What Moves the System: A Factor Map and Ranking for European Digital Sovereignty¶

Stefane Fermigier (Abilian) · sf@abilian.com

Draft working paper v0.5, 2026-09-18. Prepared for publication: the citations to the programme corpus now carry the published addresses of the papers they name, with the stale version pins corrected and the one unpublished source flagged in place. The canonical edge list was re-synced to the paper after Section 5 reclassified L2 as the capture chain; the four verification scripts now declare their own dependencies. A prose pass brought the document's coordination rate inside the corpus's own range. Revised after two referee rounds, the second by an independent reviewer given only the papers; v0.4 adds the first executed bindingness measurement (Section 7). The edge list is canonical in verify/edges.py: the table and the figure are generated from it and asserted equal at render time, conjectured edges included. The evidence tiers grade internal verification, the ranking is presented as a reasoned prioritization with tiered premises. Annex A states the results behind the top-tier edges, so the map is readable as mathematics without the source corpus.

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Abstract¶

The instruments deployed for digital-sovereignty policy score nodes: an organisation's resilience, a supplier's posture, an offer's compliance level. The published indices describe levels. Neither says what makes the sovereignty of the whole ecosystem move. This paper assembles a causal factor map for the European digital ecosystem from one research programme's verified results: twenty-two factors in five families and a canonical edge list of thirty-two directed edges (twenty-three receipted, nine conjectured, two interactions), with a stated evidence tier per edge, six feedback loops, and one directed chain (the capture pull). The tiers grade internal verification; external validation is the map's open flank. Annex A states the results behind the top-tier edges; every edge names what an attack would have to break.

Confronting the map with the deployed instruments yields two findings. First, every substantive criterion of the node instruments corresponds to a system factor, a correspondence whose construction failed twice and forced factor additions, which is its falsifiability credential. Second, conditional on the programme's own selection of what to formalize, the Cloud Sovereignty Framework's published weight vector, confirmed against the primary text, carries no economic objective at all; the official objective sets fold the market mechanisms away.

The paper then argues a prioritization at the current margin: a gate-and-driver structure extracted from the corpus's inertness results, ordinal, with premises tiered T2 and T3 and rank-by-rank comparisons that are explicitly heterogeneous (marginal effect where computed, implementability where documented, scope where proved). A model-scoped elasticity computation seeds the quantitative layer; its headline comparison holds on 59% of the sampled parameter space (85% of qualifying draws), with the excluded and complement regions characterized. The sequencing claim, clear the gates before spending on the drivers, is the paper's output, stated with its falsifiers and the measurements that would upgrade it. a coding of five years of sovereignty-labelled EU procurement notices finds structural control verified in 2 of 64 construct-relevant notices.

Keywords: digital sovereignty, industrial policy, causal factors, procurement, lock-in, open-source software.

JEL: F52, L86, O25, D85.

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Cite this paper¶

Fermigier, S. (2026). What Moves the System: A Factor Map and Ranking for European Digital Sovereignty.
Draft working paper v0.5, Abilian Econ Lab.
https://econ.lab.abilian.com/papers/factor-map/