As the US-China tech rivalry intensifies, the EU faces pressure to secure its position in critical digital value chains. The EU’s 2025 International Digital Strategy seeks to deepen digital cooperation with like-minded Asian tech powers, including Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, while promoting EU digital standards and competitiveness in AI, semiconductors, 6G and cybersecurity. This CEPS In-Depth Analysis report assesses those partnerships and identifies where they fall short.
EU-Asia digital partnerships operate in a fragmented ecosystem. A wide range of stakeholders pursue overlapping but often misaligned interests, spanning EU institutions (from the European External Action Service to multiple Directorate-Generals), Member States, partner governments divided across ministries and private sector and civil society actors. Fragmentation is compounded by variations in institutional depth (compare South Korea’s full Digital Partnership with the EU and Horizon Europe association status versus Taiwan’s informal channels), sectoral coverage and regulatory alignment with the EU.
Digital Partnerships are a complex foreign policy instrument. Unlike regional or multilateral frameworks, they lack a unifying institutional or legal architecture to manage tensions between collaboration and competition. Being like-minded does not guarantee aligned interests, and without an overarching coordination mechanism, partnership goals remain underachieved. The EU has signalled its intent to move from a hub-and-spoke model towards a network approach, but this remains aspirational.
The EU should build long-term interest alignment through research and innovation collaboration, which is less divisive than trade and investment in the short term. It should broaden its engagement to partner-country SMEs, start-ups, labour organisations and civil society, as well as develop sectoral ‘minilaterals’ within Asia synchronised with its geographic partnerships.
For Taiwan, the One China policy means the formal Digital Partnership model is not politically available. Cooperation must proceed through channels that do not require EU-level diplomatic recognition: research and innovation frameworks (with an EC–NSTC co-funding agreement being the near-term priority), institution-to-institution links through ITRI and EARTO, industry engagement through the ECCT and Trade and Investment Dialogue, and Member State bilateral programmes. The focus should be on mapping existing ties, diagnosing gaps and building visibility over time.
