This is the original version.
A Spanish version will be published next Thursday
Sovereignty: Another Digital Change
The previous post in this series on AI and
International Law focused on the breakdown of the ubiquity of facts and the impacts that AI has in Public International Law (PIL). When
a fact occurs or becomes legally relevant in digital environments, a new family
of challenges appears.
However, between the “fact” and “attribution” there is a hinge category: sovereignty, which continues to function as the
central language through which PIL organizes authority, jurisdiction,
competence, and, above all, the limits of action of its subjects.
In
constructing the post-1945 legal order, countries recognized “the need to
establish, at the earliest practicable date, a general international
organization based on the principle of the sovereign equality,” and the
drafting sub-committee of the San Francisco Conference “voted to retain the
terminology ‘sovereign equality,’ on the assumption and understanding that it
conveys: (1) that States are legally equal; (2) that they enjoy the rights
inherent in full sovereignty; (3) that the personality of the State is
respected, as well as its territorial integrity and political independence; and
(4) that the State should, within the international order, faithfully comply
with its duties and obligations under international law” (Simma et al.,
2012:144).
The problem
is that, in the digital world, the concept and the foundations of sovereignty
are mutating: the State moves from being the one that “controls and commands”
to being the actor that tries to configure technical, economic, and normative
conditions that enable a certain degree of control and command.
What does
it mean, then, to be sovereign in times of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? This
blog entry points to some elements that help us look for an answer.
Shaping Imperial Friction
Before
speaking of “digital sovereignty,” it is worth recalling that sovereignty is a
historical product. Anghie shows that modern international law was constituted
in close relation to European imperial expansion and to the need to give legal
order to the colonial encounter, the origin of a doctrinal and practical
concern: in Anghie’s own terms, “special doctrines and norms had to be devised
for the purpose of defining, identifying, and placing the uncivilized” (Anghie,
2004:36).
Contemporary
debates on sovereignty oscillate between two extremes: either treating it as a set of “immutable” features of the politico-legal order, or reducing it to
a contingent effect of discursive practices. Bartelson proposes an analytical
displacement: instead of asking what sovereignty “is,” he tries to understand
how it functions as a way of organizing political experience, though he clearly
leans toward a position that privileges the discursive: “sovereignty is what we
make of it through the use of language, and therefore sovereignty depends
entirely on our linguistic practices and conventions” (Bartelson, 2014:9).
His
position allows him to approach sovereignty as a frame that makes the political world intelligible, separating binary
categories such as “inside/outside,” “internal/external,” or “authority/absence
of authority.” We add the separation that sovereignty organizes, at the
subjective level, between “us” and “them,” which Bartelson almost suggests when
he states that “sovereignty must be understood as a symbolic form through which
Westerners have perceived and organized the political world since the early
modern period” (Bartelson, 2014:2).
That
organization into opposed pairs allows sovereignty to operate as a structuring
structure (Bourdieu, 2007:85–86), insofar as a durable social structure that is
internalized by individuals and shapes a system of dispositions and perceptions
that, in turn, generates and organizes social practices and
representations, where the social is internalized, and the internalized is
socialized.
In this
sense, the idea of sovereignty defines and feeds back social locations where
what counts as legitimate, as a limit, as interference is defined, and, we add
again, who counts as “us” or “them.”
Sovereignty and Digitalization
If
sovereignty is a form that organizes the political world, digitalization and AI
do not eliminate it, but rather force it to readjust so it can keep fulfilling
its function in an environment where physical borders are no longer the main
support of control. This brings us close to Walker’s (2009:11) idea of
sovereignty as a set of operations of different types (legal, institutional,
administrative, technical) that give stability to authority, an idea he
reinforces by saying that sovereignty “works” as a practice rather than “being”
something: it is not “there,” it is not verified, until it is put into practice
(Walker, 2009:186).
This is key
to our approach, because “the digital” does not erase the distinction between a
functional sovereignty of “doing” and an ontological sovereignty of “being,”
but it does make it more problematic, because it must now include elements of
the exercise of state authority through the control of infrastructures that
range from platforms and digital clouds to standards and cross-border digital
architectures. And with that, the binary categories we referred to cease to be
defined territorially and begin to incorporate distributed points of friction,
such as access to data, server locations, control over standards, or
technological dependence.
Sovereignty
becomes a strategy for managing conditions of possibility both intra- and
extraterritorially, sidelining PIL in the face of technological change and
creating a void within the very idea of sovereignty at the point of friction
between powers competing to define a technological governance that expresses
their capacity to manage decisions and have them applied internationally.
A cracking mold
Görnemann
(2024:7) says that “digital technologies and infrastructures can be represented
in three layers which together constitute the technological package: the
physical layer, the code layer, and the data layer.”
The
expression “digital sovereignty” appears as a space for ordering those three
layers, but the traditional molds through which we have thought sovereignty
cannot contain them, because all of them break—at least to some degree—with a
basic premise: the territoriality of the exercise of sovereign power. It is in
this sense that Weymouth (2023:25) argues that digital sovereignty is, for him,
the state power to regulate “not only cross-border data flows through the use
of Internet filtering technologies and data localization mandates, but also
discursive activities (e.g., combating fake news) and access to technologies.”
The World
Economic Forum (2025) reinforces this view, defining digital sovereignty as the
capacity to control one’s digital destiny across data, hardware, and software.
It breaks down into three layers: physical infrastructure, code (standards,
rules, and system design), and data (governance, ownership, flows, and use).
From this perspective, it also extends to AI-related domains, such as deepfakes and blockchain, introducing new disruptions to state-based control and governance.
