Smart Strategies for Tech Sovereignty

In “Building Bridges—Not Walls—for Technological Sovereignty” (Issues, Winter 2026), Anwar Aridi and Hennig Kroll make an important point at a time when industrial policy has returned to the center stage. As governments race to secure supply chains and critical technologies, the temptation to equate technological sovereignty with technological autarky is strong. But as the authors argue, the path to sovereignty does not run through isolation. It runs through capability-building combined with strategic openness.

In short, the core challenge is to remain integrated into global networks while reducing one-sided dependencies. I could not agree more.

History shows that technological leadership is rarely built behind walls. The most successful catch-up stories, including in South Korea, Taiwan, and Poland, were deeply embedded in global knowledge networks while investing heavily in domestic capabilities. The countries absorbed foreign technologies, partnered with multinationals, and learned through global production systems. As their centrality increased, they moved up the value chain and eventually became innovators in their own right.

The key is never isolation. Technological sovereignty is less about building a fortress and more about building a major airport hub.

This insight is even more relevant today as technologies become increasingly complex. Artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotechnology are global innovation ecosystems that no country—not even the United States or China—fully controls end-to-end.

Technological sovereignty is less about building a fortress and more about building a major airport hub.

From this perspective, technological sovereignty should be understood less as self-sufficiency and more as a strategic position within global innovation networks. Recent debates in Europe highlight this challenge. The Draghi report on European competitiveness, the Letta report on the future of the European Single Market, and my own work with colleagues at the European Commission point to the same issue: Europe’s innovation system remains too fragmented to compete effectively in emerging technologies.

But the point that Aridi and Kroll make is not just a compelling principle—it also can be operationalized. If we use data more systematically to understand where innovation networks actually lie—mapping collaboration patterns, technological dependencies, and untapped complementarities—new opportunities to rebalance partnerships emerge. In reality, there is often far more room for diversification than policymakers assume.

In a recent CEPS report on the EU-US Trade and Technology Dialogue project, we mapped global technology supply-chain interlinkages and identified several partnerships that remain surprisingly underdeveloped. One striking example is the EU-Japan relationship in semiconductors, where significant complementarities exist but collaboration remains far below its potential.

Identifying and activating these opportunities is precisely how countries can reduce one-sided dependencies while strengthening their role within global innovation systems.

Technological sovereignty, therefore, is ultimately about designing smart connectivity and partnership strategies that enable economies to keep moving when bottlenecks emerge. The countries that will thrive are those that combine strong domestic capabilities with a central role in the global web of innovation.

Pierre-Alexandre Balland

Anwar Aridi and Hennig Kroll examine how early-developing, initial-catch-up, and advanced-catch-up nations should tailor industrial policy to construct pathways toward technological sovereignty. In the electro-industrial era, a foundational aspect of this strategic calculus will be matching energy and natural resource governance to their respective development phase. This begins with managing the increase in electricity demand.

It is not just data centers that will drive electricity demand. The International Energy Agency reports that electrification of manufacturing, infrastructure, and transportation is projected to drive annual electricity demand 50% higher over the next five years than the previous decade. Electricity itself becomes a necessary raw material. This places higher importance on the inputs needed to build and support robust electric infrastructure such as energy inputs, minerals, and skilled labor. These inputs, says Brookings Institute Fellow Kyle Chan, build the first layer in the electro-industrial tech (“electrical tech”) stack.

In the past, manufacturing industries were differentiated. The skills and supply chains for cars did not have much crossover with the telephone. The defining feature of the modern electric tech stack is industrial coevolution, the Austrian economic geographer Maximilian Benner notes. Batteries, electric motors, and power electronics become the building blocks of scaling industries from consumer electronics to military defense.

A focus on electricity buildout places nations in a virtuous development cycle and a pathway towards technological catch-up and innovation.

Electric circuits form the backbone of technological advancement and drive innovation across industries. Understanding the role of conductors, semiconductors, and insulators is key to catching-up, engaging in innovation, and eventually achieving technology sovereignty. For initial-catch-up, a labor class with the technical understanding of circuits will then trickle over to other sectors and pull them forward.

The supply chains for products in the electric tech stack overlap and increase economic potential for mineral-rich nations. Early developing and initial-catch-up nations need to focus on capturing additional value from natural resources by increased processing to avoid a new resource curse, as Graham A. Davis and John E. Tilton of the Colorado School of Mines maintained early on. On the other hand, nations without the requisite minerals become entirely dependent on supply chains to drive manufacturing and innovations. Recycling waste materials becomes a strategic advantage to capturing value.

To power this age, a stable and affordable electrical grid is necessary. The primary obstacle for grid development is the high upfront cost. For nations without the necessary capital, attracting foreign direct investment related to grid buildout will increase reliability. Nations can require high-load users to bring their own power by on-site generation or advanced power purchase agreements to create concrete demand signals before construction.

Nations can create shared resources and partnerships through interconnection of their grids as a form of bridge-building. Increased interconnection requires greater institutional competence for matching energy supply to demand but also allows for optimal land use. Nations with higher population density and less land can purchase energy from nations with an excess of supply. This is historically analogous to how the European Union evolved from the European Coal and Steel Community and Euratom after World War Two.

In short, a focus on electricity buildout places nations in a virtuous development cycle and a pathway towards technological catch-up and innovation. Building a resource development strategy in an increasing electricity demand environment is key to ensuring a nation matches its industrial policy to the appropriate development stage.

Thomas Vedder

Nicholas S. Vonortas