Sorry, the EU has no right to cry 'McCarthyism'

When the Trump administration announced that Thierry Breton — former EU commissioner and a French national from President Emmanuel Macron’s party — and four more EU citizens faced a U.S. visa ban over accusations of "extraterritorial censorship," official Brussels erupted in fury.

Top EU officials condemned the move as an attack on Europe's sovereign right to regulate its digital space. Breton himself depicted it as an expression of McCarthyism." The EU vowed to shield its digital rules from U.S. pressure.

Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of this U.S. decision, there is another, far more consequential chapter on which the EU has been markedly more timid. The United States unleashed far heavier sanctions — not just visa bans, but also financial sanctions — against the International Criminal Court (ICC), targeting its prosecutor and judges for pursuing accountability related to alleged Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. For the same reason, Washington has also sanctioned the U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese.

These measures are designed to cripple the ICC’s and Albanese’s operations and intimidate those pursuing accountability. Here, however, the EU, a self-proclaimed guardian of the rules-based international order and international law, responded not with fury, but a revealing spinelessness. Beyond generic professions of support for the ICC, the EU failed to enact a powerful legal instrument it designed in 1990s to nullify the extraterritorial effect of such third-country sanctions — the "Blocking Statute."

This instrument was introduced to protect the EU against extraterritorial overreach. Since the ICC is located in The Hague, Netherlands, it would be effectively deployable in this case. The statute forbids EU entities from complying with listed foreign sanctions. It was first activated against extra-territorial U.S. sanctions on Libya and Cuba in 1996, proving its utility as a shield for European economic and foreign policy interests.

The contrast is not an oversight; it is the issue’s core. It exposes the EU’s highly selective commitment to sovereignty, the rule of law, and freedom from foreign coercion. It is invoked when European elites feel targeted, yet abandoned when the cost of defending those same principles, such as angering the U.S. government, becomes inconvenient.

This opportunism does more than stain the bloc’s credibility. Once the principles become contingent on geopolitical expediency, it enables Brussels to turn its coercive tools inward against those deemed threatening to the mainstream consensus. The result is the construction of a domestic apparatus of censorship under the guise of fighting "foreign interference."

This is most evident in how the EU is increasingly using its Russia sanctions framework — an inherently political instrument requiring no criminal trial — to target EU citizens, residents, and journalists for their dissenting views. Individuals like French journalist Xavier Moreau and Swiss analyst Jacques Baud have seen their assets frozen and financial lives destroyed not for any criminal offense, but for sharing geopolitical analysis deemed favorable to Russia.

These actions transform sanctions from a tool of foreign policy into a mechanism of extralegal domestic political control. It creates a parallel punitive system where the executive branch, acting through the Council (the EU member states), can brush aside all the usual judicial safeguards — presumption of innocence, right to a defense and to face the accuser, proportionality, and access to the file — to punish what is a legally protected speech, however objectionable the Council and Commission bureaucrats may find it.

The only recourse for those accused is an appeal to the European Court of Justice, which reviews only for formal errors, not the justice of the sanction itself. The result is a social and economic death sentence for dissent.

This arbitrary practice does not exist in the vacuum. The ground was prepared by a justifying narrative supplied by initiatives like the Von der Leyen Commission’s European Democracy Shield and its arm in the European Parliament: Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield, itself a bureaucratic extension of the former “special committee on foreign interference.”

While presented as a defense against foreign information manipulation, the committee, chaired by French MEP Nathalie Loiseau, a close ally of President Macron, functions as a vehicle to marginalize and stigmatize broad categories of dissent. In a revealing interview to the French daily Le Figaro, Loiseau has framed her mission mostly as hunting "nefarious Russian influence."

Her targets, however, are tellingly broad. They include not just the “right-wing populists” threatening Macron’s hold on power in France, but also Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states, foreign policy realists who advocate for diplomacy and restraint in Ukraine and even those who “romanticize Russian culture.”

This is not a sensible security policy; it is political McCarthyism. It creates a deliberate rhetorical environment where skepticism of the EU's consensus on Ukraine and Russia or criticism of its foreign policy decisions are reflexively treated as evidence of being a de facto agent of Moscow and treason.

By casting entire communities and schools of thought as inherently suspect and vulnerable to foreign manipulation, the EU is constructing the censorship complex designed to surveil, denounce, pressure, stigmatize, and now, ultimately, also sanction dissent. By making an example of the likes of Jacques Baud, the EU sends a chilling message: anyone who disagrees with whatever happens to be the mainstream EU consensus of the day is potentially vulnerable to having their livelihoods and reputations destroyed.

Policing thought is a tragic symptom of the current European trajectory. It speaks of a political elite so insecure in its own policies and frightened of dissent that it must criminalize debate. The blunt weapons, like sanctions, initially limited for foreign adversaries, are now deployed against domestic critics. And all that, instead of protecting those who, like the ICC, defend the values the EU claims to uphold.

If this path continues, the vibrant, contested, and free European public sphere will be the most tragic casualty of the “geopolitical Europe.”