Exporting the European third way: strategic narratives of a value-based digital order

The European Commission has increasingly foregrounded digital policy within its overall agenda, promoting a ‘value-driven’ digital transformation as a distinct normative alternative to the dominant U.S. and Chinese digital models. The narrative of a ‘European Third Way’ is a core element of the EU’s discourse on ‘digital sovereignty’ and its external digital agenda. A key instrument through which the EU seeks to shape the global digital order is the 2021 Global Gateway initiative, widely perceived as emblematic of persistent tensions among the EU’s geopolitical, economic and normative aims. To analyse how the EU advances its external digital policy objectives, we used computational NLP methods to construct a corpus of relevant public communications by the European Commission and the European External Action Service. We then employed structuralist discourse analysis to examine how these institutions construct strategic narratives to position the EU as a normative digital leader committed to advancing its economic interests and exporting its regulatory frameworks. We suggest that by framing its cooperative relations with non-EU partners within an established paradigm of global competitiveness and regulatory alignment with EU values, the EU is missing an opportunity to rethink its digital policy approach in the context of geopolitical change.