“For too long, Europe has not built this strategic autonomy. Today, the ideological battle has been won. » These words from Emmanuel Macron in The echoes of April 9, 2023 are those of a convinced Europeanist. The President of the Republic has often had the opportunity to affirm his desire to see the Old Continent play the role of a credible buffer between the American and Chinese ogres. This cannot be done without Europe reducing its dependence on foreign resources, or without being able to engage in a balance of power to its advantage in diplomatic, economic and regulatory negotiations.
Europe and France are well present on many fronts in the “reconquest” of strategic autonomy: gigafactories of electric batteries or microprocessors, reopening of mining sites, race for artificial intelligence and implementation of megaservers, relaunch of the nuclear program… projects abound.
But the nature, the mode of selection and deployment of these projects are reminiscent of a certain centralized, technocratic rather than democratic conception of industrial and land-use planning policies described in various fields by authors such as André Gorz (Ecology and politics, Threshold, 1978) and Timothy Mitchell (Carbon Democracy, La Découverte, 2013) or, closer to us, historians François Jarrige and Alexis Vrignon in their work Faced with power (The Discovery, 2020).
Certainly, it is important to remember the advantages of a centralized organization. It allows economies of scale, simplified a priori control, and time savings in the installation and maintenance of the infrastructures on which it is based. However, one of the main unthoughts of such a strategic orientation lies in the new risks to which it exposes us. Risks that are hardly compatible with the stated objectives of strategic autonomy. We see at least two.
The first risk to which excess centralization exposes us concerns external attacks. A centralized infrastructure will always be a prime – and visible – target for our adversaries, whether on the physical or cyber terrain. The decentralization enabled, for example, by small renewable energy production units dispersed throughout the territory reduces this risk and contributes to resilience in the event of conflict.
Metropolization phenomenon
It would be good to draw inspiration from it with regard to both the choice of location and size of digital infrastructures, but also in the choice of their managers. Avoiding entrusting the management of this type of highly strategic infrastructure to giants such as Microsoft or Amazon should not be seen as a departure from our objective alliance with the United States, but as a desire to preserve our autonomy vis-à-vis -screw Uncle Sam. Even more so if Donald Trump were to be re-elected.
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