private sector, and using it to connect public and private services, India showed that this infrastructural approach to digital services could be rolled out at scale.
This broke with the piecemeal e-government approach that most countries globally had been pursuing, highlighting the importance of having universally accessible and interoperable platforms to truly transform the delivery of public and private services across the economy. Now India is keen to export this model.
The way forward
Europe has much to learn from India’s experience, although as trade and technology talks with India ramp up, the EU will also be keen to emphasise its own digital regulations that provide a helpful regulatory framework to complement the India Stack. In particular, the EU is keen to emphasise security and trust, and to ensure that similar efforts are aligned with EU regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
At the same time, any discussion of digital public infrastructure will need to take place within a wider conversation about the full stack, given ongoing concerns about everything from semiconductor supply chains to access to computing power. Indeed on 28 February, the EU and India agreed to work together across several parts of the digital stack.
This cooperation will include hardware, such as supporting chip design, regulating telecommunications infrastructure and investments in high performance computing. It will also extend to the logical layer (the interoperability of digital public infrastructure) and cooperation between artificial intelligence (AI) offices in supporting the development of “ethical and responsible AI”. Yet, making this relationship more concrete will now require wider conversations, bringing in not only EU and Indian officials but also a wider cross section of academics, industry representatives and think tanks. Only a wider exchange between actors can spur a new and meaningful tech partnership and support the aims of both the EU and India with regard to building tech sovereignty.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: © European Union
Discussion about this post