Sovereignty contribution: the system-level reading¶
Every deployed sovereignty instrument scores a node. An organisation's own resilience, a supplier's own posture, an offer's own compliance level. This programme asks the question those instruments leave open: what makes the sovereignty of the whole ecosystem move, and what is the sign of a given policy's or organisation's effect on it. The two readings can disagree in both directions, which is the programme's premise and the reason it exists beside the node-scoped instruments rather than in place of them.
What Moves the System: A Factor Map and Ranking for European Digital Sovereignty¶
The deployed instruments score nodes and 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 out of 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 and nine conjectured, each with a stated evidence tier, plus six feedback loops and one directed chain, the capture pull. The edge list is the single source of truth: the paper's table and the figure are both generated from it and asserted equal at render time. The tiers grade internal verification and say nothing about external validity, which is the map's open flank and is stated as such; Annex A restates the results behind every top-tier edge, so the map reads as mathematics without the source corpus, and every edge names the result an attack on it would have to break. Confronting the map with the deployed instruments yields two findings. Every substantive criterion of the node instruments corresponds to a system factor, a correspondence whose construction failed twice and forced two factor additions, which is its falsifiability credential. And, conditional on the programme's own selection of what to formalize, the mechanisms with the deepest internal verification concentrate on market-economic factors that the official objective sets fold away: the Cloud Sovereignty Framework's published weight vector, confirmed against the primary text, carries no economic objective at all. Status: draft working paper (v0.5), with the bindingness premise upgraded from a procurement measurement of 339 notices.
The Contribution Criterion: Scoring Policies and Organisations by Their Effect on System-Level Digital Sovereignty¶
A subsidiary re-badging a foreign-controlled stack improves its scores and deepens the dependency; a one-maintainer open-source project fails any resilience test while keeping an option alive for everyone downstream. This paper defines the object the node instruments cannot reach: the contribution of a policy or an organisation, the change in the system's sovereignty stock under a stated counterfactual replacement of the entity's realized actions. Four rules discipline it. Only realized mechanisms score, so declared intentions and published strategies do not; a sign verdict requires agreement across the canonical counterfactuals; conduct is scored over a stated window; and every claim inherits the weakest evidence tier on its causal path. The formal core is classical, a layered adoption market that under-adopts relative to the adopter-welfare optimum, and the paper adds the closed form of the wedge in this parameterization, the two exact thresholds at which the result survives a fuller welfare ledger, both verified numerically, and the structural reading: node-scoped instruments cannot register the wedge, because it lives on other nodes, whichever way the scores point. A sign-transfer lemma with explicit, checkable hypotheses connects the definition to two applied screens of ten questions each. Three worked cases exercise them with stated, sign-checked counterfactuals, obtaining both signs, one recorded countervailing path, and one disagreement, by design, with a standard policy statistic. Status: draft working paper (v0.5).