The conference was called Sovereignty & Government. The room was full of people who knew the topic was urgent but couldn’t agree on why.
I think that’s the most honest description of where this debate stands.
What’s at stake
Digital sovereignty sounds like a technical problem. It isn’t. It’s a political problem with a technical component, and if you flip that order you end up in the wrong place every time.
Here is the core of it. Europe depends, structurally, on technology that is built, run, and stored outside Europe. Amazon, Microsoft, Google: the cloud infrastructure our government services run on sits largely under American legal jurisdiction. And increasingly under Chinese influence too, through the hardware buried in our networks.
For the SVB, that means something concrete. We process the data of millions of Dutch citizens. People on state pensions. Families receiving child benefit. People entitled to support payments. These are not abstract data points. They are people.
The wrong framing
The question isn’t whether that data is well protected. The question is who sets the rules for how it can be used, and whether we have any say in that when the infrastructure comes from outside Europe.
One thing stuck with me at the conference. The debate too often gets framed as a choice: security against speed, open against closed, European against American. I don’t think that framing holds up.
Sovereignty doesn’t mean building everything yourself. It means being able to make choices. It means you are not locked into one supplier because no alternative exists. You can inspect what you use, audit it, and walk away when you need to.
eIDAS and what’s changing
eIDAS 2.0 and the European Digital Identity Wallet try to organise this at a European scale. At the SVB we are working through what that means for us. How does our relationship with citizens change when they manage their own identity data? What does it do to our systems, our processes, our responsibility?
None of these are small questions, and the answers are not ready yet.
That’s fine. But it does mean we have to stop waiting for technical solutions to political choices nobody has made yet. The infrastructure follows the decision, not the other way around.
Hand this debate to the engineers and you lose it. Not because engineers don’t understand it, but because the heart of the question is about values, not architecture.