Digital Geopolitics and Sovereignty: Convergence and Divergence Between the EU and Turkey

Introduction

Within the space of nine weeks in the spring of 2026, Ankara and Brussels each practiced digital sovereignty in its own idiom. On April 1, Turkey launched its commercial 5G network. This followed a tender held on October 16, 2025, in which the government attached domestic content requirements of up to 60% for the new network.1 On June 3, the European Commission followed with its Tech Sovereignty package, comprising a Chips Act 2.0, a Cloud and AI Development Act, and an open-source strategy, presented as a major shift in the EU’s approach to technology.

Conclusion

Turkey’s 5G launch on April 1, 2026, and the Commission’s Tech Sovereignty package of June 3, 2026, aspire to reach the same objects under the same constraints. Digital sovereignty, this analysis has argued, is best understood relationally, as a claim to control data, infrastructure, supply chains, platforms, technologies, standards, and skills that can only ever be exercised through interdependence, never against it. The EU has built a normative answer to that constraint, Turkey a local technological-oriented one. Their divergence is acute, spanning the philosophy of control, referent objects, governance culture, asymmetry, and trust. Yet there are compatibilities: from a shared structural position to convergent threat framings, overlapping legal orders, and economies integrated through the Customs Union since 1996. This is why the current condition can be described as convergence on paper without a relationship to match.