Sfide esistenziali e resilienze identitarie nella geopolitica informazionale: l’identikit europeo tra sovranità e costituzionalismo digitale

The ability of individual states to autonomously craft regulations concerning the digital economy, oversee strategic infrastructure, manage cybersecurity, and fight misinformation represents a pivotal existential challenge for democratic systems. This analysis begins with an overview of the key features of "digital constitutionalism," the framework within which the European normative transition towards "digital sovereignty" is understood. The focus then converge to the cross-cutting issue that underlies any attempt at network regulation: the geopolitical barriers to achieving constitutionally informed global data governance. The second part of the work delves into these geopolitical obstacles in detail. Through an examination of the GDPR framework, the analysis highlights the general limitations in protecting the "right to personal identity" at both micro and macro levels, particularly in the context of handling big data. It also underscores the challenges in interpreting concepts such as "national security" and "geopolitical interest." These concepts permit exceptions to the European regulatory framework, allowing states to share data with third countries even when their data protection objectives and standards, as in the case of the United States, are not aligned with the EU approach. Finally, the study illustrates how the digital constitutionalism framework not only legitimizes the concept of digital sovereignty but also serves as a hermeneutic tool to distinguish between legitimate political contestation and actions that, by challenging the essence of European international identity, fall within the scope of “de-europeanization”.