The joint attendance of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at an event in Berlin on Tuesday (November 18) aimed at bolstering Europe's technological independence suggests they mean business on the topic.

Europe's struggle to keep pace with the US and China on tech and digital innovation — from artificial intelligence, to semiconductor production, to cloud computing — has been blamed for the continent's sluggish economic growth and apparently bleak prospects.

The Berlin gathering, titled the "Summit on European Digital Sovereignty," focused on the risks of dependence on China and the US for increasingly critical infrastructure.

"Digital sovereignty has costs, but the costs of digital dependence are even higher," said Merz, while Macron said he did not want Europe to be a client of the US or China, or a "vassal." 

"We clearly want to design our own solutions," he said.

Made in China

One of the areas where Europe is especially dependent on China is on the infrastructure it uses for its telecommunications networks, from companies such as Huawei and ZTE.

"They had very few competitors and alternatives, and most of the alternatives are much more expensive," Ilaria Mazzocco, deputy director of the trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told DW.

However, it increasingly appears that the European Commission is looking at ways to force EU member states to phase out Huawei and ZTE from their networks, according to a Bloomberg report.

"The dependencies came about because for a long time European governments have seen China mainly in commercial terms," Richard Youngs, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict, and governance program at Carnegie Europe, told DW. "They are now recalibrating to take on board security considerations."

Back in 2020, the European Commission made a recommendation that member states take measures to prevent "high-risk vendors" from being embedded in their new 5G internet networks. However, it was not made a legal requirement.

Bloomberg reports that Commission Vice President Henna Virkkunen wants to now convert that recommendation into a legal requirement. The European Commission's press office did not respond to DW's request for comment.

The EU's readiness to clamp down on Huawei was exemplified in the decision taken earlier this year to ban Huawei lobbyists from meeting with European Commission officials.

It followed an investigation into alleged corruption in the European Parliament that would have benefited the Chinese firm.

Now, it appears that Chancellor Merz is preparing the ground. "We have decided within the government that wherever possible, we will replace components, for example, in the 5G network, with components that we produce ourselves," he said at a recent business conference in Berlin. "And we will not allow any components from China in the 6G network."

6G is the proposed sixth generation of mobile communications technology and is expected to be rolled out throughout the 2030s.

The German business daily Handelsblatt reports that the German government has agreed to implement stricter legislation to make it easier to remove components deemed to pose security risks, having already agreed to remove certain Huawei and ZTE products from sensitive networks last year.

So far, 13 EU member states have taken steps to restrict Huawei's market access in some way, but Germany had been particularly reluctant to do so until 2024 due to its desire to maintain strong commercial ties with Beijing.

The true meaning of tech sovereignty?

Richard Youngs notes that the current European attempts to achieve "tech sovereignty" are complicated by the fact that European governments have different expectations from the concept.

"Some focus mainly on the competitiveness angle, others on the security angle, others on developing a public interest model of digital tech," he said. "The security element is indeed legitimate, but competitiveness is probably the strongest driving force at present."

While Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE were previously seen as reliable and affordable suppliers of components for European networks, the rapidly evolving geopolitical relationship between the EU and China has highlighted potential vulnerabilities and dependencies.

"The German tilt is part of a broader EU slight toughening towards China at present, in part at the behest of US pressure," says Youngs. "This is not just about digital issues, but a wider geostrategic shift, and important to see it in that light."

Security authorities have long warned of components being fitted with potential spying or disabling devices. Huawei and ZTE have strongly refuted those suggestions, but the 2017 Chinese security law, known as the "National Intelligence Law of the People's Republic of China," appears to obligate organizations and companies to gather intelligence if requested. The US banned Huawei in 2019.

Difficult conversations

With the European Commission now apparently ready to take a much tougher stance on Huawei and ZTE, the possible consequences for Europe of excluding them are being considered.

Lars Klingbeil, Germany's finance minister, is visiting China this week and the topic of Chinese technology being potentially excluded from German telecommunications networks is sure to come up, particularly after Merz's comments last week.

"Beijing is not going to like this," says Mazzocco. "This would be very detrimental, I think, to Huawei. And Huawei is a very important company to Beijing right now."

She adds that China sees Europe as weak and divided, and will target accordingly. "The expectation of Beijing will be that Europe will buckle under any pressure," she says.

If Europe proceeds with a legal ban on Huawei and ZTE, the focus will turn more forcefully to viable alternatives.

Member states could look to homegrown European firms such as Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson to help develop new networks, but the costs would be far higher than those offered by Chinese rivals — a hard sell at a time when many European governments are mired in high levels of public debt and struggling to boost sluggish growth.

"It's up to Europe to actually come up with a plan to ensure it doesn't buckle under pressure and introduce regulation that it can realistically implement and then withstand any pressure from China," says Mazzocco. "That's going to be difficult."

As with many other factors in Europe's quest to achieve tech sovereignty and a new birth of innovative freedom, the answer will lie in the gap between rhetoric and action.

Edited by: Rob Mudge