Description
With the EU’s increased use of the terms strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty, and the ideational construction of ’the Geopolitical Union’, there has been an increased emphasis on active state and co-regulation as a tool of shaping digital technology markets. As ‘economy’ and ’security’ have increasingly been framed not as separate and distinct policy areas, but interdependent and mutually constitutive domains, the EU has taken an increasingly assertive approach to technology governance. The contribution of this article is to consider regulation not just as a policy tool, but as a form of geostrategic infrastructure. Reconceptualising it in this way helps us to address a supposed paradox - increased ‘deregulatory’ moves internally, with increased assertiveness externally. Law as geostrategic infrastructure is intended to support capacity building and industrial policy at home, while shaping regulatory norms externally. Recent initiative such as the Data Act reforms, Industrial Accelerator Act, and the Technological Sovereignty package represent a continuation of the regulatory shift that began with the first von der Leyen Commission.