Europe may not have the size or coordination needed to pretend to be the one to design what the digital world should be. Despite the obvious problems of achieving a single voice, Europe likes to think that it is participating in the construction of the new digital order together with China and the United States, but it does not seem that others recognize it as much of a role beyond the capacity to give opinions, scold, legislate and fine. The construction of a truly coordinated Europe has been too slow and for the first time in three thousand years we Europeans may not be able to lead our next model of society.
Many of the current European nation states are the result of the unification of a previous, more fragmented reality. The antecedents of today's Italy were a set of city-states, like Spain's were different kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula or Germany's were dozens of pre-existing small states. It is true that there have been empires that have collapsed and fragmented, but the general trend throughout history is for us to come together in larger and larger groups, giving way to increasingly different models of political and social management sophisticated From the nomadic groups of the Paleolithic to the settlements of the Neolithic until reaching the nation states formed mostly throughout the 19th century, which without any doubt we will also see disappear and give way to another order of magnitude.
Two centuries have passed and it's been decades since the European nation states know that a new change of scale is needed, they need to coordinate much more if they want to be relevant, but the project of building a European Union is far from being efficient and we're just getting started to be late The new digital society is rapidly increasing the number of people who are managed from a single center of power. It started with globalization and has skyrocketed with digitization, and the political structure of nation-states is increasingly inefficient in bringing order to the large supranational groups promoted mostly from China and the United States.
In the 20th century we talked about where the factories would be, where the jobs would be created or how the markets would be organized. The 21st century still has a lot of all this and we continue to talk about the sources of raw material and energy, but new digital keys are emerging strongly. New giants appear that base their power and capacity on the information they can get from each of us, with which they design personalized services based on instant data.
The new economy depends on energy sources, data and the infrastructure through which this data circulates. China and the US compete for world leadership in chips and processors, algorithms and artificial intelligence systems, service platforms and surveillance systems. Europe tries to react with ambitious projects to achieve a certain technological sovereignty, but it has a weak position in the struggle to dominate the economy and the world of the 21st century.
It's not just economics and technology; as always, what social and moral precepts the world will operate under is also at stake. The United States considers data protection to be a matter for the market, while China believes that this protection belongs to the State. Europe proposes that guardianship be in the hands of citizens, but while the United States has companies with billions of customers and China has authority over billions of citizens, Europe supports its proposal in billions of thoughts and laws which cannot be applied en masse.
If we want to participate in the design of the digital society, it would be better if we stop talking about the United States and China, and start talking about the West and the East. We should not discuss our model with the US, but build it with the Westerners. Thinking in terms of the West allows expanding the number of guests to imagine the future. Colombia, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Morocco, Uruguay, Chile or Japan have remained on the fragmented side of the world, without mechanisms or volume to discuss the new digital society. The great political project of Europe throughout almost the entire 20th century has been the European Union, and we have not been able to complete it in time. The digital society calls for a new upper layer, a new political project that will occupy us throughout the 21st century: a Western framework of collaboration.
