Drive for tech sovereignty will shape EU R&D policy

Industrial ambitions look set to place new demands on research funding, says Thomas König

In recent years, autonomy, resilience and sovereignty have taken centre stage in European policy debates. Policymakers pepper their talks with the words, while think tanks and research facilities give them meaning and flesh them out into agendas.

Probably the most sophisticated definition of technological sovereignty comes from a 2020 report from the Fraunhofer institute, which calls it “the ability of…a federation of states to provide the technologies it deems critical for welfare, competitiveness, and its ability to act, and to be able to develop these, or source them from other economic areas, without one-sided structural dependency”.