The European Union is undergoing a significant conceptual shift in how it understands digital governance, competitiveness, and state intervention. This shift is most clearly articulated in Draghi Report on European Competitiveness, which acknowledges that Europe can no longer rely on regulatory authority alone to secure its technological future. Instead, the report calls for large-scale industrial policy, strategic public investment, coordinated state action, and deliberate capacity-building in critical digital sectors. Public intervention and targeted subsidies are no longer framed as market distortions, but as existential necessities in an era defined by geopolitical competition and technological concentration.

This recognition marks an important moment of candour in EU policy discourse. Yet it also exposes a longstanding asymmetry in how similar strategies are evaluated when pursued outside Europe. The very tools now embraced as pragmatic realism state-backed infrastructure, conditional market access, strategic autonomy, and domestic capacity-building have, for decades, been used to criticize Global South governments as protectionist, nationalist, or hostile to innovation. When Europe adopts these strategies, they appear responsible and forward-looking; when others do, they are framed as suspect or illegitimate. The Draghi Report thus inadvertently reveals a deeper normative hypocrisy embedded in global digital governance discourse: intervention is legitimate when Europe does it, questionable when everyone else follows suit.[1]

This asymmetry is not merely rhetorical. It shapes institutional behaviour, regulatory confidence, and the distribution of authority in the global digital order. It determines who is recognised as a legitimate rule-maker and who remains burdened with the obligation to justify governance itself. This post argues that Europe’s evolving embrace of industrial policy, sovereignty, and strategic intervention should prompt a critical re-examination of how similar measures are evaluated beyond the EU. Without such reflection, the EU risks reproducing a hierarchical model of digital governance that undermines its own claims to fairness, universality, and normative leadership.

Against this backdrop, this post examines how this double standard operates across three key domains: digital sovereignty and data protection, industrial policy and competition, and the right to regulate.

From Norm-Setter to Strategic Actor

Over the past decade, the European Union has deliberately cultivated its identity as a global standard-setter in digital regulation. Through instruments such as the GDPR, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the AI Act, the EU has projected a vision of digital governance grounded in fundamental rights, market fairness, and risk mitigation. These instruments are routinely presented not merely as sectoral regulation, but as constitutional interventions in the digital economy- designed to discipline private power, correct structural asymmetries, and embed public values into technological systems. This regulatory posture has reinforced the EU’s self-image and external reputation as a principled guardian of both citizens and markets.

What is increasingly acknowledged, however, is that regulation alone cannot compensate for Europe’s structural dependencies in critical technological domains. The EU’s growing reliance on non-European providers for semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, and advanced AI capabilities has exposed the limits of normative power without material capacity. The EU Chips Act marks a decisive break in this regard. Rather than relying on market correction or competition law alone, the Act explicitly endorses public funding, relaxed state aid rules, and coordinated industrial planning to secure semiconductor supply chains and domestic production capacity. Similarly, Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEIs) in microelectronics, batteries, and cloud infrastructure institutionalize large-scale state intervention as a legitimate and necessary tool of economic governance. GAIA-X, despite its contested governance structure and uneven progress, reflects the same underlying ambition: to reclaim infrastructural control in a sector dominated by foreign hyperscalers.

Taken together, these initiatives signal a structural transition in the EU’s understanding of its role in the digital economy. Europe is no longer positioning itself solely as a regulator of markets created elsewhere, but as a strategic economic actor willing to shape, subsidize, and steer technological development directly. Crucially, this transition has been widely accepted within European policy discourse as both inevitable and overdue for an adjustment to geopolitical reality rather than a departure from liberal principles. Yet this acceptance remains strikingly selective. Comparable strategies pursued outside Europe continue to be evaluated through a far less charitable lens.

A Sovereign Stage: When Europe “Reclaims” and the Rest “Retrogress”

Within contemporary EU policy discourse, “digital sovereignty” has become a central organizing concept. It functions as a bridge between regulatory ambition, industrial policy, and geopolitical awareness. In official communications and strategic documents, digital sovereignty is framed as a necessary response to Europe’s structural dependencies on non-European technology providers, particularly in data infrastructure, cloud services, and advanced computing. The concept is consistently presented as defensive rather than protectionist: a means of safeguarding democratic governance, economic resilience, and the Union’s capacity to act autonomously in an increasingly contested technological environment.

