By Adam Idris
Former European commissioner for the internal market from 2019 to 2024, Thierry Breton, along with four civil society figures involved in regulating U.S. digital platforms (online content) will reportedly be sanctioned by the U.S. The US sanctions is taking the form of visa bans.
Top European Union (EU) officials condemned the move as an attack on Europe’s sovereign right to regulate its digital space. Breton himself, a French national from President Emmanuel Macron’s party, called it a ‘’wind of McCarthyism blowing again.’’ McCarthyism (named after Senator Joseph McCarthy) is the practice of publicly making reckless unsubstantiated accusations of disloyalty or subversion, specifically targeting communist influence in the U.S. during the Second Red Scare in the late 1940s.
The EU officials erupted in fury and vowed to shield its digital rules from US pressure. Observers, however, note that irrespective of the rights and wrongs of this US decision, the EU has been markedly timid, keeping mum when 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 United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese. These measures were designed to cripple the ICC’s and Albanese’s operations, and intimidate those pursuing accountability. In this case, the EU, the self-proclaimed guardian of the rules-based international order and law, responded, not with fury, but with a revealing spinelessness.
Beyond the 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 extra-territorial overreach.
Since the ICC is located in The Hague, Netherlands, the instrument could be effectively deployed in this case. The statute forbids EU entities from complying with listed foreign sanctions. It was first activated on Libya and Cuba in 1996, proving its utility as a shield for European economic and foreign policy interests.
This contrast is not an over sight, it is the core of the issue. 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 the EU to turn its coercive tools against those deemed to be threatening its 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 the French journalist, Xavier Moreau, and the 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.
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, resulting to a social and economic death sentence for dissent. This arbitrary practice does not exist in a vacuum.
The ground was prepared by a justifying narrative supplied by initiatives like the EU European Democracy Shield, and its arm in the European Parliament: The 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 the French legislator, Nathalie Loiseau, a close ally of Macron, functions as a vehicle to marginalize and stigmatize broad categories of dissent. In a revealing interview to the French daily Le Figaro, Loiseau 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 indeed 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 community and schools of thought as inherently suspect and vulnerable to foreign manipulation, the EU is constructing a 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 for foreign adversaries, are now deployed against domestic critics, instead of protecting those who, like the ICC, defend the values the EU claims to uphold.
If this trend continues, the vibrant, contested, and the free European public sphere will be the most tragic casualty of ‘’geopolitical Europe.’’
Adam Idris writes from Sokoto
