There is a word circulating in European policy corridors with increasing urgency: sovereignty. Energy sovereignty. Technological sovereignty. Strategic sovereignty. Digital sovereignty. Europe has spent the better part of this decade discovering, often painfully, the cost of dependency. And yet when it comes to media and culture, the continent continues to avoid the full weight of the question its own experience demands: what does it mean to govern your own communicative future?
This is not an abstract idea. The structures through which Europeans access information, culture, and public debate are increasingly shaped by decisions made outside Europe, by platform architectures designed elsewhere, by recommendation algorithms optimised for „engagement“ rather than democratic function, by streaming economies that treat European stories as content to be tolerated rather than culture to be sustained.
The European Media Freedom Act, the Digital Services Act, and the AI Act are serious legislative efforts. But legislation without the industrial, financial, and institutional conditions to support genuine cultural production is governance without ground beneath it.
What concerns me most is not the absence of regulation. It is the absence of a coherent vision of what European media sovereignty would actually look like in practice and who it would serve. Sovereignty invoked at the level of institutions, without reference to the citizens, journalists, creators, and communities whose communicative lives it is meant to protect, is sovereignty in name only.
It is precisely this tension that opens our 2026 Public Lecture Series, Transformation and Pressure in Media and Cultural Governance, hosted in partnership with Webster University Vienna. On April 28th, Dr Giota Alevizou of King’s College London will examine how digital platforms, from Wikipedia to contemporary AI systems, are reshaping the governance of knowledge itself. Her recently published book, The Web of Knowledge, asks who controls the production, credibility, and accessibility of knowledge in the digital age. It is a question that sits at the heart of everything this series will explore.
The lecture series, the lab’s ongoing research, and the posts that follow on this blog are all part of the same intellectual project: to think seriously about what European media governance is actually for, not sovereignty as geopolitical abstraction, but sovereignty as a lived condition. The capacity of European publics to produce, access, and recognise themselves in the cultural and informational spaces that shape their world is now more urgent than ever.
Contributions, challenges, and responses are welcome.
Katharine Sarikakis
Director, Media Governance and Industries Research Lab, University of Vienna
Series Convenor,
Transformation and Pressure in Media and Cultural Governance, Media Governance Lab, University of Vienna and Webster University Vienna
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