Can we really build a ‘European stack’… without first building national stacks?

Can we really build a ‘European stack’… without first building national stacks?

That is the open question posed by our president Alexandre Zapolsky.

Behind the debates on digital sovereignty, there is a reality: sovereignty can only exist if it actually creates value locally, in each of the countries that compose it.

For our president, everything hinges on this:

“We will not build a European stack if each country does not find its benefit in it.”

To illustrate, he relies on a very concrete analogy. Airbus, for example, would not exist if a single country concentrated the entire value chain. It is precisely because this model is shared among several countries that it works and endures.

According to him, this logic fully applies to the digital realm. Choosing software is never a neutral act: it also directs value, and thus contributes, directly or indirectly, to one economic model rather than another.

“Our clicks are our jobs.”

For Alexandre Zapolsky, the challenge is not to replace one dependency (American or Chinese) with another, even a European one. In other words, building European sovereignty first and foremost requires finding a balance between the contributions and the benefits of each country.

A statement that brings the debate back to concrete foundations.