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 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”.
I am trying to think of an historical example of a “competition”. Perhaps the closest would be Airbus and Boeing – equivalent planes associated, respectively, with the EU and the USA. The customers (airlines) preferred a situation with at least two competing firms, rather than a monopoly, as it gave them price arbitrage. But it led to an enormous dispute over subsidies. That story had many complicated twists, e.g. UK, integral to Airbus, managed to sell its Rolls Royce jet engines to both Europe and the USA (an example of British “cherry picking”). But I am not sure we could draw any obvious lessons from it.
Intentional reorganization in a multilateral format offers an alternative approach to “uncontrolled” competition. Undoubtedly, it would also be difficult. But it was definitely tried before in digital technology, at least within the American bloc, through such schemes as the “International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors” under President Clinton.
As I could understand, over the past 40 years, due to falling profitability of the US microelectronics industry, as well as various technical problems, 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.
Once Again, Governments Stepped In…In 1998, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), with participation from Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the US was formed, and it was then possible to finally mobilize all the resources necessary to deal with the magnitude of the problem [charge tunneling]…In the year 2000, the US government announced major funding in technology focused on the theme of “Nanotechnology.” Research funds of over $400M that were allocated in 2001 by the US Government were soon followed by similar levels of investments in research by Japan, Europe, as well as all other countries producing semiconductors. The total worldwide funding soon accumulated within the $1B range!
Paolo Gargini, 2023, Semiconductor Crises and Roadmaps Rescues (IRDS), p. 9
The rise of Nvidia within the husk of the old system is tribute to the insight of its managers. But the dispensation is otherwise causing ructions. It is unsustainable for Taiwan to concentrate the lion’s share of chip production nor Ghana to accept the bulk of the e-waste.
An exact re-run of the Clinton years would fail; while still a prime mover, the USA 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 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, not only in digital but also green-tech. 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.
Furthermore, questions of European “competitiveness” are often cover for discussing a handful of German multinational firms, typically of great age.†† Without any information about the internal management of these firms it is impossible to judge if the arguments they make are true. The reality is that we need to move their assets into more productive activities. They have, in general, been a drag on innovative sectors within Europe. This is in part because they hold great political power and therefore can interfere with all manner of policies. But it is also because they are sweating depreciated assets – unlike innovative firms that have more recently entered the market.
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.”
Lu Gao added that there was a need to focus on “an alternative horizon of order” because 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 suppression of the virus, a humane and scientific idea that was in-keeping with its policies regarding other infectious diseases such as TB (a bacterium).
It became a plausible goal due to the extraordinary technical and mobilization capacities of its state which, in the early stages of the crisis, could halt the virus at speeds never before seen (this is in a country that otherwise lacks universal health coverage and has a performance as mixed as many others when it comes to eliminating infectious diseases).
China actively promoted the possibility of suppression and regularly offered copious guidance to external audiences in English through online channels such as China CDC. But China “lost” because the USA had neither the desire nor the capacity to achieve it. Crudely put, this is perhaps why Chinese leaders later dropped “zero COVID” so quickly. No one wants to relive their own defeats.
A similar story perhaps 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.
[W]e are so convinced that we are better than the others, that if we have a very fine product or a very good idea, the others must accept it. [But] we don’t think that the other person might have something else in their head.
Édith Cresson [former French prime minister and EU commissioner], Historical Archives of the European Union, interview, 6 May 2006, INT989, p. 11
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 counter-argument is that China would have logically believed Western powers were threatening it. If the actions of one country are perceived by another as dangerous, it is not going to welcome them.
Debates about “true” Chinese intentions mirror those during the Cold War and cannot be described as original. The overall point is that Chinese intentions are dialectical within the context of Western intentions, and vice versa, and in light of the assumptions both parties make, which typically have historical roots.
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 to China 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 highly probable that anti-Americanism will get soft-pedaled without any notable reductions in Sinophobia.
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 white supremacy constantly hover over European policy would require a deep dive into history and I encourage the EU policy community to reflect on it.
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.
In a recent paper, Juan Embid Sánchez pointed out the potential for European research institutions such as the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre to become hubs for information exchange between the two superpowers (evoking, perhaps, the role of CERN during the Cold War).
Certainly, positioning European countries within this uncharted political landscape is a priority. But currently it seems impossible in any substantial way due to Europe’s dependency on Washington, D.C. Unless the USA abandons either its Sinophobia or its opposition to green-tech in particular, Europe cannot, even in theory, escape the bind.
However, the use of sagacious language by anyone able to use it, 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. Again, at this juncture, it is a job for analysts to imagine, rather than a program that could be put into practice. 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.
Logically, the European External Action Service (EEAS) could be rebooted with its primary task to take forward EU S&T diplomacy with the idea of helping shepherd a new multilateral architecture of invention, production and waste disposal. Such rebooting of EEAS would be cheap in financial terms but would depend on big shifts in worldview as well as personnel. However, the directionless science diplomacy “framework” recently “adopted” by the Council of the EU shows this to be an impossible dream.
Overall, 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.
Notes:
*Sangwoon Yoo, 2026, The Dual Division of Labor: American Origins of East Asian Hegemony in the Semiconductor Industry, is an important recent analysis on this topic.
†An inventory might help us understand what venues for discussion actually exist, e.g., the “Global Convergence for Growth Summit“.
††Mavericks such as Thomas Sattelberger are among the most vocal critics of the management of these firms from the FDP end of German politics. The critique from the left and greens is widely available.
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