‘There's nothing fixed about the global order’

The Brussels Institute for Geopolitics held an expert panel ‘Tech Sovereignty – What does it Mean?’ on Wednesday 12 March to discuss Artificial Intelligence and geopolitics.  It started with the launch of World Builders: Technology and The New Geopolitics by political philosopher, author and Portugal’s former Secretary of State for European Affairs, Bruno Maçães, followed by an expert panel on the topic with independent researcher, Ophélie Coelho and Professor of Political Arithmetic at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Daniel Mügge. 

The event was chaired by director Luuk van Middelaar and was followed by questions from the floor. Listen to the event in full here.

Maçães provided insights from his book illustrating that the struggle for supremacy is no longer only geographical, but also technological. ‘I think we're now at a moment of transition, stated  Maçães, [...] from one kind of order to a different kind of order. These moments of transition are moments when people tend to realize that there's nothing fixed about the global order. There's nothing eternal. It's always changing'

The panellists discussed Europe’s evolving relationship with the United States and China, Russia’s economic perseverance during its war with Ukraine despite European sanctions, and the over-arching question of digital sovereignty.

Maçães looked at the significance of digital sovereignty in modern geopolitics, highlighting the optics of the political theatre played out recently in both Washington and Beijing.

“This idea of digital sovereignty, I think, is extremely powerful in the US And China [...].  I advise you to see the photos first of Donald Trump's inauguration with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and perhaps a couple others sitting behind him. The digital-political-military complex in all its glory, but not hidden anymore, very visible.”

He drew parallels with China after similar pictures emerged in the media recently of Xi Jinping meeting tech CEOs, including of Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek. It’s a race, he reiterated, that Europe cannot be committed to winning.

Meanwhile, Coelho emphasised that Europe should hold true to its values and focus on technologies that serve society. “We really have to thread the needle to be really specific, and to build this strategy to gain back, to win back, power on those specific technological components, beginning with what we use daily, as citizens. [...] We always have this opinion that it would be good to have a European champion, a European big tech. But do we really want to have a big tech conglomerate in Europe? We have to do the contrary.”

Europeans are scratching their heads over how to engage with Artificial Intelligence, according to Mügge. “When you survey workers, desk workers, whether they're using Gen AI, whether it's co-pilot in their office or something, they at best play around with it, but they really don't know what exactly they should do with it. So this fixation on OpenAI and that's where the future lies, and if we don't have something like that, we're basically screwed is, I think, fundamentally misleading.”

He urged European leaders not to necessarily replicate models set in the US and China, such as large-scale data centres and instead focus on robotics, for instance, and chart a more human-centric way forward.

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