The (False) Promise of Solutionism: Ideational Business Power and the Construction of Epistemic Authority in Digital Security Governance

Digital technologies are transforming security governance, bringing new risks and opportunities. The resulting uncertainty creates interpretative contests about what these new challenges are and who can–and should–address them. We argue that private actors use their ideational business power–and specifically solutionist arguments–to influence how public actors perceive digital security problems; whether they view private actors as necessary and/or effective in solving them; and whether they view public and private goals as compatible. In doing so, they influence how public actors navigate competence-control trade-offs. We substantiate this argument in two qualitative case studies on the involvement of Palantir in EU law enforcement and on the prominent role of (foreign) tech companies in the European cloud project Gaia-X. Drawing on and contributing to the literatures on (critical) security governance, competence-control theory, and ideational business power, we shed light on the ideational underpinnings of Europe’s regulatory security state.