Closing the Digital Geneva Gap

How can foreign policy and digitalisation be combined? And what role should International Geneva play in this? Nicolas Zahn and Kevin Kohler from the think tank foraus on the challenges for Switzerland

In the last five years various Swiss strategies have addressed issues of digital governance with a foreign policy component. The most prominent Swiss ambition is to make Geneva the “international capital of digital governanceExternal link”.

We have reviewed all Swiss Digital Foreign PolicyExternal link documents for the think tank foraus and we welcome this ambition. However, we also find that there is still a gap between the high level of ambition for “Digital Geneva” and the political support needed to achieve this ambition.

Nicolas Zahn is a Project Manager at the Swiss Digital Initiative and works at the intersection of foreign policy and technology. Joanna Scheffel

The state of Digital Geneva

International organisations based in Geneva already have a strong importance for digital governance independent of any Swiss strategy. Relevant organisations include the International Telecommunication Union, the World Trade Organization, the UN International Computing Centre (UNICC), the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Health Organization.

Furthermore, Switzerland has supported specific initiatives aimed at strengthening Digital Geneva in recent years. This includes the Swiss Digital Initiative, which has introduced the first digital trust label, and the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA), which anticipates future and emerging governance challenges. There is also long-standing support for the DiploFoundation that provides, for example, the Geneva Internet PlatformExternal link.

Kevin Kohler is a security analyst at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, where he works on digital technologies and risk management. CSS

Nevertheless, we urge against complacency. Two points should be kept in mind:

1. Co-Financing Digital Infrastructure:

UNICC is the main provider of IT consulting, software, cloud and cybersecurity solutions to UN agencies. UNICC was foundedExternal link in 1971 in Geneva, which remains its headquarters. In 2012, UNICC opened a new office in Valencia, which is now by far its biggest office. Spain does not have a large UN ecosystem and, contrary to Switzerland, does not have an explicit strategy to strengthen the digital component of that ecosystem. Yet Spain was willing to co-finance the centre for the UN.

2. Legal Environment:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is headquartered in Geneva and is by far the biggest receiver of financial support from the Swiss foreign ministry. Yet when the ICRC decided to create its “delegation for cyberspace”, it placed it in LuxembourgExternal link. The main reason for this seems to be Luxembourg’s willingness to experiment with “data embassies”External link – parts of a data centre that are exempted from local jurisdiction. The government promoted the idea of “Switzerland as a safe harbour for data”, including for international organisations.

Back in 2020, one of the authors had informally inquired with the foreign ministry whether that line means that Switzerland is working on a data embassy concept like Luxembourg. The answer was that such an arrangement would be interesting and technically feasible but that it would require “political will”. With the heated debate about a “Swiss Cloud”, various departments are thinking around the idea of providing safe data spaces again.

We are aware of the fact that Switzerland cannot offer unlimited financial support, all of the legal frameworks or be involved in every global governance initiative. Still, the examples show that other states too want to play a role in global digital governance and are backing up their announcements with concrete actions. As such, they serve as a warning that a future central role of Geneva in digital governance is not a given.

Meeting emerging challenges

So what can Switzerland do to close the gap? We think that emerging digital technologies would be particularly interesting, for example, for regulatory actions in the field of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Switzerland has shown with the Montreux Document on Private Military and Security Companies that it can successfully lead a multi-stakeholder mapping process in an emerging field and thereby accelerate norm-building.

Also, Switzerland has created an excellent foresight capacity with GESDA, but it’s not clear yet how its outputs are embedded in governance processes. There are strong reasons to believeExternal link that the demand for global governance of digital emerging technologies will grow in the coming decades.

One specific idea for the governance of emerging digital technologies that we highlighted in 2019 was an “IPCC for AI”External link. This model would address the main challenges collecting relevant data. There are more organisations that measure AI-related issues today, such as the OECDExternal link. Yet the best works on fundamental and global factors, such as global compute resourcesExternal link, compute in AI modelsExternal link, predictions for specific AI thresholds, and future scenarios for compute and its impact, continue to be made by independent researchers with minimal resources.

Overall, we would encourage a pro-active approach to becoming a leader in the governance of emerging technologies, where agility and the ability to learn are particularly important. To echo the words of foreign affairs minister Ignazio Cassis: Dare to innovate, dare to anticipateExternal link!

The road to Digital Geneva: additional documents

This ambition has been repeatedly formulated in the Foreign Policy Vision for 2028 (AVIS28)External link, the Foreign Policy Strategy 2020-2023External link, the Digital Foreign Policy StrategyExternal link, the Strategy Digital SwitzerlandExternal link, and the National Strategy for the Protection of Switzerland against Cyber RisksExternal link.