The Draghi Report crystallizes this logic. By acknowledging that Europe can no longer rely on regulatory authority alone, the report situates digital sovereignty squarely within a broader strategy of material capacity-building and state intervention. Sovereignty, in this account, is not a rhetorical flourish but a practical requirement for competitiveness and survival. Strategic autonomy, public investment, and coordinated state action are treated not as ideological departures but as unavoidable responses to geopolitical and economic reality.

Yet this framing remains strikingly asymmetric when applied beyond Europe. When India enacted its Digital Personal Data Protection Act, international commentary frequently characterised the legislation as an expression of economic nationalism or digital protectionism. Despite its substantive convergence with core GDPR principles lawful processing, accountability, purpose limitation India’s assertion of jurisdiction over data governance was framed as a threat to global data flows and market openness. Similar reactions have accompanied data localisation measures or sovereignty claims in Africa and Latin America, which are often portrayed as retrograde or destabilising.

What the Draghi Report inadvertently exposes is the fragility of this distinction. If Europe’s turn toward sovereignty is justified by vulnerability, dependency, and geopolitical pressure, then the same structural conditions, often more acute, apply to many Global South states. Yet while European sovereignty is narrated as rational reclamation, Global South sovereignty is framed as regression. The difference lies not in the policy instruments deployed, but in the normative presumption attached to the actor deploying them.

This asymmetry reveals a deeper hierarchy embedded in global digital governance discourse. European assertions of sovereignty are presumed to be rights-enhancing and system-preserving; non-European assertions are treated as deviations from an assumed liberal baseline. Sovereignty thus becomes a selectively granted entitlement rather than a universal attribute of political authority. In this sense, Europe’s explicit embrace of sovereignty through the Draghi Report does not merely mark a policy shift it exposes the inconsistency of long-standing evaluative frameworks that legitimate intervention at the centre while problematising it at the periphery.

The Right to Regulate vs. the Burden to Justify

The asymmetry in how sovereignty is evaluated finds concrete expression in the regulatory process itself. Within the EU, expansive regulatory initiatives, whether addressing platform power, algorithmic risk, or market concentration, benefit from a strong presumption of legitimacy. Instruments such as the DMA, DSA, and AI Act are debated intensely, but the underlying premise that European institutions possess both the authority and the competence to intervene in the digital economy is rarely questioned. Regulatory ambition is framed as a natural extension of democratic mandate and technocratic expertise.

The Draghi Report reinforces this presumption by explicitly normalizing state intervention as a core component of economic governance. By framing public investment, subsidies, and coordinated industrial strategy as existential necessities rather than distortions, the report collapses the traditional distinction between regulation and intervention. In doing so, it confirms what EU practice has long suggested: that the right to regulate is inseparable from the capacity to shape markets and technological trajectories.

Global South regulators operate under markedly different conditions. Proposals to regulate digital platforms, mandate algorithmic transparency, impose labour protections, or assert control over data routinely encounter resistance from multinational firms, trade partners, and international financial institutions. These measures are frequently framed as threats to innovation, breaches of investment obligations, or signs of regulatory immaturity. Southern regulators thus face a disproportionate burden of justification. They must demonstrate not only the proportionality of specific measures, but the legitimacy of regulatory intervention as such.

This asymmetry produces a form of structural regulatory self-doubt. Anticipating trade retaliation, investor arbitration, or reputational damage, governments may delay, dilute, or abandon regulatory initiatives even where platform dominance, labour precarity, or consumer harm is well documented. Importantly, this dynamic does not reflect a lack of regulatory capacity or normative commitment. Rather, it reflects an uneven distribution of epistemic authority: Europe is presumed to regulate responsibly until proven otherwise; others are presumed irresponsible unless exhaustively justified.

Read alongside the Draghi Report, this disparity becomes increasingly difficult to defend. If Europe now openly acknowledges that market forces alone cannot deliver public objectives in the digital economy, then the continued skepticism toward similar conclusions reached elsewhere appears less like principled concern and more like normative gatekeeping. The right to regulate, in practice, remains unevenly allocated, affirmed for some as an expression of governance, withheld from others as a deviation from it.

De Facto Dominion: The EU’s Extraterritorial Sweep vs. the “Soft Colonization” Label

The EU’s exercise of extraterritorial regulatory power provides one of the clearest illustrations of how legitimacy in global digital governance is selectively distributed. The GDPR applies to any entity worldwide that processes the personal data of individuals located in the Union, regardless of where that processing takes place. This jurisdictional reach is neither accidental nor marginal; it is a deliberate governance strategy that conditions access to the EU market on compliance with European legal norms. Firms across jurisdictions from U.S. technology conglomerates to African tech startups have restructured data practices, contractual arrangements, and technical architectures in order to maintain access to European users.

