Remaking European Futures through Digital Innovation Politics

Amidst the unfolding of global economic and geopolitical challenges, the European Union (EU) has increasingly projected its future as closely intertwined with its 'power to innovate'. From artificial intelligence (AI) to blockchain, from digital health to personalised medicine, emerging areas of digital innovation have been targeted by the Union for major investments, as well as governance and regulatory efforts. EU-led initiatives in digital sciences and technologies, which cut across other prominent innovation sectors such as life sciences, are widely seen as promising to address complex societal challenges and transform the way we live, move, communicate and are cared for. Moreover, while they aim to provide the knowledge and material infrastructures for an ever more integrated and globally competitive European knowledge economy, they are heralded as the 'European way' to digital innovation, tailored to what are framed as distinctive European values and principles such as privacy, solidarity and fairness.

Drawing on insights from STS-informed infrastructure studies, the sociology of European integration and the political economy of digital technologies, we explore how the constitutive elements of European 'post-digital' societies, such as AI algorithms and genome sequencing, are increasingly assuming the role once assigned to coal and steel as building blocks of the European integration process. Based on the book 'Project Europe: Remaking European Futures through Digital Innovation Policies' (Edward Elgar, 2025, co-edited together with L. Marelli, J.Dratwa), we address the question of how novel digital orders are co-produced with distinctly European social, political and economic identities, institutions and practices, and provide an understanding of how 'Europe' is being reimagined and repositioned in a wider debate about the identity, shape and future of the EU, including in relation to other geopolitical entities such as the US and China.