The gloomy economic outlook and declining government budgets worldwide are already applying maximum pressure on world leaders. In these times of turmoil, I believe we need an ambitious yet inviting goal in our mind’s eye. By this I mean re-engineering the entire global architecture of digital tech. Let us imagine a plan along those lines that would play out over the next decade.
The American theory that the global architecture could fall into a new dynamic state, somehow acceptable to major parties, through the metaphor of “a race” won by America, is unproven. The guileless tech diplomacy of senior administration officials like Michael Kratsios certainly does not help. Yet a similar underlying theory of competition is held on both sides of the aisle in Washington, D.C. A recent manifesto by Jake Sullivan rejected the idea of “a race to a finish line” but referred to “a contest [that] has no end…a competition [that] will extend indefinitely”.
Intentional reorganization in a multilateral format offers an alternative theory. Undoubtedly, it would also be difficult. But it was tried before, at least within the American bloc, through such schemes as the “International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors” under President Clinton.
Due to falling profitability in the US microelectronics industry, the supply chain was redistributed around US allies such as Taiwan. It was not a competitive phenomenon but an ordered intervention. The core achievements were splitting chip design from chip fabs, plausible continuation of Moore’s law, and, ultimately, the restoration of profitability.
The rise of Nvidia within the husk of the old system is tribute to the insight of its managers. But the Clinton-era dispensation is otherwise causing ructions. It has been overtaken by events.
A repeat performance by the USA would fail; while still a prime mover, it no longer controls all the factors. However, it still wants to feel like it rules the roost. China is now a major source of innovation. The countries that mine the raw materials or serve as dumping grounds for the waste will also demand a say.
Chinese experts definitely understand that global architecture needs re-engineering. The USA does too, in its own way, but its federal government is in ruins. Someone else has to put the pieces together. That does not mean creating yet another international forum or a ceremonious written agreement, but gradually taking a series of loosely coordinated steps based on an emergent shared understanding.
The “chapter” on software could, in theory, describe regional open source ecosystems. The chapter on regulation is, as it were, already being discussed in fora such as the UN. The underlying tangible goods, namely, the hardware, would require a different approach.
The EU could in theory play a catalytic role in this process. If there is one thing European officials ought to know about, it is multilateral negotiation, having kept their own fractious, insincere and shape-shifting coalition of member states more or less on the road for decades. But Europe is currently trapped within an excessively narrow logic concerned with “tech sovereignty”.
Tech sovereignty meets reality
EU tech policy essentially rests on the premise that the continent’s renewal will emerge from within the European genius. An expansive view of one’s own scientific capabilities are essential for it to work. But reality bites if the underlying genius is not to be found; high tech is an unforgiving field.
Two recent examples are the “Northvolt” battery program, which already collapsed, and the “SiPearl” chip program, billed as a challenge to Nvidia, but which some in the industry consider sub-par. Both have been heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Yet batteries are difficult to make and so are chips.
The lesson some analysts took from the battery fiasco is that the EU had to align with China on green-tech as it was itself not up to the mark. Member states such as France and Spain have already peeled away from the “sovereignty” policy and seek to onshore Chinese green-tech manufacturers. The outcome of SiPearl has yet to be determined; the new chips are now reported to be undergoing fabrication in Taiwan.
After the financial crisis in the earlier part of the century, European commitment to austerity devastated science, research and industry across many areas. To the contrary, China, and the USA kept up the pace. In arcane technical fields, Europe cannot make up for lost time; if it must buy European, it will have to settle for sub-par. Historically, Europeans have refused that option.
Tech is typically a means to an end. If an indigenous version delivers the end less effectively than an overseas competitor, to implement it would make the continent poorer, not richer. Whether a program makes sense therefore hinges on objective technology assessment because this gives the data needed to make good choices. Unfortunately, that is often lacking.
Alternative horizon of order
In a recent paper, Lu Gao, affiliated to the School of Marxism, Tsinghua University, put across an expansive perspective: ”On the one hand, China can no longer be understood simply as a passive recipient of global technological norms. On the other hand, the issue is equally one of how China’s own discourses and value frameworks come to matter within global settings. In an era defined by intensified geopolitical competition and the politicization of technology, China’s governance practices, institutional language, policy initiatives and cultural resources are increasingly entering the arena of global technology ethics debates…In this respect, China’s significance in global technology governance lies not only in its institutional practices but also in the theoretical position increasingly assigned to it. From the perspective of intellectual history, the impulse among Western thinkers to ‘seek remedies in China’ is hardly new.”
She added that there was a need to focus on “an alternative horizon of order” because, according to her, Chinese diplomacy was making “an ongoing effort to imagine a form of global technology governance that places greater emphasis on shared futures, coordination and mutual benefit, even while the nation-state remains the primary unit of political action.”
During the COVID pandemic, China proposed global eradication of the virus, a humane and scientific idea. It was plausible due to the extraordinary technical and mobilizational capacities of its state which, in the early stages of the crisis, could halt the virus at speeds never before seen. But it lost because the USA, unlike China, had neither the desire nor the capacity to achieve it. Crudely put, this is perhaps why Chinese leaders later dropped “zero COVID” like a hot coal and brushed it under the carpet as a badge of shame. No one wants to harp on about their own defeats.
