Hanging in the air at this year’s Munich Security Conference is a new Schleswig-Holstein question. The term once applied to a prolonged 19th-century tug-of-war between imperial Germany and Denmark over the territory connecting the two kingdoms.
Today’s Schleswig-Holstein question is no longer about land, but is still about sovereignty: digital sovereignty.
Put simply: if US president Donald Trump takes against an EU country, leader, judge or private person – and leans on US tech companies to block their email or web service access – is it wise for Europe to keep all its digital eggs in Microsoft Office and Amazon web server baskets?
Schleswig-Holstein thinks not. The northern German state is just three-quarters the size of Leinster but, when it comes to digital sovereignty, it thinks big.
Last October the state government allowed its licences to lapse on Microsoft 365, the popular web-based office suite. More than 40,000 civil servants, politicians and other public servants are now using free and open-source replacements for Word, Outlook and Teams.
The one-off €9 million transition costs, officials say, compare favourably to the €15 million in licence fees it was paying to Microsoft annually. Those welcome savings are now being reinvested in local digital schemes, says Schleswig-Holstein’s digital minister, Dirk Schrödter, but far more is at stake.
For him the long-planned move became even more timely after last year’s drama at the International Criminal Court (ICC), where a US-sanctioned judge there was reportedly locked out of his Microsoft email and other web services.
“The ICC case has demonstrated once more, unfortunately, how dependent institutions, governments and private companies are on proprietary software – often provided by just a few global technology corporations,” he said, a dependency he views as an open flank given US attacks on the postwar rules-based order.
“State sovereignty today is no longer determined solely by military strength and the ability to enforce law and order domestically,” he said, “but by the ability to steer, control and further develop digital systems and infrastructures and to be in charge of state data storage.”
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Now that Schleswig-Holstein has effectively written the blueprint, it has been inundated with inquiries from home and abroad about how it moved into the post-Microsoft era.
The Microsoft 365 subscription service is hugely popular around the world, but the convenience of its web suite and cloud storage services comes at a monthly cost of at least €50 per user.
Irish Government departments and the Oireachtas all use Microsoft 365 services but a spokeswoman said that commenting on arrangements or costs “could breach contract confidentiality and undermine the security architecture of our services”.
Germany’s federal government, responding to a parliamentary question last week, said it spent €481 million last year on Microsoft licences – up 76 per cent in two years. One network technician with experience of Microsoft 365 says the platform’s technical edge is what keeps it popular and near-ubiquitous, but at a cost: “Microsoft has jacked up the prices of late but, once you are in, there is little you can do.”
Except there is. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is shifting his chancellery away from Microsoft 365 to openDesk suite, advertised as “sovereign by design”, and developed by German state agency ZenDiS, the Centre for Digital Sovereignty.
While Microsoft locks down its software code to sell as a product or service, open source software like openDesk is available at no or low cost. Leaving code open to other developers, its adherents argue, boosts user autonomy, transparency and security.
David Amiel, French minister for public services and reform. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Another prominent new adherent is David Amiel, French minister for public services and reform. Last week he promised to “reclaim digital independence” with La Suite, an open source office and collaboration platform being introduced across the French public service.
“We cannot afford the risk of our scientific exchanges, our sensitive data, and our strategic innovations being exposed to non-European actors,” he said.
But how great is the risk? Microsoft insists that customer data in its web services and servers is so well-encrypted that not even the US company can access it. But some wonder if this is the case if US law-enforcement or intelligence demand data – even stored on European servers.
As for the ICC stand-off, Microsoft denies it blocked any email access. Rather than fight it out, the court is switching to openDesk. This software suite incorporates a popular, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office – LibreOffice – whose recent converts include the Austrian military and some Danish government ministries.
The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, sees “a growing push to use public money for public code and to get away from lock-in by the tech giants”.
After years lobbying for open-source software in Europe, Document Foundation board member Paolo Vecchi says the ICC incident has flicked a switch in many official minds.
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“People are realising they need to have a plan B and move now and not when an incident happens to them,” he said via Jitsi, an open-source alternative to Zoom and Teams.
Fine Gael TD James Geoghegan agrees that, even without any concrete threat looming against Ireland, it would be “irresponsible not to ask whether our democratic institutions are adequately protected” from pressures piled on by US tech companies.
“The terrifying vista that has come to the fore, of sanctions imposed on Europe,” said Geoghegan, “means solutions are needed, and they lie within Europe”.