Europe is debating digital sovereignty as though the central question were who owns the infrastructure. The more consequential question is whether European firms can move across systems freely, securely,
and without lock-in.

In a new EDI Perspective, Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD argues that the sovereignty debate has drifted away from the oldest ambition of European integration: building a genuinely unified market. The Commission’s Tech Sovereignty Package illustrates the risk. By leaning on national compliance mandates rather than common rules, it could deepen the very fragmentation Europe has spent decades trying to overcome.

The paradox is straightforward. Europe was built on the premise that reducing internal friction creates collective strength. Yet much of the sovereignty agenda now threatens to add friction: new compliance layers, divergent national implementations, and territorial restrictions that ultimately burden the European firms policymakers want to strengthen.

Europe’s central digital weakness is not only dependence on external actors. It is the inability to generate scale internally. If sovereignty measures deepen fragmentation, Europe weakens its own competitiveness in the name of strengthening autonomy.

Komaitis sets out a better path: sovereignty understood as resilience through openness and interoperability, rather than control through restriction. In practice, that means:

Making Interoperability the organising principle of Digital Policy

Eliminating internal fragmentation, reforming procurement around portability rather than nationality, treating open source as a strategic asset, and investing in trusted alliances.

The original promise of the European project was never about autarky. It was about integration as a source of strength. The digital sphere should not become the place where Europe forgets that lesson.