A similar dynamic begins to develop with AI, digital tech and decarbonization although, of course, in these cases, the winner is as yet unknown. But it is a catastrophic dynamic from the perspective of humanity. As COVID showed, forces can rapidly spiral out of rational control for all concerned.
The real “China shock”
When times change, the EU must change accordingly, as happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet European policy frameworks rarely acknowledged the implications of that change. Eastern Europe (and Turkey) is still on the psychological periphery despite its now vital role in the continent’s manufacturing ecosystem.
China represents an extreme challenge for Europe, far beyond any news that reached Brussels before, because it calls into question the continent’s deepest beliefs of its supposed intellectual and moral superiority.
Diplomats want to keep a civil public tone. In April, for example, Kaja Kallas, the EU high representative, was reported to have “stated that the EU regards China as an important partner, does not seek to decouple from China, and looks forward to maintaining dialogue and communication with China”. This was the Chinese foreign ministry readout of a call involving the foreign minister Wang Yi intended to tamp down discord.
Yet official-adjacent pundits are out in the European media with strident messages: evidence of bureaucratic rifts beneath the surface. In February, the “Geostrategic Europe Taskforce” took it to the extreme with a threat to cut off both American and Chinese diabetics from life-saving European-made insulin as a means of geopolitical “leverage”. Europeans might imagine their threats as “defensive” but you have to wonder how they know their interlocutors will not read them as escalation.
They also use a fixed vocabulary such as “China’s economic coercion” that brooks no nuance. Its proponents typically avoid asking why China reacted as it did in the cases of “coercion” named. The reasons were because China would have logically believed Western powers were threatening it. There is nothing notably mysterious in Chinese government behavior. If the actions of one country are perceived by another as dangerous, it is not going to welcome them.
The messages are mainly coming from groups previously known for their criticism of China like the Financial Times and the Atlanticist think-tanks (the latter still holding true to Biden administration talking points).
But since the advent of Trump, the language has blended; it now also comes across as anti-American. It is therefore very difficult to parse politically because historically Atlanticist groups are taking anti-American stances reflecting internal divisions among American elites. The tilt blends into parts of the European left, who always felt the chafing of American power. They sometimes viewed the Chinese Communist Party sympathetically through the lens of anti-colonialism but the Europeans are now as unsympathetic as the Americans. The Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament is fully bought into this agenda. In their latest policy paper on tech sovereignty they wanted “control…in European hands”.
We do not know exactly what the Green statement about “hands” would signify. But there is a particular reason why I mention it. In older “European” tech pushes, it boiled down to what I believe to have been unstated racial criteria that excluded Japanese but let in (white) Americans. This is why we have to be careful when advocating for such a policy and be honest with ourselves about what it could be understood to mean. It is certainly highly probable that anti-Americanism will be soft-pedaled.
The prominent anti-colonialist of the last century, Kwameh Nkrumah, believed the Treaty of Rome that launched European integration to be a neo-colonial counterpart to the Berlin Congress that formalized colonialism in the nineteenth century. The “Brussels So White” meme, referring to the lack of racial diversity of EU officials, stings because it hits the mark.
Progressive plans
Understanding why both anti-Americanism and racism constantly hover in the background of European policy would require a deep dive into history and I encourage the EU policy community to reflect on it. But progressives need to focus on action.
The unprecedented challenge of equipping the energy system to cut carbon emissions would be cause enough to argue for a new approach, while the huge difficulties presented by AI and digital tech evidently require global cooperation. Neither Kratsios, nor Sullivan, nor many of the Europeans appear to have grasped the global scale of these challenges; these challenges are never going to be strands in otherwise national policies but central shapers of them.
Positioning European countries within an uncharted political landscape seems to me the priority. The use of sagacious language, particularly, the avoidance of violent terms such as “choke-point” and “weaponize” is, in my view, a useful qualifying step. Geopolitics is brutal but it need not be barbaric.
New forms of tech diplomacy will have to be built across a wider emotional register than threats against supply chains. Recognizing China and other players as moral as well as intellectual equals is an important concession that Europe can offer which has substantial persuasive value in a decolonizing world.
Diplomacy must also continue with the USA which is not a totalitarian monolith. Noting Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter, progressives should keep in mind that the USA has always been a motor of reform across the Western bloc and Europe needs it. This implies taking the time to find out about useful forces across the Atlantic rather than fixating on Trump.
It would be best to avoid being excessively doctrinaire and see how things develop. But, social democratic criteria ought at the least to be raised. The left needs to stop pretending “Europeaness” is a proxy for morality. Tech firms participating in EU programs could instead be judged against having at least 50% participation of women in decision-making roles like the board, political neutrality of managers, labor union recognition, quality of tech, and probity of funding.
It was no less a Marxist figure than Trotsky who described “the reactionary tendencies of autarky” as “a defense reflex of senile capitalism to the task with which history confronts it”. “Autarky” is the old-time version of current buzzwords like “strategic autonomy” and “sovereignty”. Trotsky has never been notably popular, but this point is resonant.
Science Think Tank 