Europe’s Digital Sovereignty Push Gathers Pace as MEPs and CEOs Meet in Brussels

Not Protectionism — But Not the Status Quo Either

European policymakers, industry leaders and digital experts gathered in Brussels for Wire’s European Digital Sovereignty Summit with a clear shared premise: Europe must build a digital ecosystem that reflects its own values — democracy, transparency, interoperability — rather than simply replicating the infrastructure architecture of US Big Tech. MEPs Brando Benifei from Italy, Alexandra Geese from Germany and Bruno Gonçalves from Portugal led the debate, framing digital sovereignty not as a retreat from global engagement but as a precondition for remaining meaningfully competitive within it.

The distinction mattered. As Europe accelerates its push for technological independence, the risk of conflating sovereignty with isolationism has become a live political concern — one the summit moved quickly to address.

Build on Open Standards or Build on Someone Else’s

Wire CEO Benjamin Schilz was direct on the infrastructure question. Reducing reliance on foreign technology platforms is not optional in an era of heightened geopolitical risk — it is the foundation on which democratic stability and data sovereignty depend. Open source, interoperability and transparent standards, he argued, are the only credible path to avoiding vendor lock-in while maintaining the resilience that Europe’s digital single market requires.

Wire CCO Oliver Brown extended the argument into policy: regulation should be enabling rather than restrictive, with competition reform and targeted investment in AI, semiconductors and cybersecurity unlocking the potential of Europe’s considerable talent base. The bottleneck, in his framing, is not capability — it is market fragmentation.

The Airbus Warning: National Priorities Are the Real Barrier

Jean-Philippe Scherer, Head of EU/NATO Public Affairs for Defence and Space at Airbus, offered the summit’s sharpest provocation. The greatest obstacle to European digital cooperation, he argued, is not foreign sovereignty — it is fragmented domestic priorities. Individual member states pursuing national agendas at the expense of collective European infrastructure is the structural problem that no amount of sovereignty rhetoric resolves.

His call for a broader mindset shift — more European leadership, deeper cross-border education, genuine alignment rather than coordinated announcements — echoed the concern raised by Alexandra Geese MEP, who acknowledged diplomatic pressure against sovereignty initiatives while pointing to growing momentum at the local level. Others were blunter still, warning against sovereignty washing: political positioning that uses the language of independence without delivering the structural reform that makes it real. The EU’s ability to compete globally depends on closing that gap.

From Ambition to Operational Delivery

The risks identified at the summit were specific and concrete: concentrated browser ownership, dependence on foreign cloud infrastructure, governance vulnerabilities embedded in the platforms that underpin European public and private sector operations. Participants were clear that addressing these risks does not require Europe to close itself off — it requires Europe to be anchored in its own standards while remaining globally connected.

The final session closed on a demand for practical reform: stronger policy alignment across AI, semiconductors and cybersecurity, and meaningful simplification within a deepened single market. Wire reaffirmed its commitment to secure, open and interoperable digital infrastructure — a position that frames digital sovereignty as resilience-building rather than border-drawing.

The consensus from Brussels was unambiguous. Political ambition must translate into operational delivery. Europe has spent long enough diagnosing the dependency problem. The summit was a call to fix it.