Featured article from Global Newsletter February 2026
Written by Philippe Narval, Austria
Remarks Delivered at the Ronda Conference (April 2025)
In November 2016, I stood outside the Javits Center in New York City, standing in a slow-moving queue behind tight security. Inside, more than a thousand people had gathered to celebrate what many believed would be a historic moment—the election of the first female U.S. president. While we waited, I chatted with a couple next to me. They were relaxed, almost relieved. The night felt decided. And then it wasn’t.
That was the first time Donald Trump was elected. For me, the shock did not fade into the background hum of “politics as usual.” It landed as a conviction: our democracy—our European democracies included—was in grave danger. I went on a research journey that took me across Europe and wrote a book on participatory democracy (published under the German title: “Die freundliche Revolution”)
Today I lead Lebenshilfe Austria, the umbrella organization of Austria’s largest service provider for people with intellectual disabilities. We are, at our core, a human-rights organization. Our work is anchored in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and our daily business is a deceptively simple demand: dignity, participation, equality.
So why am I writing about democracy and digital sovereignty?
Because I have come to believe that the struggle for human rights and the struggle for democratic self- government now share a single battlefield: the digital space where we increasingly live our lives. If we keep living in the property of a handful of corporations—then all our carefully designed democratic procedures will be conducted inside a rented hall whose owner controls the doors, the lighting, and the sound system.
I Went Looking for Democracy’s Renewal—and Missed the Bigger Problem
In Ireland, I studied the Citizens’ Assembly on the Reform of the Constitution—an experiment that took two “hot potato” issues and proved something important: ordinary people, given time, information, and structure, can deliberate with seriousness and care. In Austria, I met a village mayor who developed his town through a participatory citizen dialogue. In Germany, I followed one of the largest experiments in urban regeneration through participation.
I built an argument—eventually a book—around a thesis that felt urgent: Europe needs a “friendly revolution,” a renewal of democracy with citizen participation at its core.
But I was misled. Or rather: I misled myself.
I treated the digital sphere primarily as a threat—an environment where manipulation happens, where attention is harvested, where outrage is rewarded. That is true. But I didn’t grasp the deeper reality: there is no going back. We are not returning to an offline public sphere where democracy can be repaired first and digitized later. We will spend substantial parts of our lives online.
So the real question becomes: In which spaces, and under which rules?
Do you use Gmail? Who relies on Google Maps? Who uses one, two, or more social media accounts— WhatsApp included?
Then comes the uncomfortable part: What would happen if your private correspondence on these platforms suddenly became public—or, worse, selectively exposed and used against you? What would happen if these services suddenly ceased to be available to you?
We usually answer these questions as if they were hypothetical. But dependencies are only invisible until someone pulls on them. Digital platforms no longer just sell ads. They act as gatekeepers to identity and participation. They decide who can speak, who can be found, what becomes visible, and which communities or individuals are quietly silenced by corporate choices no parliament voted on. And, equally important: they have become the public sphere. The new agora is privately owned.
January 2025: The Symbol We Should Not Ignore
When Trump returned to power, one image captured something that Europeans should take seriously: the sight of technology billionaires and CEOs placed prominently at the inauguration—figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk, seated as if they were part of the state itself.
For Europe this is an existential warning. Our dependencies—email, cloud infrastructure, mobile operating systems, maps, social networks, advertising markets, identity systems—can be exploited. Not only commercially, but politically. We are at a stage where power over communication and information can be leveraged as coercion: through cancelling access, deplatforming, data exposure, targeted manipulation, or subtle changes to what entire populations see and believe.
And here is the mistake we must stop making: thinking of this as a future problem.
It is already here. The alignment of platform power and political power is not a conspiracy theory; it is the predictable result of concentrating the infrastructure of modern life in private hands.
Regulation Is Necessary—and Still Not Enough
Europe has regulated more boldly than most regions. That matters. But regulation alone is a defensive posture. It is like insisting on fire codes while continuing to live in a house built by someone else, on someone else’s land, with someone else holding the keys.
Digital sovereignty cannot be achieved through “better rules” alone, because rules do not create alternatives. If citizens and institutions have nowhere else to go, regulation becomes a negotiation with monopolies, not a guarantee of freedom. So we need something structural: independent, community-managed, publicly accountable digital infrastructures and platforms.
We need a European Digital Agora.
Not a single giant website. Not a government propaganda machine. Not a new bureaucracy. But a public, common-good-oriented digital space—built on democratic governance and designed for pluralism.
And we need it for the same reason we need public parks, public schools, and public broadcasting: because some goods are too foundational to outsource to profit-maximizing actors.
The “What If” Europe Needs to Ask Itself
What if Europe actively attracted international talent—engineers, designers, ethicists, organizers— who want to build alternative digital systems that are ethical and democratically legitimate?
Right now, much of the world’s digital imagination is trapped between Silicon Valley’s surveillance capitalism and authoritarian state control by China. Europe could offer a third model: civic digital infrastructure as a democratic project.
And what if we built a broad societal movement—across NGOs, unions, municipalities, universities, public broadcasters, and responsible businesses—dedicated explicitly to building this autonomous, democratic, space? The first step is simply to admit: we are in trouble if we don’t act.
This Is a Task for All Democratic Actors
When I say “digital sovereignty,” people often hear “geopolitics.” They imagine defense policy, trade policy, big-tech diplomacy. All of that is relevant. But sovereignty ultimately lives—or dies—in the everyday lives of citizens.
Democracy is in graver danger than ever, not because people suddenly stopped loving freedom, but because the infrastructure of public life is being rewired in ways that make freedom harder to practice. If we want democratic debate, sense-making, information, and even entertainment to remain compatible with human rights, we need digital public spaces where those things can happen without invisible coercion.
The European digital agora will not arrive in one big bang. It will be built piece by piece: a municipal platform here, a public-service social network there or an EU-wide procurement rule that favours open standards. That work starts with a decision: to stop accepting dependence as inevitable.
