China has the largest amount of users in the world, a significant digital economy growth potential, and its national Internet giants Alibaba, Didi, Tencent and Baidu are increasingly able to rival the biggest Western competitors in terms of market value and influence on the global tech landscape. China’s cyber diplomacy puts special attention towards equal participation, the principles of non-interference in internal affairs, non-use of force and peaceful settlement of disputes, and support for multilateral institutions to shape normative views on the governance of cyberspace. However, China’s propagation of the cyber-sovereignty approach to international cybersecurity policy and an absolutist reading of sovereignty in cyberspace provide a legal cloak for state practices that often run counter to the core European values of a global, open, and free Internet.
In October 2021, North Macedonia became one of the first countries among the Western Balkans partners to issue a digital ID to its citizens [
x]; the deployment of the digital identity project is only indicative of the country’s turn towards digitalisation and e-government. With a total population of about 2.08 million, Internet penetration in North Macedonia stands at 84%, while data shows that there are about 2.25 million cellular mobile connections. [
x] The rapid drive towards digitalisation, but also its accompanying risks and vulnerabilities, are accounted for by the 2022
Cybersecurity Strategy, the country’s first comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. The document largely reflects the country’s European ambitions and is explicitly based on the “principles of the Cybersecurity Strategy of the European Union and the NATO Cyber Defence Pledge”.
As of 2009, Ukraine has been a member of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) and a strategic partner for the EU. On the basis of the
EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (AA) signed in 2014, the country has engaged in legislative and policy reforms aiming at gradual convergence with the EU
acquis, including on digital economy. During the past two years, digitalisation has become a
“flagship topic” in Ukraine, with a growing focus on e-government, digital citizenship, and state support for the local IT industry. Ukraine suffered large-scale cyberattacks during the 2014 presidential elections [
x], distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks during the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 [
x], malware attacks on its power grid in 2015 [
x], and was also heavily impacted by the devastating global-scale
NotPetya attack in 2017. This explains why Ukraine prioritised capacity building efforts to strengthen its cyber resilience.