Session I of the Aspen-ECFR Program on “European Technological Sovereignty: Human Values and Geopolitical Challenges”

Aspen Institute España organized, in collaboration with European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a new program on “European Technological Sovereignty: Human Values and Geopolitical Challenges” with the help of Aspen Digital, Aspen Germany and Aspen UK.

The first session was on “Simplification or Deregulation? The Omnibus Package and the Future of European Regulation” and took place online on Monday, January 12 from 4 to 5:30 pm (CET).

As speakers for the first session, we counted with Anu Bradford, Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organizations at Columbia Law School, andJosé Ignacio Torreblanca, Senior Adviser and Distinguished Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and Senior Lecturer at the UNED University in Madrid.

The program consists of 3 online sessions, one a month, in January, February, and March. The sessions will be online with in English with around 30 participants. The speakers will share a few opening remarks, followed by a structured discussion among participants. The discussion will be held under the Chatham House Rule, followed by a paper highlighting the key insights while preserving confidentiality. The paper will then be presented at a final in-person session open to the public. The idea is to share the online sessions’ findings with a larger audience to increase the program’s reach.

As is common in Aspen Institute España debates, the dialogue was structured around selected texts chosen by the speakers, which are linked above:
📖 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/europe/europe-could-lose-what-makes-it-great
📖 https://ecfr.eu/article/thrown-under-the-omnibus-how-the-eus-digital-deregulation-fuels-us-coercion/

Anu Bradford

Anu Bradford, is Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organizations at Columbia Law School. She is also a director for Columbia’s European Legal Studies Center and a Senior Scholar at Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business at Columbia Business School. She is an expert on European Union law, digital regulation, international trade law, and comparative and international antitrust law. Bradford is the author of “The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World” (OUP 2020), which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs. Her most recent book “Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology” was published by Oxford University Press in September 2023. It was recognized as one of the best books of 2023 by Financial Times and awarded the 2024 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.

José Ignacio Torreblanca

José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the Madrid office and senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a Political Science professor at the National University of Distance Education (UNED). Further, he holds a PhD in political science from the Complutense University of Madrid. He was a Fulbright Scholar at George Washington University in Washington DC and a postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. As an expert on disinformation, he has worked with Spain’s National Security Directorate Taskforce on Disinformation Campaigns at the prime minister’s office and submitted evidence on disinformation and foreign interference in the Joint Congress-Senate National Security Committee of the Spanish parliament. He runs a weekly column in El Mundo called “Café Steiner” and is a weekly contributor on Spanish National Public Radio. Prior to joining ECFR, Torreblanca was the editorial director of El Pais where he authored a weekly column and a blog for 10 years.