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The Illusion of Sovereignty: Why Europe’s Digital Dream Rests on Shaky Foundations
In recent times, we have heard constant talk of "Digital Sovereignty"a topic I was also asked to comment on. Unfortunately, my opinion did not quite fit the established narrative, and I was quickly issued a gag order. I developed the German BSI’s (ERPOSS) agency desktop (not to be confused with the Munich project) and have been able to witness the technical shifts firsthand over the last 25 years. Anyone familiar with how specific German authorities operate and how investment-averse (or otherwise) the German/EU economy is, knows that this is simply Mission Impossible. It is harsh, but it is the truth.
Today, I no longer need to tailor my contributions to land acquisitions, maintaining a cheerful demeanor with a constant smile nope. Today, I disseminate pure information, even when it reveals how rundown companies and their solutions are or are not. Certainly, there are positives, but my services are not needed there anyway. Today, companies have a completely wrong conception or rather, no conception at all of the damage they have caused over time. It is gruesome.
Time and again, I experience how people are promised the moon just to get a contract signed. And then? Little happens initially. Later, they desperately try to prevent the project from running completely into the wall, building “pile dwellings” around the actual, flawed solutions. Over time, you no longer recognize your own IT it’s entirely normal. The most egregious case I found was when a shareholder commissioned a friendly IT firm in which he himself was a stakeholder. It was so bad that I did not want to be responsible for it any longer and simply quit. Today, I only do consulting, and even then, only when it comes from acquaintances or friends.
In this environment, the European Union propagates “Digital Sovereignty” as its central political promise. Yet, behind the facade of ambitious legislation and summit meetings hides the bitter truth: Europe is so deeply entangled in global, non-European dependencies that achieving genuine autonomy in the coming years is factually impossible.
The Foundation is Foreign: From Hardware to Physical Infrastructure
If one speaks of sovereignty, one must start with the atomic building blocks of digitalization and this is exactly where the European project fails, starting at the hardware level.
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The Hardware Abyss: Our entire digital world is based on CPUs that are neither designed in the EU nor manufactured on any relevant scale here. Without supplies from overseas or Taiwan, every data center in Europe would stand still.
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The Periphery of Dependency: It does not end with processors. Even the cables in modern data centers come almost exclusively from overseas. Anyone who believes that RAM, hard drives, or the mechanical foundations the racks are still manufactured in significant quantities in “beautiful Saxony” or anywhere in the EU is mistaken again, no such luck. Even for basic mass orders, lead times of up to three years are common. We are also largely dependent on non-European suppliers for complex components such as specialized cooling systems, surveillance cameras, or professional monitoring hardware and software. We buy what we are delivered, under terms we cannot dictate.
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The Human Capital Drain: Who is supposed to manage all of this? Given the massive outflow of skilled workers with thousands of highly qualified experts leaving the country every month the technological substance is already dwindling.
The Hidden Dependency: Where European Providers Are on the Drip Feed
Even when software is labeled as “European,” a look under the hood often reveals a toxic dependency:
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The Open-Source Illusion: Projects often celebrated as “sovereign” are usually just forks based on US-dominated frameworks. “Very cool” a fork is quickly made, but in the end, the developers and decision-makers are back in the USA.
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The Hyperscaler Trap: A “European Cloud” cannot simply be set up overnight. The scaling and the entire software infrastructure behind it are so deeply integrated into US systems that building one from scratch would take decades.
Conclusion: A Political Narrative Without a Technical Backbone
The idea of “Digital Sovereignty” is, in its current state, political wishful thinking. To achieve true sovereignty, one would need to build a complete copy of the internet an undertaking that, if started today, might reach a beta stage in 25 to 30 years.
Perhaps it is time to face reality: The EU is developing into a digital desert. Instead of losing ourselves in illusions, we should be planning where to source services in the future and tailoring laws accordingly, rather than attempting to manage the inevitable. But then again, I am not a Digital Minister with a party card. Without capital, without a hardware base, and without technological know-how, “Digital Sovereignty” is simply not feasible.