Dominant policy and academic narratives have consistently framed this extraterritoriality as a normative achievement. The GDPR is celebrated as a model of rights-based universalism whose global effects are justified by the moral weight of fundamental rights protection. Regulatory spillovers are described as beneficial diffusion rather than constraint, and Europe’s ability to shape behaviour beyond its borders is presented as evidence of legitimate leadership rather than coercive leverage.

The Draghi Report makes explicit what has long remained implicit in this framing: that Europe’s regulatory reach is inseparable from its market power and must now be actively reinforced by strategic economic capacity. By recognizing that regulatory authority alone is insufficient in an era of geopolitical competition, the report implicitly acknowledges that extraterritorial influence operates through material leverage market size, infrastructural centrality, and dependency. This acknowledgement renders increasingly untenable the claim that Europe’s global regulatory effects are purely normative or accidental.

Yet when similar strategies are pursued by non-European actors, they are narrated in fundamentally different terms. China’s digital infrastructure investments across Southeast Asia and Africa under the Digital Silk Road are frequently characterised as vectors of geopolitical influence or “soft colonisation.” India’s data-localisation initiatives and reciprocity-based data access arrangements are framed as attempts to exert undue control over information flows. In these accounts, conditional market access and infrastructural dependency signal domination rather than governance.

What distinguishes these cases is not the existence of extraterritorial effect, GDPR itself operates through precisely such effects, but the normative narrative attached to power. European extraterritoriality is naturalized through the language of universality and rights; non-European extraterritoriality is problematized through the language of influence and coercion. The Draghi Report exposes this asymmetry by openly situating European regulatory authority within a broader strategy of economic and geopolitical power, even as global discourse continues to deny equivalent legitimacy to others.

This selective framing narrows the space for regulatory pluralism. By obscuring the power dynamics underlying Europe’s own extraterritorial reach, it reinforces a hierarchy in which only certain actors are authorized to define global public interest, while others are cast as threats to it. In doing so, it undermines the credibility of claims that Europe’s digital governance model is universally applicable rather than historically contingent.

Industrial Policy and Innovation: A Selective Lens

Europe’s renewed embrace of industrial policy completes the hypocrisy loop that the Draghi Report brings into sharp focus. The report explicitly endorses public intervention, strategic investment, and coordinated state action as indispensable to securing Europe’s technological future. Industrial policy is no longer framed as an exception to market governance but as a structural necessity in an environment defined by platform concentration, supply-chain vulnerability, and geopolitical rivalry.

This shift is already visible across EU digital policy. Horizon Europe and Digital Europe channel substantial public funding into research, startups, and strategic technologies. The EU Chips Act institutionalizes state aid flexibility and public-private coordination to build semiconductor capacity. IPCEIs in microelectronics and cloud infrastructure formalise large-scale market intervention as a legitimate governance tool. These initiatives reflect a clear policy consensus: without deliberate capacity-building, Europe cannot exercise meaningful regulatory or strategic autonomy.

GAIA-X provides a particularly instructive example. Conceived as a federated European cloud infrastructure, GAIA-X sought to establish shared standards, interoperability requirements, and governance rules that would reduce dependence on non-European hyperscalers. Although its implementation has been uneven and its governance contested, the project nonetheless embodies a distinctly interventionist logic: that control over digital infrastructure is too important to be left entirely to global market forces. In other words, GAIA-X operationalises the very principle the Draghi Report articulates strategic autonomy requires public coordination and normative steering of infrastructure.

Crucially, this European turn toward industrial policy is widely framed as pragmatic realism. Even where these interventions distort markets or privilege domestic actors, they are defended as proportionate responses to structural disadvantage. The same generosity of interpretation, however, rarely extends to innovation infrastructures developed elsewhere.

India’s digital public infrastructure Aadhaar, UPI, and the broader India Stack has created interoperable public digital rails that enable competition, reduce entry barriers, and deliver services at population scale. Yet international commentary frequently frames these systems as technocratic overreach, latent surveillance architectures, or deviations from liberal market principles. Brazil’s national AI strategy, which explicitly combines industrial development with ethical safeguards, is often reduced to concerns about localization and state control. African and Southeast Asian efforts to regulate platforms or build domestic digital capacity are similarly dismissed as premature or distortive.

The irony, made visible by the Draghi Report, is that Europe is now pursuing substantively similar strategies under the banner of competitiveness and resilience. What differs is not the policy instrument, but the attribution of legitimacy. European industrial policy is narrated as strategic sophistication; Global South industrial policy is narrated as techno-nationalism.

