The Full Digital Nation

Violaine Champetier de Ribes Jean Spiri

The Full Digital Nation

Translated from french by Nafkote Tamirat

Cent Mille Milliards

Estonia: A Break In The GAFAM Wall

First published in France 2018

Copyright © Violaine Champetier de Ribes, Jean Spiri and Cent Mille Milliards, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

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INTRODUCTION

Imagine a country where the State doesn’t have the right to ask any citizen for the same information twice. Imagine a country where, with a single card, you can complete all administrative actions, with the excep-tions of marriage, divorce and real estate purchases (and that’s by choice and only for now.) Imagine a country where you can take out a loan and vote in mere minutes, and without leaving your home. Imagine a country where both the very young and the very old have been trained in digital technologies for over 20 years. Imagine a country where the State can adjust laws in less than six months at the request of start ups. Imagine a country where you can create a company in 18 minutes. Imagine a country conceiving the State as an inclusive services platform, whose main job is to simplify and improve the daily lives of its citizens. Imagine a country where internet access has been a fundamental right since 2000. Imagine a country where the digital transformation and transparency of the State, along with the trust it has established with its citizens, are reasons for pride and part of the nation’s marketing campaign…

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That country is Estonia. Its time as holder of the presidency of the Council of the European Union, from July to December 2017, brought to light a State model that digital experts had known about for years and which the general public began to discover. The

“most advanced digital society in the world” accor-ding to Wired magazine (2017), Estonia also occupies one of the top spots in the PISA education rankings1 and one of the highest rates of start ups per capita in the EU, with Skype spearheading the wave and four unicorns (companies valued at over one billion dollars) already. There is also a remarkably seamless relationship between the citizens of Estonia and their public administrations, especially considering how the country has over 1.3 million inhabitants, who speak a rather unknown language. What’s more, since 2014, this digital identity and the services coming with it can be used by citizens across the globe through e-Residency, the transnational digital programme that gives access to an administrative and economic environment that’s well-suited to today’s breed of nomadic company creators.

This isn’t just a matter of good practices, however: what Estonia is inventing is a model for a citizen-centric nation-state for the digital age. There’s no doubt that Estonia is the world’s first platform-State which is willing to go beyond its borders and res-pond to the very predictable crisis facing the concept of the nation-state at a time when GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) are inventing

1. PISA: Programme for International Student Assessment

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a transnational solutionism2. This idea that in the near future, large digital companies will be the best-equipped to concretely address the needs of citizens should be pushing States to wonder what they will base their legitimacy on in that world of tomorrow. In this context, the example of Estonia can tell us a great deal about the future of France, as well as that of the European Union. It can also concretely respond to the idea that traditional States are growing obsolescent: in the next 10 years, and with the changes brought by today’s civilisation, these States face the real risk of watching the “uberisation” of their legitimacy. Along with the digital era comes unprecedented change and sprawling developments from GAFAM, which finds itself in a position where it’s able to provide the services that, up until now, were the exclusive prero-gative of the State, thus contributing to the erosion of States’ sovereignty.3 In that respect, GAFAM has become their direct competitor, minus the values of public service or democratic arbitration. This move has been expedited by the inertia of many States in the face of platform development. In this sense, Estonia is an exception: is its model an antidote to GAFAM’s hegemony? What is clear is that this country is establishing new global standards for digital and platform States, thereby introducing an alternative to the solutionist model coming out of Silicon Valley.

2. Solutionism: a term coined by Evgueni Morozov that refers to the ideology he believes to be inherent in GAFAM’s actions, namely, that they bring solutions that seem politically-minded but in fact, lack the democracy that such solutions would require.

3. Gilles Babinet: “There is a shift in sovereignty from States to GAFA.” France Inter; August 14, 2018.

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While the country celebrated the centenary of its independence interspersed with 50 years of Soviet occupation—on February 24, 2018, we must take a look at the specifics of this achievement. This isn’t to say that we should brush off this model as being too difficult to adapt in countries with larger populations and with States that have had longer histories. French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, ex-French Secre-tary of State for Digital Affairs, Mounir Mahjoubi, and Minister of Public Action and Accounts, Gérald Darmanin, aren’t wrong when they increasingly refer and travel to Estonia in their vision of the French State’s digital transformation. At the European level, the Tallinn Declaration of September 2017 not only suggests advances that could be made toward a digital Europe, but also lays the foundations for reflection about digital sovereignty and a model that would be suitable for the European Union. As President of Estonia, Kersti Kaljulaid, puts it: “Compared to other countries in the world, Estonia is better prepared for the time we’re living in: it’s a homeland that’s avai-lable on the internet and provides a point of reference for both citizens and e-residents.”4

Our crush on Estonia

This is a book born from encounters: those of the authors with each other and with Estonia, as well as many other meetings with the people who lent their

4. Extract from the brochure “Estonia Oh Surprise!”, published by the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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testimonies to this book. It comes from a desire to understand the ins and outs of this Estonian model, to go further than postcards and to never forget that this model is the result of a culture and a state of mind.

