“Sovereignty has become a top priority for government leaders. Strengthening strategic autonomy, the three Cs of Control, Capabilities, and Capacities that are necessary for sovereignty are becoming a go/no-go criterion in technology policy initiatives. However, what is the future of sovereignty in a pervasive digital, densely connected, and compute-intense world? What is sovereignty in the world of 6G? Or is the question rather: what is 6G in a world where safeguarding sovereignty is a major theme in geopolitical collaboration, competition, and conflict? This chapter outlines the interplay of 6G technology and political-industrial governance in different scenarios for the future of sovereignty.
Four Scenarios for 6G in Detail
The 1648 Treaty of Westfalen established the system of sovereign states, which consists first of all of the idea that the international order is based upon states and secondly that each state is sovereign and has a sovereign. The latter at the time was a king or emperor but this has evolved via popular democracy into what we now see as the government of a state. So, Westfalen has evolved into the international system of sovereign states, in the West generally internally legitimized by popular democracy, and internationally externally legitimized by treaties, international law, and a plethora of international bodies, most prominently the UN, a rich mix of hard and soft power, and, importantly, having evolved way beyond the idea that the international system of sovereign states is an anarchy of states that in principle are always at war. However, in today’s world we do see a harking back to this proto-Westphalia model of sovereign states that principally cannot trust each other and have to rely upon self-help (Waltz, 2010). Here, when we say ‘Westfalen’ we mean the whole range of geopolitics (i.e., international relations) from Westfalen-1648 to a global world in which sovereignty is compatible with global collaboration.”