European Digital Sovereignty and Structural Dependencies Towards a Shared Digital Culture as a Strategic Capability

European digital sovereignty has become a central reference in public policies, industrial strategies and institutional debates. It is commonly invoked in relation to data protection, cybersecurity, economic resilience and strategic autonomy. Despite this prominence, Europe’s digital dependencies on extra-European actors, infrastructures and legal frameworks remain deep, diffuse and structurally embedded in everyday digital environments. This analysis is based on the hypothesis that European digital sovereignty is still predominantly approached through regulatory, technological and industrial instruments, while a critical dimension remains insufficiently formalised: the collective understanding of the mechanisms through which digital dependencies are produced and reproduced. In the absence of such shared understanding, political, economic and organisational decisions tend to reinforce existing dependencies, often implicitly and independently of stated strategic objectives. The paper adopts a non-partisan and non-prescriptive analytical approach. It proposes a transversal examination of European digital dependencies, encompassing their technical, legal, economic and cultural dimensions. Digital sovereignty is not addressed as a binary objective, but as a progressive trajectory aimed at identifying and reducing the most critical dependencies over time. Particular attention is given to the role of political understanding of digital architectures, as well as to the diffusion of this understanding across enterprises, citizens and future digital professionals. The analysis concludes that the sustainable strengthening of European digital sovereignty requires the development of a shared digital culture. This culture is understood as a collective capability to grasp the systemic implications of digital choices and the dependencies they generate. As such, it constitutes a strategic condition for European digital sovereignty trajectories, although it remains largely implicit and insufficiently articulated in existing analytical and policy frameworks.