Violaine Champetier de Ribes relates, “I discovered Estonia in May 2017 during a trip that was organized by Jean-Michel Billaut, a pioneering and passionate explorer of new technologies and president and foun-der of l’Atelier BNP Paribas5. I wanted to see what a totally digitised country looked like, but I had no clear idea of what we were going to discover. It was the political project at the heart of the digital State that struck me: this was a country truly at the service of citizens and entrepreneurs. Citizens are considered clients, whom the State can best serve by simplifying their lives. I’m convinced that therein lies the key to the success of this new model of the State in the digi-tal era: by placing the citizen at the centre of public activities, the success of any public digital programme led by the State is guaranteed.

I’d like to point out that Jean-Michel Billaut deserves a great deal of credit, as he is 72 years old and disabled, with an amputated leg due to a medical error. Our group leader rattled about on the cobblestones of old Tallinn in a wheelchair, launching himself into this exploration of Estonia. His limitless curiosity compelled him to stop every single Estonian whose path we crossed in order to ask about their internet bandwidth at home. Their response was always the same: “I have no idea. All I know is, it works.” During

5. An innovation lab of the French bank.

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our week there, whenever we were leaving a place, Jean-Michel rewarded us with a booming, “We are so SCREWED!” At the end of one presentation on the e-Ambulance programme (see Chapter 4), he got emotional, remarking: “If we had had this solution in France, I wouldn’t have lost my leg.”

Billaut notes: “I had found my way to Estonia quite naturally. I became an e-Resident to see what it had to offer. It was a matter of opportunity, because I met the Estonian ambassador to Paris, His Excel-lency Alar Streimann6. I asked him to help me go see it for myself and I ended up going with friends. I went expecting to understand how a nation, which just 25 years ago had been crushed by Soviet rule and its oppressive bureaucracy, was able to become the first fully digital nation in the world. I didn’t think it would have reached the point that it had and what I saw bowled me over. I found a fully online administration: X-Road, digital ID cards, personalised medical files. (In 2017, we still didn’t have any of this in France!) There was electronic voting, genetics, a high-performing education system, tons of start ups and of course, the e-Residency programme, available to the entire world. Nearly everything surprised me but the electronic voting system blew my mind. In France (home to the wonderful minds of our country’s National Cybersecurity Agency) we’re told that this would never work. So why can it work so smoothly in Estonia and not in France? In my opinion, electronic voting is the beginning of direct democracy!”

6. Estonia ambassador to Germany since September 2019.

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As for Jean Spiri, he remembers his first visit to Estonia, soon after independence: “My first trip to Estonia was in 1995. I was a teenager and I went with my father. I remember the ramparts of Tallinn and a few old Ladas that had survived, but I also recall a moment that seemed to best illustrate the transi-tion the country was living through: the opening of the first McDonald’s. There was a very long line of people wanting to discover this symbol of the West and we joined the queue: such a symbolic Big Mac is well worth a little bit of waiting and has a particular kind of flavour.

I rediscovered Estonia much more recently in 2017, during a study trip organised by l’Atelier Europe7, in which Violaine also participated. I was expecting to find perfect digital images, classrooms with computers and start ups, but not at all a global project for society built around the construction of a digital, service-oriented State platform. What I found remarkable was that our hosts were very accessible, even those at the highest levels, and that they all shared the same enthusiasm and had all developed a vision for the future of the Nation-State in the digital era. This echoed my own thinking about public trans-formation in France and about the threats posed to our Nation-States by solutionism, and I felt that there was something new and tremendously inspiring to be found in Estonia. I hadn’t experienced this feeling of radical newness since a study trip I’d taken to Silicon Valley. This was another Silicon Valley, with values that were completely different, but just as disruptive.”

7. A French think tank.

We came away from the interviews we conducted with the conviction that it would be pointless to treat Estonia as an idealized model. Its geography, history, culture and the mindset of its inhabitants go a long way to explain how this model has been built. Clearly, this is where our exploration of Estonia had to begin.

We’re inviting you to discover this country, its ways of thinking and its achievements, alongside numerous experts, political leaders and entrepreneurs, both French and Estonian. Why? Because Estonia is not a disembodied notion, but contains complexities and paradoxes that merit further exploration. Because Estonia tells us something about who we are and where we’re heading, both in France and Europe. Because it’s time to abandon an approach that focuses exclusively on western Europe and to understand, like Estonia, what the erasure of borders could mean for the Nation-State, the democratic futures of our societies and their social contracts in the digital age.