Two recent developments have had a decisive impact on the EU’s approach to digital technology policy. First, Europe’s neoliberal economic policy consensus has been repoliticized and industrial policy has made a comeback. This is evident in a number of new policy initiatives such as the Chips Act, the Important Projects of Common European Interest (e.g. on semiconductors) or the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud.
Second, more and more policy areas have become geopoliticized, that is, economic and geostrategic goals are increasingly entangled across a wide range of policy areas ranging from foreign investment screening to state aid.
Technologies—and digital technologies in particular—are essential to both repoliticization and geopoliticization. On the one hand, they are at the center of geo-economic and geo-political competition, as evidenced by widespread calls—under the banner of digital sovereignty—to regain control over their physical layer (resources, infrastructure, devices), code layer (standards, rules, design), and information layer (content, data). On the other hand, steering markets into emerging technologies—specifically digital ones—which are considered strategic, such as semiconductors, cloud computing, or batteries, is a key impetus behind the EU’s new industrial policy which aims to favor the emergence of a European Silicon Valley. Understanding the interplay between technology policy, the geopolitical and geoeconomic transformations, and the return of industrial policy is thus increasingly essential to
understand any one of them.
Our working group aims to bring together a variety of leading scholars from different disciplines and countries to study how industrial policy is actually done in Europe and beyond, and what the specific role of technology is therein. This promises not only to significantly advance the existing and rapidly growing literature on industrial policy and digital policy-making. It will also have practical relevance for the effectiveness and legitimacy of industrial and digital policy.
Research Results
This workshop has shown that the consensus that ‘industrial policy is back’ notwithstanding, more needs to be done to understand the specific challenges this poses. Many countries have spent decades adopting market-serving policies, having had little capacity for or experience with industrial policy. Now they face the challenge of ‘doing’ industrial policy again, that is, directing economic activities towards technologies essential for the ‘triple’ digital, green, and geopolitical transitions.
The workshop made first inroads into understanding how this happens, from Hungary’s push to become a battery manufacturing hub to decarbonization bargains in the Netherlands to the EU’s own multifaceted industrial policy. They have shown that returning to industrial policy is not as straightforward as turning back the clock to the postwar period, as previous choices constrain current ones. Future research should thus further unpack the difficulties—and provide solutions for—the problems of ‘doing industrial policy in a geo-tech world’.