“Digital sovereignty is a capability that can be exercised; digital resilience is a quality that is built and measured.”
The Cigref closes with these words, an appeal for semantic rigor.
The association representing France’s major companies and public administrations notes a problematic confusion between the two concepts. It sees this, in part, as the result of a literal importation of the Anglo-Saxon vision, in which the term sovereignty is largely centered on questions of legal jurisdiction, operational control, or mastery of an asset.
Referring to the legacy of Rousseau and Jean Bodin (16th-century economist), the Cigref asserts that the continental legal tradition gives sovereignty a very different depth. It is a supreme, perpetual, and indivisible power recognized by the State—a transcendent political concept that cannot be dissolved into compliance logics applied to the private sector or to digital objects.
Sovereignty for the public sector, resilience for businesses
To bolster this argument, the Cigref cites Article 3 of the Constitution. More precisely, its first two paragraphs:
National sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it through their representatives and by means of referenda. No segment of the people, nor any individual, may claim to exercise it.
A company, which is, in legal terms, a section of individuals, cannot therefore exercise any sovereignty, the Cigref concludes. Likewise, technology, of which digital products and services are made, “will never be sovereign by nature,” since it lacks political will and democratic legitimacy.
From there, the association continues, it is the responsibility of the public sector to exercise its digital sovereignty as a structured public policy. And to “assume its responsibilities [in this area] when private interests challenge them.” As for companies, their true mandate is digital resilience. Cigref refers to the definition provided by the DORA regulation. In broad terms, it is the ability to build and to maintain, over time, one’s operational integrity.
