The geopolitical role of digital standards in the quest for European digital sovereignty

While the term digital sovereignty was used in the 2010s mainly in countries such as Germany and France, this changed with the election of Ursula von der Leyen as the new president of the European Commission in 2019. Under her legislature, digital policy has become a central focus of the EU and digital sovereignty one of its guiding concepts. This chapter first gives an overview of the political-economic constraints in which this development is taking place and then examines how it is legitimised along central communications of the European Commission. It shows that the pursuit of digital sovereignty is less a problem of different values than one of containing non-European distributive forces in the interest of European capital. Subsequently, a central means of this programme is discussed: the unilateral establishment of digital standards on a global scale. This is followed by a discussion of the limitations of the European quest for digital sovereignty.