This selective lens reproduces a global hierarchy of innovation authority. It positions Europe as a legitimate architect of digital futures, while confining others to the role of adopters or risks to be managed. By doing so, it obscures the extent to which Europe’s own regulatory ambitions increasingly depend on the same forms of state intervention that have long been stigmatized elsewhere.

Toward a Multidimensional Digital Symphony

Dominant global digital governance discourse continues to frame regulatory ambition in the Global South as a threat rather than a resource. By doing so, it confines these states to the role of rule-takers: consumers of technologies, standards, and governance models developed elsewhere, rather than equal participants in shaping the digital order. This positioning does more than misread intent. It actively constrains domestic innovation ecosystems, discourages regulatory experimentation, and pushes vast reserves of institutional capacity, technical expertise, and creative labour to the margins of their own technological futures.

Across multiple domains of digital governance, the same narrative pattern repeats itself. Sovereignty becomes nationalism when asserted outside Europe. Extraterritorial regulation becomes “soft colonisation” when exercised by non-European actors. Public intervention is reframed as overregulation, social protection as ideological excess, and industrial strategy as retreat from globalization. Meanwhile, when the European Union adopts substantively similar measures, commentators describe them as rational, rights-based, and forward-looking. These are not isolated mischaracterisations. They reflect a durable hierarchy of normative legitimacy sustained by historical power asymmetries and epistemic privilege. While European policy discourse often invokes internal market specificity to justify intervention, the global reach and external effects of EU regulatory choices tell a different story.

The Draghi Report on European Competitiveness brings this asymmetry into sharp relief. By openly acknowledging that Europe can no longer rely on regulatory authority alone, the report normalizes large-scale industrial policy, strategic investment, and coordinated state action as conditions for technological survival. It frames public intervention, targeted subsidies, and deliberate capacity-building not as market distortions, but as existential responses to geopolitical competition and technological concentration. Yet these prescriptions closely mirror the strategies state-backed infrastructure, conditional market access, strategic autonomy that Global South governments have pursued for years and for which they have been persistently criticised. When Europe adopts these tools, observers recast them as pragmatic realism; when others deploy them, the same observers denounce them as techno-nationalism. In this sense, the Draghi Report does not merely signal a policy shift. It exposes the normative inconsistency at the heart of prevailing global digital governance discourse: intervention gains legitimacy from origin, not substance.

If this discursive asymmetry persists, its consequences will intensify. As the EU deepens its turn toward anticipatory regulation and industrial strategy, the gap between regulatory practice and evaluative judgment will widen further. Global South regulators will increasingly face a paradoxical environment in which international actors encourage them to emulate European ambition while penalizing them politically, economically, and reputationally for doing so. These dynamic risks produce two destabilizing responses. Some states may under-regulate to avoid backlash, entrenching platform power and social harm. Others may pursue aggressive localization and unilateral control, accelerating geopolitical and technological fragmentation. In both cases, the credibility of “global” digital governance erodes when legitimacy attaches to geography rather than to the quality, proportionality, or objectives of regulation. Appeals to harmonization and shared standards lose force when only certain actors retain the authority to define collective risk and public interest.

At the same time, this moment creates an opening. As regulatory experimentation accelerates across jurisdictions, the limits of a Eurocentric evaluative framework become increasingly visible. The future of digital governance will not emerge from unilateral standard-setting alone, but from negotiated coexistence among diverse regulatory models shaped by different economic conditions, political priorities, and developmental trajectories. Whether policymakers treat this plurality as a problem to be disciplined or as a resource to be cultivated will determine whether the next phase of digital regulation reproduces existing hierarchies or begins to dismantle them.

Only by confronting these asymmetries directly can digital sovereignty move beyond its colonial echoes and function as a shared principle of collective self-determination. When any state regardless of history or geography asserts claims over data rights, platform accountability, or anticipatory governance, policymakers should recognize those claims not as disruptive outliers, but as contributions to a resilient and plural digital polity. In such a future, sovereignty ceases to operate as a privilege reserved for the few and instead becomes a living right exercised by the many.

[1] In this post, the Global South is used broadly to refer to economically developing nations, usually former colonies in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. These are often forgotten in mainstream conversations and are academically underrepresented.

Pratiksha is a Post Doctoral Researcher at Tilburg University for the EU Horizon 2020 project AI4POL and is affiliated with Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) and Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC). Her research interests include digital regulation, data and consumer law, AI and regulation, comparative law, and global studies with perspectives from the Global South.