Europe excels at writing digital rules, yet much of its backbone such as cloud, payments, identity, AI, etc. runs on non-European, highly centralised infrastructure.

A new policy brief by the European Decentralisation Institute sets out a practical strategy for Europe to regain control over its digital foundations. Entitled “Rebalancing Europe’s Digital Power: Decentralisation as a Practical Route to Digital Sovereignty,” the report argues that Europe can close its sovereignty gap by embedding decentralisation into the architecture of key infrastructures such as cloud, payments, digital identity, energy systems, and AI.

EDI defines decentralisation as a systems-design approach where control, auditability and rule-change authority are distributed across multiple independent operators, making digital infrastructure more resilient, governable, and aligned with European law.

Europe’s problem is not overregulation but under-digitalisation. We need to build systems that reflect European values and are governable by design. Decentralisation provides the blueprint.

The policy brief identifies four priorities for EU and national policymakers in the next 36 months:

1. Adopt a Decentralisation for Digital Sovereignty Framework (DDS Framework) — Mandate decentralised governance across existing EU regulations including eIDAS2, MiCA, DORA, and NIS2.
   
2. Redefine the EU Digital Infrastructure Fund — Finance open, interoperable protocols with independent testing.
   
3. Move to governance-first regulation — Focus on how digital institutions change their rules, ensuring transparency and enforceability by design.
   
4. Measure the Total Cost of Centralisation — Introduce an EU-wide scorecard to monitor dependency and resilience across digital systems.
   

Sovereignty is not declared on paper; it’s engineered into infrastructure. Europe must now build what it can govern.

The brief follows EDI’s inaugural high-level roundtable “Decentralisation: A Strategic Imperative for a Sovereign Digital Europe” in Brussels on 28 October 2025, co-hosted with The Lisbon Council, where policymakers and industry leaders discussed decentralisation as a path toward digital autonomy.

The EDI will bring these findings to the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty, hosted by the governments of Germany and France on the EUREF Campus in Berlin (18 November 2025). The summit will gather political leaders, industry, academia, and civil society to advance a shared vision for an independent, secure, and innovation-driven digital Europe.

Decentralisation is not an ideology but a systems design choice. Decentralisation is not an ideology but a systems design choice. It allows Europe to turn sovereignty from intent into capability.