Conceptual, Terminological, and Methodological Clarifications

This chapter clarifies conceptual, terminological, and methodological aspects of the digital sovereignty debate. It focusses on the meaning of sovereignty in international law and international relations and emphasizes the interrelational nature of sovereignty in acts of recognition (Sect. 2.2). It discusses the incoherencies of the concepts of individual digital sovereignty and corporate digital sovereignty and stresses that the advantage of private government over the state lies precisely in the fact that private government is not associated with claims to sovereignty (Sect. 2.3). Emphasizing the post-territoriality of digital technologies (Sect. 2.4) and the counterfactually stabilized nature of norms (Sect. 2.5), it defines the discourse about digital sovereignty as the construction of a postliberal (Sect. 2.6) normative imaginary (Sect. 2.7) for domestic and international audiences (Sect. 2.8). In this context, the importance of digital sovereignty to ontological security is underlined (Sect. 2.9).