Digital Corporations Play the Game
Today,
those layers and their modes of management depend less on the State than on a
small core of private companies that hyper-concentrate power, so it seems
legitimate to ask whether the very concept of sovereignty is shifting away from
the State—without leaving it—toward the private sector. This, which is
inadmissible in theory, looks too much like what happens in practice for us to
simply refuse to think about what it would mean.
The
political motivation for denying reality is clear: to prevent the major private
actors that hold dominant positions in the digital market from capturing the
value in each layer of digital sovereignty and increasing their ability to
condition public policy. As Jelinek (2023:21) puts it, for States digital
sovereignty “requires preserving or regaining control over data and digital
technologies, which is central to digital transformation and the imminent
paradigm shift” (Jelinek, 2023:21).
To add
further complexity, we must add the human component of sovereignty, that “us
and them” expressed both in identity and in power terms, which now also
manifests as the concentration and capture of personal data by large private
actors, as well as in defining which cultural models will feed—or be excluded
from—the training processes of digital models (Kath et al., 2023:7).
For States,
digital sovereignty poses a new threat that must be neutralized by recovering
control capacity in a new environment where power is exercised in an
increasingly deterritorialized space for which the State was not designed.
The Silos Trap
The turn
toward digital sovereignty carries a structural risk that must be underscored,
because it can turn the problem of digital interdependence into a program of
fragmentation: each involved actor moves its digital pieces, but only if it
controls the board that guides its moves. While “digital sovereignty is an
unquestioned consensus term: regardless of the digital policy one defends [and]
no one can say they do not care about digital sovereignty” (Görnemann, 2024:6),
only some can claim to give it content, and the possibility of fragmentation of
responses based on technological rivalries leads to decouplings and
contradictions that affect the possibility of establishing global standards,
resulting in digital “balkanization” (Jelinek, 2023:33).
In other
words, the effort to “regain control” can result in a world of incompatible
digital ecosystems, with global economic and political costs: “the risk, in
supporting national digital sovereignty, is ending up endorsing a digital
sovereignism or a digital statism” (Floridi, 2020:374).
The State
seems condemned to advance into an unmapped space of incorporating the digital,
knowing it will not achieve control over it. Under these conditions, any use of
the idea of sovereignty based on purely state-national framing can lead to a
dispute in which everyone loses.
Faced with
this, it seems smarter to assume that reality has changed and to try to rebuild
a certain degree of control by activating geopolitical incentives, optimizing
supply chains, developing technical standards, and promoting global markets, in
order to produce cross-dependencies that allow everyone to take part in the
prize, without anyone having total control of the game. As Weymouth (2023:4)
argues, “paradoxically, for digital globalization to thrive, the multinationals
that currently dominate digital markets must first be contained,” and this
requires a pragmatic reconfiguration of state sovereignty.
Managing Sovereignty
We thus
arrive at the core of our concern: in the digital age, the State operates
increasingly as a sovereignty manager, within a framework in which “control
comes in degrees and, above all, can be both aggregated and transferred”
(Floridi, 2020:371), and in that calculus mere territoriality of the exercise
of power cannot be the only element.
Building
state capacities to understand and steer systems that, by design, tend to be
opaque should be a priority action for any government that intends to maintain
a practice of digital sovereignty, especially when “between companies and
States, the former can determine the nature and speed of change, but the latter
can control the direction of change” (Floridi, 2020:371).
Digital
sovereignty will necessarily be “more open” or “less sovereign,” not because
the State renounces it, but because power comes to be exercised in multi-actor
networks in which authority takes on new distributions over which the State can
no longer exercise full control. The more a State tries to seize dominance over
this digital ecosystem, the more it will encounter its capacity deficits for
acting in isolation.
Conclusions
Anghie
(2004) argues that, in its international legal conception, sovereignty
historically served to organize hierarchies and manage differences within the
world order. Bartelson (2014) proposes seeing it as a symbolic form for
organizing our experience of authority and limits, and Walker (2009) insists
that it operates as a practice that must be put into action. Contemporary
debates on digital sovereignty show how the center of gravity of control has
shifted toward data, infrastructures, discourses, and technological access
(Weymouth, 2023; Kath et al., 2023), bringing with it the risk of a
territorial-silo fragmentation of an issue that, by nature, is cross-border
(Jelinek, 2023). Floridi (2020:372) concludes that “modern-analog type
sovereignty remains necessary, but is increasingly insufficient, exactly like
the State.”
We believe
the critical element to keep in mind is the State’s change of role: it stops
being the ultimate decision-maker and becomes a configurator of responses to
tools over which it has no more than partial control. The “facts,” as we saw in
the previous post, become harder to locate as they unfold within
non-territorialized transnational architectures, and “attribution,” as we will
see in a forthcoming blog, becomes harder to sustain due to its distribution
across different layers and actors.
In a world
where the State loses part of its control, rethinking digital sovereignty as a
radical transformation that affects its foundations is a task that must bring
together scientists in the field of digital technologies with their peers in
the social sciences and with political decision-makers, who must be willing to
add a pair of digital lenses to their ways of seeing the world.
References
Anghie, A.
(2004). Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law.
Cambridge University Press.
Bartelson,
J. (2014). Sovereignty as symbolic form. Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (2007). El sentido práctico. Siglo XXI
Editores
Falkner, G.; Heidebrecht, S.; Obendiek, A. y Seid, T.
(2024). Digital sovereignty -
Rhetoric and reality. Journal of European Public Policy, 31(8),
2099-2120. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2024.2358984.
Floridi, L
(2020). The Fight for Digital Sovereignty: What It Is, and Why It Matters,
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(2023). The digital sovereignty trap: Avoiding the return of silos and a
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