Cyber Resilience as Soft Power

Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany - October 31, 2025

From county code to diplomatic cachet: turning Anhalt-Bitterfeld into a trust brand the EU can sell abroad

Soft power used to mean pop music and soccer leagues; in the next decade it will mean packet traces and privacy statutes. The reasoning is brutally simple: every container terminal, vaccine plant or parliament that buys European machinery now asks two questions before the purchase order is signed—can you deliver spare parts during a pandemic, and can you keep Russian ransomware out of the firmware update? If the answer is no, the steel is cheaper on the other side of the ocean. That shift turns regions that master cyber resilience into exporters of something more lucrative than code: they export the confidence that digital life will continue even when geopolitics fractures. Anhalt-Bitterfeld’s role is to become the reference implementation of that confidence, a living showroom you can board a train to, inspect, copy and re-import under your own flag.

The mechanics start with standards that travel light. Most technology exports drag heavy compliance appendices—ITAR lists, export licences, end-user certificates—that freeze deals for months. The Cyber Resilience Alliance instead publishes its entire stack as permissively licensed open source: 1.8 million lines already on GitHub, Docker images signed in the EU, documentation translated into the six official UN languages. A municipality in Chile or Georgia can therefore re-host the whole platform without negotiating a single clause, yet the implicit stamp “Made in Germany” still rides along because the repository commit history is cryptographically time-stamped under German civil-law jurisdiction. That is soft power in its purest form: influence without obligation, authority without enforcement. The first foreign deployment went live in Chișinău last August; the Moldovan cyber-response team had a working SOC in forty-eight hours, but the metadata still reads “authored in Anhalt-Bitterfeld,” which is exactly the kind of reputational residue that used to require an embassy and a cultural institute.

Economic diplomacy follows the same script. Traditional arms-length sales of cybersecurity software often collapse over liability questions: who is responsible when an update bricks a hospital? The Alliance sidesteps that deadlock by selling membership, not licences. A regional government in North Macedonia can sign the same participation agreement German SMEs use, gaining access to threat-intelligence feeds, policy templates and the county’s own on-call incident responders. The subscription fee—capped at 48 000 €—is routed through the county development bank, which issues a conformant invoice that any ministry of finance can book under “capacity building” instead of “defence procurement,” a label that keeps parliamentary debates polite and budgets off the front page. Meanwhile the technical artefacts run inside Skopje’s sovereign cloud, so sovereignty is transferred outward, not extracted inward. The first year of the programme brought 1.2 million € in foreign subscriptions, a figure smaller than a single fighter-jet bolt but large enough to prove that trust can be invoiced like copper wire.

Cultural diplomacy is the subtler layer. The county hosts quarterly “Digital Autumn” weeks where foreign officials, journalists and civil-society groups spend three days inside the live cyber range, not as tourists but as blue-team operators defending a simulated waterworks against red-team actors who speak the local language. The exercise ends with a traditional county fair—hand-made sausages, brass band, children’s lantern parade—so that memory associates robust security with convivial public life rather than with surveillance cameras. After the most recent edition, a Kenyan delegation took home not only the GitHub repository but the recipe for the local rye bread, a small culinary soft-power token that now sits on meeting tables in Nairobi whenever cyber policy is discussed. The bread is irrelevant to packet inspection, yet it makes the abstract idea of “German resilience” physically present, chewable, memorable.

"We export confidence, not surveillance; the recipe is open source, the bread is local rye, and the warranty is a public Git log."

The narrative weaponises humility instead of hubris. Where Silicon Valley exports evangelists, Anhalt-Bitterfeld exports error logs. Every quarter the Alliance publishes a “Resilience Journal” that discloses what broke, how long it took to fix, and which union complained about shift rosters. By volunteering embarrassing details, the county positions itself as the honest broker in a market crowded with vendors who never admit fallibility. That posture pays dividends when third countries choose between alliance systems: trust accrues to the actor that demonstrates self-correction faster than it demonstrates self-promotion. The journal is already cited in policy papers from Singapore to Montenegro, a bibliometric footprint that costs nothing but credibility.

Finally, there is the long game of standard capture. The county funds two full-time engineers whose only job is to feed lessons-learned into ETSI working groups and ISO drafts, ensuring that the next revision of cyber-resilience standards carries paragraphs written in Dessau-Rosslau dialect. Once those paragraphs become normative, every vendor worldwide that wants to sell “compliant” solutions will implicitly replicate Anhalt-Bitterfeld architecture, a royalty-free export of design philosophy more effective than any patent portfolio. The first paragraph—on sovereign-cloud federation—passed the committee ballot last month; the second, on rural SME onboarding, is scheduled for 2026. When both are ratified, the county will have outsourced its worldview into the DNA of global procurement language, the soft-power equivalent of making the Euro the invoice currency of the internet.

The cumulative effect is a new category of export: confidence as a service. Regions that once sold coal or wine now sell the guarantee that life will proceed normally even when geopolitics does not. Anhalt-Bitterfeld’s specific contribution is to have packaged that guarantee into legal, financial and cultural artefacts that travel without visas, install without IP conflicts, and age without planned obsolescence. The county does not need an aircraft carrier; it needs a Git repository, a bread recipe and the courage to publish its own mistakes. That combination turns code into cachet, and cachet into influence—the softest power of all, running on the hardest packets we can forge.

The Cyber Resilience Alliance is a public-private partnership established 2025, led by CypSec, Validato and the County of Mansfeld-Südharz. The Alliance operates a sovereign private-cloud security stack, a shared SOC and an cyber academy, aiming to make Mansfeld-Südharz the reference site for rural cyber resilience by 2030.

Media Contact: Daria Fediay, Chief Executive Officer at CypSec - daria.fediay@cypsec.de.