Description
The EU is reframing itself as the Geopolitical Union. Responding to perceived external threat vulnerabilities, the EU has placed security at the centre of its relations with the world. Semiconductors, minerals at the heart of the chips that make all modern technologies function, demonstrate the indivisibility of material and cybersecurity objectives. Cybersecurity and the protection of critical infrastructure is dependent on material security and the accumulation of these chips, identified as key strategic priorities of the EU. This article explores how the EU’s perception of its vulnerability to external threats to its semiconductor supply are serving to reinforce a digital sovereignty strategy. Blending cyber, material, and economic security goals, using regulation to reduce strategic dependencies, the EU’s policies can be conceptualised as an example of regulatory mercantilism. Through initiatives such as the Chips Act and proposed Critical Natural Resources Regulation, the EU seeks to boost domestic supply and production through a unified approach referred to as ‘Chips for Europe’, accumulate natural resources key for producing semiconductors, and export its own regulatory standards as world standards, using a discourse of security to do so. As such, the interdependence of cyber and material is now central to the Geopolitical Union’s security objectives.
