It’s the European Commission’s latest dystopian invention—the so-called European Democracy Shield. It came with all the pomp one has come to expect from Brussels’ ever-immodest ruling priesthood. On November 12th, Commissioner Michael McGrath and Commission Vice President Henna Virkkunnen stood at their podiums invoking the familiar incantations about #OurValues™. One could almost have admired the spectacle—the sheer impudence of it all—were it not for the cold chill unmistakably running beneath the rehearsed phrases. Behind the seemingly benevolent, paternalistic presentation, a programme lurks that is so breathtakingly centralising, so unabashedly authoritarian, that it can only be called by its proper name: This is not a shield with which to defend democracy, it is a sword intended to threaten and control the peoples of Europe.
If one were to believe the Commission, Europe stands at the edge of collapse—not because she is misruled, but because too many have realised that she is misruled. In Brussels’ view, our continent is beleaguered from all sides by shadowy digital phantoms whose memes, posts, and poorly edited deepfakes threaten to topple an overall decent, effective, and benign political class. As ever, Brussels is framing itself as the last bulwark of the rotting “liberal order”. The Shield is framed as a defensive structure, with its three “pillars” crucial to holding the democratic order in place: The protection of the information space, the strengthening of democratic institutions, and the enhancement of social resilience. What the press release leaves unsaid is that each of these pillars rests on a decidedly anti-liberal premise—namely, that the European citizen cannot be trusted to think without supervision.
Crowning this new architecture of repression is an omnipotent European Centre for Democratic Resilience, a veritable tour de force of Orwellian imagination. Formally, its mandate is to protect us gullible plebeians from disinformation. Less formally, it’s a great deal closer to a pan-European Ministry of Truth. It will be coordinating national authorities, monitoring online discussion, and—more importantly—deciding what information is and isn’t “reliable.” One can almost imagine the collective sigh of relief making its way around the falsely subtle authoritarians at the Berlaymont: At last, the power to define truth will have been duly centralised. The truth will no longer be dependent on boring and potentially destabilising facts; it will be birthed by an administrative act.
The Commission’s intentions come into clearer focus when one examines the many layers of enforcement built into the Shield. Under the combined weight of the Digital Services Act and the AI Act, large platforms will face increased scrutiny, particularly during electoral periods. “Harmful narratives” may trigger crisis protocols; an ecosystem of “independent” fact-checking bodies—funded, overseen, and legitimised by Brussels—will arbitrate the boundaries of acceptable discourse. If one adds Chat Control, which Brussels has withdrawn from public discourse but still desires to implement, what you are left with is a dense repressive network that dwarfs the scope or resources of Mielke’s Stasi in the former German Democratic Republic.
This is not democratic resilience, but its clearest opposite. It is dictatorship in the name of liberalism: it is, indeed, a dictablanda, a Spanish term for a soft dictatorship. In her crusade against Russian bots, trolls, and disinformation, von der Leyen seems intent on creating a copy of Surkov’s and Putin’s concept of “managed democracy” and imposing it on the peoples of Europe. This must not be allowed.
Some might see these considerations as outrageous or melodramatic. They are not. One needs more attention to what Brussels does and less to what it says. Across Europe, governments have already erected numerous schemes to manipulate and shape internet discourse. These are all premised on the idea that the State alone can distinguish truth from falsehood. The Shield simply Europeanises this model, folds it into the supranational machinery, and grants the Commission the role of ultimate arbiter. It builds on the eerie logic already behind the French Viginum Unit, which claims to be the protection against foreign digital interference, or Germany’s NetzDG Law, set up to combat “misinformation” online, and gives away the authoritarian toolbox to an institution that is unelected and, therefore, democratically irresponsible.
By doing this, the EU betrays a far more profound fear: After years of institutional blunders—the botched management of the pandemic and Ursulagate, the energy crisis, the erosion of public trust, its manic, self-defeating geopolitical bellicosity—Brussels understands it has lost whatever moral authority it still had left. Rather than confronting its failures, it seeks to manage perceptions. When reality is uncooperative, narrative management becomes indispensable. And when the public becomes sceptical, then scepticism itself becomes a security threat to an out of touch ruling class. We are confronted with the quiet transformation of European democracy into something that is loudly, unmistakably top-down, in which institutions treat citizens not as political agents but as inept children. It is a model that celebrates obedience over debate and consensus over political diversity.
It’s a show of spectacular irony: In trying to “protect democracy,” the Commission constructs the very conditions under which democratic life withers. Europe does not need another centralised censorial machine. It needs trust in its citizens, humility from its institutions, and the courage to accept that freedom includes freedom to disagree, to err, to argue, and even to offend. A democracy that cannot face unapproved speech is no democracy at all.
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