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The fear of falling behind has been a driving force of European integration. Historically, Europe's response to the looming angst of declining competitiveness has been more market-creation, not market-direction. Recently, however, Europe has – in the name of safeguarding Europe's technological sovereignty – taken on a much more active role in directing economic activity towards sectors and technologies deemed geopolitically or geoeconomically important. In this paper, we attempt to explain this 'geo-dirigiste' turn. We reconstruct the evolution of EU industrial policy through the lens of Europe's fear of falling behind, drawing not only on primary (including archival) and secondary sources, but also on original interviews and deep transfer learning applied to an original dataset of 66.548 documents. Focusing on Europe's changing technological and geopolitical context, its coalitional underpinnings, and the role of ideational politics, we document and explain the historic shift away from market-creation and towards supranational market-direction in EU industrial policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies are rapidly transforming economies and societies. Scholars have approached this rise of digital capitalism from various angles. However, relatively little attention has been paid to digital capitalism's cultural underpinnings and the beliefs of those who develop most digital technologies. In this paper, we argue that a solutionist order of worth – in which value derives from solving social problems through technology – has become central to an emerging spirit of digital capitalism. We use supervised learning to trace the relative importance of different orders of worth in three novel text corpora. We find that solutionism is indeed central to the normative beliefs of digital elites and the broader digital milieu, but not to capitalist discourse at large. We illustrate the importance of these findings by discussing how the spirit of digital capitalism motivates, legitimates, and orients the actions of digital capitalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investments in education and retraining, or research and development have become essential in today's knowledge‐intensive economies. While private actors often underprovided such knowledge‐based capital due to various market failures, there is also considerable variation in the extent to which governments invest in knowledge‐based capital due to cross‐sectional and intertemporal trade‐offs. I argue that in trying to account for this variation, corporatist institutions are a neglected but crucial factor. By necessitating and facilitating cooperation and compensation, corporatism creates a more collaborative style of policy making and a sense of common ownership of policy problems that helps overcome the trade‐offs associated with investments in knowledge‐based capital. Using within‐between mixed‐effects models on a novel time‐series‐cross‐sectional dataset, I find strong support for this argument. Corporatist countries invest a lot more in knowledge‐based capital, and corporatism also affects how countries react to deindustrialization. This is an important finding given the key role of long‐term policy making in areas like climate change politics, pandemic preparedness or responding to the digital transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies are transforming security governance, bringing new risks and opportunities. The resulting uncertainty creates interpretative contests about what these new challenges are and who can – and should – address them. We argue that private actors use their ideational business power – and specifically solutionist arguments – to influence how public actors perceive digital security problems; whether they view private actors as necessary and/or effective in solving them; and whether they view public and private goals as compatible. In doing so, they influence how public actors navigate competence-control trade-offs. We substantiate this argument in two qualitative case studies on the involvement of Palantir in EU law enforcement and on the prominent role of (foreign) tech companies in the European cloud project Gaia-X. Drawing on and contributing to the literatures on (critical) security governance, competence-control theory, and ideational business power, we shed light on the ideational underpinnings of Europe's regulatory security state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, the EU's trade policy has been centred around open(ing) markets. Why, then, has the EU recently embraced open strategic autonomy as the conceptual cornerstone of its renewed trade policy? In this article, we argue that this move away from neoliberalism has to be understood against the background of a changing global environment. The geopoliticization of trade in particular has changed the Commission's view about how to best serve European interests (and values) but also provided an opening for neo‐mercantilist and socially oriented actors to challenge Europe's embedded neoliberal compromise. Using document analysis, interviews and discourse network analysis, we show how the Commission used open strategic autonomy as a coalition magnet to mobilize support for its new doctrine of qualified openness. Our paper contributes to understanding the ideational and coalitional politics behind the recent evolution of EU trade policy as well as broader debates around European autonomy and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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