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Technology, Infrastructure and Security: Understanding the Strategic Autonomy of the EU (STG-MA-ECM-TISE3)

STG-MA-ECM-TISE3

Description

The debate over European strategic autonomy and the EU's role as a geostrategic player is at the core of today’s policy agenda. For a long time, the discussion centered on competences and the conferral of powers in relations between the EU and Member States, but today’s major challenges increasingly stem from dependence on third countries. This dependence should be understood as infrastructural, spanning the technological stack and significantly affecting the EU’s autonomy, including its security arrangements. Existing dependencies on third countries’ material support - from compute and chips to connectivity, energy, and critical raw materials - place the EU at real risk of weaponized interdependency.
This CIVICA Honors Seminar - delivered to STG Y2 students and a selected number of students from CIVICA partner institutions - examines this shift through a triangle of interrelated dimensions: i) the technology stack the EU runs on, ii) the infrastructures that carry it, and iii) the security implications that both produce. Drawing on the Draghi, Letta, and Niinistö reports, recent CJEU and Commission practice, and the post-2022 wave of industrial-policy legislation, the course invites students to explore what "open strategic autonomy" means in practice. The program consists of three days of substantive discussions and one social event in Florence that explores the connection between medieval infrastructure and today’s dependencies.
The first day sets the scene, with experts tracing the genealogy of strategic autonomy, while students are asked to build a visual representation of tech and security dependencies using AI tools. The second day focuses on the first dimension of infrastructure dependencies, examining technology infrastructure and mapping the what, who, and how of the technological relationship between the EU and third countries. On this day, students will map the European Commission's current efforts to incentivize ‘industrial policy’ at the EU level, from the hyperscaler debates to the limits of the Chips Act, submarine cables, and the Critical Raw Materials Act. Some attention will be given to how EU law configures this strategic autonomy through a series of novel instruments in competition and industrial policy (e.g., foreign direct investment).
The final substantive day examines the second dimension of infrastructure - EU security - focusing on how dependency can pose an existential security risk to the European Union. Here, students will be invited to analyse current transatlantic tensions and connect them with China-EU relations. The day closes with a policy-oriented negotiation simulation in which students will be asked to develop normative solutions to dependency challenges.

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