Strategy documents and regional policies of the European Union in the process of creating a digital society

Digital technologies change daily life, the way of work and do business, the way of travel, communication and establishing relation to each other of the people. As in the whole world, the European Union also experiences a digital transformation. This thesis study aims to display the digitalization status of the European Union both within itself and in front of global actors such as Japan, the United States of America, and South Korea, to present the main problems of the European Union in the digitalization process and to examine the documents, prepared for the digitalization of the European Union with the method of content analysis related to the digitalization. In the thesis study consisting of four main chapters, the digital society concept and Digital Economy and Society Index and the International Digital Economy and the performance of the member countries, based on the Society Index data were examined and the documents, published regarding the digitalization of the European Union were analyzed. It has been stated that the European Union has implemented various policies in the way of digitalization and has been successful in many of these policies, but the digitization level of the European Union is not yet sufficient at the global level. The impact of Europe 2020 and Lisbon Strategy on digitalization to the regions has been discussed. As a result of the analysis, the frequency of repetition of the codes obtained from the documents, used within the scope of the analysis and the number of insertion in the documents were determined by years. In the conclusion part of the thesis, some suggestions were made for future studies on the digitalization of the European Union. Key Words: European Union, Digital Society, Regional Policy, Europe 2020 Strategy, Digital Single Market.