“Techplomacy”: Towards an Increasingly Privately Ordered Digital World Politics?
Résumé
The paper explores attempts by some States to address the numerous challenges posed by global digital platforms through innovative diplomatic practices.
It examines in particular the two case studies of Denmark and France. Denmark is the first nation ever having appointed a “Tech Ambassador” to the US digital giants, considering that “these companies have become a type of new nations and [Denmark] need[s] to confront that” (Politiken, 27/01/2017). France promoted his “Special Representative for International Negotiations on Information Society and the Digital Economy” (since 2013) to “Ambassador for Cyber-Diplomacy and the Digital Economy”, with the explicit mandate “to conduct direct dialogue with the big US digital platforms” (French MFA, 22/11/2017).
Through empirical study of these two cases and how they interact with other related national or European initiatives (such as the “Global Tech Panel” recently set up by the European External Action Service), the paper examines to which extent these diplomatic practices are actually innovating with regards to already existing ones (such as economic diplomacy, science diplomacy, public diplomacy and other means of soft power) and interrogate the real consequences of their so-called disruptive nature, most notably in terms of an increasingly privately ordered digital world politics.